Many people, wanting to live their lives in more interesting ways, will decide to take the occasional cooking lesson A well-connected friend asked me the other day to let her know what she should tell politicians of both parties that small-business people would like to have right now. Since I struggle to find the words […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
John O’Donohue wrote, “The primary world that each of us has to do with is the world that is invisible, that is the interior world within us.” He reminds us, “No one else sees your life in the way that you do.” Here’s a glimpse at a small snippet of mine: I really like working […]
Dr. Vivek Murthy wrote in his book Together: “The more I studied the seesaw relationship between loneliness and togetherness, the more convinced I became of the great power of human connection. So many problems we face as a society… are worsened by loneliness and disconnection. Building a more connected world holds the key to solving these […]
About 25 years ago my partner Paul started talking about the idea of Natural Laws of Business; laws that—like gravity—were simply true. All thriving businesses, he suggested, were living in harmony with those Natural Laws. About a decade later I took Paul’s concept and fleshed it out further in Part 1, Secret #1: “The Twelve Natural Laws […]
Every day brings new challenges, which is always true. But sometimes – like right now, during a global pandemic – the challenges are coming faster and seem especially jarring. Trying to navigate a global pandemic, a nose-diving economy and a crisis of confidence in our government and social systems can drain anyone’s energy. Talking with trusted friends […]
The creation of the 12 Natural Laws of Business is a lot like the story they tell about gravity. Apples had been falling off trees and hitting the ground long before Sir Isaac Newton figured out how, and why, and how fast. Similarly, somewhere along the way in our over almost 38-year-long existence, Ari Weinzweig […]
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