296: We Bake Brownies to Hire People

Good morning dear friends

“All acts of kindness are lights in the war for justice.”

These words are part of Joy Harjo’s Reconciliation, A Prayer included in How We Became Human.

/strategy

In Humanocracy, London Business School professor Gary Hamel and Management Lab co-founder Michele Zanini provoke, “However daunting, even the most entrenched problems yield to courage and tenacity. We must not flinch or look away. Instead, we must confront what we have long known — our organizations are incapacitated by their inhumanity”.

It is not an easy pill to swallow. Who wishes to say that the places we spend a major chunk of our adult lives are inhumane? Who wishes to admit that whether by intention, omission or inattention, we contribute to that incapacity?

Yet, in the provocation is, we know, an unsettling truth. I don’t need to list the list.

Alongside this, in his essay, The Joys of Storytelling III: Aphorisms and Fragments, Ben Okri reminds us, “Creating the smallest living thing, creating life, no matter how small, is greater than creating a vast dead planet. A thing that lives is a universe”.

The Greyston Bakery employs about 150 people, who bake 35,000 pounds of brownies every day for Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream and other retailers. Its motto: “We don’t hire people to bake brownies; we bake brownies to hire people.”

An NYU Stern Center for Sustainable Business discusses their practice of Open Hiring model, which simple means no-one is excluded from the possibility of working there. There is no screening. The application process is simple: put your name on the Job List; when a vacancy becomes available, you get called. You must then complete a six-to-ten-month apprenticeship programme, and only 30% complete it. However, those that do, tend to stay – Greyston has an average annual turnover rate of 33%, compared with about 42% across all industries and job levels in the U.S.

Elsewhere in Okri’s essay he writes, “To poison a nation, poison its stories. A demoralised nation tells demoralised stories to itself. Beware of the storytellers who are not fully conscious of the importance of their gifts, and who are irresponsible in the application of their art: they could unwittingly help along the psychic destruction of their people” and “Stories are the secret reservoir of values: change the stories individuals or nations live by and tell themselves, and you change the individuals and nations.”

South African chicken chain, Nando’s, are storytellers supreme. They have been buying South African art and design for decades; in the process creating a collection of approximately 32,000 pieces from 700 artists and becoming one of the country’s most significant supporters of visual artists. Furthermore, its programme for furniture and lighting designers, Clout SA, has commissioned and supported 70 designers to create 65,000 items; all on display in one of the world’s 1,200 Nandos (Read more in his Guardian article, Peri Peri Patron).

Minneapolis’s Post-Modern Times is a restaurant that doesn’t charge for food.  You can choose to donate but you can eat there for free. There’s not a ‘free food’ menu. There’s just a menu. Choose what you want, order. Should you want to, choose to pay. Or not. Owner Dylan Alverson shifted his restaurant to donations-only, in part to stop paying tax: he didn’t want to be funding a government to take actions he found reprehensible. Forty to fifty percent of his customers eat for free. He’s now more profitable than he’s ever been (Thank you Africa in the World founder, Dele Olojede, for sharing this with us).

These businesses reminded me of how psychologist Mark Epstein ends his book The Zen of Therapy “simple kindness is the fuel of the peace of mind we all crave.”

//self

Continuing with Okri: In Redreaming the World: For Chinua Achebe, he writes “It is possible that a sense of beauty, of justice, of the inter-connectedness of all things, may yet save the human species from self-annihilation. We are all still learning how to be free. Freedom is the beginning of the greatest possibilities of the human genius.”

Reporter Brett Anderson paints a scene in which Post-Modern Times’s Alverson has to manage angry customers who, although not paying, feel they’re being treated unfairly – others got their order first. Alverson is neither angered nor insulted. He understands and responds from there. “We have a lot of customers that are very used to being discriminated against. It’s a lot of big, deep human emotions.”

In each moment, Alverson and his team create life.

///soul

Jazz guitarist Gary Wittner’s Elijah’s Room tells the story of his four-year-old grandson’s room, the room where Gary and Elijah play.

He sings:

“It occurs to me that I can grow branches or leaves

I just want to be in Elijah’s room

I can slide on the floor in Elijah’s room or I glide and soar up high

I’m a robot or a car or a king”

And continues:

“And do you know what?

I can be anything in Elijah’s room

In Elijah’s room, all we imagine is real.

In Elijah’s room, that’s just how we feel.

When its time to come out of Elijah’s room, all the magic comes along. It reminds me that its always there. When it finds me, I can go anywhere”.

With love

Karl

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