Intro

I’ve been a franchisor the whole of my professional life. Franchising requires a different skillset from other business formats; a person might be very good in a centrally-managed setting, yet do poorly as a franchisor. All my work habits and beliefs were hammered into shape by helping free and independent owners invest their personal life savings into businesses of their own. These people were investing $150K or more; not only that, they signed a contract with us that was more binding, legally, than marriage. Franchisees aren’t exactly customers, because there’s that mutual binding legal promise. Like customers, you live or die by their success and satisfaction. But unlike customers, they have a huge reciprocal stake in the success of your company, too. And they aren’t anything like employees, because nobody’s going to get far arguing with them. It’s their money, their business. They simply do what they think is right, off in their far-away towns.

It’s been three decades since Laura & I founded Great Harvest Bread. The world of business shifted in those years, and it's become more mainstream now to think the way we think. Successful employees of well-run companies accept more risk, and know that their success or failure depends on quick learning. Even within a large enterprise, people are encouraged to think and act as though they own their own businesses. Companies are worth exactly what their knowhow is worth, what their relationships are worth, not what their things are worth. Things get auctioned to the lowest price; but knowhow gets sold at high multiple. Value, today, derives directly from learning. Companies that are doing well aren’t leaving knowledge to chance. Stuff that Laura and I were proud of, that we thought we’d invented, we’re now seeing everywhere.

We sold Great Harvest in 2001, so this is the story of the way it was right before we left, and how our own management shaped it to that point. The company is still healthy and growing today. It has most of the same people, and the same learning-community culture I’ll be describing. But I have no connection to the company anymore, other than friendship.

I won’t dwell on history much, how it got where it did. Great Harvest is one-of-a-kind even today. It's the only pure example, as far as I know, of what we called a “learning community franchise.” Now that I’ve left and I’m no longer immersed in it, it seems even more interesting. The things we learned the hard way while franchising a system of free owners are on-target now, for the much-more-fluid forms of organization that lead to business success today.

I’ll describe what our learning culture looked like, and how the pieces fit together to support it. For the sake of brevity, this will be a snapshot, so you can see what the critter looks like. From there I’ll go to the special opportunities and pitfalls of running a business this way and why I think it’s very strong. At the end, I will touch briefly on my interest today, which is applying these same ideas to enterprises similar to Great Harvest – not necessarily franchises, but any organization made up of separate free & independent workgroups, far apart geographically, with a high need and desire to share know-how.

When people think knowledge management, they think of the biggest companies – and for good reason, because these companies are an enormous KM opportunity/headache. They are the ones who assemble the big teams, they buy the expensive software, they need KM to work. They're icebreaking for the rest of us.

But the basic rules of good KM apply equally well beyond the large-company setting. We were good with technology at Great Harvest, but we were small. We did neat things without anything fancy. The fundamentals of KM - how organizations learn and build knowhow - these fundamentals scale. They scale up to Shell Oil's complicated global web of customers and outside partners; they scale down to a franchise of 200 bakeries, or even to an association of community radio stations in Latin America.

I believe in this, and I'm enthusiastic about it. It’s powerful and it’s good.

The agreement

It maybe seems dry to start at the legal agreement. But shortly you’ll see how our franchise agreement was the original commitment which burnt all our bridges forever. Because of the agreement we HAD to select just the right people, then do everything in our power to bring them together around constant learning.

Our agreement is the only one in franchising which states in writing that there will be near-total freedom to run your business any way you like. After the first year of business, there are basically no quality standards, no cleanliness standards, nothing saying how the bakery should be run. No power even to shut down a really horrible bakery.

The agreement comes in two parts. The first, called the Apprenticeship Agreement, defines a more-conventional “I’m the franchisor you’re the franchisee” relationship. It details how the training and startup will happen, along with a set of (yes) nitty-gritty bakery standards. New bakery owners promise to do all the most important things, just our way. Here’s a sample of the tone of it:

“Within 14 days after our sending the Confidential Book of Promises to you, you will acknowledge in writing that you understand its provisions and confirm the contractual obligation to abide precisely by its terms. This is essential to our long term business relationship. If you intentionally break one of these critical promises, you and we will both know that your word is no good.

“If you un-intentionally digress from the Confidential Book of Promises in the operation of your Bread Company, and we bring it to your attention, you agree to remedy the default at once. As long as you are committed to the spirit of these promises, trust stays intact. An honest person knows her own intent. And it is intent, not execution, that is at the heart of this. Lapses due to events beyond your control, or exceeding your ability to control, will never be held against you.

“The type of Bread Company defined by the Confidential Book of Promises is the one we believe to be strongest in nearly every situation and market, both in the first year and beyond. Nevertheless, each Bread Company is unique. At any time during the apprenticeship year, you may request a variance from any specific limitation placed on you by the Confidential Book of Promises... Variances from the Book of Promises are seldom given.”

This Apprenticeship Agreement gets torn up (often in celebration) after the first year.

The real franchise agreement, called the Continuing Agreement, governs the relationship from then on. Here’s the tone of that:

“The relationship between you and us, which this Agreement creates, is one of mutual interdependence and a formal franchise relationship. But it differs from the traditional franchise relationship. In a traditional franchise relationship, we would reserve an ability to control most aspects of your business, with few exceptions. Our relationship with you though, and yours with us, is one where both parties are free to run their businesses as they like, with few exceptions. Accordingly,

ANYTHING
not expressly prohibited by the language of this Agreement
IS ALLOWED.

“The remainder of this Agreement is divided into three sections: promises we make to you, promises you make to us, and additional clauses.”

This page of the agreement leaves no room for misinterpretation; click here if you would like to see what it looks like in real life. The wording above was shrunk down to get it under control for this essay. Like any respectable legal document, our agreement is laid out in a serious-looking 10-point Times New Roman. But the words “ANYTHING IS ALLOWED” take up one-half of page one, in 62-point, bold.

From a KM standpoint, another interesting part is this:

“WE PROMISE: 1. Complete Openness

“We will never have secrets from you, your employees, or any other Signed Great Harvest Insider. You may ask us any question about any aspect of Great Harvest, including our internal policies and our numbers, and expect a straight answer. We will be open with you even when our honesty will expose us to embarrassment or reveal our mistakes. This openness will extend to all business and personal relations involving you and us. The only exceptions would be: (1) if we’re involved in a clear-cut dispute with you or a third party and openness on our part would put us at a clear disadvantage in an adversarial situation, or (2) in a case where openness on our part would be unethical, for example, by causing us to break a promise of confidentiality or violate the privacy of any person.”

Then later on, in the part where they make their promises to us:

“YOU PROMISE: 1. Complete Openness

“You agree to openly share your discoveries and ideas, whether big or little, with us and with any other Signed Great Harvest Insider, and never to withhold any innovation which might help us or the Great Harvest System as a whole. You acknowledge that you completely understand, and accept, this foundation of your relationship with Great Harvest; that you are entering into a mutually beneficial free dialog with all other Signed Great Harvest Insiders; that central to this dialog is open and honest generosity in the exchange of new learning; that there is no place for score-keeping regarding who gives the best ideas to the system, or who gains more than whom; and that by signing this Agreement, you are giving your promise, along with every other Great Harvest bread company owner, that every procedure, recipe, or idea developed or discovered by you will be available to all Signed Great Harvest Insiders and becomes the property of Great Harvest Franchising, Inc. for the benefit of the System as a whole.”

Note that the openness promise is the #1 promise, by us and by them.

It then goes on into things like bakery territory, protection of marks, paying royalty, confidentiality of trade secrets, termination, renewal – mostly our mutual understandings on how problems will get solved, if they come up. But there’s almost nothing on how they should run their business. They could easily sell tires, fill the place up with flies, or sideline in porno. We have given ourselves no tools to stop them. Intentionally.

There are a few store standards in there – there’s a limitation on wholesaling, a requirement that they use approved wheat and grind it fresh, rules on how the logo gets displayed. They agree to help us promote the franchise with a little counter easel. That’s really all, though. Each of these things has some specific importance to the health of the franchise system as a whole, none of them are there because “we think this is good for you.”

Built up all around this agreement is a 25-year-old culture. Here a smattering of clippings from assorted old emails and training materials, to give you the flavor:

“Defining our product this way means a bread customer sees less uniformity, has less guarantee of same quality from store to store. It also means that we are not selling "Success" or "Security" to our franchisees. A near‑guarantee of success, such as other well-run franchises offer, is a very different thing from a guarantee of freedom. The two don't mix. Even a franchise which allows a lot of innovation from its strongest franchisees, while paternalistically protecting its weaker members from making mistakes, is fooling nobody on the price paid in freedom to buy security. Freedom isn't ‘the right to do anything you want, as long as you show home office you're being sensible.’ That's a phony approximation of working for yourself — safer, maybe, but not freedom. Freedom has always been, and always will be, the freedom to do what you think is right without justifying it first to others.”

Another quote:

“Recruit the nicest, most generous, most honest and authentic people we can find -- people who love learning for the plain fun of it, who see business as an excuse to play, and love all of life for the sheer thrill of a bumpy ride -- and bring them together in a caring community which supports these entrepreneurial types to TRULY run their own thing, make their own mistakes, have their own successes, and be 100% themselves. Our product isn't just bread. It's freedom, fun, learning, and a group of people who build and reward the very best in each other.”

...and another:

“This kind of franchise can only thrive in an environment of complete openness. We have a full freedom of information policy, and we expect everyone who joins the franchise to share everything they learn with the other bakeries, and with us. We don't have any company secrets that you can't know. This means that competitors of ours, wanting to copy our success, can probably get ahold of our most important secrets. Nothing is hidden from anyone inside the system, so the chance of leaks to people outside of the system is greater. This is a weakness. But every weakness is the flipside of a strength, and our greatest strength, by far, is the incredible pace of innovation which is only possible in a network of free entrepreneurs, freely exchanging all ideas. Competitors can copy us, but unless they copy that same spirit of openness, they will never innovate at our pace. They will be left holding a blueprint of what Great Harvest was, and we will be out of view.”

As a practical matter, it’s not quite as easy as that.

The learning community

Great Harvest bakeries are more alike than different. Without enforceable standards, we needed to get very good at bringing the whole group together on common themes and common culture. This has worked well. At the time we sold the company, system-wide sales were $60M, our top line at home office was $4M, 92% of that was royalties, the rest startup fees. If you visited a typical bakery, it wouldn’t look exactly like the others, but you would be buying the same great bread from the same kind of people. 70% of their money came from selling bread (as opposed to other bakery products). Bakeries differed widely in strengths and weaknesses. But there were enough strong ones executing evenly on all the fundamentals to make a strong franchise.

There are drawbacks to not being standardized. But done well, there are offsetting strengths. Here’s another old clipping I like, talking about the potential of this as a new style of franchising:

“These franchises will have the "look" that Great Harvest has now, but will cover many other product lines. That "look" is almost exactly opposite to the look of successful franchises as people think of them today. Rather than slickness, professionalism, and uniformity, successful stores in the new type of franchise will be funky, full of fun, obviously amateurish, and no two the same. A customer would have no way of knowing he was in a franchised store unless he had seen another store before. And yet there would be a definite underlying professionalism of management, a sharp competitive focus, seemingly mismatched with the down-home look of the place. It would feel like "Mom & Pop," but a Mom and a Pop who knew what the heck they were doing. Sensed by the customer, but vaguely unidentified and undefined, would be the power of the franchise operating in the background, training and retraining through newsletters, calls, visits and meetings; disseminating innovations quickly through the system; investing in research and development. A franchise that is out of the business of inspection and enforcement, having that much more money for the business of leadership and service. And the system, all the stores, humming with the spirit that only freedom brings.”

Franchising is simple in its basics. Any franchise – not just Great Harvest – signs people up and teaches them how to run a certain kind of business. After that, the franchisee sends the franchisor a percent of their top line as ongoing royalty. Royalties in franchising typically vary between 3% and 7%. Ours averaged 5%.

So you start them and they send you money. From then on, purely from a survival standpoint, you have to justify your existence. It’s true the agreement is binding. But that’s a lot of money for a bakery to pay out each month, and if you don’t put that money to work making life better for your franchisees, things go to hell abruptly. Franchise systems frequently unravel. We’ve personally witnessed plenty of them collapse. I loved franchising – the whole thing. But there’s a nice little fear element adding that extra bit of spice. It seems so fragile. You have to pinch yourself to prove that it's not a dream, that it’s really working.

Strong franchises have strong “glue” – they have used the royalty money wisely, and the majority of their franchisees can point to that royalty as “money that makes them money.” Consider Subway, for example: they have the name, they have the standardization, they have locations everywhere, and because of this you tap into a reliable stream of habitual customers from the very first day your store is open. Take down that sign, you lose it all. But not only that, they help you in a hundred other ways, mostly with things you could never accomplish alone without the group. To top it all off, customers love Subway's concept. It all adds up to really good glue. Us franchisors drool in envy over glue like that.

In a freedom franchise, standardization can’t be the glue. Also we’re a smaller franchise, so we can’t rely on the name recognition, or having locations everywhere, or large-group economies of scale. In fact it's even worse, because these strengths of Subway's become weaknesses for Great Harvest: many basic franchise services get harder to deliver, since all the bakeries have differing needs. In a standard franchise, since they’re all pretty much the same, if you make and roll out something that works, it will work in almost all of them. In a freedom franchise, you can make something really good, roll it out, and it might help one in five.

So what is Great Harvest’s glue? It's the learning community itself. It isn’t that “learning” is worth that much, to anybody. You can get learning by subscribing to a trade magazine for $50 a year. But the Great Harvest learning community isn’t a magazine. It’s this huge, complicated contraption that cranks out constant answers on an as-needed basis. It’s the reason people love Great Harvest. It’s the reason the bakeries stay successful year after year, while so many non-Great-Harvest bakeries fall by the way.

Bakeries are structurally weak, as businesses go; they fail a lot. The way they generally fail is by going downhill, getting tired as the spirit drains out of them. Great Harvest bakeries don’t fail very often. In fact, often they instead shine with, like, this inner light. An established Great Harvest store in the hands of a master can overwhelm you with motion and music and hot smells. The reason is full owner freedom. Freedom, nourished by constant, constant fresh learning. And that learning, coming continuously and intentionally out of a structured problem-solving process.

Theory

I could kill us both, with theory. I’ll do my best to keep it succinct.

Picture that you already have a learning community franchise built. It doesn’t look like a home office, serving bakeries in return for royalty (visualize a hub at the center, straight lines running out to the bakeries). It doesn’t even look like home office encouraging the bakeries to get connected, then acting like a switchboard, amplifying the best ideas back to the system (visualize now a wagon wheel, the rim is the bakeries all connected with each other, but the hub is holding it together). Those two models both went out of vogue in our company 20 years ago, and 10 years ago, respectively.

Now picture a classic network, black dots are the nodes, they’re crossconnected by lines. (I placed a rough sketch of these models here, if you'd like to see.) In this network there are lots of nodes (the bakeries) but each has only about 5 connections. So it’s sparsely connected. But you could, if you wanted, hop-scotch across it, node to node. There is no hub. Ideas, help, friendships, shared materials, all move without any hub. Strictly speaking, there’s no need for a franchisor.

In Great Harvest when we left it, you have 130 of those big black dots, the bakery owners, plus lots of little satellite dots orbiting around them, their employees. On top of this now sprinkle 30 blue dots. Draw in lots of connecting blue lines. Those are the franchise staff. These people have, maybe, 10 strong connections each, because they’re doing it all day, and they know a lot of people. Half of those connections might be to bakeries, half to their co-workers. Their job isn’t to be mini hubs or switchboards. Their job is to contribute full-time boost to the thing that already wants to happen by itself.

This becomes tangible at annual convention. The big black dots, the little black dots, and the blue dots, they all walk around like real people. Each has their own agenda. But for everybody, it’s all about getting hooked up. Franchise staffpeople do this hooking-up easily, because they do it all year long, so they have lots of tricks in their toolkit, and they're good at it.

Laura and I used to go once a year to IFA’s annual convention, the International Franchise Association. One year there was this big dance on the last night, and they hired a crazy troupe of professional dancers and misfit actors to get out on the dance floor and simply be high-energy. The crowd on the dance floor, which was already lubricated, loved it. So picture it. It was mostly franchisors, business people, but about 10% mixed in were these other unknown people, nothing like us, paid simply to be crazy. Surprisingly, it worked. It worked super good. We were all dancing like we never danced before, sparsely interspersed with made-up clowns and dancers-for-hire.

This image fits perfect. It certainly bumps aside the old “hub & spoke.” This crosslinked net of bakery owners and employees, liberally spiced with high-energy franchise people, is the goose that lays the golden egg. But it won’t lay eggs yet.

To put the thing to work - and also to get it stronger with exercise – you push and pull Great Harvest’s collective knowhow thru it in a learning-cycle. This works for any problem or project. It’s like hopping in a car to go someplace, you don’t think about the car too much, that’s just how you go places. All those connections make a big parallel-processor. A question forms, big or little, and everybody looks around at what everybody is doing, and the answer is often obvious. The best of these answers get published or may even spread on their own, feeding the cycle again. This fresh recommendation bounces around, people experimenting with flavors and versions, until a new question forms; then a new answer emerges, the answer becomes widely known, and back around. This could be as insignificant as how to sharpen millstones, or it could be the total company strategy and direction, or how the actual royalties get spent. There are formal processes for each thing, but that’s the idea. A recommendation or blueprint or clearly-stated goal goes in, gets banged around for 3 months to a year depending, the next answer comes out, it’s packaged up fresh, and the cycle repeats.

Now let’s look at the same thing from an entirely different viewpoint. The practice of knowledge management, as we all know, gets confusing. I like Einstein’s rule that things should be made simple as possible, but no simpler. For me, if you strip everything away until you can’t go simpler, all KM is driven by two pistons, each equally essential, each driving the other around in a cycle. Those of us in KM often label these the Tacit and the Explicit. Those are geeky words but I’ve grown to have affection for them - maybe because they’re short, and rhyme so good. In Great Harvest, the tacit side was the bulk of the learning community, people getting things done – running their bakeries, but also franchise workgroups, projects, meetings, discussions, problemsolving, phonecalls. People simply being skillful. The explicit side was the stuff we happened to save out of all this, and also the stuff we were pushing that particular week, like best-practice recommendations for example. Saved how-tos, captured discussions, databases, spreadsheets, printed materials, photos, videos, manuals, websites, numbers -- all these are examples of the explicit.

You can find this basic model drawn in KM books and articles, crosswise, sideways, and otherwise, because it does work, and is definitely “simple as possible not simpler.” Two arrows are drawn to show the explicit side pulling fresh knowhow out of the tacit, the tacit side pulling useful tools from the explicit. Or equally true, depending on the situation, freshly-minted explicit knowhow can be pushed out to the tacit side, and fresh knowhow from the tacit side can shoved into storage on the explicit side. (I posted some rough sketches of this model here.) Doing an important project, the tacit side creates explicit stuff, and it also needs explicit stuff, as it's getting the project done. But likewise (in a franchise especially) we actively PULL good stuff from the tacit side, package it explicitly as possible, then energetically PUSH it back out into the learning net.

In a freedom franchise like Great Harvest, the CORE set of beliefs and sense of direction that we all have in common becomes not just something nice to look at, but a tool that’s caringly sharpened and used every day. If you think of the technical and physical infrastructure provided by the franchise to support the flow of tacit to explicit, and explicit back to tacit, and the overlapping communities it serves, a part will be franchise staff only, a part will be bakery owners only, and the biggest part will be where both of these groups are collaborating. The bakery-only part might have this awful, high-fat, rogue muffin recipe posted for permanent reference on the explicit side, or an out-of-control gripe session about the franchise office, on the tacit side. Or, it might have the next great thing that’s going to make us all rich, developing out of view to headquarters. The franchise-only part has its internal company meetings on the tacit side, and the office intranet, for example, on the explicit.

But the big part, where franchise staff and bakery owners are working hard in concert, is where most of the action is. And in the center of that shared space is a kernel, a core. We call it “The System.” It includes our mission statement, our shared values, our common culture, our logo and trademarks, the current budget, and all the big goals we’ve set for ourselves. On the tacit side, “The System” is formal, funded, elite meetings like the Advisory Council or the Marketing board, where top franchise and bakery people work together doing big things that will get rolled out with fanfare. On the explicit side, “The System” would be operation manuals, approved recipes, best-practice howtos. So what it finally looks like is a lot of loose, free, untethered knowledge-building, swirling every whichway around a core System which has been lovingly assembled by all of us, and stays quite steady over the years.

The program mix

The learning community needs 4 things to keep it running, and they all take labor and money. These are: 1) Travel - people meeting face to face; 2) Distance Community - people meeting by phone, email, etc; 3) Replicated materials - the explicit knowhow. Some of it sits there, birdfeeder-style, for people to help themselves, and some is actively pushed; 4) Research & Development - because some ideas are either too risky, or too tedious, to expect the bakeries to tackle them on their own.

I think it's important to show you some of the fine-grained detail, because a central point I'm trying to make here is that learning communities need energetic input, they don't simply self-organize. At the time Laura & I left Great Harvest our programs looked like this:

1) Travel

Visits. Franchise staff visiting bakeries, helping troubleshoot, hooking bakery owners up to fresh ideas. We also sent star bakery owners to weaker bakeries, with the same mission.

Crosstravel. Bakeries visiting other bakeries. Some of this was actively funded. We published a list of the best bakeries for people to go see, in each of our fundamentals - bread quality, promotion, etc. We also catalyzed bakery employee crosstravel, and peer-group or regional gatherings.

Annual Convention. Very expensive and completely essential.

Elite roundtables. Standing boards like the Advisory Council, Marketing Board, R&D Council, Group-buying Board. These went year after year. There were also swat teams, assembled for just one or two meetings around a specific problem, like milling, or bakery design. These were our top bakery owners in the specific topic, working alongside franchise staff. We paid their way. If you think back to that image of the whole learning community, black nodes the bakery owners, blue nodes franchise staff, these important meetings pulled a mini-version of that into a compressed space for two or three days.

2) Distance Community

Extranet. It was getting 1,000 hits a day from bakery owners and employees. It had a discussion area, downloads, search, etc. The company was featured in a series of television spots aired nationwide by Microsoft.

Email. By default everyone was given an “@greatharvest.com” address, but people could use any address. We maintained the addressbook to make it easy for people to talk to each other.

Phone. There was a system to make sure bakeries got regular calls. Naturally, too, they called each other.

3) Replicated materials

Extranet again. Most of our printed stuff was posted there, available for download. Clip art, marketing materials. Numbers.

Newsletters. Frequent and important, sent by regular mail, often featuring case-studies from individual bakeries.

Training videos.

Manuals, how-tos, kits. Occasional important blueprints or howtos on a specific issue. These often piggybacked the newsletter mailings. Also regular marketing plans, and the materials to implement them.

Numbers club. We spent considerable energy collecting key financial results from all the bakeries annually. Most bakeries opted to view each other’s numbers, by joining the “numbers club.” This was in effect agreeing “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.” It was a real leverpoint of the learning community, much more important than it may appear at first blush. Bakery owners could really see the leaders in each area, and ask them very specific questions; they could also see what their friends were doing. And those numbers weren’t dry; they matched a real bakery they knew personally, they had visited it and seen the practices those numbers derived from, on the ground, in real life.

4) R&D

The Lab. A complete little bakery at home office, not generally open to the public, for teaching, experiments, and testing wheat.

The Butte Bakery. Our only company store. We were trying out a different concept that couldn’t be risked on any existing bakery.

Spontaneous pilots. Of course this happened naturally, and ended up in a published case-study.

5) Maintain unity

I’m adding a brief number five to the “Four Needs of a Learning Community” in order to explain the remainder of our programs. Just like a good government goes to war, protects the boundaries, provides roads and a rule of law, it’s the franchisor’s job to do that for a franchise system. We defended trademarks and trade secrets, helped settle territorial disputes between neighbors, and facilitated the hard transitions like selling or terminating. We also kept a steady flow of tested wheat, which in our business was critical for the bakeries, and a competitive advantage for the franchise.

A clear and steady rule of law, where problems get resolved even-handedly, and clear territories (good fences make good neighbors), plus a well defended boundary between “insiders” and “outsiders” - these things help explain why bakery owners can’t spontaneously create a learning community by themselves. They need the franchise, to have confidence that all this sharing of their hard-earned knowhow doesn't get away from them or even turn around to bite them. This important role of the franchisor is what enables bakery owners, normally sworn competitors against each other, to trust each other like cousins and siblings with the same last name.

Tidbits of advice

Having lived like this for years, what things would I say to my peers in KM?

Travel: To build a far-flung learning community, travel isn’t optional. I wish it were. It’s extremely expensive. I wish these techniques could be easily applied to make learning communities blossom in poorer settings, poorer countries. But unfortunately that big royalty stream was the thing that gave it lift-off.

Good always drives out bad: This has to a matter of unshakable faith, or you can’t keep it up. Seeing it play out in everyday life, blow-by-blow, the forces of light against the agents of darkness -- it can be scary to watch.

Crises: A robust learning community is a godsend in a crisis. I won’t say it gets everyone pulling together for the common good, because it doesn’t. But it delivers the solutions fast, it delivers leaders in your darkest hour (I’ve openly wept in gratitude) and it gets the crisis behind you in a way so everybody is up-to-speed on what just happened, and why. In our company, some of our biggest crises were 1) we had our royalty too low, and had to raise it to survive, 2) we weren’t good yet at managing openness and confidentiality at the same time, so got hammered by people running off with our stuff; and, related to that, 3) our market got bombed by copycats. It was the learning community, with its over-rehearsed grooves of trust and communication, that kept the ship afloat every time.

Strong leadership: Great Harvest was never a democracy or co-op. We had a twelve-month iterative planning cycle which involved a special pre-budget meeting of the Advisory Council, plus carefully thought-out “Start-Stop-Continue letters” from all franchise staff and many of the bakery owners, posted publicly on a big wall. Start-Stop-Continues were each person's contribution of their best ideas, after a year of watching the company from their own special perspective -- the new programs they would start, the old programs they would kill, the old programs they liked and wanted to keep. There was high participation, and lots of floor given for both written and oral debate. But the final choices rested with Laura and me. Full consensus, in any group larger than five, means somebody got their spirit broke. The last time I saw full consensus was when Saddam Hussein swept the Iraqi elections at 100%. Because there was so much freedom in Great Harvest, there had to be a strong core, in our case The System. Leadership didn't reside only in top people. In the learning community, real leaders stepped forward. But it was critical – CRITICAL – that the organization never be allowed to simply drift.

Trust: People won’t share ideas if they don’t have years of shared memories, shared culture, a history of dependable integrity – Trust. If you ever see trust eroding (and you will) that’s your FIRST fire to put out.

Isolate the negative people: They deserve it (no, just kidding). Everybody has a bad day sometimes. Somewhere in your 80-year lifespan, there's going to be an entire year that’s the worst year of your life. It’s not uncommon for this worst year to happen right while your business is failing. A person who’s normally shy can really howl when frightened or in pain. Build your learning community so they can wail in a smallish space, but still have direct access to the people they need. Prevent broadcasting pain to the group at large. The happiest, most energized people in your organization will also be the ones who empathize most strongly with that person who's suffering. If you don't give your positive people some insulation from the negative people, they're going to feel a slump in their own confidence, wondering if maybe they’re just ignorant to be so happy.

It's easy to get confused on this point, especially in any organization that prides itself on openness. There is complete freedom for anyone to speak their opinion, positive or negative -- complete freedom of expression. But never forget who owns the central printing press. It's your newsletter, your convention, your councils and meetings, and when it comes to the things you're directly paying for, you have a right to steer the content.

A corollary: Provide your positive people a soapbox. Feature them in the newsletter, invite them to write articles, invite them to join workgroups or committees. For awhile, the negative people will assume the positive people are pathetically simpleminded, obviously unaware of the dismal facts. But let time pass, and it's always the positive people who emerge as your future leaders.

Keep it simple: While I sympathize with individuals feeling “information overload,” those of us in KM should be beyond that. In the story of Great Harvest, you’ve seen there was never any effort to “capture our knowhow.” Even in a small enterprise like we had, that would be like capturing a forest, freeze-drying every bee, bird, and tree, the whole ecology, freeze-drying all that lively growth and evolution. A given tool -- for example a final recipe or a final budget -- gets pronounced “done” at some point, at least until the next iteration. But only the truly-useful tools find wide use; any tool that gathers rust should go quietly into the basement, no matter how pretty it is. The intranet and extranet are good tools, exactly like the telephone. They're nothing but a way to speed ideas along, to reduce friction. Nothing should pool up there. Explicit media shouldn’t be expected to “capture” our knowhow, any more than a telephone would. When they want to find the best tools, people ask their friends “what works?” It’s a popularity market. Nobody has time to read anything, even if it’s good - they only have time to DO. So capturing is exclusively in response to a real need, right now. Each budget cycle, it’s something different. There’s a quiet steady feeling to it – ka chunk, ka chunk. The new comes in, and pushes out the old. There should never be “more” knowledge this year than there was last year – only better knowledge. There’s should never be a KM moonshot. That kind of drama is inappropriate, and sends everybody the wrong message.

Technology (things I care about): All online tools email-and-browser based. A clean, easy to use discussion area which can be accessed by both browser and email. Nothing ever pushed to people, unless they actively opt in. Easy to opt back out. Transparent for anyone, including bakery employees, to self-publish and upload files. Old materials (the last iteration of the learning cycle) sink into the muck and disappear, no apparent trace. Only the freshest shows. But if you go “remember that newsletter that had the part about oven timers?” and type in “oven timers” it's right there. No censorship; although a separated “mercado negro” is fine. (In Latin America, it’s typical for a town to have a big main market, and then in another part of town, the “mercado negro,” even bigger and noisier. This translates to English as “black market” but it doesn’t have that connotation – it’s a legitimate market, where regular people go, although it certainly flows with contraband and piracy. It’s just looser, and as a result there’s lots of unique stuff for sale there.)

Deep roots: It’s so true it’s cliché. But cultures run deep and they don’t happen overnight. There are so many little pieces that need to grow up around each other in order to work. This is plainly evident (and tragic to watch) in fledgling democracies. Our country has had so much time and so much practice, 200-plus years. We can’t even see anymore how all the pieces depend on each other for support. Many of these ideas from Great Harvest may prove useful in your own enterprise, but only if they play well with what's already happening there; only if they easily customize into your very specific, special, and existing scene. A friend of mine tried to transplant a full-grown tree once; of course it died. Only seedlings transplant well.

Will this work elsewhere?

What might be some applications of this outside of Great Harvest?

Application #1: It's good, easy-to-recognize KM. You and I, as practitioners in this field, have an habitual ability to see how knowledge is flowing, and how it’s getting put to work. Most of us (perhaps provincial on our part) see it as the root fundamental that creates ALL value. I myself can’t help but see all the knowhow in a blade of grass. It jumps out at us. Others see sparkle and glare on the surface of the water, but we put on our polarized glasses and see fish swimming everywhere. So the first application outside Great Harvest is simply that we love to read each other’s stories, and the more stories we know, the better we get. You have simple thought-models of your own, ways of making sense, that fit more appropriately with what you’re doing. But I’m sure you’ve already mapped most of my models onto yours, and been surprised, as we always are, by all the cross-match. There are principles that none of us invented. They just are.

Application #2: For a small organization, good KM doesn’t require fancy tools. It’s how you spend the money you’ve got. Even in a wide-flung organization like Great Harvest, we got by for years with a whopping phone bill, a fast copy machine, and plane tickets. Of course we loved each new thing that made it work better, and we were early adopters. But we never adopted the fancy. Some of the best collaboration tools are nearly free. They take root naturally if the culture is right, and people get automatic with them.

Application #3: In a large company, remote corporate branches are a lot like franchisees. The greater their free latitude, the more their spirit, creativity, and quick adaptability. The way we held our freedom franchise together was by helping the bakeries (read, branches) to thrive. We kept everyone aligned by running the printing press, funding elite teams, finding and disseminating the truly useful. Control of distant branches can be done in a similar way. Not by direct command, not even by lots of training and encouragement. Better than command, even better than training, is plenty of freedom combined with a loud learning community. Nobody wants to fail. The key is to create that thirst for new learning by scaring them with freedom. It syncs up the organization like command or training would, but without snuffing the spirit. Franchising is a very cool way to organize, especially over distance, where branches are out there floating on their own, loose cannons even in the best-run firms. Cross-breeding franchising concepts into the enterprise, a little or a lot, will work well for the knowledge age.

Application #4: Independent or semi-independent island-enterprises. This is my real area of interest – the application of a guerrilla-bootstrap brand of KM to fire up learning communities in situations where they WANT to happen spontaneously, but just can’t get off the ground for lack of a strong central authority, experience, and money. My own interest is Latin America, although these kinds of opportunities are everywhere, with plenty here in the U.S. Potential examples exist wherever there’s a community-of-practice that doesn’t even know about itself yet, or just can’t get the flame lit because it’s separated geographically. University consortiums, hospitals, trade associations, the local outposts of an NGO, international agencies, and agricultural research co-ops are all good examples. Or medical research groups which may be working in parallel on the same bug, in different countries, with the need to synchronize. The difficult hurdle is that they have so much less money, hence so much less travelability, hence fewer strong personal relationships to keep the fire burning. That’s big, and hard to overcome. On the positive side though, suddenly there are decent collaboration tools near-free for the taking, many of them already in wide public use. People in developing countries are quick to adopt them and quick to get fluent. You can step into any internet cafe in Bolivia, and see things we would have killed for in the early days of Great Harvest. Good, cheap tools, and kids that know how to work them. And in the kinds of groups I’m thinking of, people aren’t natural competitors, like bakeries can be. They may even be working toward a common higher cause. Trust comes as a freebie. There’s also what I think of as the “first-convention effect.” The first time you attend a trade convention in your field, and walk into a roomful of people just like you, the learning curve is so steep it’s exhilarating. The second convention can never be quite that way again. You get huge bang for the buck the very first time people find connection to their own kind.

Summing up

Because this is a book on KM, it’s easy to think that I’m simply describing our “KM systems and strategies,” and that I could write another article, equal to this, describing our “financial strategies” or “marketing strategies,” or any other subsystem of the business.

The reality is different. All of us in Great Harvest, we saw ourselves as a learning-community franchise, a freedom franchise. We sold, as our product, that freedom to REALLY grow your own business, and we used the learning community process as our way to do everything that needs to be done in any well-run company. We tried our darnedest to mix bakery owners in with all of our processes. We looked at all our programs and spending from this angle. Our vocation was to make bakeries successful and we saw the learning community, with all its tools and techniques, as the way to do this. Financial systems & strategies came right out of the learning community process. Marketing systems & strategies happened the same way. Keeping bakeries fresh and their owners up-to-date was all done using nothing but the learning community. Big money and big energy were applied to make that happen. The results were the same or better than you would get using a service mindset, a product mindset, or a financial mindset. It wasn’t a subsystem of the business: “How are we going to manage our knowhow around here?” It was the superset: “This is the only way to get things done.”

What we did was create 130 free-agent test-bakeries. That sure sounds nice, but of course you don’t NEED that many test bakeries. It’s overkill. We were making bread, not building a national defense against germ warfare. Three test bakeries would have been impressive.

But here’s the key point. What that did was turn “Training” into “Learning.” The safety net was taken away. In replacement for that safety net which other franchises provide, we channeled 100% of our money and labor into a different kind of net - a learning net. We gave our bakeries a wide variety of easy options for “catching up with the herd,” if they were behind, or “feeling their power” (as we used to say as teenagers, strutting down the sidewalk) if they were already ahead. Because of this total freedom to fail or succeed, they were terribly thirsty for fresh knowhow – whatever little perfections they could grab, or better yet, that big silver bullet. This sometimes-desperate problem-solving thirst made the learning network act like a sponge. Can you see the non-optional role of unconditional freedom?

So it wasn’t a way to do R&D (although it did that too, and wonderfully). It was a way to continually bring all the bakeries up to speed, and then beyond. It was a way to get all our bakery owners very, very good at running bakeries, and keep them that way, year after year.

The thing to remember is that this was a franchise – there were $4 million dollars, and 30 motivated franchise staff, saying this was going to happen. It took applied force to get that knowhow out to every bakery. It took applied force to help each bakery owner learn in the individual way they learned best. Knowhow was PUSHED into that sponge, and then SUCKED out the bottom, by force.

A hero of mine is Norman Borlaug. He is a crop scientist, now in his 90s, who started in a one-room schoolhouse in Iowa and went on to save tens of millions of people from starving in the developing world during the 60’s. He is the one person most credited with launching the Green Revolution. He got the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, and is still working today. These are his words, from a recent interview:

“Q: How did you do it?

“A: We had international nurseries where the best wheat varieties were compared. As the crisis of hunger in Pakistan and India grew in the 1960s, we had the data. It wasn’t published yet. Hell, we were trying to fill empty stomachs. The academics said, “Who are these insane people from Mexico?” ... They said it would take 10 or 11 years (to reap the benefits of the high-yielding strain). We cut it to four or five by planting two generations (of wheat) a year, one in the north and the other in the south.

“Q: Who worked on it?

“We brought many young students to Mexico. They were a new generation, a fraternity of hungry, gutsy young scientists from countries such as Pakistan, India, Egypt, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan. Most of the well-trained scientists in those countries were wearing white coats... They weren’t out in the field where the problems were.

“Q: How did your students accomplish this?

“A: I used to tell them when they first arrived, “we’re going to teach you to be rebels. Not gun-lugging rebels, but scientific rebels... And that sets the grass roots on fire when peasant farmers see that land that’s been producing eight or 10 bushels can suddenly produce 75 bushels.

“Q: Did you call it the Green Revolution?

“A: It wasn’t us scientists. In 1968, at a small meeting in Washington, William Gaud (head administrator of USAID) said “For the last five years, we’ve had more people starving and hungry. But something has happened. Pakistan is self-sufficient in wheat and rice, and India is moving towards it. It wasn’t a red, bloody revolution as predicted. It was a green revolution.”

A head-on collision with mass starvation in those countries was seen as inevitable. So the green revolution was not a trivial thing. It’s probably obvious to us that Norman Borlaug was world-class at KM. But his REAL gift was plant breeding. He did all this, just by being a great plant breeder.

What are the fundamentals of plant breeding? Find or make the plots of fertile soil. Plant lots of varied seed. Wait. Cultivate. Watch. Harvest. Select the strongest and the best. Reseed, using nothing but the best you’ve got.

Then repeat this, year, after year, after year.

Give 130 bakeries every opportunity to hear “what works” in whatever - breadmaking, accounting, right on up to core values, and mission. Seed. Wait. They’ll chew on that “best guess now,” turn it every which-way, invent permutations, compare notes. Harvest. The franchise works very hard to identify, quantitatively, the ones that are having success, and either give them a big soapbox, or ghostwrite their story. The harvest is simple good reporting, just the facts, avoiding personal judgment. Let the whole franchise see what’s happening out in the best bakeries, as clear as possible. Then pick something really important – locations, remodeling, wheat, the franchise agreement itself, anything - and make a real effort to decide, firmly, bang: “Editor’s choice. We decree it! THIS is the best way.” Select. This part is best done by assembling an elite group, like Norman did. In our case, the franchise leaders in that subject, both bakery owners, and franchise staff. Select. Then take that newly minted standard, and reseed.

Seed. Wait. Harvest. Select. Reseed.

That’s the learning cycle. It’s really simple, and it can be used on anything.

Appendix: Selected Fire & Brimstone

Rather than bore or startle the reader, I corralled these clippings from the past into an appendix. Some of this is big, tough talk, coming from a little bakery franchise! It will help you feel the passion that we had for this way of working.

Something noble

“The words Learning Community are unfortunately cliché now, but those two words are still the best for describing what we are and what we want to be. There is a "big" idea here, though: the dream ‑‑ so far realized ‑‑ of creating an organized network of truly‑free entrepreneurs. Tom Cordova said recently, in response to something I wrote: ‘I fear that Pete views this as a grand experiment, and is willing to let the franchise fracture just to study the results.’ It isn't an experiment to me, it's something very noble, something worth fighting very hard to make it work. It is the possibility that, even though it's never been done before, we can have all of the intense networking with peers and fast learning that is found in the best large organizations, in perfect harmony with the creative freedom that's found only in real self‑employment. That's huge. Fast learning, with full freedom to create. It isn't some dry business strategy. Learning, freedom and creativity are the very things that make us human, in love with life, vibrantly alive. People in self‑employment are perpetually starved for the fast‑paced learning and the sheer fun that comes from staying up all night drinking beers and playing with exciting ideas. People in corporations are perpetually starved for the freedom to take their wildest ideas and just DO THEM for the fun of it, without justification to anyone. A thing like Great Harvest truly makes the world a better place for people, and serves as an organizational model for maximizing human growth.”

The only course of safety

“Invent, as a group, a radical and totally-new system of organization, borrowing heavily from the best-run franchises and companies, but adding from new science, new technology, and our own experience, to leverage concepts either unknown or unappreciated by other organizations. Adhere to the tried and true only where it is in complete alignment with the new thing we are trying to invent; otherwise, strike off alone and invent as we go... Specifically: Build a thing which is neither franchise, company, or community, but similar to each -- an adaptive net, centered around fast LEARNING as the core value. Learning as what we do, learning as our source of fun, learning as the source of all our innovation, and learning as the key to our success...

“All of this has a dramatic and dangerous sound. I am positive that, on the contrary, it is the only course of safety, and will make us wildly successful and unstoppable as a group. Hit us with something bad, and we're multi-redundant, quickly self-healing of any breach in the crosslinked net. Throw us a problem and 100 separate 8-to-12 member groups work in parallel to solve it, with head-spinning speed. Send the whole system in the wrong direction, and renegade groups quietly assemble, perfect, and prove themselves, until the system turns. Change the whole world all at once, we reconfigure, transmutate, then come reborn brand new.

“The proof that this works will be in our success -- garden-variety success. Success which will see some people hurt, but for all the others, be fun, and easy.”

Everything of value

“There are two facts of the franchise relationship which are intractable of solution: royalty, and territory. If you think about those two things, and the nature of franchising, you'll see why they can never be solved. The first franchise which discovers a way to make its owners happy about royalty and territory might as well go ahead and solve the unified field theory, while they're at it...

“Rodd said to me once that in a funny way, he's actually willing to pay a high royalty to a franchise which mostly leaves him alone. Jason said to me once ‘when people ask what I get for my royalty, I tell them I don't get anything, except the right to talk to the other people in this room -- and also, I tell them I'm definitely getting my money's worth.’

“Both Rodd and Jason were hitting on something fundamental: real freedom in combination with real know-how is always expensive. That's why poor countries can't afford democracy and education. When nothing is cookiecutter, it costs. It also happens to be the modern way to run almost any type of business, in the information age -- one on one with every customer, customized solutions. We're just the first to apply that to franchising...

“We in Dillon make decisions based on one thing only: how can our business be the strongest? In that, we are no different from you. And we have a very simple, but very uncommon, answer... we take enough profit to grow the company (as determined by formula) and release the rest to programs... Now we've got all this money for programs -- how do we spend it? In a way that's pleasing to owners? Of course not! (This is a source of so many misunderstandings!) We spend it to build a LEARNING COMMUNITY. Just as we believe bakeries should be, simply, about HOT BREAD, we believe GH will be strongest if Dillon directs ALL programs toward 1) LEARNING or 2) COMMUNITY. If a program fails these two tests, end it or outsource it.

“A learning community happens to be an expensive bugger to maintain. It's at least as expensive as going around and enforcing standards, like a Subway or McDonalds. Freedom and Knowledge, like I said, are expensive -- especially expensive if you're trying for both at once. For example, let's just say that the best way to run a GH is all bread and hot all day. A conventional franchise would gradually bring all its agreements around to that, and enforce them through lots of visits. We can't, because of the freedom thing. They would have the expense of all those visits and clipboards and checklists. But we have the expense of massive communication, largely one-on-one or in small groups, selling new ideas the hard way, and yes, watching horrified as owners distort our ideas until they actually work.

“The expensive ingredients of a Learning Community are: 1) travel & gatherings, 2) distance communications, 3) mass-media replication of ideas, and 4) constant encouragement of experiments. Each of these takes a huge act of faith, hoping the results will be worth it, and each costs money.

“To spend our money -- the royalty money -- on ANYTHING else would be to neglect our leverpoint and waste it. What we as a group have that's very, very special, is freedom AND know-how. What we're uniquely creating is a system where every store is REAL, undeniably real, in ways customers can't ignore. We are the very first to intentionally franchise something real.

“So when you say ‘everything of value I got from other owners,’ you're right. Jason, especially, is right. Your royalty gives you that membership you need as bad as air or water, if you are to learn fast, and grow fast, and change fast enough. How you use your membership is completely up to you. And all Dillon really does -- ALL it does -- is maintain the learning community.”

Sledgehammer

“I do feel that the world is trying to invent a way of organizing that allows the fast-paced learning you find within the walls of a corporation (voicemail, meetings, project teams, people who know they can only win by sharing everything they know with each other, and quickly) while at the same time allowing the total individual freedom of small-scale self-employment (wall in the way? Rent a bobcat and a sledgehammer and have it out of there by lunchtime, without asking ANYONE's permission). I'd be misleading you, though, to say it's easy to create such an organization, or that real problems don't exist. We really do it not so much as good business, but because we love it and couldn't stand to see it be any other way. It attracts people just like us, and that has made a good life.”

Not a two-headed animal

“It's a fact of nature that healthy organisms, to survive, must be decisive. That's why in all of evolution, there are no surviving multi‑headed animals; if a two‑headed mutant is born, it dies, or needs special care. Neither are there multi‑headed companies, or multi‑headed countries, or multi‑headed institutions. There is a strong egalitarian impulse in us all, which wishes that it could be so ‑‑ wishes that a company or a country could thrive with a 5‑person tribunal at the helm, instead of a president. It seems like decisions would be more balanced that way. But of course they're slower, and luke‑warm when they finally do get made. It turns out in nature that organisms which make very quick, hot‑and‑cold decisions win.

“This company and this system ‑‑ Great Harvest ‑‑ will always have a single final decisionmaker. Right now, strictly speaking, that's Laura, since she owns the most stock... Many years ago, I transferred some of my stock to her, simply so that GH would never be stuck with two heads.

“This kind of decisiveness isn't needed often. Even when it is, there has to be wide inclusion of enough smart people beforehand ‑‑ for example, the two years of royalty discussion. But on big hairy issues, a day comes when a decision must be made, or the organism will be immobilized.”

Lifelong-learner types

“We more iterate than plan... I think something is fun when it comes easy -- like riding a bike is more fun than running, and skiing is more fun than riding a bike. Organized the way we are, certain things are very hard, and certain things are very easy. Innovation would be happening here whether we wanted it or not, because of the way we're structured -- so we have pointed the skis downhill and loved it. It is the things that come hard in an organization like ours that really interest me. If a free-network franchise were easy and completely natural -- a basin of attraction -- everyone would be rolling into it. I believe it is quite stabile -- we've been doing it for 20 years -- but maybe it has to grow slowly from its own roots to work. If so, that's a big disadvantage in a fast-paced world. Other disadvantages that come quickly to mind are the high cost of doing everything "custom." Since every bakery is different, you can't just crank out a standard solution to a problem and deploy it overnight. Things are certainly deployed overnight here -- almost weekly! -- but the odds of them finding fertile soil in every bakery are nil. The only way the thing really works is if the bakery owners love inventing and installing and de-bugging custom solutions on their own -- which means it won't work hardly at all without lifelong-learner types who constantly spend the time and energy to network with each other.”

Depressing

“What's mind-boggling, almost depressing sometimes really, is just HOW MUCH LEARNING is required, continuously, to stay ahead of change and be strong. And learning can't be limited to the owner level, or the franchise level, but must be aimed, mostly, at the employee level, for the system as a whole to change quickly enough. It's a huge commitment in reading NL's, visiting bakeries, attending roundtables, buying plane tickets, making time in schedules, researching problems, calling each other with questions, developing friendships. If all this isn't energizing to you, it will make you very tired.”

The free‑ride perception

“Scott C has pointed out another problem, one which I believe will be shown to be intrinsic in any free‑network franchise: ‘It takes a monster effort to help your fellow baker, and continue to run your own shop. Camaraderie is the glue that is holding us together. The appreciation and empathy we [bakery owners] have for each other is amazing and a delight to behold. And to many it appears that you are getting a free ride.’ This free‑ride perception is very hard on me and Laura and all of us here in Dillon, yet it is a direct result of everything we do as facilitators of owner‑networking and problemsolving. ‘The most powerful leader is he who's existence is merely known’ and ‘When a great leader's work is finished the people will say: 'we did it ourselves.'’ We live by these principles in Dillon, we know how good we are, we know the good we do, and we give each other way‑to‑go's every day, behind owners' backs. But as facilitators, it is wrong and counterproductive to ever claim the spotlight. The free‑ride perception is always going to be there, and the better we do our job, the stronger it will be.

Never overconnect

“NEVER try to collect all information in a neat package and make sure it gets to everyone who needs it. JUST KEEP LEARNING. That's enough. LIMIT YOUR CONNECTIONS, never try to stay connected to everything that's happening. When you don't know something -- "I should have known; somebody should have told me" -- take PRIDE in that! You're doing something right. An overconnected network binds up, becomes brittle, calcified, slow to react, in fact, is plain old-fashioned disgusting bureaucracy. If two people have two entirely different answers, THAT'S THE WAY IT SHOULD BE. If you don't know something, it's because you were busy learning something else, and when you NEED to know anything, you can always find the answer just by asking around... Reinvent the wheel, in parallel. There's NOTHING WRONG with reinventing the wheel. A strong distributed system doesn't overcommunicate. It re-invents its wheels in 10 places at once, then after awhile, looks up from its work, and compares wheels. Contradict frequently; enjoy, promote, celebrate wildly conflicting signals. One harmonious hum eventually emerges. Let people scatter off in all directions on a search; as the best answers are found, they gain converts, who teach new converts, and soon a chaotic scattered mess gets aligned in a stampede toward a single point.”

Beauty in diversity

“We might think you could be more profitable running your business different than you do, but we would much rather see something being done "wrong" than see every bakery the same. The freedom within Great Harvest means that some bakeries will be mediocre, some will be stars, some will be specialists in one thing or another. We are lovers of diversity, we see beauty in it, it makes everything more fun. Not only that, but out of diversity comes fluid flexibility, the ability to change overnight, when change is seen to be needed.”

Other franchises

“When Laura and I talk with other franchisors, the FUNDAMENTAL DIFFERENCE between us and them is, very simply, that ALL other franchises (as far as we know) continue what we in GH would call the apprenticeship relationship, indefinitely. This is why a single agreement serves them for the whole term of the relationship.”

And...

The Great Harvest Mission Statement:

Be loose and have fun,
bake phenomenal bread,
run fast to help customers,
create strong, exciting bakeries,
and give generously to others.