Ari weinzweig and paul saginaw illustrate that good leadership is

Chapter 1

Zingerman’s:Laser-Focused on Customer Service

“I think that if people don’t believe that customer service is a critical thing, then they’re going to do as little as possible, and then it’s going to be only done as a tactical tool, which is sort of like the person who eats a half dessert instead of a whole dessert, and that’s their tactical tool to get in shape. So it’s not bad, but it’s not going to create a meaningful life.” —Ari Weinzweig

I’ll Take a Side of Customer Service, Please

If you like good food and you live in Ann Arbor, Michigan, you already know all about Zingerman’s Delicatessen, which is as much of an institution as its neighbor, the University of Michigan. You’ve probably started at least one day with their roasted coffee along with a freshly baked cinnamon roll. Or maybe you’ve stopped by the deli for a #48, Binny’s Brooklyn Reuben, a side of Alterna Slaw, and a Magic Brownie. At night, you may have eaten at Zingerman’s Roadhouse restaurant, which offers the company’s unique spin on comfort food, or stopped by Zingerman’s Creamery to bring home a pint of gelato, fresh mozzarella, and Detroit Street Brick Cheese.

It all started back in the early ’80s, when Paul Saginaw and Ari Weinzweig became friends. The two met at a restaurant after Ari graduated from the University of Michigan; Saginaw was the manager and Ari was the dishwasher. As their friendship evolved, they decided to band together and open a deli in an old brick building in a part of Ann Arbor called Kerrytown. In 1982, Zingerman’s was born.

Since then, Zingerman’s has come to comprise a diverse community of businesses that includes everything from the deli itself to a candy manufacturer and Korean restaurant. Much has already been written about Zingerman’s. Bo Burlingham dubbed it “The Coolest Small Company in America” in a 2003 article in Inc. magazine, and Micheline Maynard of the New York Times wrote an article titled “The Corner Deli that Dared to Break Out of the Neighborhood” in 2007, Zingerman’s twenty-fifth anniversary.

Ari is an author in his own right, and has written multiple books and pamphlets explaining Zingerman’s business philosophy. Available through Zingerman’s Press, the titles are diverse and range from the fifty-two-page pamphlet Bottom Line Change: Zingerman’s Recipe for Effective Organizational Change to full books such as Zingerman’s Guide to Good Leading Part 4: A Lapsed Anarchist’s Approach to the Power of Beliefs in Business (there are also parts 1 to 3) and my favorite, Zingerman’s Guide to Giving Great Service .

In addition to its mission and guiding principles, another feature that defines Zingerman’s is its decision to develop new, independent businesses rather than franchise successful ones. Firmly rooted in Ann Arbor, each new business is operated by one or more managing partners who not only run the business but also share ownership. Annual revenue companywide is now about $62 million—a far cry from the early days at the deli.

However, not all of the businesses under the Zingerman’s umbrella revolve around retail. ZingTrain, their customer service and leadership training company, hosts seminars in Ann Arbor and on-site around the country. It’s run by Maggie Bayless, who worked in the deli while getting her MBA at Michigan in the late 1980s. Asked why she got involved with ZingTrain, she says she admired its focus on customer service.

“After graduation, I stayed in touch with Ari and Paul and watched how they worked to build an organizational culture that focused on service not only to paying customers but also to staff and each other,” she says. “I didn’t find that approach to service, or to leadership, in any of the companies where I worked post-MBA. So in 1994 I saw an opportunity to bring my passion for training back to Zingerman’s—to both improve the quality of internal training and also to offer outside organizations an inside look at how Zingerman’s does business. From the beginning, customer service training was the number one topic that ZingTrain clients have been looking for.”

Guiding Principles

At some companies, the mission statement and guiding principles (if they exist) may be in the employee handbook, but they are definitely not ingrained in the company’s culture. Not so at Zingerman’s, where the guiding principles inspire day-to-day decisions as well as future ones. They are the foundation of how employees relate to one another, their customers, suppliers, and the greater Ann Arbor community.

As a cofounder of Zingerman’s, Ari has played a huge role in establishing, nurturing, and growing its customer service philosophy. A self-described “lapsed anarchist,” he is deeply passionate when he speaks about customer service, which is as essential to Zingerman’s identity as a pastrami sandwich from the deli. This isn’t just lip service.

Unlike most companies, which only consider a financial bottom line, Zingerman’s has three bottom lines: Great Food, Great Service, and Great Finance.

Customers don’t accidentally have a good experience at Zingerman’s. Customer service is woven into the fabric of the company, as the text from bottom line number 2, below, shows.

“Our business exists only because of customers who spend their money on our products. The customer is the only reason we are here. Consequently, the customer is never an interruption. Without those customers, there would be no Zingerman’s and no jobs. Consequently, the customer always comes first.”

One morning, during a busy breakfast at the Roadhouse, Ari and I spoke about all this. The room was filled with people of all ages and occupations, from millennials with babies and people in suits to older couples enjoying a cup of coffee. Over the chatter from patrons and servers, Ari explained Zingerman’s customer service philosophy.

“Customer service has been a bottom line, a literally, overtly stated bottom line for us, for twenty-seven years. We said in the mid-’90s that we have three bottom lines. And one of the reasons that we did that was because we decided that for us customer service was an end in and of itself. It wasn’t just a tactical step.”

He took a sip of tea and continued.

“For us it’s a core piece of everything. And I think really that’s why we did it, but I think it extends to people’s lives everywhere because it’s a mindset around your existence in the world.”

Before we discuss exactly how Zingerman’s delivers on the promise of meeting and exceeding customers’ expectations, it’s essential to understand a bit more about the philosophy of the company and why it has garnered so much national attention.

To begin with, for Ari and everyone else at Zingerman’s, “Great Service” is not just one of three bottom lines: it’s also the second of eight guiding principles, all of which are spelled out on the company’s website and in its printed literature. Along with the company’s mission statement and bottom lines, its guiding principles seem to be engraved on Ari’s heart, holding him accountable not only to Zingerman’s customers but also to its employees, from the bus girl to the managing partners.

These guiding principles weave together a very particular culture. And, as you can see, they are as enthusiastic as the people who work there:

1. Great Food!

2. Great Service!

3. A Great Place to Shop and Eat!

4. Solid Profits!

5. A Great Place to Work!

6. Strong Relationships!

7 . A Place to Learn!

8. An Active Part of Our Community!

Reading guiding principle number 2, “Great Service!,” it’s easy to be cynical. You’ve probably heard something like it before:

We go the x-tra mile, giving exceptional service to each guest. We are committed to giving great service—meeting the guests’ expectations and then exceeding them. Great service like this is at the core of the Zingerman’s Experience. Our guests always leave with a sense of wonderment at how we have gone out of our way to make their experience at Zingerman’s a rewarding one.

If you’ve just done a mental eye roll, I don’t blame you. Pretty much every business claims to “go the extra mile” and “care” about your experience, even cable companies and airlines. However, in talking with Ari it’s very clear that these are not just empty words. He emphatically believes that he and his team not only need to meet customers’ expectations, but continually exceed them before, during, and after the sale. They do this in myriad ways. One small example: training employees to look people in the eye or engage verbally, depending upon how far from the customer they’re standing.

“Our job is to increase expectations,” says Ari. “Don’t you have higher expectations of yourself than you used to? Everybody that’s growing is increasing their expectations. It’s a good problem.”

This belief is reflected in the description of Zingerman’s second guiding principle:

Customer satisfaction is the fuel that stokes the Zingerman’s fire. If our guests aren’t happy, we’re not happy. To this end, we consistently go the x-tra mile—literally and figuratively—for our guests. The customer is never an interruption in our day. We welcome feedback of all sorts. We constantly reevaluate our performance to better accommodate our customers. Our goal is to have our guests leave happy. Each of us takes full responsibility for making our guest’s experience an enjoyable one before, during, and after the sale.

You may be thinking, as I was, “Nice words. But how does that work in a concrete way?” Well, here’s how: Zingerman’s has an internal process to evaluate complaints and compliments using “Code Red” and “Code Green” forms. Employees write a Code Green when they receive a compliment or hear another employee receiving one. In contrast, employees write a Code Red when there is a complaint of any kind. If there’s a Code Red, the employee explains what the issue was and how it was resolved. And the issue is almost always resolved. If the line employee and managers can’t “make it right,” they’ll go up the chain until they find a managing partner.

Ari admits there have been a few people over the years who have taken advantage of Zingerman’s willingness to do just about anything to make a customer happy, but the vast majority don’t. Most people are just grateful that someone cared enough to listen to their complaint and apologize, before fixing the problem.

Ari smiled when I told him that I thought that the next part of guiding principle number 2, giving great service is an “honorable profession,” was unique.

“One of the biggest things that we do is to get the message across that service is honorable because if you’re taking flak from your friends and family, you can do it, but it’s very difficult to stay grounded and rooted. My mother, ten years after we were open, she was still asking me when I was going to go to law school.” He pauses and looks me straight in the eye. “I’m not exaggerating.”

This is a far cry from the stereotypical image of a service-oriented job. Consider, say, a call center, where customer service representatives are near the bottom of the hierarchy, or a fine restaurant where dishwashers, busboys, and waitstaff are treated as easily interchangeable, expendable assets. That’s why Ari says that this belief is hard for some people to grasp when he teaches customer service seminars through ZingTrain.

“People have the belief that service is a terrible thing to have to do. If you’re a doctor, and you worked your ass off for literally fifteen to twenty years to get to your job, and you’ve been taught that puts you at the top of the hierarchy, and now some adviser comes in and goes, ‘No, she’s a bus girl and you should be nice to her.’ That belief is not congruent in your mind.”

Everyone, he says, is influenced by the people around them. Therefore, if managers and other leaders only say the right things, sooner or later what they truly believe, that the people dealing with the customers aren’t as important as the managers, or that striving for good service is “a crock,” then these beliefs will permeate the organization no matter what the mission statement says. Another part of guiding principle number 2 reads:

We give great service to each other as well as to our guests. We provide the same level of service to our peers as we do our guests. We are polite, supportive, considerate, superb listeners, and always willing to go the x-tra mile for each other.

This guiding principle, that serving peers within an organization is as important as serving customers, flows out of “servant leadership” philosophy and practices. First outlined in an essay by Robert Greenleaf in 1970 and then expanded into the book Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness in 1977, the basic idea of “servant leadership” is that staff will give no better service to customers than managers give to staff and managers will give no better service to staff than owners give to managers.

In this way, it becomes incumbent on the leadership to give their employees and customers outstanding service. On a normal day at Zingerman’s, this might manifest itself by a manager asking the sandwich makers if they would like a cold drink, or for Ari to pour water for customers himself when the Roadhouse is packed.

This concept is taken very seriously throughout the organization. In a traditional company, the onus of customer service is on those at the lowest level of the hierarchy. Servant leadership turns that upside down, because the higher you rise in the hierarchy, the more customers you have and the greater your responsibility for giving outstanding customer service to everyone .

That’s not all. Although it’s not an official Zingerman’s guiding principle, the idea that everyone is an individual lies at the heart of Ari’s personal philosophy and Zingerman’s approach to customer service inside and outside the organization. It’s impossible to convey how passionate he is about this topic. Indeed, he believes it is “demeaning,” “dehumanizing,” and “counterproductive” not to consider everyone as an individual.

“I think every customer is different and every employee is different. And every customer is different every day, and every employee is different every day, so it’s like a kaleidoscope. Most times the same customer doesn’t even want the same thing at two different times of the day.”

Beliefs about Giving Excellent Service

Not only do Ari’s books delve into the power of beliefs in business, his conversations do too. And he is passionate about them. He’s established what he calls a “self-fulfilling belief cycle,” which affects everything from the ground up. During our meeting, he draws a picture of it: a circle with arrows going around. That’s why he is so certain that delivering outstanding customer service increases the financial bottom line, even though he doesn’t have hard data to prove it (apart from the company’s growth and success over the years).

Asked whether he feels there’s a law of diminishing returns when it comes to giving outstanding service, he shakes his head. “I don’t think so. If you believe there is a law of diminishing returns, you will find evidence to show that it’s not worth it. I don’t believe it; I think that it increases one’s energy to learn, I believe that it’s more fun, and I believe if we’re not getting better, we’re getting worse, and there’s one thousand other people that would be happy to have our customers.”

Making guiding principle number 2 a concrete reality takes hard work—a lot of it. Zingerman’s has a ninety-day orientation that blends classroom and shift training, with continuing training for the entire time an employee works there, as well as clearly defined expectations for each position, with recognition and rewards when employees succeed. Additionally, like many companies, there are also formal performance reviews plus on-shift feedback and periodic conversations with managers.

In an as-yet unpublished essay he shared with me, Ari writes about the best way to give feedback. After talking with him, it’s not at all surprising that he sees it as a two-way street, as something in which employees and managers equally participate: the former by creating a personal vision of where he or she wants to be in a year, and the latter by helping the employee realize that vision.

He summarized his perspective like this:

“If our work as leaders is a lot about helping everyone here figure out what their dreams are and then successfully go after getting them to be a reality, then inside-outing the approach to performance reviews—which everyone believes in but hardly anyone actually loves doing—could be a big piece of making that happen. [The essay] is based on my belief in each individual’s ability to get to greatness, in the power of visioning, and the assumption that one of our main responsibilities as leaders is to help every one of us live their dreams with ever greater efficacy.”

Thoughts about the Future of Customer Service

No one knows what the future will bring to any industry. Of course, new technology will continue to usher in changes. Like many restaurants, Zingerman’s Roadhouse now texts people when their table is ready, for example. But Ari believes the result of outstanding service—“a guest having a great experience”—is one thing that won’t change. The secret, he says, is for the servers to observe their customers carefully to understand what they want.

Ari says many organizations don’t train their staff to take cues from the customers to find out what they want at that particular moment. Zingerman’s does. So, even if Roadhouse servers could talk to customers at length about the food—its origin, processing, and history—they won’t if a customer seems to be in a hurry or just plain hungry.

He looks around the room and spots a table of what looks like four students eating breakfast. “A lot of people get in trouble because they’re not seeing what the individual customer wants. If you say, ‘This is what customers want,’ you’re already doomed.”

Looking at one of the young men at the table, he continues. “If I’m going by his body language, what that guy wants now is to be left alone and chat casually and take forever to eat his breakfast. But later today he might want total efficiency, no conversation, completely on the fly. So if you don’t honor that his situations have altered and you can’t pick that up from his tone of voice and his body language, you’re going to completely misserve him.”

The way Zingerman’s has reacted to the gluten-free trend offers a revealing example of how it responds to its customers while staying true to its mission. While they sell products that are gluten-free, they know it’s not their niche, so they haven’t tried to compete with the bakeries in that market.

“We’re not a gluten free-bakery, and we’re not going into it. It needs to be somebody who’s super passionate about gluten-free baking, not somebody who doesn’t care about it but is trying to do it to get people’s sale. It doesn’t mean we can’t sell other things that are gluten-free or try to do what we do; we just try to find things that are naturally gluten-free.”

Millennials Are Just Like Us

In the introduction to this book, I discussed some of the research on millennials that argues that they differ from previous generations. Given Ari’s philosophy—that everyone is an individual—it isn’t surprising that he not only vehemently disagrees with that premise but seems offended by it.

“First of all, I don’t believe you can assign a characteristic to ten million people. It doesn’t make any sense any more than saying women can’t or women can do something. This is a core thing for me. The belief that people can assign characteristics makes no sense.”

“If you believe millennials are lazy and unproductive and difficult to work with, how will you treat them? You’ll treat them with weird energy and you won’t really engage them. Then what do they believe? They believe work sucks and you’re a jerk. Then how do they work? Badly, and you say, ‘See, they’re terrible.’ I treat them like every other human being, like they’re smart and they’re going to do great work. I’m sure some fall short, but I’ve got sixty-year-olds that don’t do good work either. It’s not like everybody for one hundred years was a fabulous worker and super motivated to concentrate.”

Of course, he is correct; everyone is an individual. It’s interesting to note, however, that many of Zingerman’s business practices seem lifted from a book on appealing to millennials. For example, the company uses open book management, which offers employees complete transparency regarding finances, and makes everyone a stakeholder responsible for the financial health of the company. Additionally, the entire culture at the company stresses principles and beliefs, key intrinsic values of the millennial generation.

Zingerman’s Recipe for Success

Zingerman’s is very prescriptive when it teaches its recipe for great service. But the company also encourages employees to be creative and adapt to situations as they perform each step of service, much like an experienced cook in an unfamiliar kitchen.

“Good cooks always adapt recipes to the setting,” Ari explains. “The beauty of those steps is sometimes you’re doing step three before you do step one because it’s what’s called for. It requires a creative application, just like a great cook adapts to the ingredients, adapts to the setting, adapts to the taste of a guest. But the recipe is still helpful for training new people to get them up to speed, and the better you get up to speed, the more you can be personal.”

The two basic “recipes” that ensure consistency in the way service is delivered are below, but, as previously noted, employees can adapt as the situation requires.

Three Steps to Giving Gre at Service

1. Find out what the customer wants.

2. Get it for them accurately, politely, and enthusiastically.

3. Go the extra mile.

Five Steps to Effectively Handling a Complaint

1. Acknowledge the customer’s complaint.

2. Sincerely apologize.

3. Take action to make things right.

4. Thank the customer.

5. Write it up.

These steps aren’t just a means to improve Zingerman’s bottom line (though they certainly help do that). Just like Nick Sarillo, who is profiled in Chapter Two, Ari and his colleagues believe that giving employees and customers outstanding service not only changes the workplace but also the greater community.

Or, as Ari puts it, “A lot of what energizes me around anarchist stuff is that it’s really just about how you treat other people. So I think that when people adopt the mindset of giving great service everywhere, it goes better, and the world becomes better because you’re treating everybody as an individual.”

After talking with Ari, I’d say that in addition to Zingerman’s overall recipe, he has one of his own:

1. Develop organizational principles and stick to them. At Zingerman’s, principles and beliefs are not just words on a web page. They are infused into the organization’s DNA and every employee—from the newest sandwich maker to the managing partners—understands and implements them.

2. Treat everyone as an individual. Always.

3. Know your niche. Zingerman’s hasn’t tried to conquer the gluten-free market, but each Zingerman’s business tries to be the best in its class.

Section 3

The Pragmatists

Jerrod Melman

(Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises)

Richard Coraine

(Union Square Hospitality Group)

Mark Hoplamazian

(Hyatt Hotels)

The three insightful leaders profiled in this section all stepped into an established company. In doing so, they recognized the importance of keeping the values that originally differentiated the company from its competitors and the necessity of evolving to meet the needs of the current marketplace. In each case, they adapted existing practices and forged a new path forward to help their organizations compete with new competitors. They acknowledge that younger employees are changing workplace culture, but the pragmatists still maintain a laser-like focus on offering exceptional customer service. As a result, they have positioned their organizations for excellence today and for the foreseeable future.

Chapter 2

Nick’s Pizza & Pub:Employees in Charge

“I think what needs to happen as technology and artificial intelligence and all those things grow is that humans need to be more human, right? There’s an opportunity there. That’s when organizations realize that being more human is going to be their competitive advantage in the industry.” —Ni ck Sarillo

A Brief History of a New Kind of Pizza Joint

Countless businesses across the United States were started out of a garage and many are still run out of one. Some of these ventures will only last months, while others may be sold for millions of dollars. Nick Sarillo, the owner of the Chicagoland pizza mini-chain Nick’s Pizza & Pub, didn’t start his first restaurant in his garage, however. When he couldn’t find a family restaurant that catered to his entire family, kids and adults, he literally built it board by board from old barn wood.

Nick is a lapsed carpenter by trade, so he has the look of a guy accustomed to working with his hands, and he’s fit, clean-shaven, and focused. Although he grew up working in his father’s hot dog stand, which later morphed into a pizza place, he’d had enough of it by the time his high school graduation rolled around, and he decided to be a carpenter. But, after a few years working at McCormick Place, Chicago’s premiere trade show venue, Nick got bored despite the hefty union paycheck. When a friend offered him a few side jobs in residential construction, he jumped at the opportunity. Then, as often happens, serendipity struck: his brother graduated from architecture school, and he and Nick decided to strike out on their own building houses. As time passed, Nick got married, started a family, and began building in Crystal Lake, Illinois, where he still lives.

It was at this point that he began to feel that the construction industry was increasingly prizing speed over craftsmanship, so he did a 180-degree turn and went back to the restaurant business. He saw a niche after noticing that if he and his wife wanted to take the kids out to dinner, they had to choose between a place where the food was good, but kids weren’t welcome or the opposite—a place where the food was so-so, but all the bells and whistles made the kids happy.

“That’s what gave me the idea to build this. It was really to have a place where kids could be treated as first-class citizens, like parents, and the family could come together and have a great time. And the neighbors could come together and have a great time. That’s what initiated the business,” he says, proudly.

So, Nick and his brother designed the restaurant, and Nick started building it from scratch on nights and weekends after he got home from his regular job. Little did he know that the old barn wood he was using to build the restaurant because it was so cheap would be all the rage today. Proudly showing off the wooden front door of the original Nick’s in Crystal Lake, which has antique hinges that he built himself, he explains that his goal was to construct something that looked like it had been around for one hundred years so customers would immediately feel at home. And in 1995, that’s exactly what he did. The result is a warm, homey space.