Forty years ago this week, on the 13th of September, 1971, a ninety-one-year-old woman died quietly in Genoa. She had moved there near the end of WWII to live with her son’s family, while continuing to do the anarchist writing and publishing work that had helped her make her way in the world throughout her […]
In the strange corners of my mind, sometimes I start to imagine conversations between people who I know full well never met one another. Silly as they may seem, these imaginary “chats” are flights of historically mixed-up fantasy that help me get my mind around what shifts might have happened along the course of human […]
In prior installments in The Guide to Open Book Management posts, you learned what Open Book Management is, The Case for Open Book Management, whether Open Book is right for your business, the 3 Key Components of Open Book Management, and 5 Decisions to consider as you go Open Book. In this installment, the assumption […]
Giving and receiving actionable feedback is a pillar of a strong team culture. Not only is feedback an essential tool for performance management, it’s also a productive tool for debriefing events and managing ongoing change – continuously improving your work as a team. How can you foster this kind of feedback within your team? We […]
If we look for patterns in the past, interesting and unexpected things will appear. Sometimes, what we find makes us smile (I’ve been studying the history of “the frozen water trade” that was one of the country’s most important industries 120 years ago). Other times it can cause consternation (like the discomfiting realization that we […]
Fourteen years before we opened the Deli in 1982, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton went out west to travel. In 2019, writer and permaculturist Fred Bahnson published a thoughtful piece about that trip, entitled “On the Road with Thomas Merton.” Aside from the fact that I have long admired and sought to learn from Father […]
On his new album All Round the Light Said, Irish singer songwriter Joshua Burnside sings about “A Man of High Renown.” Who we hold in high renown, who we learn from, who we admire, and who we aspire to emulate has a huge influence on how we live our lives. What follows is, I hope, a […]
The other morning, I got an email from a Zingerman’s alum. Although it’s been many years since she worked with us, she still lives here in town and has long had her own successful career in business. She wrote that last week she’d had a particularly stressful medical appointment for which she’d had to fast. […]
As many of you know, I’ve been working for a while now on what is the next set of Natural Laws of Business (and also of life) that I hadn’t yet formulated when I wrote the initial essay back in 2009 in Part 1. Natural Laws, like gravity, are simply the way the world works. We don’t […]
Poet Naomi Shihab Nye says, “Questions are very helpful. Begin with a few you’re carrying right now.” So, in the spirit of Ms. Shihab Nye’s suggestion, here are a few questions with which to start this conversation: What if I told you I had a tool that you could put to work in your organization […]
Peter Koestenbaum could, on the surface, seem a surprising choice for an apostle of the revolutionary approach to putting freedom in place in the 21st century workplace. Even in the progressive part of the business world, few folks will likely have heard of him, and I doubt that his numerous books have made it to […]
Toni Morrison, who was born in 1931 about two hours east of Ann Arbor in Lorain, Ohio wrote, “This is the time for every artist in every genre to do what he or she does loudly and consistently. It doesn’t matter to me what your position is. You’ve got to keep asserting the complexity and […]
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