We are an organization that traffics in words and images. At times it's really difficult to communicate our ethic to members, donors, even employees. The best tool we have—bar none—is the values statement we honed with the help of ZingTrain. It's a distillation of our better organizational self, a living embodiment of who we are and what we hold dear. I'm not being nice in that Southern sort of way. I'm serious.
Business Visioning
Creating a Vision of Greatness
When Inc. Magazine called Zingerman’s “the coolest small company in America,” they said that the “grand plan” the Zingerman’s founding partners came up with for the future of their business was “far better than anything a management-consulting firm could have devised for them.”
At Zingerman’s, we call the “grand plan” a Vision. We’ve been visioning for nearly 20 years now. We use it all the time and at every scale - for really small ideas like moving the office copy machine to really large ones like where the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses will be in the year 2020. Just about every one of our staff members and partners would tell you that Visioning is the key to our unique and uniquely successful community.
Ari Weinzweig, co-founding partner of Zingerman's and author of several books, even has a Vision for Visioning:
“10 years from now, visioning is an intrinsic part of the way that thousands of progressive organizations around the world do their work …. And my vision is that Ann Arbor is one of the capitals of visioning work.”