What do you think?
Rate this book
A Lapsed Anarchist's Approach to The Power of Beliefs in Business
The fourth in the series from ZIngerman's CEO Ari Weinstein. Drawing on insights from history, psychology and, of course, nearly 25 years of running Ann Arbor's most famous food business, Weinstein makes the case that beliefs have a far larger impact on organizations and individuals than might be thought at first. He looks at the beliefs that have driven Zingerman's and also maps out a way to identify and, if desired, change beliefs, particularly those that prevent an organization from becoming a great one.
- GenresBusinessLeadership
588 pages, Hardcover
Published September 1, 2016
5 people are currently reading
113 people want to read
About the author
Ari Weinzweig
21 books32 followersCO-FOUNDER, ZINGERMAN'S COMMUNITY OF BUSINESSES
In 1982, Ari Weinzweig, along with his partner Paul Saginaw, founded Zingerman’s Delicatessen with a $20,000 bank loan, a Russian History degree from the University of Michigan, 4 years of experience washing dishes, cooking and managing in restaurant kitchens and chutzpah from his hometown of Chicago. They opened the doors with 2 employees and a small selection of specialty foods and exceptional sandwiches.
Today, Zingerman’s Delicatessen is a nationally renowned food icon and the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses has grown to 10 businesses with over 750 employees and over $55 million in annual revenue. Aside from the Delicatessen, these businesses include Zingerman’s Bakehouse, Coffee Company, Creamery, Roadhouse, Mail Order, ZingTrain, Candy Manufactory, Cornman Farms and a Korean restaurant that is scheduled to open in 2016. No two businesses in the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses are alike but they all share the same Vision and Guiding Principles and deliver “The Zingerman’s Experience” with passion and commitment.
Besides being the Co-Founding Partner and being actively engaged in some aspect of the day-to-day operations and governance of nearly every business in the Zingerman’s Community, Ari Weinzweig is also a prolific writer. His most recent publications are the first 4 of his 6 book series Zingerman’s Guide to Good Leading Series: A Lapsed Anarchist’s Approach to Building a Great Business (Part 1), Being a Better Leader (Part 2), Managing Ourselves (Part 3) and the newly-released Part 4, The Power of Beliefs in Business. Earlier books include the Zingerman’s Guides to Giving Great Service, Better Bacon, Good Eating, Good Olive Oil, Good Vinegar and Good Parmigiano-Reggiano.
Ari regularly travels across the country (and world) on behalf of ZingTrain, teaching organizations and businesses about Zingerman’s approach to business. He is a sought-after Keynote speaker, having delivered keynotes for Inc. 500, Microsoft Expo Spring Conference, Great Game of Business Gathering of Games, Positive Business Conference at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business, American Society for Quality (ASQ), and the American Cheese Society. Most recently, Ari and Paul Saginaw were invited to address an audience of 50,000 for the University of Michigan 2015 Spring Commencement.
In 1982, Ari Weinzweig, along with his partner Paul Saginaw, founded Zingerman’s Delicatessen with a $20,000 bank loan, a Russian History degree from the University of Michigan, 4 years of experience washing dishes, cooking and managing in restaurant kitchens and chutzpah from his hometown of Chicago. They opened the doors with 2 employees and a small selection of specialty foods and exceptional sandwiches.
Today, Zingerman’s Delicatessen is a nationally renowned food icon and the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses has grown to 10 businesses with over 750 employees and over $55 million in annual revenue. Aside from the Delicatessen, these businesses include Zingerman’s Bakehouse, Coffee Company, Creamery, Roadhouse, Mail Order, ZingTrain, Candy Manufactory, Cornman Farms and a Korean restaurant that is scheduled to open in 2016. No two businesses in the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses are alike but they all share the same Vision and Guiding Principles and deliver “The Zingerman’s Experience” with passion and commitment.
Besides being the Co-Founding Partner and being actively engaged in some aspect of the day-to-day operations and governance of nearly every business in the Zingerman’s Community, Ari Weinzweig is also a prolific writer. His most recent publications are the first 4 of his 6 book series Zingerman’s Guide to Good Leading Series: A Lapsed Anarchist’s Approach to Building a Great Business (Part 1), Being a Better Leader (Part 2), Managing Ourselves (Part 3) and the newly-released Part 4, The Power of Beliefs in Business. Earlier books include the Zingerman’s Guides to Giving Great Service, Better Bacon, Good Eating, Good Olive Oil, Good Vinegar and Good Parmigiano-Reggiano.
Ari regularly travels across the country (and world) on behalf of ZingTrain, teaching organizations and businesses about Zingerman’s approach to business. He is a sought-after Keynote speaker, having delivered keynotes for Inc. 500, Microsoft Expo Spring Conference, Great Game of Business Gathering of Games, Positive Business Conference at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business, American Society for Quality (ASQ), and the American Cheese Society. Most recently, Ari and Paul Saginaw were invited to address an audience of 50,000 for the University of Michigan 2015 Spring Commencement.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
November 13, 2016
There are at least dozens of reasons to read this book. If you didn't already know of the Zingerman's Guide to Good Leading series, of which this is the fourth volume, and need some persuasion, read on.
First, for those running or hoping to launch a business, the proposition made by the author in the first volume should be more than compelling. In that book, Ari Weinzweig—Ari from here on, as I believe he would prefer—said that he was often asked for the “secret” that explained how Ann Arbor's most famous food business had grown from a tiny deli to more than $40m business (that was 2012; today sales are over $60m). His answer was that there wasn't a single “secret” but many practices and insights that had helped Zingerman's thrive. More surprisingly, though, he had decided to write them all down in a series of books. How could anyone in small business not want to read that? Especially considering that the phenomenal success of Zingerman's has happened in an industry generally known for anemic profits, enormous staff turnover, and rapid business failure.
So there is much in this volume for the entrepreneur, just as there was in the previous three. These, by the way, weighed in at 351, 369, and 490 pages long. Some of the more interesting elements in this installment, which pick up on earlier themes: how to develop the vision for your business; how to find, train, and keep great employees; and the bright side of customer complaints (and why you should thank them for complaining!).
But the topic at the heart of this book is belief. This seems a bit incongruous at first. The skeptic would certainly wonder what this has to do with business. And Ari admits that this area of inquiry was a new one for him. “After living most of my life with beliefs that I barely even realized I had,” he writes, “the last few years of studying this subject have been life and business altering. While in the past I paid a lot of attention to actions, arguments, and analysis, I gave little or no thought to beliefs. That, too, has changed nearly 180 degrees.” Given the depth of the arguments made here, I believe that one.
And this is where the book will interest a much wider base of readers beyond the entrepreneurs. We all work in organizations. Some work in large companies or schools. Some in much smaller entities. But the one-woman business has a network of suppliers with whom she too must work as a team. Let me put it out there: even those who have lived their entire lives in organizations and spent considerable time and money studying them (that means you, MBAs) will gain a tremendous amount from this book. What is said here, it can be guaranteed, wasn't and couldn't be taught in any business school. And this is true above all in examining the beliefs held by many different people in a gamut of roles in business, from the busboy to the CEO.
That said, I think the book should also get a readership well beyond those who want to think about business. The issue of beliefs is necessarily profound and touches every aspect of our lives. It's an intricate, thorny, and fascinating subject. To take just one element: is it useful to spend much effort figuring out whether belief or action comes first? Another: what about the truth or falsity of beliefs? Does truth signify simply that which is true for you or is there some independent yardstick? Here too long digressions are interesting and worthwhile (and Ari has a few of these). But the usable and teachable point is that beliefs and actions are linked in a cycle where each drives the other, that the cycle can work in forward (better beliefs and better actions impelling each other along) or, sadly, in reverse, and that, approached consciously, unhelpful beliefs (e.g., “you just can't trust anybody”) can be identified and altered. The book shows the reader how this can be done. Impressively so, in fact.
It comes as a delightful surprise to those who might have been looking primarily for business wisdom to see the emphasis on history in the latest book and the three earlier volumes. Ari shows that history lives in buildings, in towns, and, above all, in people. The world of which we are a part is the product of a whole antecedent set of events. We are shaped by these and the people who made them, including the anarchists that are so central to the author's outlook. What is striking about the series is the way in which Ari brings these connections to the fore. The reader becomes far more aware of these living connections to history for having read the books. They are not works of history per se. But they are a credit to Ari's training in history (his field when an undergrad at the University of Michigan) and it's not simply a matter what he studied decades ago; he has brought to bear a lifetime of engagement with history in the GGL series. I would be surprised if anyone were to read the latest book as a whole, or even excerpts, and not go on to chase down some of his many historical references or pick up at least one item from his pages-long list of suggested further reading.
So we have the latest in Zingerman's “secrets” which the author can publish, making them more or less “open-source”, without fear on his part that he has undermined his own business. Interesting, no? Hard to imagine any Fortune 500 company doing the same. How is it possible? At least two reasons come to mind. First, as Ari himself points out, “copying” Zingerman's would be a very long and laborious process. Among his natural laws of business is that “It generally takes a lot longer to make something great happen than people think.” It requires an enormous effort. Considered from a traditional business standpoint, it is ironic then that Ari wants other organizations to adopt his recommendations and make that effort. Moreover, he readily acknowledges that training Zingerman's employees means that at least some will leave and start businesses that sell food in the same markets. The business is knowingly creating tomorrow's potential competitors. But, in reality, this may not be the danger that it appears to be. Businesses that take up the GGL series may well become part of a collaborative ecosystem with Zingerman's at its center. This is not simply speculation—the series is full of testimonials from people who have learned from the organization and now supply to it and buy from it. This extended network, by the way, would be a great subject for serious study.
The last word, even in a brief review, should belong to the author. It's hard not to think about and be moved by this statement, which is only one of many that might be selected as exemplifying the nature and caliber of the book: “I'd say that a technically terrific strategy, in the hands of nonbelievers, is just about guaranteed to fail; by contrast, a B-level strategy, put in place by people who are passionate about what they're doing, is far more likely to succeed.” Indeed. And “The Power of Beliefs in Business” will show you how to help them find that passion and success.
First, for those running or hoping to launch a business, the proposition made by the author in the first volume should be more than compelling. In that book, Ari Weinzweig—Ari from here on, as I believe he would prefer—said that he was often asked for the “secret” that explained how Ann Arbor's most famous food business had grown from a tiny deli to more than $40m business (that was 2012; today sales are over $60m). His answer was that there wasn't a single “secret” but many practices and insights that had helped Zingerman's thrive. More surprisingly, though, he had decided to write them all down in a series of books. How could anyone in small business not want to read that? Especially considering that the phenomenal success of Zingerman's has happened in an industry generally known for anemic profits, enormous staff turnover, and rapid business failure.
So there is much in this volume for the entrepreneur, just as there was in the previous three. These, by the way, weighed in at 351, 369, and 490 pages long. Some of the more interesting elements in this installment, which pick up on earlier themes: how to develop the vision for your business; how to find, train, and keep great employees; and the bright side of customer complaints (and why you should thank them for complaining!).
But the topic at the heart of this book is belief. This seems a bit incongruous at first. The skeptic would certainly wonder what this has to do with business. And Ari admits that this area of inquiry was a new one for him. “After living most of my life with beliefs that I barely even realized I had,” he writes, “the last few years of studying this subject have been life and business altering. While in the past I paid a lot of attention to actions, arguments, and analysis, I gave little or no thought to beliefs. That, too, has changed nearly 180 degrees.” Given the depth of the arguments made here, I believe that one.
And this is where the book will interest a much wider base of readers beyond the entrepreneurs. We all work in organizations. Some work in large companies or schools. Some in much smaller entities. But the one-woman business has a network of suppliers with whom she too must work as a team. Let me put it out there: even those who have lived their entire lives in organizations and spent considerable time and money studying them (that means you, MBAs) will gain a tremendous amount from this book. What is said here, it can be guaranteed, wasn't and couldn't be taught in any business school. And this is true above all in examining the beliefs held by many different people in a gamut of roles in business, from the busboy to the CEO.
That said, I think the book should also get a readership well beyond those who want to think about business. The issue of beliefs is necessarily profound and touches every aspect of our lives. It's an intricate, thorny, and fascinating subject. To take just one element: is it useful to spend much effort figuring out whether belief or action comes first? Another: what about the truth or falsity of beliefs? Does truth signify simply that which is true for you or is there some independent yardstick? Here too long digressions are interesting and worthwhile (and Ari has a few of these). But the usable and teachable point is that beliefs and actions are linked in a cycle where each drives the other, that the cycle can work in forward (better beliefs and better actions impelling each other along) or, sadly, in reverse, and that, approached consciously, unhelpful beliefs (e.g., “you just can't trust anybody”) can be identified and altered. The book shows the reader how this can be done. Impressively so, in fact.
It comes as a delightful surprise to those who might have been looking primarily for business wisdom to see the emphasis on history in the latest book and the three earlier volumes. Ari shows that history lives in buildings, in towns, and, above all, in people. The world of which we are a part is the product of a whole antecedent set of events. We are shaped by these and the people who made them, including the anarchists that are so central to the author's outlook. What is striking about the series is the way in which Ari brings these connections to the fore. The reader becomes far more aware of these living connections to history for having read the books. They are not works of history per se. But they are a credit to Ari's training in history (his field when an undergrad at the University of Michigan) and it's not simply a matter what he studied decades ago; he has brought to bear a lifetime of engagement with history in the GGL series. I would be surprised if anyone were to read the latest book as a whole, or even excerpts, and not go on to chase down some of his many historical references or pick up at least one item from his pages-long list of suggested further reading.
So we have the latest in Zingerman's “secrets” which the author can publish, making them more or less “open-source”, without fear on his part that he has undermined his own business. Interesting, no? Hard to imagine any Fortune 500 company doing the same. How is it possible? At least two reasons come to mind. First, as Ari himself points out, “copying” Zingerman's would be a very long and laborious process. Among his natural laws of business is that “It generally takes a lot longer to make something great happen than people think.” It requires an enormous effort. Considered from a traditional business standpoint, it is ironic then that Ari wants other organizations to adopt his recommendations and make that effort. Moreover, he readily acknowledges that training Zingerman's employees means that at least some will leave and start businesses that sell food in the same markets. The business is knowingly creating tomorrow's potential competitors. But, in reality, this may not be the danger that it appears to be. Businesses that take up the GGL series may well become part of a collaborative ecosystem with Zingerman's at its center. This is not simply speculation—the series is full of testimonials from people who have learned from the organization and now supply to it and buy from it. This extended network, by the way, would be a great subject for serious study.
The last word, even in a brief review, should belong to the author. It's hard not to think about and be moved by this statement, which is only one of many that might be selected as exemplifying the nature and caliber of the book: “I'd say that a technically terrific strategy, in the hands of nonbelievers, is just about guaranteed to fail; by contrast, a B-level strategy, put in place by people who are passionate about what they're doing, is far more likely to succeed.” Indeed. And “The Power of Beliefs in Business” will show you how to help them find that passion and success.
Displaying 1 of 1 review