COOPERATION 101

I'm helping to create an economic system that will respect and protect the earth -- one which would replace corporate globalization with a global network of local living economies. Business is beautiful when it's a vehicle for serving the common good.

Judy Wicks is an entrepreneur, author, speaker, and mentor working to build a more compassionate, just, regenerative and locally-based economy. In 2004, Inc. magazine named Judy Wicks one of America's 25 most fascinating entrepreneurs, "because she's put in place more progressive business practices per square foot than any other entrepreneur." Founder and CEO of the White Dog Café in Philadelphia, she is also co-founder and chair of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) and of the Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia (SBA).

After helping to save her block of Victorian brownstones from demolition to make way for a proposed mall of chain stores, she grew what she began as a tiny muffin shop into a 200-seat restaurant featuring fresh local food. Over the years, White Dog grew a national reputation for community engagement, environmental stewardship, and responsible business practices. In 2009, Judy sold the company through a unique exit strategy that preserves White Dog’s sustainable practices and maintains local, independent ownership.

Under Judy’s leadership, White Dog became a leader in the local food movement, purchasing sustainably grown produce from local family farmers, and only humanely and naturally raised meat, poultry and eggs, sustainably harvested fish, and fair trade coffee, tea, chocolate, vanilla, and cinnamon. Other business practices she implemented at White Dog include paying a living wage, mentoring inner-city high school students, recycling and composting, solar-heated hot water, eco-friendly soaps, and office supplies, and purchasing 100% of electricity from renewable sources, the first business in Pennsylvania to do so. Judy Wicks continues her work to build self-reliant regional economies in her home city and state with All Together Now Pennsylvania and the Circle of Aunts & Uncles, a micro-loan fund for under-resourced entrepreneurs.

On making decisions for the greater good, living cooperatively:

I've found that many of the decisions in my life involving change have come from the heart. For instance, paying what is called a living wage. This means a voluntary commitment on the part of business owners to pay their employees not just the disgracefully low federal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour but rather to pay them what it actually costs to live in their community. When I first heard about the idea of paying a living wage around six years ago, I thought, "Well, no one is going to tell me how much to pay my people." My first reaction was that I couldn't do it because I'm a restaurateur. Restaurants are labor intensive. How could I pay dishwashers and prep people $8 an hour, which was the living wage in Philadelphia at the time? But then I was in the kitchen one day, getting a piece of pie out of the refrigerator, and I happened to look over at the three young entry-level workers lined up prepping vegetables. They all looked up at me at once, and I had a sudden realization, saying to myself: "What are you thinking? Of course you want the people who work in your restaurant full time to be able to make a living, to be able to pay their rent and buy their food and buy their clothing." There really weren't that many who weren't earning $8 an hour anyway. We never paid that pitiful $5.15; people were making $6.50 or $7 as entry-level dishwashers. I gathered together those not earning $8, along with their supervisors, and I talked about what a living wage is and told them we wanted to pay that. We went through a process by which they were given incremental raises, and by the end of the year everyone was making $8 an hour.

Merrian Goggio Borgeson moderated a conversation between Michael Shuman and Judy Wicks on July 9, 2020 as part of the Schumacher Conversations Series

COOPERATION 101

Cooperation is about listening when you want to be heard and finding the best way, not in having your own way.

Cooperation is about working toward the benefit of the group—across all levels and environments. If what we are doing doesn’t benefit everyone involved, then it’s not cooperation. It’s something else. It could be ministry or service, where it helps others. Or, it could be selfishness, where it only benefits a small group or just us as individuals.

Some of us work better alone. Scientists, mechanics, writers—and we accomplish a lot. But when we work alone, we are unchallenged by the thinking of others and therefore don’t reach our trues potential. Incorporating the reasoning of others makes our ideas and solutions better and more robust.

Whether we are cooperating in person or virtually, there are two approaches we can take to cooperation. We can be loud and abusive, playing to the cliché “the beatings will stop when morale improves.” Or, we can enter the water gently, creating less whitewater. A gentler method is often better than being harsh. We have this play out with children, horses, dogs, and we know this from our own experience. It’s another law of systems: if we feel pressure, any pressure, from another, we are more likely to press back, reject, and defend. Similarly, a team working together can accomplish much more than individuals working alone.

The ability to make progress in and outside of our team is the ultimate test of our cooperative spirit. Each member covers other members of the team, and they have to trust each other to do that. In making progress, the group comes to expect a certain pace for results. Members collectively look for whoever is able to help the team most on any given day, rather than always looking to a “star” member. The abilities of the members serve the team, as opposed to the members being used to serve an individual. That’s cooperation.

Does this mean everyone has to be best friends? No. How tight-knit a team is varied. However, when the members are present, they are utterly loyal to one another at work. No one tries to undercut the group and be a hero. They are each unassuming and accomplished.

How do we increase our sense of cooperation?

PRACTICE

List all contexts where you find yourself in a cooperative group.

Where, in your experience, are you working alone and could benefit from the cooperation of a colleague or group? What steps will you take to develop a team in one of these areas?
How does this apply to your experiences of partnering virtually?

COMMIT

[ ] I commit to myself to developing a cooperative, team spirit in all that I do.

In her words…

“My business is really a way of expressing my love of life.”—Inc, 2004

"I'm helping to create an economic system that will respect and protect the earth -- one which would replace corporate globalization with a global network of local living economies. Business is beautiful when it's a vehicle for serving the common good."

"Non-cooperation began for me by refusing to be part of the factory farm system. This motivated me to create an alternative system. What came first though was the moral obligation to non-cooperate with a system I saw as evil."

“Every year we hold a Native American Thanksgiving dinner. We give thanks to the Indians of North America for all the many foods they cultivated, which make up the majority of our diet today--among them corn, potatoes, tomatoes, squash, peppers, and melons.”— 24th Annual E.F.Schumacher lectures (2004)

“I attribute our success to staying one small, very special restaurant as well as to making decisions not for the sake of maximizing profits but instead maximizing relationships with our customers and staff, with our community, with our suppliers and our natural environment.”— 24th Annual E.F.Schumacher lectures (2004)

“Many business schools teach their students to leave their values at home when they go to work. We teach our children the Golden Rule at home, but in the workplace gold rules. I believe this has caused a lot of unhappiness because most of our waking hours during our working years are spent in the workplace, and when our values at work aren't aligned with our personal values, we lead unsatisfied lives.”— 24th Annual E.F.Schumacher lectures (2004)

“Living and working in the same community has given me a stronger sense of place and a different business outlook. When I make a business decision, it comes naturally for my decision to be in the common interest of all involved because every day I see the people affected by my decisions—my neighbors, my customers, and my employees as well as the natural world. There is a short distance between the business decision-maker and those affected by the decision.”— 24th Annual E.F.Schumacher lectures (2004)

“I've found that many of the decisions in my life involving change have come from the heart.”— 24th Annual E.F.Schumacher lectures (2004)

“Business schools teach "grow or die," the idea that we measure success in our economy and society by constant growth, by growing bigger and bigger. …I came to realize that we can measure our success in other ways besides just growing our size, sales, and profit: we can measure our success by growing our knowledge and expanding our consciousness, by deepening our relationships, increasing our happiness, and having more fun.”— 24th Annual E.F.Schumacher lectures (2004)

“The Eskimos have no sense of envy. If I said to you, "I love that bead necklace you're wearing," if you were an Eskimo, you would take it off and give it to me. You have to be careful; if you admire something overtly, it's yours. This made me look at our society, at our economic system, in a new way. We actually create envy through advertising. …We make people feel inadequate and create a sense of envy of others for their material goods. In this society, we actually reward people who are greedy, and we admire the most those who hoard the most. Those who use up natural resources by having the biggest houses and the biggest cars or SUVs, which use all that gasoline—those are the people this society actually admires the most, which is just the opposite of the way it should be.”— 24th Annual E.F.Schumacher lectures (2004)

“I do believe in the concept of an invisible hand, but I don't think the way it has been interpreted is what Adam Smith had in mind at all. He never meant to suggest that a successful economy is created by people making decisions in their narrow self-interest, removed from their own community. On the contrary, Smith, a moral philosopher, based his theory on the existence of a moral community, where business decisions were made with enlightened self-interest by business owners who understood that their well-being was tied to the well-being of their community. I see the invisible hand as representing the collective consciousness that all life is interconnected. If everyone were to make economic decisions based on enlightened self-interest, I believe we could, in fact, create a world in which the needs of all are met.”— 24th Annual E.F.Schumacher lectures (2004)

“Though the movement for responsible business has grown, it is still the case that the environment has gotten worse, wealth inequality has gotten worse, and we have a social crisis because of family farms being forced out by factory farms, family businesses being forced out by Wal-Marts.”— 24th Annual E.F.Schumacher lectures (2004)

What we don’t see on the resumes we review or the job descriptions we want is the litany of emotional entanglements we bring to our roles, uninvited, to the team and organizations we work in. Alongside technical skills, people who can master a range of subjective skills are better able to influence, deal with ambiguity, bounce back from setbacks, think creatively, and manage themselves in the presence of setbacks. In short, those who learn lead.

Observing subjective qualities in others past and present gives us a mental picture for the behaviors we want to practice. Each figure illustrates a quality researched from The Look to Craftsmen Project. When practiced as part of our day-to-day, these qualities will help us develop our mastery in our lives and work.

References:

Inc Magazine Profile, 2004, White Dog Enterprises
Shetterly, Robert. “Americans Who Tell the Truth: Judy Wicks.Document Actions” RSS Feed, 2020.

COOPERATION 101

I'm helping to create an economic system that will respect and protect the earth -- one which would replace corporate globalization with a global network of local living economies. Business is beautiful when it's a vehicle for serving the common good.

COOPERATION 101

Cooperation is about listening when you want to be heard and finding the best way, not in having your own way.

PRACTICE

COMMIT

FURTHER READING/ WATCHING

In her words…