We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Dean Cycon. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Dean below.
Hi Dean, thanks for joining us today. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.
I have always been a risk taker. Maybe that’s the result of growing up in a broken home and on some mean streets, but I have always sen the world through my own lens and tried to create my own path. I wanted to be a lawyer to change the world for the better. I did some good work for the environment and for marginalized peoples around the world, but ultimately realized that the legal system was not a place for me. I turned to non-profit development work, co-founding the first development organization in the coffee world, Coffee Kids. My task at Coffee Kids was to visit indigenous coffee communities, discover challenges to their development, create programs and seek funding from the coffee industry. After a few years I realized that charity was not change, and I had inadvertently supported the very systems I sought to change. I decided to create the first social entrepreneurial effort in the coffee sphere, Dean’s Beans Organic Coffee Company. This gave me a clean canvas upon which to try new approaches to business and development in the social, economic and environmental arenas. For thirty years I headed up an ever-growing company that stayed true to its mission and had meaningful impact in a dozen countries. But at heart I am a creative, not a manager. I was able to keep excited not only by my development work on the ground, but also by getting a role in a movie (Pirates of the Caribbean III), hosting two PBS specials and writing a book about the impact of globalization, climate change, women’s rights and more on coffee villages, both through my eyes and the farmers voices. But it was time to move on. I turned Dean’s Beans into a worker-owned cooperative so that my sixteen employees could have a chance at ownership and greater life choices. My latest iteration would be historical fiction, finding dusty corners of history that illuminate the human condition and are relevant today. I have written two novels and am finishing a third, with six more outlined. I hope to write until death tears my pen from my cold grip.
Dean, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I think the last question answered this well!
As an attorney, human rights and indigenous rights advocate and international development worker, I was unique in the coffee world. Without the constricting cultural context of a business degree, I was able to chart my own course in business, and my success showed me that business as usual was not necessarily a recipe for success or satisfaction. Dean’s Beans won many international honors for our work from UNWomen, FAO, Oslo Business for Peace, the Flourish Prize and more, but most importantly it proved that a profitable business can be a meaningful vehicle for real change.
I bring this world of experience and insight into my writing, so that readers are given real worlds wrapped in a fictional lens. This allows me to both explore interesting episodes in history and relate them in an accessible and exciting way. My first novel, Finding Home (Hungary, 1945) as the first to explore deeply the experience of Jewish concentration camp survivors trying to return to their homes in Eastern Europe after liberation – only to find their homes and businesses owned by their former neighbors and friends. A sad but ultimately uplifting tales about the othering of marginalized populations, denial of responsibility and different reactions to trauma. My second novel, A Quest for God and Spices, concerns the search for a mythical Christian king during the medieval period in Europe and the far east, combined with the search for the source of spices. It is a literary adventure tale about he danger of seeking saviors. My current project is The Sultan’s Chart, where an old leather map of the Venezuelan coast in Arabic could upend the historical narrative of exploration of the new world.
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
Interestingly, I have had to pivot several times in life. I wish I could say that they were all my choice to take me to the next level, but more often it was because I was so dissatisfied with where I was that it showed, and I would be asked to leave. Painful to admit, but it taught me that failure can lad to new creative horizons. Best example was being a practicing lawyer. I was so bored with the day to day, the office politics and the feeling that I was actually legitimizing the very systems I was trying to change that people around me (read: bosses) saw it and told me they thought I didn’t want to be a lawyer anymore. I was shocked, even though I knew inside it was true, but I had invested so many years and so much energy into it that I had lost sight of other possibilities. I came home and announced to my social worker wife that I had basically been fired. Her response? That’s great, honey, now you can do all those things you’ve talked about. There it was. I had already co-created Coffee Kids, the first international development organization in the coffee world, so I thought, hmmm, I love international development, I don’t approve of the way coffee companies treat farmers. How can I do that differently? Could a business that treated third world growers with respect, paid a living wage and participated in their economic, environmental and social development still be profitable? I bought a small used roaster and a few bags of coffee, sat with a roaster friend for a day to learn how to roast…and Dean’s Beans was up and running. I never looked back.
What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?
We all live on the surface, usually too busy or without resources or knowledge to go deeply into more than one thing at a time. My mission has always been to go as deeply as possible into whatever was exploring. In law, I was one of the first environmental lawyers in the country and definitely the first to focus on environmental law and indigenous peoples. That required deep dives into not only law but social processes and the intersection of law and culture. As a business person I was unencumbered by the norms of business that are taught at business school (I give a great talk called The Myths of Business School), so I could experiment with forms and follow my own instincts on running and growing a business in accordance with my values. As a writer, I dont take the safe path of writing romances or sci-fi, rather, I search for hidden gems that illuminate aspects of the human experience even though they may have happened a thousand years ago, but are very relevant today. Going deeply for me is a goal, a mission and the greatest source of satisfaction in my life endeavors.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.deancycon.com
- Instagram: @deancycon
- Facebook: dean.cycon
