Today’s podcast is with Ari Weinzweig, the CEO and co-founding partner of Zingerman’s Community of Businesses, a much-admired gourmet food business group headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. Ari is a friend, a veteran of the podcast and was also one of the contributors to Punk XL. Ari joins me today to talk about his latest missive – a chapbook entitled Life Lessons I Learned From Being A Line Cook; what a chapbook is, the insights behind some of the lessons and what they mean from an entrepreneur and leader who is passionate about customer service and experience.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – The natural home of the contact center is under the CMO – Interview with Alex Levin of Regal.io – and is number 531 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here are the highlights of my chat with Ari:

• Ari started his career in the food industry, washing dishes and then got promoted to line cook.
• There, he met his future business partner, Paul Saginaw, and they went on to establish Zingerman’s together.
• Today there’s around a dozen Zingerman’s businesses, each different, all located here in the Ann Arbor area. We have about 700 and something staff members and we do about $80 million in sales collectively.
• Pamphlets are about double the size of chapbooks.
• They first appeared about 200 years ago and are more common these days in the poetry world.
• However, they were essentially the social media of the day 100, 200 years ago.
• Life lesson No. 1 – The little things make a big difference.
• People like to look at the catastrophes and the crises and the drama, but they don’t have a lot of interest in the real work of governance that goes on.
• Life lesson No. 5 – Stay Humble.
• Without humility, things don’t grow well. Now you can make stuff grow, just like people have topsoil erosion and continue to grow commercial corn in very large quantities, but it’s by using a lot of artificial inputs that ultimately damage the ecosystem. So humility is, I think, essential to our organizational health.
• Life Lesson No. 6 – Foster a connection with art and beauty.
• Beauty is essential to our existence.
• John O’Donohue, the Irish philosopher, said that the world is suffering from a crisis of ugliness.
• In dealing with this crisis of ugliness, the responsibility in a punk-rock way is on all of us. It’s not for the boss to fix it, it’s for each of us.
• We need to train our eye to see the beauty.
• If we don’t inject that into what we do, notice it or accentuate it, then we’re just automatons in many ways.
• A recent e-news from Ari had a piece on handling guest or customer complaints and the recipe that Zingerman’s use. Here’s the link.
• Life Lesson No. 7 – Start with Purpose
• Any work can be drudgerous, but when we choose to be purposeful in what we do, then it brings it to life in a completely different way.
• You’ve got to make sure that everybody in the organization is connected to your purpose and understands their reason for being there and doing what they do and why it’s important.
• Patrick Earl Barnes, who is an artist in New York City, said “The purpose of my life is to live a purposeful life.”
• People are often looking for purpose and then they’re freaking out because they can’t figure out what their purpose is.
• Like Partick Earl Barnes, you don’t need a big purpose. Just every time you open the door for somebody, be purposeful. Every time you salt the fish, be purposeful. Every time you put a piece of fish on the grill, think about the person, the man or the woman that fished it and what’s happening in their community because we’re selling the fish and how it’s helping to support sustainable fishery communities.
• Put purposefulness into every tiny act in the understanding that regardless of what we do in the long run, that creates a purpose-filled life.
• Life Lesson No. 11 – Learn emotional resilience.
• The integrity, the congruity of how you play when you’re losing by a lot, knowing you’re going to lose, carries over into the next game.
• There’s a possibility that some people don’t play the game because they’re scared to lose. I understand that because I have that fear too. I just learned to go ahead anyway and doing that helped me learn emotional resilience.
• Success means we get better problems.
• Life lesson No. 13 – Diversity matters.
• If you don’t have diversity in the team, it’s hard to be healthy.
• Life lesson No. 15 – Live with paradox
• Here’s the paradox we’re faced with everyday…. we want to serve this artisan food and pay people better, but we want the food to be really affordable.
• Grab a copy of Life Lessons I Learned From Being A Line Cook from zingermanspress.com. It is not available on Amazon, so if you need to ship internationally from the US, contact them and ask for Jenny Tubbs. She will help you out.

About Ari

Ari Weinzweig is CEO and co-founding partner of Zingerman’s Community of Businesses, which includes Zingerman’s Delicatessen, Bakehouse, Creamery, Catering, Mail Order, ZingTrain, Coffee Company, Roadhouse, Candy Manufactory, Events at Cornman Farms, Miss Kim and Zingerman’s Food Tours. Zingerman’s produces, sells and serves all sorts of full flavored, traditional foods in its home of Ann Arbor, Michigan to the tune of $65,000,000 a year in annual sales. Ari was recognized as one of the “Who’s Who of Food & Beverage in America” by the 2006 James Beard Foundation and has awarded a Bon Appetit Lifetime Achievement Award among many recognitions. Ari is the author of a number of articles and books, including Zingerman’s Guide to Better Bacon (Zingerman’s Press), Zingerman’s Guide to Giving Great Service, Zingerman’s Guide to Good Eating (Houghton Mifflin), Zingerman’s Guide to Good Leading, Part 1: A Lapsed Anarchist’s Approach to Building a Great Business, and Zingerman’s Guide to Good Leading, Part 2: A Lapsed Anarchist’s Approach to Being a Better Leader. Zingerman’s Guide to Good Leading, Part 3; A Lapsed Anarchist’s Approach to Managing Ourselves. Zingerman’s Guide to Good Leading, Part 4; A Lapsed Anarchist’s Approach to the Power of Beliefs in Business was released in summer of 2016. In 2017 Ari was named one of “The World’s 10 Top CEOs (They Lead in a Totally Unique Way)” by Inc. Magazine. In 2018 he released the pamphlet, “The Art of Business; Why I Want to be an Artist.” Another pamphlet, “Going into Business with Emma Goldman” came out in June, 2019.

Inc. Magazine described Zingerman’s as the “Coolest Small Company in America”. Meanwhile, they have been featured in the Harvard Business Review and on MSNBC for their business practices and Bo Burlingham in his book, Small Giants, cited Zingerman’s as a model for organizations that define success more creatively than just “getting as big as we can as fast as we can”.

Find out more at Zingermans.com, ZingTrain.com and Zingermanspress.com (You can also find many of the books at Google Books). Finally, say Hi to the folks at Zingerman’s and ZingTrain on Twitter @Zingermans and @ZingTrain and if you want to email Ari directly then his email is: ari at zingermans dot com.

Finally, sign up for Ari’s Top 5 newsletter here.

Credit: Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash