Originally published April 2, 2016 on LinkedIn. I’m bringing this one back, with a few updates.
Sometime around 1972, my Dad switched the way our little family restaurant topped our pizza with mozzarella. Up until then, we bought the cheese by the brick and used our meat slicer to create slabs of cheese 2 millimeters thick, which we’d place on the pie. For a 17″ large pizza, I believe it was seven slices for the outer ring, and three for the inner ring.
Then he switched our supply to twenty pound bags of shredded mozzarella and taught us how to get just the right quantity and spread of cheese on the pizzas. “It costs a little more per pound this way,” he said, “but we don’t have to use as much cheese to achieve the same quality. It saves three hours a week of running the meat slicer, and frees someone up from cheese cutting to change the oil in our deep fryers one extra time per week so that our chicken wings and fish frys will always taste better.”
I don’t acknowledge often enough, how much about life I learned from my Dad. He passed away in April, 1989. And now it’s April again.
Twenty years ago I began reading about the Japanese management concept of “Kaizen,” a concept that is normally associated with continuous incremental improvement in business management circles. Roughly translated into English, it means “good change” and, applied to business, means that everyone at every level of the business gets a voice in recommending changes that can improve the way things are done. In Kaizen, even little changes can eventually produce big results. That’s because the positive effects of many small changes add up.
From my Dad, I retained the lifelong habit of making my own pizza. And for many years, I’ve rotated in a staple of my favorite pizza toppings. The toppings list hasn’t changed much. Until…
… on a very recent trip to Italy, I learned two delicious new things about pizza toppings.
One of them is that when its very fresh, arugula (you may know it as “rucola” or “rocket salad”) is quite pleasantly spicy. I’ve tried it before here in the U.S., but it’s always been bitter instead of spicy. So now, I’ll educate myself on how to get good, spicy arugla for my pizzas, because it’s not only delicious, but with its Vitamins A and C, it’s good for me!
And what about pumpkin flower petals! In Italy I learned they are actually quite distinctive and delicious as a pizza topping. So I’ll figure out where I can get fresh pumpkin flower petals for my pizzas.
Because I kept myself open to trying new things, my pizzamaking skills will be incrementally enhanced as I experiment with some new toys in the flavor box.
So now it’s April again, the 35th anniversary of my father’s passing, and a good time for me to call him to mind. Him, and all the numerous ways he tried the best he could, to teach me how to continually look for opportunities, large and small, to make improvements. Thanks, Dad. You didn’t hear that enough, and I still don’t hear myself say it enough.
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