An ENFP man produces possibility at almost no cost to himself, which is precisely why it costs everybody else so much to evaluate, and an organisation’s defence is a discount rate applied to the man. Nobody computes his hit rate. Everybody feels his frequency.
Sy Ludvik came into my office on a wet morning in 2010 with a paper cup of whey in his hand and told me we should be aging cheese.
I said we make ice cream and fresh cheese and we have made ice cream and fresh cheese since 1953.
“I know. I’m saying we’ve got a room.”
I said the room was full of pallets.
“The room is full of pallets because nobody’s ever needed it for anything.” He put the cup on my desk, which I did not care for. “Vergil’s out there selling curds to a hundred and six accounts and every one of those accounts also buys aged cheddar from somebody two states away, and we’ve got the milk and we’ve got the room and we’ve got a guy in the plant who’s been asking to make cheddar for six years and nobody’s ever asked him why.”
I said I’d think about it.
That is the honest transcript, near enough, and I have gone over it more than any other four minutes of my working life, because the aged cheese program is now a shade over a third of what this company sells and I would not be able to name one person outside this building who would say it was his.
Sy came to Vandermeer in 2001 as a shipping clerk. He was twenty-three, with two and a half years of college and a summer working at a fair. He is a fast, loud, entirely unembarrassed man who talks with a cup or a pen or somebody’s stapler in his hand. He remembers what everybody’s kids are doing, and there is no technique in it. In twenty-five years he has not sat all the way through a budget meeting. He will interrupt you, apologise, and interrupt you again inside the same minute, and the second interruption is usually the good one.
Vandermeer Creamery is in Vessey and has been since 1953. Verner Vandermeer is the third generation. We take milk from nine farms inside a fifty-mile ring, we make ice cream, fresh curd, and — since 2011 — aged cheddar and two washed-rind wheels that lose money and that we keep because they win things. A hundred and forty people, most of them in the plant.
I came here in 1994 on the packaging line. I have been the general manager since 2016, which means that for a decade every dollar this company has spent on trying something has come out of a line I control, and that line is called the trial budget, and it has been the same number since 2014.
This company has a sentence for Sy Ludvik. Everybody says it, everybody says it fondly, I have used it in the room where using it decided things, and I am the person who turned it into a procedure.
Sy’s always got something.
Anjali Rao brought me a proposal at the start of this month about a private-label co-packing arrangement with a bakery group.
She brought it properly. Two pages, a customer list, a rough capacity model, and the name of somebody at the bakery group who has already said they would take a call. It is a good proposal. It is also, in its essentials, a thing Sy brought me in 2019, and Anjali does not know that, and I do.
Verner has a way of ending a discussion that everybody in the building can do.
“Let’s see if it comes back around.”
Fourteen Months
The reason this business runs the way it does is that cheese takes fourteen months to tell you anything.
You make a wheel today. You put it in the room. It gets turned and brushed and it sits at fifty-two degrees while the plant runs and the seasons change and two people quit, and somewhere between a year and eighteen months it becomes either a thing you can sell for a good number or a thing you sell to a shredder at a loss.
Ice cream is the opposite. You can have an idea in the morning and taste it before the end of the week, which is why every food company in this country is drowning in flavors and short on anything that lasts.
But the money in this company is in the room. And what that means — and it took me a long time to say this out loud — is that for fourteen months at a stretch there is nothing to evaluate except the person who proposed it.
You cannot audit a wheel of cheddar in its ninth month. You can only look at the man who said it would be good and decide how you feel about him.
The room itself is a hundred and ten feet of racking at fifty-two degrees and about ninety per cent humidity and it smells like a cellar and a barn at once. Everybody who comes through on a tour says the same thing about the smell and everybody who works here stopped noticing it inside a month.
Orlin Bakke has turned wheels in that room since 1996. He wears the same coat. He does not like the washed-rinds and has said so approximately nine hundred times and turns them anyway, on schedule, and once wrote a note on the door about the humidity that the maintenance company laminated.
I do not cook. At all. I run a food company and I have not made a meal since about 2011, and this is the single funniest thing about me according to everyone I work with, and I have stopped trying to defend it.
Nine a Year
What Sy has is not creativity, which is a word that means nothing and gets applied to people who buy interesting glasses.
It is that the world arrives at him as what it could be. He cannot walk the length of that plant without it suggesting things. A pallet in a room becomes an aging program. A driver mentioning that a bakery keeps asking for cultured butter becomes a co-pack. There is no searching in it and no effort in it. That is the crucial fact about it and it is the fact that ruined him: generating costs him nothing.
Which is exactly why it costs everybody else so much. Nine ideas a year from one man is nine evaluations, nine meetings, nine sets of numbers somebody has to run, and eight of them will not happen, and the eight that do not happen are not free.
And the second thing, which nobody in this building has ever credited him for, is that he is not generating at random. Something in him picks, and the picks are good. I went back and counted. Between 2004 and 2020 he brought forward, by my reckoning off my own notebooks, about a hundred and forty things. Twenty-six of them got tried, which is to say twenty-six of them got money out of the trial line, and the trial line is the only place money for a new thing has ever come from in this company. Of the twenty-six, seventeen are still running or ran until we chose to stop them.
Seventeen out of twenty-six is an extraordinary number. Nobody in this company has ever seen it, because nobody has ever computed it, and I only computed it in the spring.
What everybody has instead is a feeling, and the feeling is nine a year.
I walked the plant with him in about 2016 because a customer was coming and we were checking the route.
We got about as far as the whey tanks.
“Who buys this?”
I said a broker took it for feed.
“For how much?”
I told him, and he stood there a moment and then said there was a protein powder company in the next state that was buying from three hours away, and that if we could hold it cold we could be a day fresher than their current source, and that anyway the more interesting thing was that the guy who buys it for feed also runs a hog operation that is nine miles from a farm we take milk from and there is a truck going both directions empty.
Then he said, “Also we should paint that,” pointing at a bollard.
That is how it goes, walking anywhere with him. Three things in about forty seconds, one of them a real business, one of them logistics, one of them a bollard, and none of them flagged as different from the others, because to him they are not different. They are all just what the plant is suggesting.
Perri Lindstrom ran our specialty accounts for six years and had the identical equipment. Perri brought things constantly. What got said about Perri in that period was that she was scattered and needed to pick a lane, and it was said by three different people including me, and she is a category director at a much bigger company now and I saw her name in a trade magazine last year. Sy got always got something, which is affectionate. Perri got scattered, which is a performance note. What the identical nine ideas a year earn a woman in this business, and how much sooner the discount arrives, is worked out on its own page.
She came in to give notice and I asked her, because I was genuinely surprised, what we could have done.
“Said yes to one,” she said.
I told her we’d said yes to the seasonal program.
“That was Sy’s,” she said.
The Second Ask
I invented the rule in about 2007. I was proud of it. I taught it to two other people.
The rule is: wait for the second ask.
If Sy brings you something and you say you’ll think about it, and it was real, he will bring it back. If he does not bring it back, it was a passing thing and you have just saved yourself a week of work by doing nothing at all.
It is a completely defensible filter. It costs nothing. It has no meeting in it. It selects for conviction over enthusiasm, which is a thing every operator in every company on earth is trying to do.
And it is, I now understand, precisely calibrated to destroy a man like that.
Because the whole point of the faculty is that it moves. He does not come back to a thing. He meant it. It is that by the time you have thought about it he is standing somewhere else looking at something else that is also good. The filter does not measure whether an idea is worth doing. It measures whether the person proposing it has the one trait he has least of.
Vergil Toft uses my rule. Verner uses my rule. Verner learned it from me and has told me so, approvingly, twice.
He put it to me once as though it were a compliment to both of us.
“Best thing you ever taught me. Saves me a day a week.”
I said it saved me more than that.
And it did. Here is what I have never managed to work my way round: the rule worked. It did exactly what I built it to do, for nineteen years, at no visible cost to anybody.
The Cheddar
The aged cheese program went in during 2011 and Rolf Kiechle built it.
I want to be precise, because Rolf has been decent about this and does not deserve to be a villain. Rolf was the plant guy who had wanted to make cheddar for six years. Rolf specced the vats, rebuilt the room, fought the humidity for two years, took the first hundred and ten wheels to a shredder at a loss, worked out the make schedule, and got us to a product that wins things. That is four years of extremely hard work by a serious man and everything this company earns off that program is downstream of it.
And the reason there is a program at all is a paper cup of whey on my desk in 2010.
I have watched what happens to those two facts over fifteen years. The second one dissolves. Not because anybody suppressed it — because a thing that exists gets attached to whoever is holding it, and by 2015 the answer to how did we get into aged cheese was Rolf, and by 2020 it was Rolf and a story about the room, and now it is in our own marketing copy as a decision the third generation made, which I approved.
Meanwhile the flavor program in 2013 that we killed after nine months is still, in this building, one of Sy’s things.
That is the whole asymmetry and I do not think it is anybody’s malice. The successes get absorbed into the organisation because that is what a success is. The failures keep his name because a failure needs an owner and the owner is whoever wanted it.
Rolf told me a thing at the twentieth-anniversary do that I did nothing with at the time.
“You know that was Sy’s, right?”
I said of course.
“I say it.” He had a plate in his hand and he was not making a point of it. “At the state thing in the spring, the young fella from the extension asked me how we got into it and I told him. He wrote down my name.”
I said people hear what they expect.
“Sure,” Rolf said. “I’ve been saying it for a decade. It doesn’t take.”
The Email
In 2019 Sy came to me about co-packing cultured butter and specialty dairy for regional bakery groups.
It was the same shape as the thing on my desk this month. Underused capacity in the second half of the week, a customer set we already touch, a product we can make with equipment we own.
I said I’d think about it.
And then — and this is the only time in twenty-five years — he came back. Eleven days later, in the hallway outside the lab.
“Did you think about it?”
I said I hadn’t got to it.
“Do you want me to put it in an email?”
I said that would be great.
He sent it that night. It is nine paragraphs, it has a customer list in it, it has a rough number that is within about fifteen per cent of what Anjali’s proposal says now, and it is sitting in my inbox, unanswered, seven years later. I did not archive it. I did not delete it. It has moved down the inbox the way things do, and it surfaces every time I search the word butter, which has happened perhaps six times, and every time I have looked at the date and closed the search. I answered forty things that week and I did not answer that one, and I saw it.
I made a rule that said the second ask was the signal. The second ask came. And I did nothing, and the reason I did nothing was that it was 2019 and we were putting in the new filler and I had a hundred and six other things, which is a true and sufficient explanation of every failure that has ever occurred anywhere.
He Didn’t Push
The thing that started all of this happened in a production meeting in the spring, and it took me about a week to work out what I had seen.
We were talking about the second washed-rind, which loses money, and whether to stop it.
Sy said, “We could sell it as a club. Six times a year, direct, people who care, they pay double and we stop guessing at volume.”
Verner said, “Let’s see if it comes back around.”
There was a small laugh, the good kind, and Vergil said something about Sy’s club and somebody else said something, and the meeting moved on to the maintenance schedule.
And Sy laughed too and moved on with it.
That is what was different. For twenty-five years the next thing that happened in that situation was that he said it again, differently, from another angle, thirty seconds later, and half the time by the third angle somebody in the room was arguing about the actual thing.
He did not say it again. He wrote nothing down. He picked up his phone.
I caught him in the lot afterward and asked, in a light way, whether he was going to come at me about the club.
“Nah.”
I said it wasn’t a bad idea.
“It’s a good idea,” he said. He was looking for his keys. “I’ve got a list. I stopped bringing it.”
I asked how long the list was.
“Long,” he said, and got in his truck.
I went back and counted what he had formally brought forward by year, off my notebooks. Nineteen in 2008. Twelve in 2015. Four in 2022. Two last year. None this year until the club, and he did not push the club.
I had a declining curve in my own handwriting going back eighteen years. I have looked at those notebooks perhaps forty times and never once seen it, because a thing that gets smaller every year does not announce itself.
I asked Orlin, who has been here longer than I have, when the last time was that Sy really went after something.
He took a while over it.
“The cheese,” he said.
The Profile Book
Verner brought in a family business advisor in 2017 for the succession work.
It was a real engagement and it was worth the money. There is a shareholders’ agreement now, and a board with two outside people on it, and Verner’s brother’s children know what they own, which they did not.
Part of it was an instrument. The family members took it, and the four of us they designated key leadership took it, and the results came back in a bound book with a name on the spine — one page per person, four letters, a paragraph, a facing page with a chart. There are six copies in the credenza in the boardroom and one of them is mine.
Sy’s page says ENFP. My own page is two pages ahead of it and I read it in 2017 and thought it was reasonably accurate and did not turn back to it for nine years.
The paragraph is about enthusiasm and possibility and inspiring others, and it is the kind of writing that lets a person decide the whole exercise is a party trick and never turn to the back, where the material is. The back is a methodology appendix that says the letters compress a ranked order: a habit doing most of the lifting, a second that decides which of its output is worth anything, and, last, two that come to him only when he decides to go and get them — slowly, and badly under any kind of pressure. How that order runs here is laid out on the page that belongs to this type, out of the sixteen the advisor’s instrument was built on.
The one doing the lifting is the generation of possibility. The world arriving as what it could be, continuously, without being asked. Not searching. Not straining. Producing.
The part nobody here worked out, myself least of all, is that the cheapness of it is the whole problem. It costs him nothing, so he does it constantly, so an organisation that has to spend real money evaluating things develops a discount rate — and the discount lands on the man, because the man is the only thing in the room when the cheese has nine more months to go.
The second habit is the selector, and it is a private standard about what is worth doing. Not margin, not fit, not what the category is doing. His own settled sense, arrived at whole, which he cannot explain, which is why the answer to why that one has always been some version of it just seems right. And it is right seventeen times out of twenty-six, and he has never been able to say why, and nobody has ever asked in a way that would have got an answer.
The adjacent version of this — the one who leads with the standard and generates around it — produces a position and then a hundred ways of putting it. This one produces a hundred things and then picks.
And the last two in that order are the two he needed.
One is the apparatus: the follow-through, the schedule, the metrics, the thing that turns a possibility into a program. Rolf has it. That is why the cheddar exists and it is not a small point.
The other is the retrievable concrete past — what was actually tried here, in what year, and how it went. Which is the exact faculty required to say I brought this in 2019 and here is the email and here is what happened to the eight before it. He does not have it. He does not carry his own record. I have his record. It is in six notebooks in a cabinet nine feet from where he sits, and he has never asked to see it, and it would not occur to him that it was a thing to ask for.
I invented the filter, so this part had better come from me. What you originate at work almost always belongs to your employer, and that is normal and legal and is not the issue. The issue is that an organisation’s memory attaches to whoever executed, so the record of who originated a thing has to be made at the time, by you, in writing, dated, and sent to somebody — a one-page proposal with your name on it, filed where you can get it. Asking for your contributions to be recorded in your own performance file is an ordinary request and a manager who will not do it has told you something. And if you are being evaluated against a rule nobody has written down, the question of what the criteria actually are is a fair one to put in an email. Not one line of that is about somebody’s temperament. The people for it are a manager first, then whoever your employer has for complaints, then a lawyer.
The advisor’s own methodology page calls the instrument a conversation aid with no business allocating roles, and that when the same people complete it again four weeks on, roughly a third shift a letter, while the scales beneath it hold much better.
The advisor’s structural recommendation, in the same book, was that this company establish a standing innovation committee, quarterly, with a charter and a rotating chair.
It met four times.
I chaired the second one. There were seven of us in the conference room with an agenda, and the agenda item was idea generation, and we sat there.
Sy came in nine minutes late with a coffee and said, “What are we doing?”
Vergil said we were generating ideas.
“On purpose?”
Somebody laughed. Sy sat down, was pleasant, contributed two things, and left at the break. The fourth meeting got cancelled for a customer visit and was never rescheduled.
Verner asked me afterward whether we should keep it going.
I said it wasn’t producing much.
“No,” he said. “Funny, isn’t it.”
Anjali
She is twenty-nine and has been here fourteen months and she will be formidable, and her co-packing proposal is on my desk and the operating committee sees it in eleven days.
Two things came unstuck since the parking lot.
The whey cup in 2010. I have told that at three industry dinners as a charming account of how a shipping clerk talked me into a cheese program, and the cup is always the laugh. What was going on in those four minutes is that a man looked at an empty room, a sales list, and a plant employee nobody had asked a question, and produced a whole business out of the adjacency between them, in about ninety seconds, and then handed it to me and left. The cup is not the story. The cup is what I remembered because it annoyed me.
Then the hallway in 2019. For seven years that has been, in my head, a busy week. It was the second ask. It was the only second ask in a quarter of a century, and it satisfied, exactly, the rule I invented and taught to two other people and was proud of, and I did nothing, and then I went on using the rule for seven more years.
What the book left out. He has not taken a holiday out of this county since 2011 and gives a different reason every year, none of them the reason; he has a brother in the next county he sees at funerals and nothing else; and he is capable, about one specific former employee, of a coldness that fits nothing else on this page, and I have watched it twice and not asked.
Sy is on that operating committee. He will be in the room in eleven days when Anjali presents it, and he will be pleasant about it. Whether he will recognise it I could not tell you, and I have turned that over more than is reasonable.
Anjali asked me yesterday, on her way past, whether anybody had ever looked at co-packing before.
I said we’d talked about it.
She wanted to know what happened.
The people in these essays are composites drawn from long observation. The theory is not.