“Your coworkers are your first responsibility,” an excerpt (pages 6-7) from Off-Centered Leadership: The Dogfish Head Guide to Motivation, Collaboration & Smart Growth, in which Sam discusses supporting and celebrating coworkers, embracing their complementary superpowers to drive exponential success.
There is a term in Japanese for the ultimate expression of selfless appreciation and support: omotenashi. There is no direct translation in English, but the best definition might be something like: the host anticipates the needs of the guest in advance and offers a pleasant experience that guests don’t expect. In the context of business, this can mean that “the customer is always right.” Or simply that we want to “exceed customer expectations in every way the customer interacts with our company and the things we make.” I love the concept of omotenashi, but in my journey toward leadership, I give it a different twist: the customer is secondary.
As a leader, your first responsibility is to your coworkers. You need to support them and help them to always try to do the right thing and to be as happy doing their work as possible. Going forward, I need to redirect more of my creative energy toward this end. I’m no Zen master, so there are going to be stumbles along the way. And I still intend to personally take the lead on some experimental brewing and arts projects that are dear to my heart, creatively cathartic, and marketable. Some of these projects may go into coast-to-coast distribution and some experiments may be one-time-only small-volume brews produced for events around our Delaware facility that allow me to interact with coworkers and Dogfish fans who come to visit us in our home state. But in terms of the evolving soul of Dogfish Head, my most important role is to be one among many who collectively make the important strategic and opportunity decisions facing the company. There will still be some specific functions attached to my job responsibility, particularly as the majority owner, but a central component of my evolving role at Dogfish is to allow great ideas and great people to bubble up and contribute exponentially and collectively to the company we are growing together.
Sam continues this sentiment, widening the aperture to include local partners and collaborators, in an excerpt (page 107) from The Dogfish Head Book: 26 Years of Off-Centered Adventures.
There’s a great scene in Ernest Hemingway’s book A Moveable Feast where the famous writer Gertrude Stein is showing Hemingway and his wife around her apartment, 27 rue de Fleurus in Paris, and she’s showing them her collection of original Picassos and other painters who were maybe just a little bit older than Gertrude Stein. Stein was probably more than twice Hemingway’s age and gave Hemingway and his wife some advice: “Pay no attention to your clothes and no attention to all the mode, and buy your clothes for comfort and durability, and you will have the clothes money to buy pictures (paintings) … Buy the people of your own age – of your own military service group. You’ll know them. You’ll meet them around the quarter. There are always good new serious painters.” I think I took this story to heart because as soon as we could, the first thing we did was to invite coworkers who had complementary talents to Mariah and me to join our company, and the second thing we did with that financial strength was to seek out local non-profit groups and artists of our generation who inspired us to help amplify our creative journey and add their voices to it.