Tal Yifat is a new Post Doctoral Fellow at Ivey's Centre for Building Sustainable Value and Network for Business Sustainability. This profile piece has been contributed by NBS's Maya Fischhoff.
Related to this story: Read more about the Network for Business Sustainability.
Tal Yifat is interested in how smaller units can come together to form an effective whole. How can individuals connect meaningfully? How can organizations become part of a powerful network?
Tal, NBS’s newest postdoc, studied these issues in his graduate work at University of Chicago. He looked at Organic Valley, an American dairy cooperative. Organic Valley has in its value chain 1500 dairy farms, 100 processing plants, and hundreds of other firms. It also has strong stakeholder practices, seeking to give its members a voice in organizational decisions. Tal examined how Organic Valley kept its open communication as it grew.
“Farmers and suppliers are often relatively powerless in supply chains,” he explains. “Big companies focus on consumers and investors. Workers, suppliers, and especially farmers tend to be weak. Organic Valley has engaged farmers and taken seriously engagement of other stakeholders. They try to produce value through this engagement.”
Organic Valley seeks to maintain prices high enough to sustain family-scale farms, with pasture-based dairy. They do this by controlling the large volatility in the milk market. Historically, during downturns, farms have gone out of business. “Organic Valley figured out a way to handle the tension between long-term value creation and short-term volatility,” Tal explains.
Tal also has a long-standing interest in a global community of practice called the “Art of Hosting.” The Art of Hosting is a participatory approach for engaging groups in meaningful conversations for shared learning that can lead to wise action. Tal explains: Art of Hosting seeks to “create these kinds of processes that can bring people together and generate a lot of energy. [The interactions] are a place where people can express what really matters to them… When it works well, some magic can happen.”
Tal would be happy to lead this kind of engagement exercise for NBS. “We would take a question that’s important for NBS members, start by going through this process/engagement… If it goes well, we would reflect on what happened, how it worked.”
Tal became interested in effective connections when he was living in Israel, where he worked for six years in the software industry. He moved to Chicago to study sociology. Sociology has provided “neat ways to think about the world from different perspectives,” he says. But Tal wants both to observe and to be involved.
“I want to engage with people at the cutting edge of experimenting and developing new kinds of institutions.”
At NBS, he is excited about pursuing that engagement. “It will be great to connect with other people, about things we deeply care about,” he says. At NBS, he envisions being “driven by mutual commitment and movement to something we care about, to create something in the world.”
Tal has a wife and a three-year-old daughter. In his spare time, he focuses on family. He is also interested in Buddhism and hopes to find a meditation group in London. He works out and especially likes yoga and basketball.
In response to the classic NBS question – “Who would be your ideal dinner guest?” Tal responds: “The Buddha – providing we had someone to interpret.”
Please join us in welcoming Tal to Ivey!