How Business Can Change the World, One Life at a Time

Jonathan Fields: [00:00:09] What my guest today, Ari Weinzweig, didn't realize when starting Zingerman's Deli with a $20,000 loan from a bank and a degree in Russian history from the University of Michigan, was that he was seeding a revolution. Actually, in hindsight, maybe he did know that now, 17 companies later and sitting as the CEO and co-founding partner of Zingerman's Community of Businesses Rec's Commerce as an engine of impact, expression and service that changes people's lives. And Ari and his ideas, they've set off a global ripple of compassion and dignity, imagination, and aliveness in the world of business, inviting people to reimagine a profoundly different, radically expansive and inclusive way of defining success. Named by Inc. magazine as one of the world's top ten CEOs, he's forging an entirely new way in business that rejects the norm and is grounded in purposeful vision, passion, and anarchy theory. He's written extensively about the values and beliefs that have kept the now iconic Zingerman's Delicatessen, his first business venture, afloat and successful for over 40 years. In weekly newsletters and the numerous books, he's authored, such as A lapsed Anarchist Approach to the Power of Beliefs and a lapsed Anarchist Approach to Managing Ourselves and so many others, he is read by, trained by, followed by so many people globally. And in our chat today, Ari shares some of the brilliant happenings inside his head, ranging from the ways we can use history to guide us in work and life and business. Today, a reclamation of this word anarchy as a tool for impact and equality are his natural laws of business and the importance of being in harmony with nature and the power of visioning, and the steps that you can take to cast your own life and world changing vision.

Jonathan Fields: [00:01:57] Let's dive in. I'm Jonathan Fields and this is SPARKED. So it's interesting. I was, uh, I was actually watching a documentary last night on the making of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the moon, and, uh, which is fascinating, by the way. And there was sort of talking about the different songs on the track. And when it came to this sort of like iconic song Us and Them, which is really this deep exploration of how do we live in a world where, like, people are profoundly different and not just constantly walk around othering other human beings, and then they're talking about how they make sort of like the finale song eclipse, and it's all about the sun being eclipsed. But Roger waters is saying it's actually all about hope. It's about like what happens when the light comes out. And I was thinking to myself, uh, this was 1973 when this came out, you know, and as you and I are having this conversation, you know, like, you know, 50 years later and these identical issues are still at the heartbeat of so much of what we're experiencing. And I was thinking about our conversation today, and so much of your philosophy seems so steeped in these ideas of balancing individuality, community and hope not just in business but in life. And I was just I was struck by how relevant everything that you pour yourself so deeply into has been for so long in our human condition, in business and beyond.

Ari Weinzwieg: [00:03:29] Yes. Fully agreed. Just processing how all of that has evolved over the years, because in 1973 I was probably listening to that album very loud, as was. I leave out the other parts of the context that in which we were listening. But anyways, I agree, I said in a in a good way, business is life. Life is business. Not that there's not more to life than business, but I would suggest that what I've learned, or one of the many things I've learned, is just that when we do business well, then we're doing it in a way that's congruous with living a good life. It's meant to be the same. And I it's taken me a lot of years to kind of understand that. But if we do our work well, then hope is a good, normal outcome. Positive beliefs are a normal outcome. Treating people with dignity is an appropriate and normal outcome, and it's really only the violation of that natural context that creates all those negative things that we all are so challenged by and frustrated with.

Jonathan Fields: [00:04:33] Yeah, and it's interesting because you lay them out as these natural outcomes. And I think there's a strong argument to to also say they're also the natural mechanisms that lead to the outcomes. Right. And yet it seems and maybe this is my lens. I'm curious in your take that so often they're not centered in the way we make decisions, the way if we're, you know, we build our careers, the way we build our businesses, the way we step into our own personal lives and relationships. Um, I'm always wondering, like, why is that? You know, if it seems so obvious on the surface, why are these afterthoughts or sometimes just outright rejected?

Ari Weinzwieg: [00:05:07] Well, I'm paraphrasing, and if you want, I can look up the quote. But Gustav Landauer, who was a very interesting German anarchist, uh, early 20th, late 19th, early 20th century, he was killed by the German army in the revolution of 1919. And he said, essentially in answer to the same question, because people's parents aren't trained that way and their parents weren't trained that way, and that people just continue on apace. And so said without judgment, because we're all just trying to figure it out. I mean, it's hard to detach from so much information that's being thrown at us all the time. And I'm not talking about social media. I mean, this is just always been true, right? So long before there was a web or telephones. I mean, you're in a community and people start to say stuff, and so it allows, you know, whatever it is, racist beliefs to circulate commonly openly anti-Semitic beliefs. I'm reading a book about the history of Lviv in Ukraine and the onset of World War two. And it's not really intellectually shocking, but it's really shocking at the same time to go back to what, you know, in the same way that happens to people all over the world. But it's just people like you and me that were having a podcast on Monday and then getting moved out of your house, into the ghetto the next day and a few months later getting sent to Auschwitz. And this is not unique to Jews in Lviv. I mean, it's clearly happens all over the world, but it's just examples of what people are surrounded by and how commonly those negative beliefs circulate and how difficult it is to stay grounded and centered away from those.

Jonathan Fields: [00:06:54] I wonder if also part of what goes on there is that if we do become really aware of where we came from and everything that came before us, and then we sort of like sit here as one individual in our lives, there's a sense of futility that I know so many people are having now, this relationship between despair and self-awareness. And it's almost like. If you're going to say yes to self-awareness, which includes looking back in time, do we also have to accept a certain element of despair? And then how do we go from there to hope?

Ari Weinzwieg: [00:07:22] Well, as a person who was raised without a lot of emotional intelligence, clearly we all have emotions. But I'm not unique in that childhood. I understanding that we do have emotions and how they're playing out all the time was huge, right? And so despair. I wouldn't say is my favorite emotion, and I certainly don't live in it all the time, but it's difficult to really be in touch with how we're feeling and learn to manage it well. In my experience, if we don't have the whole range. So I metaphorically have come to compare emotion to the weather. I have no influence over it. It always passes. Different weather forms impact me in different ways. Like today, it's like my perfect day. But the truth is, when it's gloomy and rainy all day, it impacts my mood, right? But I can't do anything to stop the the weather. What I can do is change the way I respond to it by dressing appropriately, by reaching out to other people who will help me reground myself in a more positive place, etc.. So from despair to hope, I guess cognizance is a huge piece of it. Understanding that it's all temporary for both when it's good and when it's not so pleasant, and then understanding that it's a practice and having studied hope also, which I didn't know anything about, and writing about hope, it's actually something we can work at, just like building up your biceps or going to the gym. I mean, it's it's a practice that we can learn to work with, teach using our organizations, use at home, use it everywhere.

Jonathan Fields: [00:09:01] Yeah. The idea of hope as a practice, I think to a certain extent. Right. It's like, oh, so this is a muscle you can build. It's not like you either have it or don't have it, or you just subject to the will of the moment or circumstance.

Ari Weinzwieg: [00:09:13] No, I think the moment clearly impacts our hope level. But just like when we're sick, we doesn't mean we're going to. I mean, unless it's a terminal diagnosis, it doesn't mean we're going to stay sick forever. And even then, it still seems from reading and talking to people, there's still a lot of room for people to manage. They respond to the illness. So there's no question. I mean, I as I wrote in an essay about it in part four of the leadership series that I did, I mean, I'm in a high hope bubble. I mean, this is a big, big advantage that I have. And probably you have too, because we're it's not just about money, although clearly financial, systemic bias, etc. all these are enormous factors. I'm not trying to in the least minimize those, but hope is a factor that provides an advantage or a disadvantage that is not really talked to a lot about. And I started to realize that I'm in this high hope ecosystem. Right. And the metaphor for hope is the sun. So I'm like living in a really sunny place and, uh, the things that you need to have hope I both have around me. And I work at it a lot, and so it allows my hope level to stay high. And then I'm just a history major, like you said, but starting to read people who actually know science and study it, it's just obvious that the the benefits of having hope both manifest, both physiologically. It manifests in people's work, it manifests in your relationships, and it's free. Um.

Jonathan Fields: [00:10:43] If you look back when you were a kid, do you consider yourself sort of like wired for hope as a kid? Or do you think this is something that has really changed in a meaningful way as you've grown?

Ari Weinzwieg: [00:10:52] I want to say both. So I think it's clear that I grew up in a relatively hopeful setting. We the six elements. I'm going for memory, but the six elements that I came up with on the Hope star one is having an image of a better future, a picture of a better future. And certainly I didn't come from a family that was despairing and hopeless. I mean, we had our multiple dysfunctional, moderately dysfunctional family issues, probably not dissimilar to yours, but clearly there was always the belief it would get better. You know, we could make it. The second one is that we have a path to get there. And certainly that was lots of coaching. And, you know, you got to go to college, you know, do this, you got to do that. So lots of that. The third thing is that we as individuals matter, certainly for better and for worse. That was true in my family as the oldest kid in a good, educated, middle class family. Uh, the fourth is that our work matters. These are different. One is that we matter as a human being. The other one is what we do matter? Certainly. That was clear to me. Uh, the fifth is that the little things matter, which certainly I'm just thinking back and reflecting on your question was also absolutely true. And then the sixth is that we were part of something greater than ourselves, which clearly was. True. So yes, I had all of those, but I certainly wasn't trained in how to create hope or how to help advance hope or build hope. And so that's really something that I only came to understand in the last five, six, seven years is that we can actually work at it. And so, just like, you know, if somebody was born with advantages, whatever they were, financial or physiological, you can also squander them. And so, yes, I grew up with it, but I would have been completely clueless if you had asked me even ten years ago what to do to make more hope happen. Yeah.

Jonathan Fields: [00:12:45] It's interesting that those items three and four I matter and like the work that I do matters. So often I feel like we conflate those and we feel like actually, if that number four, if the work that I'm doing in the world doesn't matter, then I don't matter. We derive our own sense of of meaning just as a human being from the thing that we do, rather than saying, do I have meaning just because of the simple fact of my existence? And I think on the one hand, if we do work that really, genuinely is deeply meaningful to us, it can be a powerful, you know, like that coupling of three and four can be great, but if we don't, you know, it can. It can also be this double negative. That kind of just really takes us down. Yeah.

Ari Weinzwieg: [00:13:23] And those those are beliefs, of course. Uh, and in a good way. A lot of this learning, I mean, clearly was helpful to me as an individual. But the biggest benefit really was in realizing the impact that I was having and could have on the people that we work with. Right. So in a leadership role, of course, we're hiring people with less hope. I mean, it's, you know, we're in the food business. Uh, it's not like and the reality is there's low hope in all walks of life. And it's not really although certainly Maslow's hierarchy or whatever manifestation of that impacts and the disadvantages that people need to overcome. Nevertheless, I've met people that make way more money than I do, and they're pretty low hope. So it really realizing the power in a good way that I have as a leader to help some new staff member to come in. And by just running through those six things, it can be done. I mean, I've internalized it by this point. So it's not like I'm like trying that hard to do it, but it can be done as a practice. And those six things, I'm confident you could do them in our world, if you're working with somebody for eight hours, you could do it for all ten people you worked with and take you two minutes, five minutes per person. I mean, it doesn't take a lot.

Ari Weinzwieg: [00:14:36] It can be as simple as just asking a heartfelt, authentic asking of somebody how their child is doing, how their mother is doing, how their school project is going. Remembering to ask, we have some high school students working. Awesome. How did that paper go last week? Like, I mean, it's it's under 30s to ask and then take time to listen to the answer. So helping them understand that they matter and then also to appreciate the little things, which is, in a good way, something I work hard at now. And I grew up in a setting where it was more the other way, which is appreciating all the things I should have done better, you know, which was an implicitly meant to say how much they cared about you, but it didn't really work all that great. But anyways, so just the power that we have to build hope and then understanding that hope levels can change the community, hope levels change the school system, hope levels change the organization, hope levels change, the way people parent or the way they partner with their significant other. I mean, these are all huge impacts that that we're having every day. And we can back to the history stuff. We can be cognizant of it or we can live in, I don't know, denial might be too strong, but we we don't even realize it's it's happening.

Jonathan Fields: [00:15:51] Yeah. I mean, the way you describe it also sort of like, you know, like hope as a practice and the way that you step into it in the context of leading an organization, a community, actually a community of organizations that forms this bigger community, and then being in service of a much broader community of clients and vendors and patrons. And it's interesting, right, because what you're also sort of giving lip service to without using the word, but I know you have used the word very expressly is is this notion of love. Yeah. And again, this is one of the things that, you know, if you came out of a traditional MBA program, which I know you did not, the idea of leading with love, like if somebody had a class in there, my guess is you get three people enrolling in that and like every other person in the school, would be rolling their eyes at the notion of centering this ideal of love as like, it's so soft, you know, it's like, no, the way you succeed is kill or be killed like, that is the classic way of business, and you've completely turned that on its head.

Ari Weinzwieg: [00:16:46] Well, The Killer Be Killed is a set of beliefs and that people just accept because that's how we get trained. And I would suggest having studied it, it's actually inaccurate. It's unhealthy, and it doesn't lead to much good unless judging good is short term fame and fortune, then maybe it works. But in terms of if you change your frame, if you change your beliefs, if you change your vision. To say that you're trying to create a holistically sound, regenerative ecosystem, whether it's your family or your organization or your community or even a country. It's not going to happen out of that set of beliefs, because for many reasons, my study of anarchism as a reminds me, taught me to learn to undo the hierarchical thinking that I had been like everybody raised with everybody in the US, pretty much not everybody. I'm sure there's exceptions, but most of us, many of us have been raised with hierarchical thinking. And the hierarchical thinking leads almost inevitably to somebody better and somebody worse. And so it's just has become clear to me. Like, if I don't change that thinking, then even though my desire, my values might talk about equity, I'm going to create inequity, inevitably, because it's very difficult to not fall back into that old model of hierarchy. Right. And then when it manifests in bad ways, really overtly bad ways, it becomes violent. And that violence can be anything from crushing your competition to dominating the market to all those things. But and then it goes further because it becomes racism, it becomes the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it becomes anti-Semitism, it becomes misogynistic leadership practices. And it's that connection is not getting made very often. But I really believe it's just a continuum of the same thing.

Jonathan Fields: [00:18:43] But it's interesting to me. I'm nodding along and at the same time I'm thinking, what I'm hearing you talk more about is the notion of recognizing the humanity of every person, no matter who they are, right? Which of course, I agree with. You know, it's sort of it is it's steeped in dignity, which, again, is another subject that I know you've cared deeply about and have written about. Um, and I think a lot of folks would nod along and buy into, yeah, we need more of that. I can like that has to be the ideal raising and operating system around not just dignity, but sort of like, as you describe, based in no small part on bell hooks, writing love is a verb. Like, let me actually operationalize this. Yeah, it's a whole different level that we're talking about there.

Ari Weinzwieg: [00:19:24] Yeah. And yet at the same time, it's incredibly, wonderfully, joyfully practical. Uh, yeah. It's just a practice and and it's no different than driving on the right side of the road. If, if you just moved here from Ireland, it would be incredibly awkward. If you've been here for five years, it's going to seem pretty normal for ten years. You almost forgot you ever used to not do it. And if you go back to Ireland, you're going to have to be very uncomfortable. I started to understand that well, that love is a my belief. Love is a naturally present byproduct of a healthy ecosystem. Right. So that means that it could be your family, it could be our organization, it could be a basketball team or a jazz band or a church choir or whatever. But in a healthy organizational ecosystem, love is present. And at the same time, we can consciously choose to come into everything we do. And I certainly don't get it perfect, but come into everything we do, whether it's cooking or talking to a kid or talking to a coworker, or having an extremely difficult conversation, which could include talking to somebody that we really disagree with.

Ari Weinzwieg: [00:20:38] And if we consciously choose to bring love, as you said, bell hooks taught me that love is a verb, not a feeling. And that was like, that totally makes sense. And in a healthy ecosystem, it's so much easier. The challenge is when you're in an unhealthy organizational ecosystem where it's a lot about conflict and domination. Et cetera. Et cetera. Love isn't present. And then in a not healthy way, I would suggest we're telling people to live this domination, crush the competition, win lose mindset at work, but then go home and be loving to your spouse, your kids, and your neighbors. And it's very difficult to live that way because it's so incongruous. Whereas hopefully, and again, we're highly imperfect. But if we create an ecosystem in the organization where people feel that love and they become comfortable in it, it's just obviously so much easier to go home and continue on a pace. Right. And so the impact is pretty huge and it does make a difference, no pun intended. Right?

Jonathan Fields: [00:21:41] Of course. Of course. If I'm getting this right, what you're arguing is that the absence of love is actually the unnatural state that it exists. It flourishes. It literally would be centered in any context if you basically create the container for it and remove the barriers for it. It's almost something that like we actively, without realizing it, create structures that remove it from the experience of what we do, whether it's relationships, life, business.

Ari Weinzwieg: [00:22:10] Yes, absolutely, I was helping. To long this under path of understanding. Humberto Maturana, the Chilean biologist who passed away during the pandemic. Sadly not from Covid, I don't think, but just did some awesome work and it was hugely insightful. And he shares his belief that human beings are naturally loving animals. This goes back again to the businesses. Win lose. He's saying that's completely inaccurate and I believe he's correct. So yes, absolutely. If we treat each other with dignity, if we create a healthy setting, if we work on hope, then love just manifest because people nobody's born wanting not to be loved, I don't think. Yeah. And this all again manifested for me going back to study anarchism again as a older person, uh, not as a student was. It's all in there, right? Because it was all, like you said, about honoring the natural humanity of human beings. And so Emma Goldman wrote about love. Kropotkin wrote about love. They all it was a big part of it in a way that was trying to respond to the dehumanization of the industrial model, dehumanization that was happening all over the world and still is.

Jonathan Fields: [00:23:24] Yeah. I mean, Gustav Landau, who you referenced earlier, also centered that a lot. And as an anarchist. You've mentioned this word anarchism a couple of times now, and I just want to parse that a bit, because typical person who hears that word and they're like chaos, madness, you know, like absolute. That's not when you talk about that. You're almost using it in an opposite context. Yes.

Ari Weinzwieg: [00:23:47] That's another example of inaccurate beliefs. So anarchism there's a couple lines from Alexander Berkman, a friend, lover, colleague, coworker, whatever, of Emma Goldman for decades. I could look it up, but he basically said, you know, that the general belief about anarchism is it's rock throwing and violence and destruction, and that is still the commonly held belief. He said it's actually the opposite of all that, and that's what I'm interested in. So were there anarchists who have been violent? Yes. Were there anarchists who threw rocks? Yes. Were there anarchists who didn't behave well? Yes. But I don't think you're going to find any made up grouping of human beings that didn't do those things. So there's Jews who did it. There's white people who did it. There's, you know, I mean, it's it's it's everywhere. Right? But we don't want to judge any group by the behavior of a few people on the periphery. And really, of course, anarchism of all things. There's no proper definition. It's up to everybody to do what they want to do. The core of the work at that time, and still now in many, for many people, is getting rid of government. That's not my issue. I'm much more focused on how we behave, what I do, and really the understanding that anarchism is about involving the people who are part of the organization and designing and running the organization of thinking in a non-hierarchical way so that the person we might have just fired last week is no worse a human being than I am.

Ari Weinzwieg: [00:25:17] And they have a lot to offer the world that for whatever reasons, it didn't work out in this, even in this caring, constructive setting. But I don't need to treat them any with any less dignity than I would treat you meeting you on this podcast, and to really choose positive beliefs about human beings and to create systems that can actually engage people. And I don't mean we've got this down. I mean, it's we mess it up daily, right? But it's really about involving people and two big eyes for me. One came from reading an Emma Goldman quote from her essay anarchism and Other. Well, it's called Anarchism and Other Essays, but it was one of the essays in the book in 1910. And her quote on that was, I read it and I'm like, this is how we're trying to work. And it was all about the passion of the scientist. And, you know, and I'm like, this is what we're trying to do.

Ari Weinzwieg: [00:26:08] And the other thing that blew my mind going back to Gustav Landauer was he said, we have no political beliefs. We have beliefs against politics. Um, and when I read that, I'm like, I totally get it. Because the misconception, which even I kind of held still was that anarchism is a political alternative, and it's actually the antithesis of politics. And I'm not saying I don't vote because I have the same strong feelings you do right now, I'm sure. But that's not my point. But my point is that it's really a way of life, and it's really about how I treat the next human being that I interact with. It's about how I treat myself and really creating a healthy, loving, dignity based, hope based, engaged ecosystem that we can all come out ahead. And there's some really fascinating work that was done. Like, I mean, mutual aid got a lot of attention again during the pandemic, but it was Peter Kropotkin's book from 1902 which again disputed this. Businesses win lose. And he said, we're essentially the what, Maturana said. The healthiest are the ones who are helping each other, the most generous, the most caring.

Jonathan Fields: [00:27:15] And to phrase that as sort of like under the mantle of anarchism is, I would imagine, jarring for for most people. It's interesting because when I was thinking about this, I was saying, well, when I thought about anarchism before I started to really deepen into your work, in no small part, you know, to me, there were these three elements that showed up. One is this is what we don't want. Let me invest energy in dismantling it. The second one is this is what we believe. And those beliefs will enable what like what is possible. And the third is this is what we hope to create in the place of what we don't want. I think when most people think about the idea of anarchy, they're thinking about that first part. It's all about the energy. That's just sort of like madly invested in the tearing down and discarding the things. Well, but let's actually bring everyone into the conversation and let's figure out together what we believe in our hearts. And then let's do the work of figuring out what can we build that is better and more expansive and more inclusive in its place based on those beliefs? But also, I don't know if you've read the work of Gene sharp.

Jonathan Fields: [00:28:15] He passed a couple of years ago. He was a this, um, a professor emeritus who went deep into the dynamics of nonviolent revolution and developed this whole methodology. In fact, he developed a pamphlet called From Dictatorship to Democracy, which is sort of like. The guidepost for many nonviolent revolutions around the world over the last 30 years. And and one of the things that stayed with me, which ties in to what you talk about, what we're talking about is this notion of so many people focus all the energy on trying to tear down the oppressor, the dictator, the source of pain. The reality is that the most successful revolutions actually build something that is so much better in its place that whether the that old thing exists in name, generally or not, becomes largely irrelevant because the power has all moved away from it, because what you've built in its place is so much better, so much more inviting, so much more appealing that you're taking all the pillars of power that supported the old thing, and you're just putting it under the new thing. And it really like so messaging as a central thing. Tear down. This thing actually is distracting and it doesn't make what you want to happen happen.

Ari Weinzwieg: [00:29:26] Yeah, absolutely. I, I mean, a couple of things. So one is having studied beliefs and started to realize which again, I knew nothing about beliefs until consciously at least up until 6 or 7 years ago. I mean, is that I don't believe it's possible in the same way that gravity goes down, not up. I don't believe it's possible to get positive outcomes from negative beliefs. And that's not to deny the problems, it's just we can have. I've come to understand negative beliefs about a problem or positive beliefs about a problem. The negative beliefs would be we're stuck, we're screwed. You can make up a lot of those versions. The positive beliefs were this is a very serious problem. We have responsibility to do something. If we work at this for the next 30 years, we can make something happen. Uh, and we can do something about it. And the idea of destroying certainly is an element of that work in anarchism and many other things too. But I, and I sort of get the theoretical, uh, and destruction is creativity etc., but but I don't really believe we can create something positive by just tearing down. And I took me a long time to understand that. And I think as a I would say as an 18 year old, I was certainly there. But it's so it's not a judgment of that feeling. And and again, I'm not saying we got this down. I mean, we screw this up every 15 minutes. It's just but that's part of the work. And in that context, the other thing I was going to say is I've really, as you know, embraced this model more and more and it's evolving into the next book, which will take a while because books take a while, but hopefully a pamphlet will come first on this ecosystem metaphor, because then it's not pillars and it's not a building, it's an ecosystem.

Ari Weinzwieg: [00:31:12] And like I live with a farmer, I mean, the idea that, like, no one thinks like in a month you're going to change the soil, like of a farm that was farmed industrially for 50 years, like nobody goes, dude, we'll have this totally straightened out and give me 60 days. Like, it's not going to happen. I mean, we know it takes a long time. We know it takes years. Uh, and yet when we go to work, we have this industrial model, like, dude, just change the engine out and it's going to be fine, and it just doesn't work that way. So I think in the context of creating a better option for the future, it's understanding that it's never done. So no matter what we've created today, we've got to keep working on it like nobody no farmer goes like, okay, I got it. I'm going to kick back now and just work ten hours a week like it does. Farms don't work like that. Ecosystems don't work like that, you know, and that we embrace in a beautiful way and a joyful way, in a positive way that we want to go work because we're creating something special.

Jonathan Fields: [00:32:12] Um, I wonder if the more connected we are to nature, the more the more bound up we are in the fact of like, everything is an ecosystem and it things happen in their time and you just have to devote yourself to this. And the more disconnected we get from nature, the more we leave those expectations. And we just want to manufacture instant. And so much of our society has become largely disconnected from nature and natural rhythms. Yeah. And in fact, like and now we're disconnected from the notion of everything happens in a larger context. And it takes effort over time and cooperation and collaboration 100%. I think this brings us nicely into a conversation around visioning, because how do you then create a mechanism that invites everybody who's part of this ecosystem, this organization, this community to all be facing in the same direction, you know, to sort of say, okay, so this is what we're down for and we see where we're going, not just tomorrow, but next year, five years from now, ten years from now, 15 years from now. And we understand why it matters. What are we actually talking about when we're talking about visioning?

Ari Weinzwieg: [00:33:15] Well, it's like anarchism. There's a lot of different perspectives. And I'm not here to tell you ours is right. The way we use I mean, certainly the term vision is widely used. Well, you know, well, frequently discussed. Et cetera. Et cetera. And I don't think anybody argues against vision, but what? Is not common as a definition of what vision actually is. And ours is quite different, certainly from the way it's taught in business schools. And the way it's commonly applied is to share the story of how visioning has radically changed our lives organizationally and personally for the better, and how this process, which I'm happy to share the history of. But we wouldn't be here without it. If we were, we would have just followed one of the paths that everybody else you know, we would have sold Zingerman's to some big company. We would have gone public. We would have opened up 300 Zingerman's all over the country. And I'm pretty confident. Had we followed any of those, I wouldn't be here. If I were here on this podcast, it would be telling you all the lessons that I learned from not walking my own path, which you've probably interviewed many people who have burned out or regret what they did, and not that they're bad people. They just went along with the beliefs and the path they were told was the right way to go, and then later woke up one day or one year or one week. And it's like, why am I doing this right? And visioning allowed us or gave us a tool that helped us to not do that. So the way we do visioning, it's a story.

Ari Weinzwieg: [00:34:48] It's a story of your own life, written as if it's already happened at a particular time in the future. We like mission statements also. I've written about our application of that to. Our version is pretty close to what a lot of people do. We view it like the North Star being in the metaphor, like when you're having a dark, difficult day, which we all have, I have plenty. I can take a deep breath and remind myself of the mission, which, like the North Star, in theory, you can find it. If you're not a Chicago City kid, you can find the North Star and move in the right general direction. Vision is different for us because it's time constrained. It's far more detailed. So the business school version and I say this with respect, but the business school version of vision is also generally like a 4 or 5 line statement that I am not smart enough to understand how to differentiate that from the mission statement, even though they go over it with me over and over, I still don't really quite get it. But so for us, the vision is a detailed, emotionally engaging, nuanced story of your future and the way we do it. It includes both strategic details that matter to you. So it could be if you're in a business setting or a nonprofit setting, it could be how big you want the organization to be. It could be roughly not to the penny, but roughly how many sandwiches and sales you're doing. Or if it's in your case and you're raising money, it might be how much, how many donors you have. And it doesn't matter if it's 8 or 10, but eight and 800 is a radically different way of being in the world.

Ari Weinzwieg: [00:36:22] And they're both good. It's just leads you on a different path towards a different life. So our vision, which we wrote between 2018 and 2020 for 20, is set in 2032, which will put us at the 50 year mark, which is almost miraculous in the food business. And it's about ten pages long. I mean, and it describes how we relate to our food, how we relate to each other, describes the way we give service. It talks about in prose, not in bullet points. Our commitment to the community, our decision to only open businesses within the Ann Arbor area. And they're not really rights and wrongs. It's just telling the story that you want to tell. In the same way that whatever a great musician isn't doing, an analysis of which kinds of music are selling better and slicing and dicing it up and creating a song like they're writing from the heart and then figuring out a way to make it appealing to themselves, and also hopefully in a way that sells enough that they can make a living. But I don't think anybody who's really an amazing artist is going out and doing a detailed market study of what styles of art are selling the most, like they're painting. And this is the same thing. And I like I love the quote from Thelonious Monk, the jazz musician who said, a genius is a person most like himself. And that's really what this is. So the vision for us is not a strategic analysis. It's an inside out exercise. And that's huge.

Jonathan Fields: [00:37:56] Yeah. I mean, I know you've I'm going to read you to you you wrote visioning is a bit like coming home. Home to ourselves, home to a community of our own choosing home to a future that fills us with hope. When the vision comes alive, you'll likely feel the positive energy it evokes. That last line in particular really resonated with me, because there have been times where I have written sort of like my own version of like, this is, this is me, like down the road, and, and I know it's not right until I literally feel my body shaking. There's something about writing the truth in the future, in the present also. But like like visioning, if I don't have a physiological reaction to what I'm writing, to me, it's not. It's not mine. I'm sharing some vision that I think I'm pieces of it I'm supposed to have until I get to the place where this is me, like, this is me coming home. And for me, the tell is literally it's physiological, like my body responds to whatever's coming out of my brain.

Ari Weinzwieg: [00:38:57] Makes sense. I mean, this is back to what you brought up about connection with nature, the visioning process. That's certainly makes sense. I will say it's my belief that everybody knows how to do this. Back to love is natural. Same as vision. Every child knows how to do this. We all did it when we were four or 5 or 3. We created all kind of stuff, right? And then we start getting trained through social pressures, social beliefs, family beliefs, etc. it's self doubt. We start to constrict it and then a small minority of people pushes ahead anyways. And then we society starts to dub them visionaries. And that leaves the other 99% of us is just sort of dumb followers waiting for the visionary to lead the country, or lead the company, or lead the art world or whatever, lead social change. And I've really, again, in the spirit of anarchism or humanity or whatever frame you want to put it in, is to really believe everybody's capable of it. We're more than capable of it. We just need to recover what we lost through social pressure and part of the process as we learned it from Stosh Kazimirski, who taught it to Paul and I in 1993, and he learned it from a guy named Ron Lippitt, who was at University of Michigan Institute of Social Research in the late 50s, 60s and 70s. And he had worked with Kurt Lewin. So, I mean, this has a long history, uh, behind it. But part of what Stosh taught us is what he called hot pen. And essentially, if you're an English major, which I'm not, it's free writing.

Ari Weinzwieg: [00:40:32] And so this process is a huge piece of what makes this work so well and helps us to short circuit the constant chatter that probably everybody who's listening to this has at some level in their heads. I certainly have it. I don't know, I won't assume for others, but the critical voices and the advice and the parents and the professors and the articles that we read or whatever was on the podcast last week that we're trying to follow along with what we learned. And it really makes us write from the heart in a much more meaningful way, that the overthinking that I'm certainly prone to is far less likely to happen. And that, to your point, when it works well, there's a different feeling then the feeling that comes from arguing over whether the market is going to go for 16 ounce or 8 ounce, or whether red is the hot color or pink. It's like, it's not the question. The question is, what do you what will you feel best about? And if you say red is what gets you going, then let's figure out how to make red work in the marketplace. And we can't always, but often. More often than not, I believe that we can. And when you pursue it with passion and when you really believe in it, when your hope level is high, etc., and you're willing to do the due diligence that you know, because there's a lot of work to make it happen. Good things come from it.

Jonathan Fields: [00:41:50] I love that, and it's also, I think it's helpful for for me to hear for our community here because it gives context, you know, because nobody operates in a vacuum and you're always doing that dance of what is the vision in my head, and what are the elements of it that are so dear to me that if they weren't a part of it any longer, even if it accommodated other people's contribution, I wouldn't be drawn to it anymore. So I think it's it's a really interesting dance. And the way you describe it, I think it's the way that you're going to get to that place is going to be unique to each person, to each vision, to the project, to whatever it is like, and to create the the space to allow for that. Thank you. Hey, so I hope you enjoyed that conversation. Learned a little something about your own quest to come alive and work in life, and maybe feel a little bit less alone along this journey to find and do what sparks you. And remember, if you're at a moment of exploration, looking to find and do or even create work that makes you come more fully alive, that brings more meaning and purpose and joy into your life, take the time to discover your own. Personal Sparketype for free at sparketype.com. It'll open your eyes to a deeper understanding of yourself and open the door to possibility like never before. And hey, if you're finding value in these conversations, please just take an extra second right now to follow and rate SPARKED in your favorite podcast app. This is so helpful in helping others find the show and growing our community so that we can all come alive and work in life together. Until next time. I'm Jonathan Fields and this is SPARKED. This episode of SPARKED was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and Me, Jonathan Fields. Production and editing by Sarah Harney. Special thanks to Shelley Adelle for her research on this episode.