The Impact of Art and Artfulness in Life & Business, Part 1

ZN: Where did you get the idea of thinking about business as art? 

A: Probably 25 years or so ago. Maybe more, even. It dawned on me that designing our organization well was as much a creative act as the work I was doing with food and cooking. 

Before that realization, in the context of the new book, I’d say I had negative beliefs about a lot of the organizational work that we needed to do. I’d seen it as drudgery, or a problem I “had” to deal with. But when I started thinking of it as a creative act, the whole thing got a lot more interesting and a lot more rewarding. I started to realize that, just like a beautifully designed building looks better, works better, and feels better, most of the people using it can’t tell you what it is that makes it feel that way. Same with a great organization. It feels better and works better even though most people may not be able to tell you why it works as it does. 

Today, having come to think of things much more in alignment with nature, I’d use the metaphor of a beautifully designed garden. It looks great. It’s comfortable. But it’s not just about surface-level beauty. It actually works better—more sustainably, enriching the soil, retaining water effectively, etc. And although one can walk through it and casually appreciate it in a few minutes, it takes a LOT of hard work, advance thought, skill, creativity, and care to make it what it is. 

ZN: It seems like a lot of this is about relationships? 

A: Yep. Joanne Leonard, the Ann Arbor-based artist told me, “I’m interested in what could be called rhythms and rhymes—a diagonal here with another, similar one there, or a dark shadow off-set in another place, by a light but similar shape.” I agree. I think I look for those rhythms and rhymes in the way our spaces are laid out, in the way an organization relates to the community it’s a part of, etc. 

It’s a lot about your relationship with yourself as well. It’s only when we really get to know ourselves, when we can (more often than not, at least) separate the voices of all the other people we know and care about that we’ve internalized from our own…that we can sort through things to get where we want to go. I like the Robert Henri line: “There is nothing more entertaining than to have a frank talk with yourself. Few do it—frankly. Educating yourself is getting acquainted with yourself.” 

ZN: Part of this focus on business as art seems to be played out in your focus on uniqueness. 

A: That’s true. It’s just a lot of what’s always appealed to me and motivated me for as long as I can remember. It was true when I was a kid. It was true when I was in school at Michigan—that’s a lot of what was so intriguing to me studying the anarchists. They were all about honoring every person as a unique individual. Which was so much the opposite of people being swallowed by society and pressured to fit in and conform. I love the Rollo May quote about “the opposite of courage isn’t cowardice, it’s conformity.” But of course, walking one’s own path is much easier said than done! 

This is a lot about what resonates for me with this art-life-spirit approach. I really like the John O’Donahue line: “The poet wants to drink from the well of origin; to write the poem that has not yet been written.” With businesses, the sort of mass market, big box franchises that are plopped down or opened up all over the country—actually all over the world—are the opposite of uniqueness. They’re pretty much identical whether you go to the south side of Ann Arbor or South Carolina. Wendell Berry wrote that this conformity is, “placed upon whatever landscape merely by imposition, as a cookie cutter is imposed upon dough.” Less obvious, there are so many businesses that are trying to catch the latest wave, to take advantage of the trends, to take on what everyone else is doing, to follow the market leaders as quickly as possible. That’s not a terrible thing. But I don’t think it makes for optimally interesting businesses. 

Maybe a better word is originality. Because in a way we’re all just combining things that already exist in some other spot or form, or putting our own spin on something that’s been done for centuries. The cool thing, I think, is that when we’re true to our spirit and to who we really are, then what comes out is, by definition, going to be original. I love Robert Henri’s quote—“Don’t worry about your originality. You couldn’t get rid of it even if you wanted to.” 

So often, though, people are watching others’ success patterns and trying to tag onto their success. Which isn’t evil, but it’s not all that interesting. I was reading an interview with Scott Belsky in Tim Ferriss’ book Tools of Titans. He said, “It’s easy to see why most investors rely on pattern recognition. It starts with a successful company that surprises everyone with a new model…what follows is endless analysis and the mass adoption of a playbook that has already been played…sure, [those companies] may create a successful derivative, but they won’t change the world. If you only look for patterns from the past, you won’t venture far.” 

I’m convinced that everyone we work with has it in them. Like Henri said, “Art, when really understood, is the province of every human being.” There’s a musician named Lauren O’Connell whose music I really love. When I was watching some YouTube videos of her playing one day I discovered that on many of her recorded songs she actually plays nearly all the instruments herself. That was impressive. But what blew my mind was that how many everyday ordinary things she turned into instruments. Everything from loose coins shaken on a tennis racket and then tapped with a spoon, to rubbing her finger on the edge of variously filled water glasses, tapping glasses with a blue ballpoint pen, hitting a phone book with a drum stick, to using a bow to play the banjo. She stomps her boots on one song to start the percussion. While I’m sure she’s not the first person in the world to do those things, she’s clearly put them together in a way that brings something special to her music and performance. And it’s not just an oddity or affectation. She uses it to make really great music. 

The opposite of originality is standardization. It’s the industrial model. On a personal level, it’s—to a greater or lesser degree— dehumanization. Where individuals don’t matter. At the extreme level that can be enslavement, concentration camps, lynchings, pogroms, etc. But on a far less extreme, much more common, middle of the road level, it can just come in the form of people being treated like statistics or machine parts. Like they’re unimportant, not creative, not capable. Like they have no value. They get put into boxes. They’re assigned identities based on…you name it—who they hang out with, the color of their skin, what they study, where they worship. It’s true with people and it’s true with big box stores set down at the crossroads of beautiful backcountry. If you do what everyone else is already doing, then the only draws you really have are price or location. Both of which are relatively easily overcome for someone who wants to compete with you. 

I’m always inclined to go the other way. To try to do things that honor the individual for who they are and that try to create businesses that are doing something unique and special. Part 1 of the Guide to Good Leading Series has much more on this. 

ZN: And how does this translate into business? 

A: I believe ever more strongly that great businesses are unique in the way they put themselves together and the way they put themselves out there in the world. Great art is always a reflection of the soul and spirit of the person who makes it. I love that line from Thelonius Monk about a “genius is the one most like himself.” I agree. And I think it’s true of organizations. Great businesses are the ones that are “most like themselves.” 

Of course, it’s harder to really be ourselves than it is to know that it’s a good idea to be ourselves. But that’s really what this whole idea is about. Creating something special that’s an accurate and effective manifestation of the spirit, values, beliefs and passions of the person or people behind the project. An artful existence—whether personally or collectively—that makes a positive impression on the people who are around it. And, personally, I’d add that, at least for me, it had a positive impact on the people and place that it comes into contact with. But that’s another interview. 

ZN: How did that work out for you guys with Zingerman’s? 

A: For me and Paul, all of this was implicit—granted in rough form—in what we were trying to do from the get go. From the beginning of the Deli back in 1982 I was always focused on creating something special and unique. Not just a copy of a deli in New York or Chicago or Detroit. It just seemed more interesting to me to work on. And, I believe very strongly, ultimately a better business. Because, while it’s almost always easier to sell people what they’re already used to buying from others, in the long run you really don’t have anything uniquely your own to offer when that’s what you do. 

On the other hand, the businesses that do something special, that create a unique model, that put pieces together in unique ways have a much better shot at doing something memorable in the marketplace. So customers are drawn to them. People who like creative work want to work in them or with them. The press wants to write about them. And that’s what I wanted to create. 

The same effort to create uniqueness was built into the vision for Zingerman’s 2009 that Paul and I wrote in 1994. Rather than follow the standard “open more stores” model, our vision was designed to create growth by recreating uniqueness. So, we designed a business model in which each business would be part of the Zingerman’s Community, but, at the same time, each would have its own specialty. 

Each would have a managing partner, or partners, in it—in this sense, they’re the artist whose inspiration informs that business. Our hope was that we kept the same energy of uniqueness that had helped make the Deli so special. In many ways, it’s harder to walk one’s own path. I’m with Herman Melville— ”It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.” You know, it’s the old Frank Sinatra hit—“I Did It My Way!” 

ZN: So you don’t think that the standard business model of opening more units of your successful original is “art?” 

A: Well, I think it’s “art.” It’s just not great art. Or not the kind of art I’m interested in. I always say to people: if you think there’s really no difference between a business with a single unique entity and one that replicates itself over and over, then why is a Picasso original worth millions when a Picasso print is worth next to nothing? The art is technically the same. But the feel, the energy, the nuance, the details, the uniqueness – totally different in the one he actually painted! I mean, I love Apple products and I admire a lot of what they’ve done. And I think the idea of the Apple store was very cool. The first one they opened blew people’s minds. But when I walk through mall to get to the Apple store in Ann Arbor and the store is 90% the same as every other Apple store in the world, it’s not all that exciting. I go there because I need to get something and really that’s it. 

The same is true with being a market leader in anything, rather than a follower. When we’re following in someone else’s wake rather than creating our own path, the second and third and fourth players in will always be compared—almost always unfavorably—to the original. I’ve generally always tried to do the opposite—to go away from the trends where I can. 

I love that Robert Henri quote: “The individual says, ‘My crowd doesn’t run that way.’ I say, don’t run with crowds.” Running with the crowd is often easier in the short term and it can definitely make you more money more quickly, but the businesses who follow in others’ footsteps are never regarded as innovative artists in their field. Jack Trout wrote about that phenomenon years ago in his books on market positioning. If you’re in a field in which someone else is already the pioneer, you’re stuck with, at best, second place. I stand by the statement from the Positive Organizational Scholarship folks here at U of M that says, “Excellence is a function of uniqueness.” The more you do something in a way that others haven’t already done it—or at least not lately—the more you have a shot at doing something that will be remembered positively for a long time. 

The reality, though, is that we’re mostly taught to try to fit in, not how to take a flyer on the top five trends of our era. There’s a safety in fitting in. It’s what Irish poet and priest John O’Donahue wrote: “One of the sad things today is that so many people are frightened by the wonder of their own presence. They are dying to tie themselves into a system, a role, or to an image, or to a predetermined identity that other people have actually settled on for them. This identity may be totally at variance with the wild energies that are rising inside in their souls. Many of us get very afraid and we eventually compromise. We settle for something that is safe, rather than engaging the danger and the wildness that is in our own hearts.” 

On the other hand, the more we focus on what we feel strongly about, something we really believe in, something we ourselves came up with or something we created out of others’ pieces, the more interesting it’s likely to be. Now, obviously, if we’re making something no one wants at all, or something no one’s willing to buy, then that isn’t going to work if we’re trying to make it in a business. 

But I know from all the work on the Beliefs book that how much we believe in what we’re doing makes an enormous difference. When we’re doing something we really believe in, and what we do is done well, the odds go up a lot that we can make it work. It’s like Thelonius Monk said: “Play your own way. Don’t play what the public wants—you play what you want and let the public pick up on what you are doing—even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years.” Now, of course, businesses can’t generally wait fifteen years. But still, the point is the same. Doing something that you believe in, making a product or service that people don’t even know that they want until you make it…those are the people/businesses who become market leaders. Make something so interesting and special, unique but still accessible in its own special way, that people will go a long way to get.