Specialty Food Magazine is the leading publication for retailers, manufacturers and foodservice professionals in the specialty food trade. It provides news, trends and business-building insights that help readers keep their businesses competitive.
Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/165618
the educated retailers' guide 3. Be Patient: Insights and Ideas Take Time There's nothing really new in the food world. All you can do is put things together in diferent ways. 1. Open Your Mind to Unusual Connections Making positive and meaningful connections between things that most people pass off as unrelated frequently will result in something special. That's because creative breakthroughs occur most often when we connect the dots in unexpected ways. Doing this opens up space for an insight, an epiphany, a leap forward into excellence. Kudos to Zingerman's partner Paul Saginaw for figuring that out, and for seeing my ability to do so long before I actually understood it for myself. Now that I've studied creativity for a while I realize that, although big concepts often go on to gain fame and a lot of press, at some point in their existence most "new" or "radical" ideas actually have been hanging around in one form or another for a long while. In many cases, years go by before anyone makes the last critical connection that takes an otherwise unimportant idea to high levels of fame, impact and, at times, even fortune. Significant applications of new ideas seem to occur due to small, steady, often slightly off-center steps or by recombining elements that were already there. That has certainly been true at Zingerman's. In 1982, when we started the business, Paul told me, "There's nothing really new in the food world. All you can do is put things together in different ways." That idea of re-blending what's been used elsewhere to develop our own effective mix is a way of business for us. We've developed our own unique approach to organizational life— people come from all over to learn about what we do. But the truth is that we learned 38 ❘ SPECIALTY FOOD MAGAZINE almost every element of it from others who were talking about, if not doing, it somewhere else. What's so special is that in adding one piece at a time—servant leadership, open-book finance, positive energy, great service, devotion to traditional foodways, community giving, diversity work and so on—we've managed to emerge with a management model that is completely ours. 2. Don't Focus Too Much People who are focused on "fixing" something may succeed, but more often than not they'll be stuck in shades of the status quo. I know this firsthand because I've seen it in our work with visioning, which is basically creating a written "picture" of how we want something to be in several years and then making steps to achieve it. Visioning gets us to stop worrying about what we should do this second, and sets us to dreaming in a well-outlined but otherwise outlandishly (by business-school standards, anyway) anarchistic way. Letting the mind wander, getting it to move from one world to the next, and then to another still, increases the odds of out-of-the-box brilliance. Other formats that foment this sort of focus-through-unfocus include yoga, walking, running, rowing, meditation or other activities that are primarily physical but free the brain to be engaged in other, unplanned ways. It's a natural law of business that great things take a lot longer to happen than you think. Or as seventh-generation North Carolina miller Joe Linley once told me: "Nothing good ever happens in a hurry." In studying all this stuff around creativity, what I've known instinctively and experientially for a long time turns out to be true statistically too: hunches, breakthroughs—or whatever you want to call them—need time to move from their initial inception through to implementation. If we judge them too quickly, if we let our impatience get in the way of our innate wisdom, we likely will have forgotten the idea long before it has a chance of being implemented successfully. Author Steven Johnson believes it takes about 10 years to fully develop an idea, and then another 10 if you want to get it into the mainstream. "Most hunches that turn into important innovations," Johnson writes, "unfold over much longer time frames. They start with a vague, hardto-describe sense that there's an interesting solution to a problem that hasn't yet been proposed, and they linger in the shadows of the mind, sometimes for decades, assembling new connections and gaining strength. And then one day they are transformed into something more substantial. … Sustaining the slow hunch is less a matter of perspiration than of cultivation." Journalist Brenda Ueland, whose work spanned the early to mid-20th century, wrote much the same thing: "I learned ... that inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic, energetic striving, but it comes into us slowly and quietly and all the People who are focused on "fxing" something may succeed, but more often than not they'll be stuck in shades of the status quo. specialtyfood.com