The great Ari Weinzweig about vision, anarchy and building systems, food, persistence, starting, writing, running, reading and growing together – not necessarily in that order.
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The episode was recorded on October 29th, 2020
Ari Weinzweig
Ari studied anarchism at university which is often misunderstood. He is an entrepreneur in the truest sense, which understands that it is good for motivation, to do things together, to be able to make a difference at the workplace: “But don’t confuse his brand of anarchic ideology with any preconceived notions involving chaos, destruction or tearing down the government. Instead, his brand of anarchy is about all about equality, community and refusing to “follow the rule because it’s the rule … I don’t think anybody really likes being told what to do,” says Ari.”
Zingerman’s founders and partners understood early that they need visions, simple processes and training to scale their own principles and to grow an institutional knowledge in the companies that form the Zingerman’s experience. Which some say is the coolest small company in the US.
“It’s all kind of whacked, but somehow it works. If you get into what we do, it’s a wonderfully weird and one-of-a-kind experience. As we said in our original vision, there are many delis but there’s still only one Zingerman’s.”
Zingerman’s work is an essential basis of my visioning work. In the preparation of this conversation I thought what Ari’s Native American name could be. And I came up with: “He who likes to read, write, eat well and run and talk about it” came to mind.
“What do you like best about working at Zingerman’s?
I think we make a positive difference in the lives of customers and co-workers, we’re always learning, we have fun, it’s hard and challenging in good ways, we help support suppliers/producers of great artisan food… It’s always interesting and never boring and there’s always way more to do than I’ll ever get done and i like all of that. I get to write about bacon and business, help CEOs and 16-year olds all to improve their lives through the work we do, and I get to eat really well and travel and learn a lot while I’m doing it.” Source
Zingerman’s
If you like food, you’ll like Zingerman’s. And Zingerman’s is the company that my guest Ari Weinzweig and his business partner Paul Saginaw founded in 1982. They grew the company along with friends and partners and hard work. Everybody involved in the growing food empire in Ann Arbor Michigan was very motivated. Zingerman’s is based on great food, strong visions, transparency, internal entrepreneurship and continuous training. And also on many unconventional views on things and actions elsewhere set in stone. What started as a sandwich shop in 1982 which was “small, clean, cheerfully, noisy, with confusion mounting to near-hysterical level at lunchtime” developed in a community of businesses with more than 700 employees and multiple partners.
“cheerfully noisy and almost unmanageably busy”
Connect with Ari & find out more
- more about Ari
- contact Ari
- Zingerman’s Youtube
- Zingerman’s on Twitter
- more about Paul Saginaw
Mentioned in the episode
- Zingerman’s Roadhouse
- The Art of Business pamphlet
- Maggie Bayless, Zingtrain
- Zingtrain
- 12 Natural Laws of Business pamphlet
- all of Zingerman’s pamphlets box edition
- Richard Branson‘s Virgin Group
- Open Book Management
- The Power of Beliefs pamphlet, read more
- The Hot Tomato podcast episode & website
- Why having hope matters
- The Facebook Red Book
- Oliver Wendell Homes
- The Guide to Good Leading
- David Bayles and Ted Orland: Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking
- Zingerman’s Newsletters
Some reading suggestions
- Ari’s posts on Zingerman’s
- Ari’s articles in the Atlantic
- A Lapsed Anarchist’s Approach to Building a Great Business
- Inc. article about Zingermans: “The coolest small company in America”
- Great article about Zingerman’s
- The new (Nov 2020) pamphlet: “Humility; A Humble, Anarchistic Inquiry”
- The power of positive beliefs, blog post
- an article about the start of Zingerman’s Deli
Newsletter
Transcript
This manual transcript was created by podcasttranscribe.com
Klaus Reichert: This is The 2pt5 – Conversations Connecting Innovators. If you like food, you’ll like Zingerman’s, and Zingerman’s is the company that my guest, Ari Weinzweig, and his business partner, Paul Saginaw, founded in 1982. They grew the company along with friends and partners and a lot of hard work. Everybody involved in the growing food empire in Ann Arbor, Michigan, was very motivated from the beginning. Zingerman’s is based on great food, strong visions, transparency, internal entrepreneurship and continuous training, and also on many unconventional views on things and actions, elsewhere set in stone. What started as a sandwich shop in 1982 which was small, clean, cheerfully noisy, with confusion mounting to near hysterical level at lunchtime, developed in a community of businesses with more than 700 employees and multiple partners. Check out the website at: the2pt5.net for additional information and the transcript of this conversation. Enjoy.
Klaus: Hello, Ari Weinzweig [vainsvaik]. Welcome to The 2pt5. Hello. Welcome.
Ari Weinzweig: Hello, Klaus. How are you?
Klaus: Pretty good. It’s a perfect… It was a perfect day for me at least. Right now it is around midst day, for you, noon, so you’re going for lunch, I suppose.
Ari : Well, I don’t really eat lunch, but I’m going to talk to you, and then I’m gonna go after that to see what’s happening at Zingerman’s Roadhouse.
Klaus: It’s great to have such places to go to all these important states, like breakfast or… something… in between meals or lunch, dinner and be welcomed, anywhere you go to these places. I really envy you here, because I like to eat a lot also.
Ari: Yeah, well, we’re waiting for you to fly over. [laughter]
Klaus: [laughter] I’d love to. I’d love to. But it’s just, right now, a very bad time.
Ari: Yeah, I know.
Klaus: Bad timing. But as you know, timing is everything. Thank you for this conversation. I’m a huge fan, boy. And thank God I’m not a journalist, because then I would have to be all serious and stuff like that. But I’m not. I’m an innovation coach, and I have followed Zingerman’s work and ZingTrain for a long time, so it created a lot for me, also, it’s inspired me a lot. So thank you very much for taking the time.
Ari : Oh, my pleasure.
Klaus: You know a lot about anarchism. [Ari laughs] I mean, you have studied about it. You wrote books. It was your major in college. How come that knowing a lot about anarchism drove you to establish systems in your business? I mean, systems! You’re an anarchist at some point, or you were an anarchist at some point. Maybe a communist. Some say maybe a cult leader at this moment.
Ari: No, no. I’ll stay away from the latter two. But I’ll take the anarchism. Yeah.
Klaus: [laughter] Okay. But how did that drive you to establish systems?
Ari: Well, I don’t know that it itself drove me to establish systems. I mean it’s… I guess what I would start with is the common misconception that anarchism is opposed to organization. This is a common misuse of the word and a common misunderstanding at almost every level, especially right now, when people in upper level American government positions keep using it as if it means chaos, when in fact, it’s the opposite of chaos. Uh, it’s it’s actually about organization completely, but it’s just… the difference is that it’s about involving the people who are being organized in the organization, so that rather than organization or systems being imposed by some hierarchical small group on the bigger group, it’s about involving everybody in whatever creative, systemic ways you come up with so that people are part of designing this system of which they’re operating in.
Klaus: Do you think that is a natural thing of people that they want to be part of the design?
Ari: I think so. I mean, I think that said, people are used to not being part of it. And so the… like all of us, we become, let’s say, dependent on the past relationships that we’ve had, or at least we’re used to them, are comfortable with them. So I think a lot of times people have been excluded for a long time, and so they become very comfortable with complaining about the way it is, but not having to take responsibility for working on it. So when one changes to this approach, it’s still imperfect and it’s a big change for the people in leadership but it’s also a big change for people on the front line. People are used to being left sort of victims of their bosses and then learning to take responsibility for having difficult agents and taking responsibility for designing the systems that you wanna work in.
Klaus: Designing such a system in a business is sort of like a thing that reflects your own vision, your own way of how you think things need to be done, need to get done, how things are right.
Ari: Yeah.
Klaus: That is quite an interesting and difficult thing to get to. The first thing is, how do you know what’s correct, what’s right, yourself?
Ari: Well, I think the point is we don’t know what’s right. You don’t. I think that was… took me a long time to understand: no one knows. [laughter] I think the point of this… well, I mean, a couple of things, I guess I would bring up one. I wrote a pamphlet a few years ago, called “The Art of Business”, which is my belief that business in life are like art. So it’s trying to approach it in that way. And so I would say designing a great system is as much a creative act as painting or music or poetry. It’s not easy to do well, but if we learn to work from the heart and apply our creative skills, we can come up with some amazing things. The other thing is, in the context of the group participating, it doesn’t mean everybody has to participate in every single thing. But the reality is, none of us haven’t figured it out on our own. We want to, many of us, like me, but the reality is everybody’s perspective is gonna bring something different to their conversation. And so creating systems that bring others into the conversation allows us to compensate for our own shortcomings and weaknesses by collaborating with people who have contrasting strengths and weaknesses.
Klaus: So you allow yourself to have weaknesses also as an entrepreneur?
Ari: Well, I think we have them. You don’t have to allow it. They’re there. [laughter]
Klaus: [laughter] Well, there’s so many people that think that they are without fault and never fail.
Ari: Well, that would be a fault.
Klaus: [laughter] Great! Ari, when you started along with Paul, you started in the eighties with creating sandwiches, soups, sort of coffee and stuff like that. And it was, as far as I understand, a nice place to go to. And starting with sandwiches… I mean, what can go wrong with sandwiches? But somehow things probably went wrong at some place right away.
Ari: Oh, yeah!
Klaus: What was one of these things that went wrong for you with the sandwiches?
Ari: Well, I could tell you the first day that we opened, Maggie Bayless, who later became the managing partner of ZingTrain, our training business, she was work… she actually studied German literature, and she actually spent a semester in Freiburg, and then later, after business school, she did an internship in Mayor Bush near Dusseldorf, too. But anyway, she was working at a bank in town, and she was our friend. And so she organized lunch for all her colleagues and came in to pick up the sandwiches, and we forgot to put the drinks in her order. So right… you know, the reality is we’re all making mistakes every single day. So… that’s just the reality of life.
Klaus: I’ve read some words in an article about the opening: “It was a small, clean cheerfully noisy place with confusion mounting to near hysterical level at lunchtime”. That sounds really, really nice.
Ari: Yeah, well, lucky. Like I said, come on over. We have to wait for Covid to end. But one day you’ll be here.
Klaus: [laughter] Yeah, but “cheerfully noisy and almost unmanageably busy”. So you started that place in a place where it was sort of traditional to sell sandwiches, I understand that. You had some initial recipes which were sort of based in, let’s say, American or New York cultures, I understand. But where did you get the recipes for the sandwiches and the soups and the stuff that you serve?
Ari: We made it up. I mean, we had, Paul and I, both had been working in restaurants for a number of years before that, uh, so I mean, I, you know, I don’t mean we’re the best cooks in the world, but we knew how to cook.
Klaus: I mean, I was in the eighties. I was in the U.S. I lived for a year in the U.S. And the food was very different than it is now, and people had a different awareness of what food was. It was very… let’s say “franchise”: McDonald’s and stuff like that.
Ari: Yeah.
Klaus: Did it take a lot of convincing for the people to follow you, with your recipes?
Ari: Yeah, and of course, it’s gradual and you know you don’t need everybody, but I actually have a book in the works, that’s a collection of food essays that I wrote over many decades and the introduction of the book as it’s drafted -it’s not finished yet- but it’s essentially talking about what I came to realize in the last few years, was essentially a food revolution in the United States that was happening, you know, in a few years before and after we opened the Deli in 1982 and I couldn’t have told you, or I wouldn’t have told you at the time that there was one happening, as so some revolutions in history happened in the context of immediate, you know, one singular event gets focused on, but many revolutions happened much more slowly in the context of social revolutions or changes. And although people may in the end fix the date on one date, the reality is it was happening over a long period of time and then it continued in for a long time afterwards because the changes are actually much more gradual than history might have. And I realized that that was happening with the food: in the beginning it was only 1300 square feet, I think so, that’s 350 square meters, so it’s not like we had room for that many people.
Klaus: What started as this sandwich place with 350 square meters is today a group of businesses, and I think it’s around nine. But at some point, I read that you started the visioning process for yourself for your own business, very early, and you envisioned, sort of, I think, 15 businesses, I’ve read. When was the first time you worked on your own vision?
Ari: The idea of vision in hindsight, I would say, is a universal truth. I wrote an essay called “Twelve Natural Laws of Business”. It’s on there. I think every healthy organization, whether it’s a musical band or an educational institution or a business, it doesn’t matter: if they’re doing great, they have a vision. You know, they may not write it down the way that we teach it but they have one in their head, of what they’re trying to achieve, and people are essentially bought in, to making that vision a reality. So when we opened the deli, I would say Paul and I had one, but we didn’t write it down the way we would do it now. The first time we actually wrote one down was in 1993-94 and that was… we were 12 years into our business life together, and we wrote a vision called “Zimmerman’s 2009”. So it was set 15 years into the future. On that vision was the first time we used the process that we now use every day pretty much. And that vision was about six pages long (or still is six pages long) and it described a community of businesses where each business would be located here in the Ann Arbor area. I still, to this day, I have a very strong belief about doing business in the place in which you’re present and live, and that each business would be unique. I don’t really like the copies or chains, I don’t know that they’re necessary, like music or art, they kind of lose their energy and the excitement of a really original musician or original artists, and that each business would be part of the Zingerman’s community, but would have some high amount of autonomy to function so that we didn’t create too much, you know, bureaucracy. And each business would have a managing partner or partners that own part of that business and really had a passion for what that business did, and they would be in their everyday operating it.
Klaus: I think that’s a great alternative way of franchising. I mean, this is something that helped you grow the group, bring in lots of talent, bring in lots of people that take on responsibility and sort of add one building block to the next, with partners, with… working together with real partners.
Ari: Yeah. Yep, Absolutely.
Klaus: And it sort of reminded me a bit of Richard Branson with the Virgin Group.
Ari: Yep.
Klaus: I mean, they have a different perspective on things, and they do things differently, and they might try even more things, and they have a global perspective. But I think what you do with your concept is kind of the local version of that.
Ari: Yeah, absolutely. He’s a little bigger than us.
Klaus: [laughter] Slightly. Slightly, only. Your sandwiches are probably much better.
Ari: [laughter] Well, I don’t know, but they do what they do well, too.
Klaus: But what you did with that is also, I mean, not just internally. I mean, right now, Zingerman’s has about 700 people. You have sort of created a movement with all these things, like open book and visioning and the power of beliefs, which is sort of transferred. The knowledge is being transferred via ZingTrain to lots of other businesses also. I mean, I’ve talked to The Hot Tomato from Fruita, in this podcast…
Ari: Yep.
Klaus: …and you know them well.
Ari: Yep
Klaus: I mean, you have created a lot in this world right now. How does that feel? I mean, this is something that is beyond a product, beyond brick and mortar. It is sort of a timeless thing.
Ari: Yeah. I mean, I think that, you know, we have tried to learn from many other people, so I think the reality of whatever philosophy of life is that we’re all building on what we learned from other people, and what we do here is no exception. So I think in many ways what we’re doing is bringing together all sorts of different creative and effective approaches that we’ve learned from others and putting it together in our own unique way, which is really true of everything. I mean any “new cooking style” is really just combining things from different places, different influences. Any musical style is the same thing. I mean, there’s no note that hasn’t been played or ingredient that hasn’t been used. So I think we wanna always give credit to those from whom we learned and then put it together in a way that’s true to us, and unique and meaningful for us. And then, hopefully Jen, at Hot Tomato, or others, they’re gonna take it and adapt it to their ecosystem, too, because in the same way that good farming is always… you need to adapt to the local climate and the local soil, the same is true with business. But yes, that’s true. It’s certainly influenced many other people, clearly.
Klaus: You kind of created a lifestyle choice, I think.
Ari: Yeah, well, I think we all are. Even if we, you know, when you’re working in a business where, let’s say, it’s not aligned with your personal values, that is a lifestyle choice for us. Also, it may not be a positive one, but it’s still a choice. And I think you know, part of what I would suggest works well in our setting, certainly imperfectly, but is that the approaches that we take are very aligned with how people wanna live in their personal life. And I would suggest they’re really the same technique. So when we teach visioning, it’s the same process that you use at home. If we teach energy management to our staff, it’s the same: when they leave work they still could manage their energy. The power of beliefs is universal. Building hope is universal. So these things are really… it’s not about a business technique that makes you work in opposition to your personal values. To the contrary, it’s a process or a technique or a system, or an approach that allows you to actually live more effectively outside of work as well as at work.
Klaus: I understand that this is big teamwork. There’s lots of people putting in things, experiences, ideas and energy and stuff like that. But somehow you have to put that together, channel that and bring it back to everybody else, at least some other… every other year or something. That Zingerman’s statement of beliefs is something… is like an effort for that, it’s like a book that every employee every… do you call people in your company “employees”?
Ari: Yeah, staff members, Zing members, ZCoBbers, we call them, you know.
Klaus: [laughter] Okay, …that every one of them is made aware of and and sort of base their work on. It’s kind of like the face… I just think of that first time of the Facebook Red Book, which is probably a copy of what you are doing.
Ari: [laughter] Well, we’re trying. I mean, especially this year. It’s challenging because communication has been… many patterns of communication have been disrupted by the pandemic, and although Zoom is awesome for you and me doing this, it’s not that ideal for really communicating with people regularly. And so a lot of regular meetings have, you know, we have stopped and then we’re trying to get them started again. And then when you’re starting on Zoom, there’s some advantages, people could do it from home, but the downside is really it’s not the same as I don’t think of being in person, and it removes a lot of the casual interactions that enhance the culture so. But anyway, yeah, we’re trying to get all of that out to people as best we can.
Klaus: You have like tangible and intangible products, I think.
Ari: Yeah.
Klaus: One is sandwiches, coffee, stuff like that. And the other, intangible is like hospitality, feeling welcome, provide a service in a restaurant, for example.
Ari: Yeah, yeah.
Klaus: That takes a lot of knowledge on one hand, but also how to prepare a sandwich, for example, the right way, how to serve a customer, but also how to interact with a customer, especially possibly with a difficult customer. Is there like a secret sauce for you, like a top three where you say: “This is what we do” and then everybody understands it right away? Because I think that’s a really difficult problem that you have solved.
Ari: Well, I don’t know if we ever solve it. I mean, I think it’s for the rest of our lives trying to figure it out. But I think the thing is, there’s not a top three, and that’s part of the problem. That’s part of what I learned from anarchism, it was just everybody’s looking for the number one thing. But it’s actually… the search for the number one thing, I think, is actually not very helpful because it dishonors the reality of the complexity of the world. So I think on the one hand it’s important to be able to present stuff in ways that are understandable. And I think part of what we’ve done with ZingTrain that’s worked is to be able to take complex realities, but then present them in ways that are simpler to learn but still honor the complexity. So our visioning process, we have an eight step recipe, we have four elements of a vision, we have three steps to great service, five steps to handling complaints. So these are simple enough to get your mind around and to learn when you’re new and it’s overwhelming, but also they allow for the reality that every customer is different, every content of every vision is different, etcetera, etcetera. So I think that’s the beauty of it. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the American scholar… I’m trying to remember the exact quote, but it was something like: “You know, I wouldn’t give a fig -which is an American expression- for the superficial simplicity, but I would give the world for simplicity on the other side of complexity.” So when you honor the complexity in your simplicity, that’s when it’s a beautiful thing.
Klaus: I think I’m lacking a few years in experience right now because I’ve never heard it, talking about complexity that nicely. And that’s easily understandable because I always thought when you started with the complexity thing, that many people reject complexity. They don’t believe that it exists. They just want the simple way, the easy solution.
Ari: Yeah, but I think that’s what part of the problem is, and I think we can create methods that work. I mean, one can’t process everything at the same time, but at the same time it’s to…. you have to dehumanize people in order to make them fit a box that one size fits all. I mean, it just doesn’t work. And again, I think, you know, going back to your original question, I mean, the anarchists were reacting to a lot of the dehumanization of the industrial Revolution, and not that everything was bad. I mean, there was good technological work that came from it, of course, but at the same time, it was really about treating people as if they were a machine part, and they’re no, right? And so I’m not the same today as I was yesterday. And how I feel talking to you will be altered 20 minutes after we’re off the phone, because something will happen. And so honoring the complexities, but still creating frameworks that work is important.
Klaus: I see what you mean. I mean, if you have some sort of framework, some sort of system in place, you will always create some result. It might not be the “correct” result, but it will create something that you can work with and improve, or pick up on it, or whatever, base something new on it.
Ari: Yes, yes, absolutely. And I think to that point, I mean, the best systems lead you towards the new development.
Klaus: With ZingTrain, do you train basically everybody in the company also?
Ari: No. ZingTrain really just trains people like from the outside. And then internally, we have our own training. And certainly people who work at ZingTrain also teach classes inside, but so do I, and so do a lot of other people. So ZingTrain is not the internal training department, but it’s more the place that we translate what we do internally for others, and then also can use the expertise that ZingTrain brings to the training inside the organization for ourselves. And then again, this year has been challenging because, you know, it’s just the reality is that so many classes have been hard to do during the pandemic. So…
Klaus: Yeah. I have switched a lot to online coaching and workshops and stuff. And it works, but you just have to adapt to it. And people have to adapt to it, not seeing themselves personally and not sharing food in the breaks and stuff like that. That’s an important part of such an experience, also.
Ari: I agree.
Klaus: And I’ve participated in online meetings that have started with food. That was really great because the people sent out like “care packages” to all the individual participants, which is really nice because we shared that, say, Bavarian food experience, or that whatever Italian food experience, and talked about other things also. So that was a great way, but it’s very, very complex to prepare.
Ari: Yeah, absolutely.
Klaus: Ari, you are writing a lot. I mean pamphlets. I know, when I reacted how I reacted about reading the pamphlets, that you were printing pamphlets, I thought: “Wow, why a pamphlet?” Then “why printed?” And then I thought of “Well, there is a shop. There is shops, there’s restaurants and people go to these restaurants and pick up all these things.” So I understand. I know that you write blog posts, and articles, and books, and so on.
Ari: Yes, yes.
Klaus: I mean, part of… if you have some sort of vision, ideas, and if you’re driven by something, you need to write about it. But when do you find the time to do that?
Ari: Well, I wrote a whole piece about time management. It’s in part three of The Guide to Good Leading, which is on Managing Ourselves, and then it’s also out as a pamphlet too. But I mean, I think that we all make time for what we care about the most. And then also, I think that… I would suggest that many of us have an unhealthy relationship with time. And I think the better our relationship with time, the more ultimately we get done. You know, I have dozens of little techniques that I use, but I think the bigger issue is the relationship. And then, you know, do people have a vision of how they would like their relationship with time to be going?
Klaus: It’s… there’s so many time management systems around, and in the end, it’s basically about knowing what is important to yourself and then coming up with the priorities.
Ari: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it’s, I guess… and now that you say it, I mean, it’s a little bit like if people have an unhealthy relationship with food, but they go on a diet, it’s not gonna work, you know? So it doesn’t mean the diet itself is evil, but it will be ultimately unsustainable unless people have a healthy relationship with food, and I think the same is probably true with time, too, now that you suggest that.
Klaus: You as a person, but also Zingerman’s as a business, has embraced the digital tools, I think, very well. You have several newsletters. I love the graphics that you developed. I saw that you are using this style of graphic also in the shops and restaurants and stuff like that.
Ari: Yeah.
Klaus: So it’s like a consistent image that you’re transferring here. But for you yourself, what is more important, somebody to read the newsletter or pick up the pamphlet in the restaurant, for example?
Ari: Well, I mean, I think what’s important is that it works for them, you know. It’s… I like paper… [Klaus laughs] but I think realistically, the e-news, obviously, just like social media, I mean, it can reach a lot more people, and people can read it in their own time and wherever: on their phone, while they’re waiting for the bus, or wherever they want to do. So certainly both have a place, and I think that the point of diversity is to be able to make material available in different methods.
Klaus: Ari, before we leave, I was wondering, could you tell me how important is hootsburgh in business? Hootsburgh for an entrepreneur, for an innovator?
Ari: [laughter] I don’t know if anybody ever asked me that. Um, well, I think it’s… the reality is that we… to do anything bold we have to… at least my belief, I remained fearful almost of everything. It’s just learning how to go ahead anyway, and not to be stopped by the fear, because I think, to your earlier point, I mean, to pretend there’s no fear is naive and not real. The difference is the people who pursue it anyway. David Bales and Ted Orland wrote a book about art and artists -I’m paraphrasing- but they said the difference between great artists and the people who fail his artist is the great artists go ahead through the fear anyway, and I think that’s certainly true for me. So I guess that translates in my grandmother’s language into hoots book. You have to go ahead and, you know, be bold. That said, people do bold things and fail too, so it’s not like boldness only guarantees success, but I think to do something meaningful, we have to take chances and come to realize over the years that not doing anything is taking a chance too. So either way, there’s a risk.
Klaus: Ari, thank you very much. You and Zingerman’s are a source of constant inspiration. Thank you very much for taking the time, Ari. That was a real, real treat.
Ari: My pleasure. Thank you.
Klaus: That was my conversation with Ari Weinsweig of Zingerman’s Community of Businesses in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I hope you enjoyed listening to it as much as I did. I had a great time preparing it and collected lots of materials, which I published on the2pt5.net website. You’ll find also a transcript, videos, additional text and links to Zingerman’s. They will help you to better understand this community of businesses and the Zingerman’s approach.
Thank you very much for listening. Have a great day. This is The 2pt5 – Conversations connecting innovators.
This manual transcript was created by podcasttranscribe.com