It’s our 50th year! That’s right. The Big 5-O! And the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses (ZCoB) is healthier, happier, and more financially sound than ever. We have continued to break creative ground in the worlds of progressive business, service, food, work experiences, love and care. In an era where electronic interaction is now the norm, […]
Many thanks to all of you who reached out with such positive thoughts after to my recent piece about our 2032 Vision. I appreciate everyone who asked for a copy. I’m happy to share—inspiring visions and interesting ideas, ever imperfect, can only lead to more creative thinking across our ecosystem when shared widely. Speaking of […]
Thursday, January 28, is a morning that I will remember, in the best possible ways, for a long time. Probably, for the rest of my life. Unlike so many other days lately, nothing particularly noteworthy that I know of happened on a national scale that day. And yet, here at Zingerman’s, it was a day […]
Malcolm Gladwell said, “Once you don’t start at the beginning, your life just gets so much easier.” Why not, then, use the end as the beginning? It’s an oft-used tactic for writers and filmmakers, so why not try it in our lives? When we know how the story winds up, we will most likely alter […]
A draft vision for a small Thursday evening Farmer’s Market we host out in the parking lot of Zingerman’s Roadhouse. It’s the longest day of the year; the sun is at its pinnacle of warmth and light. Throngs of people are milling around the Roadhouse parking lot on this Thursday afternoon, amazed and excited at […]
One day, as Becky Winkler was teaching the section of our ZingTrain MerchandiZing seminar that covers “Contrast, Composition, and Content, it suddenly struck me. Although the approach was created to address graphic design issues, it’s applicable to all the other “design work we do,” whether that’s designing a business, a product or anything else of […]
Everyone at Zingerman’s is currently engaged in what we’ve affectionately come to call ZAP, a simple acronym for Zingerman’s Annual Planning. Like any skill one is attempting to perfect, it takes time, practice and dedication to become a master planner. Planning—and even more importantly following the plan—has become such a normal part of what we […]
This essay is about effective leadership. But not the out-front, high-energy, heroic, final-step type of work that wins recognition in magazines about management. Instead it’s about an element of effectiveness that comes from the unglamorous, behind the scenes, stick to the systems stuff that’s just as important, but rarely gets headlines. It’s not about the […]
In a previous article, Why and How Visioning Works, I wrote about how the process of visioning which, as we define it at Zingerman’s, is a picture of the success of a project at a particular time in the future. I noted that a vision isn’t a strategic plan—which is the map to where we […]
When we start any project, we use the process of visioning—figuring out what we want success to look like—to get it going. I’m selling visioning because it tangibly improves the quality of the organization and the personal lives of those who use it. Without visioning, it’s easy to be dragged down by pressures and problems, […]
In 1992, we called together a group of managers, staff, and owners and set out to put on paper a statement of what Zingerman’s is all about, to write what’s referred to in business books as a Mission Statement. I was skeptical. I’m not sure why I agreed to it; probably because my partner Paul […]
Regardless of your actual title in an organization, your job involves making decisions. New staff members start making decisions the day they are hired, and beginning with their decision to accept the job, we hope their decisions will be good ones. One of the basic tenets of Bottom-Line Training — clear, documented expectations — is […]
