Energy.

Ari Weinzweig on the magic in behaving like a human being ...

Done regularly, the 10/4 Rule increases energy, improves inclusion, and could even enhance the health of everyone involved (yes, both the person greeted and the greeter). Erich Fromm writes that in a modern sense, we can experience resurrection in a nonreligious form as “the transformation of this reality in the direction of greater aliveness.” The 10/4 Rule is just that. It is regenerative in the literal sense of the word. Because the lives of all involved are enhanced by doing it, the 10/4 Rule literally creates energy!

In that sense, the 10/4 Rule is a manifestation of what business writer and creative thinker Carol Sanford says is the value of knowing about what she calls “nodes.” In Sanford’s systems thinking, nodes are

those places within a specific system where the introduction of new energy or a different quality of energy will enable an evolution and expression of its potential … Nodes are about energization, like acupuncture points rather than superhighway cloverleafs. … the fundamental approach is the same regardless of the size of what you are thinking about ...

The 10/4 Rule is a great example. In the scheme of all we do, it seems tiny. And yet, done well, it opens channels of organizational energy and connection that have an enormous impact.

One of the beauties of the 10/4 Rule is that once one starts doing it … well, we will almost all end up doing it all day. The other evening, working the floor at the Roadhouse, I tried to keep track of how many times I 10/4’d (as one might say in “Zinglish”) in an hour, but I gave up after I got to about 40 in the first 15 minutes. The point is you can get a LOT of reps in a relatively short time. In truth, many people who have worked here for a while will tell you that they soon start practicing the 10/4 Rule everywhere they go. This means that the impact of implementing it is far bigger than I could ever have originally conceived. Decades of doing it here at Zingerman’s has likely impacted the energy of the whole Ann Arbor ecosystem.

Done mindfully, the 10/4 Rule is not boring or tiring. As poet Gary Snyder says, “Repetition is not necessarily an enemy. Because every time you do something it’s different.” In this sense, doing the 10/4 Rule is like an all-day practice of purposefulness. Poet Marie Howe writes that “every poem has that silence deep in the center of it.” Reflecting on all this in recent weeks, the 10/4 Rule strikes me as the silence somewhere in the center of a poetic approach to customer service. Not in the physical sense of being “at the center,” but rather in the spirit of poet and potter MC Richards who writes about “centering” as “the discipline of bringing in … rather than of leaving out.”

Writer Seth Godin shared this in his morning missive the other day:

I worked with [science fiction author] Arthur C. Clarke at the very beginning of my career. He’s most famous for saying, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Magic isn’t such a bad thing. …