Latest / Legacy Living with Dr. Gloria Burgess / Leadership Today with Ari Weinzweig | Episode #401

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Leadership Today with Ari Weinzweig | Episode #401 · Legacy Living with Dr. Gloria Burgess

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Hello, and welcome to today's show, Legacy Living, Make Your Life Count.
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I'm your host, Doctor Gloria Gloria Burgess, international leadership expert and trusted
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advisor. Welcome to Legacy Living, Make Your Life Count. I'm so delighted
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that you joined me today. I have a very special guest on our show.
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His name is Ari Weinspeike. Now. Just a few years ago,
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Ari was named one of the world's ten top CEOs by inc. Magazine.
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Ari is the CEO and co founding partner of Zingerman's Community of Businesses. Now,
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that's a mouthful. This community of businesses includes Zingerman's Delicatessen, Bakehouse,
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Creamery, catering, mail order, zing Train, the Coffee Company, Roadhouse,
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Coffee manufactory, events at Corman Farms, Miss Kim, and Zingerman's Food
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Tours. Wow, that is quite a community. Zingerman's is located in Ann
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Arbor, Michigan. And you know, those of you who are regular listeners
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to this show, I'm just gonna say, go blue, that's one of
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my hometowns. Now. Ari was recognized as one of the Who's Who of
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food and beverage in America by the two thousand and Mester James Beard Foundation.
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He was also awarded a Bonappetite Lifetime Achievement Award among his many recognitions. Ari
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is also a prolific author. He has written a number of articles and books,
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including Zigerman's Guide to Good Eating, Zingerman's Guide to Giving Great Service,
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Zingerman's Guide to Better Bacon, and Zingerman's Guide to Good Leading Part one,
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Part two, Part three, and Part four. And each of these books
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have a unique focus. In this four part series, there's building a great
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business, being a better leader, managing ourselves, and the power of beliefs
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in business. And all of Ari's books take the perspective of what he calls
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a lapsed anarchist. A lapsed anarchist. That's right. Now you will hear
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more about what that means during our conversation today. Today's topic is humility and
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leadership, a topic that is near and dear to my heart, and I
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can't think of a better person, a better leader, a better human being
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to address this topic than Ari. Now. I met Ari in person just
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recently when I was in ann Arbor attending to family matters, but we actually
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met virtually before that through my sister Vera, who connected the two of us
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via email. Now, when I met Ari through his amazing newsletters and very
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attentive emails, and then when we finally had an opportunity to meet face to
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face right outside of his Zingerman's Roadhouse restaurant, I heard him speak so so
3:53
passionately about his business and his team, and he was just on fire at
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it. So I can't wait to host this incredible, humble human being,
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my friend and colleague Ari. Now, before I bring Arian, I want
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to take just a minute, just a moment, to connect the dots between
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today's topic on humility and leadership and legacy living. Now, there are many
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many ways that humility and leadership connect to legacy living, which you will hear
4:29
more about later, But for now, let me say that legacy living is
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a way of being and a way of living and moving through the world so
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that we make the conscious choice to be the difference we want to see in
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the world. We make the conscious choice now, right here, right now,
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not in some distant future. We make that conscious choice day in and
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day out, three sixty five twenty four seven. Now, more about that
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a little bit later, Let me introduce you to my friend and colleague,
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Ari find Spike. Welcome to my podcast. Ari, thank you so much
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for joining us today. I just want to make sure that the listeners get
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a chance to hear your voice before I start launching into questions. Well,
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I'm honored to be here with you, Gloria, Thank you for having me
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on. Thank you so Ari. We are talking about humility today, and
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I would love for you to just tell us a little bit about how you
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think about humility, what it means to you, and how you have come
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to this place around humility. Okay, well that was I think that was.
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I'm going to be humble and say that was probably more questions than I
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can remember, but I'm going to try to start with the last one and
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then work my way back to the earlier ones. So you guide me if
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I get off the rails. But sow how I got started on this.
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I mean, clearly, I know the word. I've read a lot of
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books in my life and written a fair few, and humility is not a
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new human concept. But the way I really started to pay attention to it
6:12
was four years ago. This coming spring, I got asked to speak at
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a little symposium on campus at University of Michigan that was about humility, and
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my initial reaction when the kind woman reached out to me to speak, and
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I speak pretty regularly as to you, But my reaction was, I really
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don't know anything about humility. I mean, I clearly, like I said,
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no, what the word is, but I've never spoken on it.
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I've never written about it. We teach a lot of classes internally, we
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teach a whole we have a whole training program called zinc Train, and we
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have I don't know twelve at the time, twelve two day seminars. None
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of it even deals with humility. And I'm like, I'd love to help
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you, but I don't really know anything about it. But my challenge was
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that the woman who had asked me used to work for us, and she's
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awesomely wonderful, kind hearted, generous human being. And her husband still works
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for us, and he is an equally kind and generous human being. And
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I just didn't have the heart to say no, so I said yes.
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And then I figured, Okay, I got five months or four months whatever
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it was, to figure out what I'm going to say. And so that's
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really what got me to start to study it, and like pretty much anything,
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and I given the diversity of your studies, which is wonderful and inspiring.
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I'm sure I'm going to guess you've had similar experience. But almost anything
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I believe that one starts to really pay attention to it becomes very interesting.
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So whether you know, I've read a book on the history of trains,
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which is completely not within my normal area of interest, but once one starts
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to study it, it becomes very interesting. And so that's what happened with
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Humility, and so I gave the talk. But then, of course I
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kept going and I started to study it more, and I started to realize
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how more and more how important it was to healthy leadership, to healthy organizations,
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to really to a healthy life. And then I started to look,
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and we'll get into it, but to the implications, both positive and then
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unfortunately negative, of what it can do to our communities and our societies when
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it's lacking. So that's really how I got going. So I'm going to
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pause there and let you ask another question so we can hear your wonderful voice
8:24
too. Yeah, that's great, Thank you, Thank you so much.
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Ari. So you basically followed an invitation from a speaking opportunity at Michigan and
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followed that trail, and you became more and more interested, and you have
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actually written on this topic. You published a slew of books and many,
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many, many pamphlets, and you have a pamphlet on humility. Right,
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Can you tell us a little bit about that? I can. It came
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out last fall. This is the culminator. Well, actually I'm still learning,
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but at the time it was the culmination of the work that I had
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done that started with that invitation to speak. It's called humility, a humble
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anarchistic inquiry. We can talk about anarchism later if you want. This turns
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out to be I mean, it's something I've been studying for a long time
9:09
and working hard on its application to progressive business and to sustainable life. I
9:16
guess was a way to say it, but this is really just a summation
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of my learnings and how, like I said, how I came to get
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focused on it, and then what it really means. How I realized in
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hindsight why Jamie Vanderbrook had asked me to speak, which is that although I
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had been completely unconscious about it, we were actually doing it in a healthy
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way within the organization. And I started to understand how we had woven humility
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into so much of our existing training, we just didn't call out the word.
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And then also I started to realize how important it was for leadership skills
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and really an important piece of the hiring and training and job expectations. And
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then lastly I ended up with some different perspectives on what humility is and how
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to frame it in a meaningful way. All right, Well, so you
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think about humility at the intersection of leadership, at the intersection of organizational effectiveness
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ecosystems. But I don't want to get ahead of you, so I want
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to just let our listeners know we're going to go there and talk about those
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different aspects of humility from your perspective. ARI, but for right now,
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can you just give like one or two examples of people that you would consider
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to be humble leaders in your own life? Well, well, one of
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the interesting things so Patrick Lincioni whose works I know you know, has a
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book out called The Ultimate Team Player, and he distills his research down to
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three characteristics that one ought to look for to find the ideal team player.
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Humble, hungry, i either pursuit of mastery or greatness, and what he
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calls smart, which doesn't mean intelligence but more emotional intelligence or the ability to
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work collaboratively with others, etc. And when I read those, I realized
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that actually those three characteristics were essentially true of everyone I had really enjoyed working
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with over the years. And so some of those include partners of mine.
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So Paul Saganaw who I started Zingerman's with back March fifteenth, nineteen eighty two.
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We're going to have our thirty ninth anniversary next roum. Congratulations. Yeah.
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And a crazy Maggie Bayliss, who's the person with whom we started zinc
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Train. She fits that. Bill Frank Corollo, who I had worked with
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as a when I was a dishwasher in restaurants and he was a line cook
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and started the bake house with us, all the way on through to really
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most of the people I could think of that we work with as leaders in
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our organization. There's so many. And then also people who've inspired me through
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philosophical learnings and teachings around the world, many of whom That's how I connected
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with you is because we share a lot of those. So people like Peter
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Block, you know, Maya Angelou. I just was quoting Tony Morrison and
12:20
for the News, I'm working on today. I mean, all of these
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people. I got Bell Hook's book on Love at the top of my stack.
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I mean, they're all people who are coming in their own imperfect ways,
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like all of us, from places of humility. And so I think,
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really, who's not humble? And I don't say this to place blame,
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but I mean it's the people who act full of themselves. And I
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have come to believe mostly that comes out of their own internal insecurities and anxieties,
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which we all have. Just that's how they deal with it. And
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in my experience, it's not the most wonderful to manifest it in the world,
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but I do I believe most of us have the same anxieties. It's
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really in the same self doubts. And I was just, I'm trying to
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remember her name. I was just listening to a wonderful scholar. GET did
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an interview with Brene Brown, and she was sharing her own anxiety as a
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black woman who had achieved She's written a wonderful book and great achievement, and
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she was talking about her self doubt and I'm thinking, I have the same
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self doubt and thirty nine years in business in a world renowned business with whatever.
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We have five hundred and fifty employees, you know, and I still
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feel that doubt every day. I feel like I feel like I'm falling short,
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and I don't know if it's legit. So I really believe it's a
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universal truth, and then what we can learn to do is to manage that
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anxiety in a healthy way. Yes, yes, thank you, thank you.
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Ari. So I am wondering if you can paint a picture for our
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listeners. I read a quote and I don't know if this is your quote
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or somebody else writing about your work, Ari, but it talks about Mozart
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and music, and Mozart once said that music is not in the notes,
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but in the silence in between, and that humility is analogous to that in
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that humility is the space between the sounds. And I love that image,
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and so I'm wondering if you might talk about either yourself or one of your
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colleagues or somebody else that you mentioned, and how they manifest that space between
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the sounds. I mean, it sounds poetic and lyrical and lovely, but
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what does that really look like on the ground. Well, I think in
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a way it's a funny thing, but it actually doesn't look like anything.
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That's why it's the space between the sounds. It's part of what has happened
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in the world. And I don't know that it's really new, but I
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guess it's probably been exaggerating and exasperated in recent years. It is those who
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make the loudest noise get the most attention. And I think humility by definition
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means that, of course, there's times for us to speak, and of
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course there's times for us to quotes make noise through our actions, but sometimes,
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many times, oftentimes it's really through our silence and our ability to keep
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our mouths quiet and to let others step forward and lead, to ask better
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questions, and to watch as others develop and grow and learn to struggle and
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collaborate as we are, because we're all struggling. But I mean, I
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grew up in a loving family where they showed love and affection by cutting you
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off and telling you were wrong. And it wasn't no intended, it was
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not a wasn't ill will, It was just habit, routine way every life.
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And so that's how I grew up. So I'm, with all due
16:03
respect to my family, I'm kind of in recovery. From that, because
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I can get triggered with the best of them and learn and start to just
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react and talk louder and faster, and it's not the end of the world,
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but it's not great. And so just learning to slow myself down and
16:19
back up. And then as you described it as is in a pamphlet,
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to live in the silence between the notes and just let things unfold. Not
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to be absent or to abdicate our responsibility, because as leaders are, the
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responsibility is the same whether we're listening or we're talking, but to really allow
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others to come forward and shine. And I was actually just while I was
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out running today listening to a podcast with Krista Tippett and a gentleman who I
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had not heard of named Gordon Hempton h gmpt O N who's it's about silence
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and he studies silence out in the world and goes out and listens to nature,
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and it just I was thinking about I was going to getting ready to
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speak to you, and so I was thinking, this is a perfect segue
17:06
for it. And with your musical background, of course, I'm honored that
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it resonated for you, because anybody who does what you do in the musical
17:15
world as well as you do. And your husband does understand this really even
17:21
better than I do. Well, thank you. As you were talking,
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I was actually thinking about music and conducting, which is one of the things
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that my husband does. So thank you for that. And I will look
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up that podcast. Sounds wonderful, sounds very interesting. So Ari, what
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have you learned since writing the pamphlet? I mean you kind of started out
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wondering about it, and as a learner, what have you now pulled in
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as a result of finishing that. Well, quite a few things, really,
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I'll start with a couple and we'll see where we go with that.
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But so one big one was I before I had started this work, I
18:00
think it was clear to me, of course, that people who were very
18:03
full of themselves and who were not able to ever sit in the silence,
18:07
but needed to be the noise in the notes, not the silence between the
18:12
notes. That clearly people when and we all have ego, when we get
18:17
caught up in that ego and we take it to an exaggerated state to dominate
18:22
others, either emotionally or in some cases physically, or politically, or spiritually,
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and in very bad cases, in an abusive way. Clearly that's not
18:34
humility. I would not have said, though, that people with very low
18:40
self esteem are unhumble, because I would have thought, well, clearly they're
18:44
not egotistical, so they must be humble. But I came through my own
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readings to change that belief and to really understand that humility is about neither being
18:53
high nor low. And from that, a second learning that came to me
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was really starting to believe that humility is when we're at our most human,
19:07
is when we're in a state of hum what I came to call humbleness.
19:11
And I can talk about that too, Yeah, I would love to have
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you say more about that, at our most human. Yeah, So there's
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a number of pieces of that. So when we're neither overly full of ourselves
19:25
nor stuck in the state of self duprecation, and certainly I can run my
19:30
cycles on both ends of those extremes. I think we all do that when
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we can stay centered, and it's not that easy. When we can stay
19:40
centered, that that's when we're true to ourselves, and that is when we're
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at our most human, imperfect, open to learning, rail and fragile,
19:51
yet resilient, and so a lot of it comes out of that. And
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and then I started to so look at the root of the word, which
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I do often. I'm sure you do you also, because it's always interesting.
20:07
And and then you mentioned ecosystems, and this connected with work I've been
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doing, and in a way a different subject. But of course everything in
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the ecosystem is related one way or the other, and this turned out to
20:19
be two. But so humility comes from from humans, from the earth.
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And of course in the Bible, Adam the first man, that his name
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in Hebrew Adamah means earth. So and of course the story in the Bible
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is that he was created by God from the earth. So regardless of one's
20:44
religious beliefs, is not the point. But it's just that it comes from
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that same place of groundedness and connection to nature and connection to the earth.
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So it really came out of that, and that the humans the top soil.
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The most important and piece of what plants grow in is the humans.
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And in the same way, the most important thing, or one of the
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most important things for growing healthy people in organizations is also humility, because without
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the top soil, plants don't grow well. Without the humility, people don't
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grow well, yeah, thank you. You must have been reading my mind
21:22
because I went to that word too, So that's great. Yeah, yeah,
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I love that. So Ari, can you talk a little bit about
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what humility has helped you understand about the state of our country right now?
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Yeah. When I started this study, I didn't really realize at all how
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important it was going to be in the context of what you just said of
21:51
understanding the state of society. Not like the society, and I'm a part
21:56
of it, so I'm not looking at it as an outside critic. We're
21:57
all part of the problem, all potentially part of the solution. But I
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didn't know when the pamphlet was going to come out. It was not planned
22:08
as some sort of massive social statement and commentary. It was just work I
22:12
had been doing for a long time. But a couple very current event related
22:18
subjects that are at hand. So one is if we're in a state of
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what I now would refer to as humbleness, and we can come back to
22:26
that in a bit, but if we're in a state of humbleness, we're
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not better than anybody, and we're not worse than anybody. And this is
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going back to the ecosystem in nature, there's really no hierarchy. Everyone and
22:37
everything is important. We're all different, we all play an important role in
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the moment. One person's role might be different as the conductor of the orchestra.
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If I'm in the audience and I go to the bathroom, nothing's going
22:52
to happen if you do where the show's in big trouble. Doesn't make you
22:56
a better person or me a worse person. It just means in that moment,
22:59
you have a particular important So this is not to deny that important role
23:04
that you play, but it just to not tie value as a human being
23:08
to the role people are playing, or of course to age, gender,
23:14
race, religion, political beliefs, and to come back to the belief that
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I have long held, and this goes into the anarchist stuff, that everybody
23:22
is equitable, everybody is equal, not the same. In fact, no
23:29
two people are the same, but everybody is equal, and that everybody is
23:32
an important, creative, intelligent human being. And at my job, and
23:37
I don't get it right every day. At my job is to treat them
23:40
with dignity and honor them for who they are. And that's anover ending challenge
23:45
because I fall short. But that's that work. So if we're all coming
23:49
at our lives treating everyone as an equal, then racism can't exist because racism,
23:59
antisemitism, the belief women can't be leaders, these things all come from
24:03
hierarchical thinking, which is so implicit embedded in our culture that all of us
24:11
me included, grew up with it and we don't even know what's happening.
24:15
I tell the little anecdote in the book, in the pamphlet, which I
24:18
didn't make up, out of the two fish swimming along having a conversation,
24:22
and one fish says, yeah, that guy, he's like a fish out
24:26
of water, And the other fish goes, what's water? And that's really
24:30
what I've come to realize. Hierarchical thinking is like, and it's so endemic
24:36
that people, unwittingly, we just fall into it. So people say,
24:40
like, what's the most important thing we need to know? What's the key
24:44
element, what's the biggest mistake you've ever made, what's your biggest success,
24:48
what's your proudest moment of your life? And I'm thinking, in hindsight,
24:55
in a natural ecosystem model, why do I have to pick? There's no
25:00
reason to rank them. The problem is when we're thinking hierarchically, then either
25:06
I need to be better than you or you're better than me, because we
25:08
can't really be on par If that makes sense, I mean it doesn't make
25:12
sense, but that's the way we've been trained to think. And there's a
25:17
second piece of this too, which I think is antithetical to true humility,
25:22
and that's that we've we've been trained to hold the belief that we can assign
25:26
an identity to a group of people. Women do this, you know how
25:33
men are. And then it degenerates from there into this is how black people
25:37
are, this is how Jews are, this is how Catholics are. And
25:41
it's just whether it's ill intended or not, it creates what I would suggest
25:48
as a dehumanization that's antithetical to true humility or humbleness. And so when you
25:55
combine that kind of group assignment of identity with hierarchical thinking, doesn't take you
26:00
long to arrive at the conclusion that either my group's going to be better than
26:03
yours or yours is going to be better than mine. In a hierarchically minded
26:07
world, who wants to be worse? Somebody has to be on the bottom
26:11
and So this thinking manifests in the US a lot through racism, and manifested
26:17
in Nazi Germany and much of Europe for centuries in the treatment of Jews.
26:22
There has to be somebody who's pushed to the bottom, and maybe it was
26:26
women. It was traditionally women in the household. But the point is just
26:30
to really come at it alternatively from a place of humility, of humbleness,
26:36
where we treat everybody with dignity, where we're no better and no worse than
26:40
anyone else. Yes, thank you, thank you. I often think about
26:45
birthright dignity, that everyone has that, and you know, if we begin
26:51
there, then we create a whole different paradigm. Right absolutely, I have
26:56
come. I wrote a piece about dignity over the summer, and uh,
27:02
I started to realize that's really one of the key metrics I would suggest of
27:07
a healthy culture, whether it's at our business or or in society at large.
27:11
If everyone's treated with dignity, we're still gonna make mistakes. Absolutely.
27:17
If I forget to call you back, but I treat you with dignity,
27:19
life's gonna You're you're gonna forgive me, and life's gonna go on. If
27:23
if I slip, and but it comes from a dignity based relationship. We're
27:27
gonna be okay. So that that was that's one big piece of current events.
27:32
And then the other big piece is it's a pandemic mm hmmm, which
27:38
no one alive has been through. Uh. And so humility would dictate that
27:45
we would ask for help. Humility would dictate that we acknowledge that we don't
27:51
really know what to do. Humility dictates that we understand our essential helplessness in
27:57
the face of it, and then together come up with ways to start to
28:00
address the issues at hand. But we I don't really se want to get
28:07
into politics. But if we have leadership that is not humble, then we
28:15
flail around intellectually and emotionally trying to hide the problem, deny the problem,
28:21
yell at the people who know more than we do so that we feel better
28:25
about ourselves, et cetera, et cetera. And none of that goes to
28:30
finding quicker solutions that are more holistically sound. So I didn't think about either
28:33
of those per se when I took on the challenge of learning about humility.
28:37
But as you know, and I know, I mean the horrible killings over
28:44
the course of the spring and summer, which of course are not really new.
28:48
I mean, as horrible as they are, we know it's been going
28:51
on for centuries, and certainly this is not the first time a leader acted
28:56
unhumble in the face of a crisis. But we know that humility and humbleness
29:00
leans to better outcomes, will help more people. So yeah, thank you,
29:06
Ari. I want to just pause here just a moment, because you
29:12
know what you have been addressing are complex. I'm not going to say complicated,
29:19
but complex. I actually think that there's also simplicity in what you are
29:26
talking about as well, because I think human beings at our best, we
29:30
know, you know, we know how to we know how to collaborate,
29:33
we know how to pull together. Yeah, we know how to be humble.
29:38
And yet because of whatever whatever, whatever power systems, hierarchy, whatever
29:45
is in the air, we tend sometimes not to not to go into that
29:51
place of humility, to deep humility. I just have to tell you,
29:56
I know you probably would not say this about yourself. Maybe I'm maybe to
30:02
become an assumption, but you strike me as a humble leader. And from
30:08
the moment that I met you over email, and then when we had a
30:14
COVID conversation, not a conversation about COVID, but you know, outside with
30:18
social distancing, et cetera, et cetera. And I'm just wondering how you
30:22
do what you do managing a very sizeable enterprise, a profitable enterprise, sustaining
30:30
it over four decades. And you talked a little bit about an ecosystem,
30:36
and I wonder if you can just tell us about that and how it connects
30:38
to humility for you. Yeah, I well, thank you. I spent
30:45
a lot of years in therapy to learn to take a compliment, so I'm
30:48
just going to leave it at that. There's no one thing to answer your
30:56
question. I mean, really, I guess it's fun. But because we're
31:02
here in the academic community, I get interview requests from students weekly. I
31:07
try to actually talk to all of them, although I have come to suggest
31:12
that they do some reading from what I've written before they interview me, so
31:15
I don't need to repeat all of the same stuff from scratch. But it's
31:22
funny because they'll all ask me what's the most important thing right the hierarchical thinking,
31:26
So the best answer I could give them now is the most important thing
31:30
or the best advice is to stop looking for the most important thing. There's
31:37
many reasons why I have arrived at this ecosystem model, and I'm still evolving.
31:45
I started thinking about it back when I was working on part four of
31:48
the Guide to Good Leading series, which I mentioned is about beliefs. As
31:52
I studied beliefs, and it became ever clear to me that all really all
31:56
of our conscious all of our behaviors, other than some instinctive reaction if somebody
32:02
throws a rock at you or whatever. Other than that, every action we
32:07
take, including you and me being on this podcast together, the work that
32:10
we do, how we relate to our significant others, the way we treat
32:14
our colleagues or the person at the drug store, all of that is based
32:19
on our beliefs. And I started to realize that although no one really talks
32:22
about those beliefs or rarely talks about them, they are what underlies the actions.
32:29
And so the image came into my head that the beliefs were very much
32:32
akin to the root system of our lives, and that you couldn't see them,
32:39
like I said, but what was happening above ground was always correlated.
32:44
Alexander Berkman, the anarchist once very helpfully for me, said you can't grow
32:49
a rose from a cactusy. So I came to realize you can't. Negative
32:53
beliefs will always lead to negative outcomes. You can make action and noise,
33:00
as we've experienced nationally, but you can't really create healthy, positive outcomes except
33:06
from positive beliefs. And that doesn't mean there's no problems. But you can
33:07
have a negative believe about a problem, like we're victims, or you can
33:10
have a positive belief, which is this is horrible. It's a tragedy.
33:14
It's terrible. Let's get to work and try to do something about it.
33:17
And then from there it grew and I started to realize the culture was like
33:22
the soil because anybody who does agricultural work, and I'm a city kid,
33:25
but I've been learning, and my girlfriend's a farmer, the soil is always
33:30
what holistic farmers, sustainable farmers, organic farmers always talk about feeding the soil
33:36
because when the soil is healthy, the plants are going to do better.
33:37
And it's the same in organizations. So if you put you and me,
33:42
with all due respect, on a five year tenure at a fast food franchise
33:47
with a not super great franchise e. We're just going to be two more
33:52
cynical people counting the minutes till we can get out of work. And it's
33:58
not said disrespectful to you or to me. It's just if you're in unhealthy
34:01
soil, it's very difficult to sustain. And then it kept going and hope
34:07
started to appear as the sun because we all go towards hope. I think
34:10
you can see that. Unfortunately through the behaviors of the last year on a
34:15
political level, even when the hope is negative or destructive, in the long
34:17
run, people still go hopeless. People will still when hope comes for them,
34:22
will go towards it. Spirit of generosity. I started to see like
34:28
water, because nothing grows without it. Purpose. I started to see is
34:31
air because I was reading Rebecca Soulnett, whose books I love, and she
34:36
asked, but I know she did an event, but I saw it in
34:37
her book, so I give her credit. Which is what goes faster uphill
34:42
than downhill? And I had no clue, And the answer is wind.
34:45
So I realized it if wind or air is purpose. Of course, when
34:47
we're purpose driven, as you know from your own books, and you're teaching
34:52
we will go work way harder at something difficult that we believe in, and
34:57
we will at something we don't believe in, even if it's easy. Anyway,
35:00
the concept continued to has continued to evolve, and now it's becoming clear
35:05
that it's a whole book and to itself. So it's probably going to be
35:07
part five in the series. But I like it for many reasons. I
35:13
think I have like twenty on my list, but just to give you one
35:15
or two. It's not hierarchical, which we talked about earlier. Another thing
35:21
is that everything impacts everything else, and so hierarchical thinking leads us to weight
35:25
things out and to say, hey, the elephant is clearly way more important
35:30
than to be because look how big the elephant is. But of course we
35:35
start to learn that seemingly infinitesimal, statistically present things like bees have this enormous
35:42
impact on the ecosystem, and when they're absent, you don't even notice if
35:45
you're not a farmer or somebody who keeps bees. But all of a sudden,
35:51
we're not able to grow the fruit and grow the food that we need
35:55
to grow. So in the ecosystem, the greeting that the host gives at
36:00
the front door of Ingraman's Roadhouse could gain or lose us one of our most
36:06
loyal customers. Yes, and who cares what I say that that smile or
36:09
lack thereof, that energy, that lack thereof. So all of that,
36:14
and then also it's very important to understand that everything is impacting everything else.
36:19
And so we had some guests last night at the roadhouse who had never been
36:23
there before. Their friend brought them. They're from New York. They were
36:28
blown away by their meal. Well, I'm gonna bet you they're going to
36:31
end up spending way more money at our mail order over the next ten years.
36:37
They and they went home with a coffee cake. And the guy's favorite
36:40
food in his life is coffee cake. So our bakery's going to do well.
36:45
So although they entered through the roadhouse, the long term impact might be
36:50
really show up even more prominently in other parts of our organization. So when
36:53
we understand that we're all related, and that how the dignity with which I
37:00
treat you as impacting my own life, Because if I treat you badly,
37:04
it's going to manifest in a way. I greet Tammy when she comes home
37:07
from the farm tonight, etc. So all of those things are part of
37:10
the ecosystem. And then the humbleness, as we talked about as the humans,
37:15
it's the top soil and out of that, as I wrote, you
37:20
probably saw the piece a couple of weeks ago, as somebody asked me,
37:22
and I didn't know the answer, what does humiliation mean? You didn't write
37:27
about it in the pamphlet, And I'm like, you know what, You're
37:29
right, I didn't. But she's like, well, did you do that
37:30
on purpose? I'm like, not really, I just didn't think about it.
37:34
So her question got me thinking and I realized that humiliation and it makes
37:37
sense. I mean, in essence, it's taking the other person's top soil.
37:43
We're making it hard for you to be human by pushing you to be
37:49
lower than us. And not shockingly, this is what human beings are doing
37:55
to the planet. Top soil is eroting, disappearing in a rate to the
38:01
point that it's going to threaten our existence on the planet. And this comes
38:06
also from humans, which includes all of us to some degree, treating nature
38:10
as if we're better than nature rather than what's true. And I've come to
38:15
understand, which I never understood as a kid growing up in Chicago, where
38:20
asphalt was a comforting phenomenon, that we're part of nature and that we have
38:25
a responsibility, but we aren't better than anything in nature. We're just part
38:30
of it. Well, thank you, thank you, And I love your
38:35
system's view and making it an ecosystem, which is pretty You know, it's
38:40
hard for some people to understand. Like you said, you come from an
38:44
asphalt right and for those of us who are blessed to live in a world
38:50
with old growth trees as a natural way of being and breathing, it's a
38:54
little bit easier to understand. So thank you for writing, Ari, thank
38:59
you for for thinking, thank you for being, and thank you for breathing
39:02
life into these ideas, these big ideas, and bringing them down to earth
39:08
in a way that people can hold on too. And I want to ask
39:13
you just a couple more questions. Yes, sure. First of all,
39:15
where do you find time to write? I mean, Mercy, It seems
39:20
like you have just so many, you know, things going on in your
39:22
embraces so wide. Where do you find the time to write? I wrote
39:28
an essay on time management in part three of the book, which is on
39:31
managing ourselves as a whole. You can have me back and we can talk
39:35
about time. But I came to realize that most of us have relatively unhealthy
39:42
relationships with time, and that the way most Americans talk about time not consciously.
39:51
If they were to speak about their significant other like that all day,
39:53
it wouldn't go it wouldn't go well because they're always mad, they're always frustrated,
40:02
they never appreciate it or rarely. And then I realized, like it's
40:12
people like I think about food all the time because I love it and I
40:15
work with it. But I don't have eating disorders. I just like food
40:20
and appreciate its beauty. And I'm fortunate that I can afford to eat good
40:24
food. And I'll mean, I'm super wealthy, but I'm doing fine,
40:29
and I am around good food all day, and I feel really fortunate for
40:32
that. Many people don't have access to the healthful, wonderful, nutritious food
40:37
that I do. But in the same way, I think it's true at
40:40
time, and I guess I realized that Sam Teine, who's work you probably
40:45
also know, is another wonderful, humble human being. He said, we
40:50
always make time for what we truly want to do. And I know this
40:53
is true, Like I don't play golf at all, but I listen to
40:58
you know, when we do zinc train where and I listened to whatever stereotyping.
41:01
So I apologize, but whatever bankers and they're like, I can't get
41:05
it. That's sold behind and what are you doing this weekend? Oh I
41:08
got two games of golf. I'm like, okay, so you got time
41:12
to golf. I'm not judging it, but if you got time to golf,
41:15
then you got time to write. So I think for me, it's
41:19
just a conscious choice to put time into certain places. And the writing is
41:23
not something I really ever set out to do. I just came to it.
41:28
I really out of frustration, to be honest with the way other people
41:30
were writing our newsletter. And in hindsight, it wasn't their fault, it
41:34
was mine. But so the more I did it, the more I learned.
41:37
The more I learned, the more I put that to work in the
41:40
organization, the more it helped us as an organization, the more energy I
41:44
felt because I was learning, and so it got me on a good cycle.
41:47
So I just try to be mindful of my time and type fast and
41:53
keep moving, get over the perfectionism with which I grew up. Yes,
41:59
yes, it's really important when you when you write, so, thank you,
42:02
thank you Ari. So my last question for now is you know you've
42:08
you've spoken a little bit about anarchism, and I would love to hear again
42:13
in your own words, what is the relationship between what you do anarchism and
42:20
who you are as well? Well? I talk about anarchism because it's so
42:24
misunderstood. Okay, Anarchism is about respect for every individual. It's about freely
42:32
choosing collaboration and generosity and positive beliefs. It's it's really a way of being.
42:40
And anarchism is perceived to be chaos, but it's actually all about order.
42:46
It's just that we freely choose order. And in hindsight, studying ecosystems
42:52
in permaculture, I would actually say that permaculture is anarchism in nature and anarchism
42:59
is permical for people because all the same principles show up in both philosophies,
43:05
about interconnectivity, about getting out of hierarchy, about treating everything and everybody with
43:09
dignity and respect, about seeing the beauty and benefit that each person brings in
43:15
their own unique way. So what I This is a longer story, But
43:20
as I started to restudy it ten or twelve years ago, because I got
43:24
asked to speak somewhere else at the Jewish Studies Department and Devor Dashmore titled the
43:30
talk Rybread and Anarchism because I had just written a ten thousand word essay on
43:35
the history of Jewish ryebread, and she knew I had studied the anarchists,
43:38
and I was getting once again. I took the agreement to speak, but
43:44
then I didn't. I'm like, man, I haven't looked at my books
43:45
in twenty years. I mean, I'm going to look like an idiot in
43:49
front of Like these are professors who study this stuff, and I don't know.
43:52
I'm way out of touch. So I got all my old books out
43:55
and I started to restudy and it totally blew me away in a quick sense.
44:00
For two reasons. Ay, I had not realized how much what Paul
44:06
and I and everyone around us had created was aligned with a lot of those
44:09
anarchist beliefs that I hadn't consciously done, but it was happening anyway. And
44:15
then be more, even more importantly, it just totally hit me upside ahead
44:20
is how much what's now called progressive business was aligned with anarchist thinking. So
44:25
getting out of hierarchy, self organizing, work, team flattening, organizations,
44:32
engagement, these are all take away the business seek It's all anarchist stuff that
44:39
was being written about one hundred years ago, because anarchism came as a reaction
44:44
to the dehumanization of the Industrial Revolution. It's the same, although many of
44:50
them did not deal with race very well at the time, but it's the
44:53
same dehumanization that was done that justified racism and hierarchical thinking around the made up
45:00
concept of race, which of course is a whole other subject that you know
45:05
and teach very beautifully about. So it really I started to realize that all
45:10
of this stuff you and I have been talking about for the last hour,
45:13
treating everyone with dignity, positive beliefs, including everybody actively, these are all
45:19
the themes of progressive life and organizations, and they're all themes that are embedded
45:23
in anarchism. And interestingly, Gustav Landauer, who's an anarchist whose work I
45:29
never read in school because at the time it was only in German, which
45:31
I am afraid I'm not able to read, but it was translated about fifteen
45:36
years ago by a guy named Gabriel Kuhn, which allowed me to read it,
45:40
and it's wonderfully inspiring stuff. He was a good friend of Martin Boeber's.
45:45
He was a pacifist, very spiritual guy. He said many interesting things,
45:51
but one that totally blew me away. As he said, I'm paraphrasing,
45:55
but he said, the people who pursue the destruction of the state,
46:00
which is a common theme in anarchist conversations. He said, it's misguided because
46:06
when you're trying to destroy the state, you're locked in a relationship with it,
46:10
in the same way that I was locked in a relationship with my mother
46:14
while arguing with her, refusing to do what she wanted. But in hindsight,
46:17
it was completely reactive and it felt like I was freeing myself. It's
46:22
really freedom from which is a very unfree way to be. And Endauer said
46:29
the answer is not to destroy anything, is to go and create free communities
46:34
where people can learn to treat each other with dignity, to think freely,
46:37
etc. And when I read that, I was like, oh, man,
46:40
that's what we're doing, and the last quote, and I'll leave you
46:44
alone, is Landauer said, which really helped me understand. He said,
46:49
we have no political beliefs. We have beliefs against politics, and that made
46:55
me realize that anarchism is not a political program. It's not about taking power.
47:00
It's the opposite. It's a way of life, and it starts with
47:05
how I treat you, how I treat Tammy, how I treat myself,
47:09
so that it's not about gaining power, it's about being powerful in a humble
47:15
way within ourselves. So it starts with us, and it starts with me,
47:20
absolutely, absolutely, So thank you so much Ari again for being my
47:25
guest on this podcast. For who you are, because that's where your leadership
47:30
comes from, and all that you do in the world, at Zingerman's and
47:35
in the community. I just have such high regard and respect for who you
47:38
are and just all that you bring. So thank you again. Well,
47:43
thank you. I feel the same way, and one day I'm going to
47:45
get out to Seattle or hear you on stage and see you at work.
47:50
You got to see a tiny bit of what I do. But I look
47:54
forward to more conversations to come. And thank you so much for the honored
48:00
Banana show so inspiring. Clearly, Ari is a leader's leader. He makes
48:09
a difference in his own life and in the lives of so many others,
48:13
in his own family and throughout the world in his work as the CEO of
48:19
Zingerman's Community of Businesses. And as I mentioned earlier, Ariu was voted one
48:24
of the world's top ten CEOs by inc Magazine. Now you know why they
48:31
lead differently, all of them, including Ari, They lead in a totally
48:37
unique way. To learn more about Ari's work with the Zingerman's Community of Businesses,
48:44
you can go to this website that's www dot Zingerman's dot com. Www
48:52
dot Zingerman's dot com. And when you go to that site, just be
48:55
sure to scroll all the way down to the bottom and click on about us,
49:00
and you can learn all about Zingerman's vast community of businesses and you can
49:07
take a peek at their array of offerings. And hey, why don't you
49:10
just shop while you're online? Right? Just shop right there while you're there,
49:16
if you're just joining us. I'm doctor Gloria and this is legacy living.
49:22
Make your life count. We just heard from my very special guest,
49:25
are A Weinsweig CEO of Zingerman's Community of Businesses. Now, if you want
49:31
to make your life count, if you want to be the change you seek,
49:36
be sure to listen to this episode again and again, and be sure
49:40
to tell somebody. You can find me right here on iTunes, Audible,
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49:59
I just want to give a shout out to all the women, men and
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50:07
are the ones. We are the ones that we have been waiting for.
50:12
That means that you don't want to wait for somebody else to step up and
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50:22
You can be the one. In fact, you are the one.
50:27
You are the one who can make a difference in your own life so that
50:30
you can make a difference in the lives of others. Now, if you
50:37
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Three sixty five twenty four to seven. Legacy living is a powerful way
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Until then, don't just count the days in your life, Make the
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