Archives September 2017

Thomas Merton, in Seven Story Mountain, recounts a conversation with his best friend Robert Lax one evening while they’re kicking around 6th Ave in New York City in which he asked Merton what he wanted to be. Merton, after stumbling on the question, says “I don’t know; I guess what I want is to be a good Catholic.” From the book:

“What you should say”— he told me—”what you should say is that you want to be a saint.”  . . . I said: “How do you expect me to become a saint?” “By wanting to,” said Lax, simply. “I can’t be a saint,” I said.  . . . But Lax said: “No. All that is necessary to be a saint is to want to be one. Don’t you believe that God will make you what He created you to be, if you will consent to let Him do it? All you have to do is desire it.” A long time ago, St. Thomas Aquinas had said the same thing— and it is something that is obvious to everybody who ever understood the Gospels. After Lax was gone, I thought about it, and it became obvious to me.

It takes 2 things: desire and consent.

This notion of everyday sainthood is close to my heart because it was the central theme in the eulogy message I gave a few weeks ago for a father figure, friend and mentor in my life who died recently. I was honored, deeply touched when his family asked me to do this. He was 82 and to me he is a saint. Not was but is.  

The story goes something like this . . . Not long after my dad’s death he invited me over to play music with his family. I was a teenager with nowhere to turn. He and his wife were friends with my parents. Not best friends but friends. He encouraged me to learn to play the banjo and guitar. He played the tenor guitar, or a mouth bow and occasionally a washtub bass he made. His wife and three daughters played other instruments and sang. Playing with a group, this family, it became clear that I really did not understand timing or keys or proper capo usage or any of it. He never ever one single time showed frustration with my incompetence. They made me feel like I was part of their family. This was off and on throughout high school. They made me think that even though I could not sing that I actually could. Do you know what that feels like?

Over the years he taught me how to use a camera, got me into CB-Radios [it was the 70s – what can I say]. This was a very difficult time in my life. I thought God had abandoned me after my dad died. Clearly He did not. He is a saint to me. As Aquinas to Lax to Merton says, he wanted to and consented to being my saint. I don’t know how or why but he did and he did it for decades. Don’t ask me to play the banjo today because all I can play is part of Foggy Mountain Breakdown but it was there when I needed it.

Have you had someone like this in your life? An everyday saint. Someone who wanted to be and consented to it time and time again. I would love to hear about it. I am not talking about a really good friend. Friends can be our heroes at times for certain. I don’t mean Mother Teresa – the actual person – because she’s not what I’d call an “everyday” saint. I mean someone, who more than once, picked you up when you’d almost given up. I don’t mean someone who literally saved your life and pulled you from a burning car. It’s more mundane than that. It’s little and almost unnoticeable until it’s not.

There’s the football image of a huddle but it doesn’t fit here since the quarterback leads it. I love the Webster intransitive verb example, “to gather in a close packed group;” “They huddled around the campfire.” At Askinosie Chocolate we are 16 full time and 3 part time people in a close packed group. When it comes to the perfect huddle, chocolate making is no different than rebuilding transmissions or providing nonprofit disaster relief services or brewing beer. Lawren and I detail this subject in our upcoming book but today I wanted to take this a little deeper.

Here’s what a huddle looks like at Askinosie Chocolate and you’re welcome to adopt whatever you find useful for your own great huddle.

The What

Until a couple of months ago we met every Tuesday morning at 9am for one hour. We’ve been experimenting lately with every other week but the point is we’ve doing this company wide “meeting” for nearly eleven years. Everyone in the company attends including our remote workers. For example, our Controller is in St. Louis, our Chief Marketing Officer is in Austin and they both join in via Skype. They see us and we see them. The Agenda moves at a fast pace and looks something like this:

• Quick Opening from our COO about what’s coming up this week.
• Cocoa bean report from me. I report on the status of the crops, the farmers, export dates, arrival dates or any problems we’re encountering.
• Sales & Marketing overview from our CMO.
• Sales Report sharing all channel sales numbers. This includes monthly plan (budget), forecast, and actual on a whiteboard. This report generates lots of questions from the group.
• “Jack Stack” Report from our COO. This is a group of people reporting a condensed financial statement (we call this spreadsheet the “Jack Stack” in honor of the father figure of Open Book Management) covering plan, forecast, and actual.
• Inventory Report from our Facilities Manager. This report informs everyone where we are, on a whiteboard, with all of our product inventory especially the sales team.
• Production Report. Our Production Manager lets us know, using a whiteboard, where we are with finished chocolate production reporting plan, forecast, and actual. The summary also includes what products we are making this week and next.
• Safety Report from our Production Manager.
• Chocolate University Report. Our CU Executive Director reports the status of all things related to our community development and education projects.
• Marketing Update. Our Design Manager reports on recent press mentions, and open packaging orders.
• Workaversary celebrations. If we have someone celebrating anniversary of working with us then we celebrate them. I plan on dedicating a separate post to only this. It’s really powerful.
• The Last Word. Our Facilities Manager concludes the huddle with a few minutes of uplifting thought to either challenge us, inspire us, get us thinking about our work, our lives and each other.

All of this happens in one hour unless we have a workaversary then we add on another 15 minutes because we have some awesome snacks that this person loves and spend a little time chatting with each other. I said “almost” perfect huddles because we’re continually finding ways to make them better and even more meaningful.

The Why

The most important aspect of our huddle is that almost everyone talks or reports something. The practical benefit is that many people need to know bits of important information from diffused areas of our little company. We don’t groups in the company siloed off from one another. Do the people packaging our chocolate bars really need a status update on our school lunch program in the Philippines? Yes they do! The huddle does not replace other meetings, such as sales or production, but it can make them shorter and more to the point. The huddle is an easy place when people can ask the reporter questions in a spirit of teamwork. Almost everyone walks away from the huddle feeling like they matter. They either obtained information they needed or they gave it or both. Every huddle we’re celebrating big and little victories with a single thunderous handclap in unison. The dominant feeling is “I belong.”

The meeting is full of numbers, numbers that most companies do not share with employees. It’s all part of Open Book Management which I’ve used for nearly 20 years. The numbers tell a story, both good and bad. There’s a sense of “we’re all in this together.” Kinship is an important principle in our company and our huddle is an integral component. The huddle is essential for any organization or large workgroup sharing a collective vocation or calling. My book is all about this. The huddle is ostensibly costly and one could make the argument that not every single person is absolutely critical to being there. We are taking up valuable chocolate production time with this gathering. It’s probably more costly in ways I cannot even estimate if we did not huddle together “in a close packed group.”

My huddle mentors: I learned about these years ago from Jack Stack, The Great Game of Business and Ari Weinzweig, Zingerman’s Deli. Buy their books and read them! You will not be disappointed.

I was about 40, making a lot of money, winning cases, making a difference, and loving my work and then. Then I stopped loving it but kept on. I started praying a simple prayer that went like this: “Dear God, give me something else to do.” I have never, as my friend David Mercer puts it, viewed God as my “cosmic bellhop.” Regardless of the intensity of my prayer there was no magic dust illuminating the path before me. No, instead there was anxiety, depression, searching, years of that prayer, and work, work, work, work, work, work. Work of a different kind.

You can imagine that the guy known for the courtroom – spending in the neighborhood of 15 to 20 hours of preparation for every hour of trial – would uncover every business opportunity, start-up, and franchise possibility. I relentlessly looked for hobbies I could convert into businesses. I did what I knew. I worked hard and dedicated myself with great passion at finding my next passion. How did that work out for me you ask. Not so much.

I have friends, former colleagues, and strangers who email me out of the blue asking for the illuminated path. Just like I did. Here’s the secret: there’s no weekend conference, book, life-coach, research project, or peak experience that will magically unlock the door that seems to be blocking us from meaningful work. Notice that I included books in that list. That’s right. My upcoming book is all about this very topic but reading it is not going to make it happen. I read a lot about meditation but it does not make me a better meditator.

It took me five years of wandering, wondering, serving, praying and listening before I even heard a faint whisper. It takes deep work on the inside in order to find meaningful work whether it’s the work we’re in right now or what we know is possible. Oh sure, we can skip over the gut wrenching hard parts, leave our broken hearts unexamined, and move to the next shiny thing but we’ll be right back where we started. If you want to know which thing you should invest in I am not your guy. If you want to know what it might be like to take the road less traveled and one without any guarantees then talk to me. And once you “find it” the work never stops because we don’t wander and wonder in order to find a destination. Hint: there isn’t one. We do this work so that we can keep finding our true selves as Thomas Merton would say. On the worst days I have stress, lose my cool, and forget to breathe just like any other job, but on my best days I experience the Divine in meaningful work. I am working on treasuring those best days in my heart so I can sprinkle a little bit of that around those days in the middle. And now, I have a responsibility to let others know – who ask me – that a broken heart is, despite news otherwise, a good and holy thing.