It's All About the Zuzim

By MARK ZANGER

The Hasidic Masters' Guide to Management
By Moshe Kranc
262 pages. Devora Publishing. $21.95.
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Everyone has a story about buying electronic goods from Hasidim, but that isn’t what this book is about. (You’ll have to bargain for your cell phone or flat-screen monitor just like everyone else.) Some Hasidic sects have enjoyed explosive growth and material success, but that isn’t what this book is about either. (You’ll just have to stop in at the Chabad House and take your chances.) Hasidic masters advised their followers in all aspects of life, including business, but this book is not primarily a collection of what the Rebbes said about farming or dealing in used clothing.  Neither is it an exhaustive discussion of Jewish attitudes and teachings about money and business, like The Kabbalah of Money, by Rabbi Nilton Bonder.

Instead, Moshe Kranc (pronounced "Krantz") has written a very readable management book for business people of any religious background about how Hasidic teachings can be applied to any issues between people—90 percent of management, right?—and how the Hasidic masters helped to guide people through the tensions of living a spiritually informed life in a material and often hostile world. Since management especially is almost entirely about understanding people, that’s where the lessons go.

Jews got into business when and where we were kept from farming or professions, and we survived because we learned about managing ourselves and other people.  For some of us, business has been just a source of income, and supports our spiritual lives no more nor less than farming or doctoring or lawyering. But for many Jews of many generations, the necessity of making a living has also been an opportunity to apply ethical and spiritual teachings.

Kranc has decades of experience in high-tech, and a fine collection of Hasidic stories (and some from before the Hasidic movement, and even a few from anti-Hasidic rabbis). He mixes them with regular Peter Drucker-type management advice, somewhat in the manner Wess Roberts played with the known stories of a more aggressive pre-capitalist leader in his Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun. (In fact, the real classic of this genre is a book Kranc probably hasn’t read, the 1920s bestseller, The Man Nobody Knows, by Bruce Barton. That one was a portrait of Jesus as a business executive, taking twelve losers and molding them into the most successful organization in the ancient world…)

While you wouldn’t necessarily put the reclusive Kotsker Rebbe, Menachem Mendel, in charge of your store—he would lock himself in the back room for twenty years and customers would leave—you might well consider the story of the Kotsker Rebbe and the troubled dairyman, who has been watering the milk like his competitors. The Rebbe first insists that his follower sell pure milk, but customers reject it because it tastes too thick. Lest the dairyman starve, the Rebbe relents and allows him to satisfy the public taste. A book about sales would use this story to suggest that customers are always right, even when they are wrong. Kranc’s interest is in management, so his lesson is that “truth is not an absolute value.” Were Hassidic masters immoral? No, but they didn’t let static rules get in the way of the higher morality of human relationships.

Some of these stories are not so easy to apply. One of my favorites is the story of Shneur Zalman of Liadi taking the first penny, in which a rabbinical student secures a large donation from a hostile apostate, by starting with very small increments accepted with sincere appreciation. One must have high expectations, but one also must be patient enough to accept “the first penny,” i.e. some fairly small steps at the beginning.

I recently attempted to apply this lesson in a difficult negotiation, in which I represented a civic group against a real estate developer. I think I kept my expectations high, took the first penny with humility, and maintained a pure heart… but I’m still waiting for the second penny! It may be that a degree of divine intervention is required in Hasidic management. Or it may be that my developer will come around much later, and that Hassidic patience is different than modern patience.

Kranc does not represent himself as a present-day Hasid, but rather as a modern orthodox high-tech veteran who also likes to collect Hasidic stories. He does claim to be a descendent of the Dubno Maggid, a great teller of stories. And Kranc is a good teller of stories, both ancient and from his own experience. As a student of business literature, he is a relative latecomer. Most of his career was spent programming Unix and figuring out ways to make web-based TV work. Hiring, firing, and meeting goals came later. Thus his business stories are drawn somewhat from his own experience, but more from a somewhat random reading of business literature. The Hasidic lessons he draws are eclectic rather than systematic, although he argues that the thread running through them is the conflict between mystical and spiritual aspirations and the realities of the bottom line. That ancient problem runs through the Talmud and the Hebrew Bible itself, setting up Kranc for two equally enjoyable sequels.