What do the entrepreneurial spirit and ethical conduct have in common? Everything, according to Noah Alper, author, along with Thomas Fields-Meyer, of Business Mensch: Timeless Wisdom for Today's Entrepreneur (Wolfeboro Press, 160 pp).
A veteran of numerous start-up businesses and a modern Orthodox Jew, Alper founded the fabulously successful Noah's Bagels chain in 1989 and sold it to national giant Einstein Bros. a mere six-and-a-half years later for a cool $100 million. (Full disclosure: Alper is a family friend, and I spent my high school years hungrily devouring his award-winning "superonion" bagels).
In his book, Alper recounts his various business dealings, skillfully shmearing a thick layer of folksy Jewish wisdom on top of his simple but shrewd business insights.
His entertaining stories, divided into seven rule-based chapters, roughly track his basic thesis that being a mensch is good for you and your business; in Alper's words, "it's important to be professional and maintain appropriate boundaries, but it's equally essential to integrate your experiences into your path as an entrepreneur."
While the book is not without its minor flaws, it nicely captures the zeitgeist of his bagel franchise and offers a helpful model for would-be business innovators.
Alper tackles problems from the picayune (he finds that what makes New York bagels superior to all the rest is not the quality of the water but the intense competition in the Big Apple) to the profound (community building, mental illness, the morality of business), all the while maintaining an authoritative but never preachy tone.
For instance, in a chapter on chutzpah--that indefinable yiddishism meaning everything from gall to nerve to parts of the male anatomy--Alper explains that to be successful as an entrepreneur, you needn't be an expert, an inventor, or a revolutionary; instead, "all you need is a good idea at the right time--and the chutzpah to get it off the ground."
Founding a bagel shop, Alper's particular brand of audacity, never even occurred to him until his brother Dan, with whom he would later partner, suggested it after visiting a unique bagel shop in Montreal. He capitalized (literally) on an emerging food trend in a culinarily sensitive region (the Bay Area) and never looked back.
Citing God's injunction to Abraham in Genesis to "go forth," Alper acknowledges his own shpilkes, observing that "job security, the comfort of a predictable routine, and the familiarity of staying in one field are not for the entrepreneur." He chronicles the ups and downs that attend the career of a traveling entrepreneur, a journey that carried him from his native Boston to Berkeley.
And just as a large part of menschlichkeit, as Alper nicely illustrates, is community service and charitable giving, so, too, business menschlichkeit means "cause marketing" and "social entrepreneurship." Establishing a connection to the communities served by your business helps improve the world, builds camaraderie among team members, makes your brand stand out in the eyes of your customers, and, as in Alper's case, can even attract venture capital.
Alper tells an amusing story of how he used to offer day-old bagels to the homeless of Berkeley. Slinging his enormous bags of bagel "over each shoulder like a Jewish Santa Claus," Alper "expect[ed] to be greeted as a hero," but instead discovered that certain beggars can be choosers. In Berkeley, even the homeless are food snobs, and they expressed dissatisfaction with the collection of leftover pumpernickel, whole wheat, and rye bagels with which Alper tried to ply them: "Have you got any onion bagels?" "Where's the poppy and sesame?"
Becoming a business mensch also entails avoiding unethical conduct. By way of example, Alper points to an excited employee of his who came into possession of a bagel competitor's marketing plan. Alper refused to glance at the document, calling such a practice treif, or not kosher, yet another example of how an "overtly Jewish corporate culture" pervaded the Noah's franchise.
In a deeply personal chapter entitled "Come Back Stronger," Alper shares his struggles during college to maintain his mental health, which ultimately led to his institutionalization near his family home in Boston. Glancing out a window at McLean Hospital, Alper vowed to "rejoin the world of the living." From the deepest depths, he reached the highest heights, a pattern that would repeat itself during his business career and that fostered his trust of employees facing their own demons.
In a section on the Sabbath, Alper urges his readers--Jewish and non-Jewish alike--to set aside time, to "build significant pauses into your life" because they will make you "more creative and more productive--not to mention happier." Alper himself abjured any contact with the store or his employees from dusk Friday to sundown Saturday--he writes that the Sabbath "has been so important to my life and success that I cannot imagine my life without it"--and he shuttered the stores altogether during Passover, when Jews eat only unleavened bread.
The book could perhaps have been a bit better organized, as the thematic focus of each chapter yields a somewhat unchronological retelling of how the bagel store developed and ended up crossing state lines. Religiously observant Jewish reader will also search in vain for a detailed discussion of how Noah was unable to keep the stores kosher after the Einstein Bros. sale went through. And Berkeley folks may find themselves disappointed in the short shrift given to Ristorante Raphael, the delightful Italian bistro Alper operated for three years until its demise in 2006.
Still, the book is a triumph and well worth reading for anyone considering an ethical career in business.
Perhaps fittingly, Alper concludes by explaining that he doesn't regard building Noah's from scratch to a nine-figure company as his proudest accomplishment. He reserves that honorific for his role in establishing the first community Jewish high school in the Bay Area, a project that, like Noah's, he got off the ground in just a few years (More full disclosure: my mother was heavily involved in the high school project as well). The school enabled him to put his business skills to work in an explicitly non-profit setting.
But, as he skillfully argues throughout this slim but potent volume, over his colorful career, Alper has managed to blend his altruistic and entrepreneurial instincts as smoothly as the lox in one of his signature shmears. An audacious, chutzpahdik concept if ever there was one.
Michael M. Rosen is an attorney in San Diego. Reach him at [...]
