The Smoke in the Syrup
The flavor of human commerce improves with time, and tending.
By Jonathan Cook
In every place on Earth that experiences a full season of winter, people develop local ritual traditions to mark the imminent passage into springtime. Where I live, in the northeastern United States, it is the custom — still practiced where there are trees to tap — to boil down sap until it achieves the delicious, distinctively woody and sweet flavor of maple syrup.
My children and I have practiced this ritual ever since we moved into our house in the village of Trumansburg, which came with a healthy four acres of mixed deciduous woods. We start by driving taps into the trees, diverting the sap as it rises on warm days from the roots where it has been stored underground over the winter, collecting the sap in buckets, then heating the thin liquid over a fire at the woods’ edge until it thickens into a liquid confection.
It’s not for economic gain or for convenience that we do this. Making maple syrup from sap is a long and laborious process. To get just one gallon of syrup, we have to gather and evaporate 40 gallons of sap over many weeks: standing watch over our fires, refilling the cauldron when its contents are diminished, all the while making sure that it never gets so hot as to boil over.
What if someone in Silicon Valley developed a Smart Cauldron, equipped with the latest digital technology? Such a device certainly could make the conversion of maple sap into syrup easier, with an efficient, evaporation mechanism that would control the temperature perfectly to ensure a quick reduction into syrup for the best flavor and viscosity, never allowing the sap to burn down to caramel, notifying us automatically through an Internet Of Things RFID chip when the process was complete.
We wouldn’t have to make a fire to boil the sap, though, which means that we wouldn’t have to go out into the woods to gather fallen branches. We wouldn’t have to kneel together to shield the fire pit from the wind and nurture the flames from kindling into burning logs. We wouldn’t stand over the glow of the hot coals in the gathering evening, which means that we wouldn’t have the slow conversations about life that can only be had around a fire. We wouldn’t go outside into the waning days of winter at all, and we wouldn’t come back into the house with our hands blackened, filling the house with the hint of smoke.
It would be easier, and much quicker, to go to the grocery store and buy a jug of syrup off the shelves. But making syrup from maple sap isn’t a mere production process for us: It’s an observance of the coming of spring, an annual activity that gets us outside into the open air in the last days of winter after months of confinement. As a ritual, true optimization of this process requires the purposeful inclusion of slow effort and inconvenience. The effort we put into it adds to the value of the experience, rather than detracting from it.
The Smoke in the Fire
In business, we chase after the dream of a never-ending summer of growth, but the truth is that commerce is better adapted to a temperate ecosystem in which seasons of heat and prosperity are followed by colder times. We boom and bust, disrupt and are disrupted in cycles that see our plans blossom, only to wither when they go to seed.
It’s heartbreaking to go through these dark times, when our hopes for green are met only with decay in a grim, grey, frozen world. At times, it feels impossible that we will ever thrive again. However, without these cold spells, we might never slow down. We would lack the perspective that comes from long nights sitting by a fire, staring into the embers, catching dark glimmers of inspiration.
Businesses that run perpetually hot and bright tend to produce commodities like sugar cane — sweet, but without a distinctive character. Businesses that learn to live through frozen seasons emerge from the darkness with more of a full palate. The flavor of human commerce comes not just from the sugary flow of stored assets surging upward under the warmth of the sun, but is also derived from the more shadowy flow of smoke rolling over the surface of our liquid assets, rising from the burning sacrifice of previous cycles of growth.
There will be many customers who won’t recognize the distinction of these subtle tones. They’ll be happy to grab a three-dollar bottle of Log Cabin syrup for their flapjacks. For those of us who aspire to beautiful business, however, the experience of anticipation and waiting together through a long slow simmer is far more satisfying than a quick transaction at a low price.
We tend the troubled flames that are kindled in these last, most desperate days of winter, and you can still smell the fire on us when we enter the room.
Jonathan Cook uses thick consultation and qualitative research to pursue a human vision of commerce, emotional motivation, symbolic analysis, and ritual design.
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