Past, Present and Future of Food

by John Mackey, March 13, 2007 | Permalink

As part of a recent public dialogue with Michael Pollan, I presented a slide show on the Past, Present and Future of Food. This slide show, as well as a link to a recorded version of the presentation and subsequent discussion with Pollan, are included in this blog post.

As an introduction to this material, I am sharing part of a monthly newsletter authored by Michael Strong, CEO and Chief Visionary for FLOW, a social entrepreneurial group I co-founded. He speaks to the events leading up to the conversation with Michael Pollan in Berkeley on February 27, 2007, as well as the greater meaning of the ongoing dialogue. Strong’s article adeptly references the linkage between this current presentation and my previous blog post on Conscious Capitalism. I invite you to read it with those things in mind while I work on an expanded, written version of my presentation to be posted on my blog in the near future.

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Conscious Capitalism: Creating a New Paradigm for Business

by John Mackey, November 9, 2006 | Permalink

Hi Everyone,

I’ve been very gratified and impressed with your responses to my dialogue exchange with Michael Pollan over the last six months. The following lengthy essay is something I have been working on for several months; the ideas have been gestating for many years. The topic is Conscious Capitalism and I encourage you to read this material with your mind open to the possibilities inherent in these ideas. The essay is long and it may take extended time and concentration on your part to read. However, I think the ideas I articulate here are important ideas and they deserve to be read by an intelligent and critical audience.
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Compensation at Whole Foods Market

by John Mackey, November 2, 2006 | Permalink

The following message from John Mackey was distributed to all Whole Foods Market Team Members on November 2, 2006.

To All Team Members,

I want to announce a couple of significant changes regarding compensation at Whole Foods Market. First, as you know, we have a salary cap policy which limits the total cash compensation that can be paid to any Team Member. The Board of Directors has voted to raise the salary cap from 14 times the average pay to 19 times the average pay, effective immediately. Why is this change happening? We are raising the salary cap for one reason only—to make the compensation to our executives more competitive in the marketplace. With our tremendous growth and success there has been an explosion in interest from our supermarket competitors in virtually everything we are doing. From copying many aspects in the design of our stores to selling more organic foods of all types, other supermarkets are studying and emulating us in dozens of different ways in their attempt to compete more aggressively against us. One of their competitive strategies has also been to aggressively seek to hire several of the executive leaders in our company. Everyone on the Whole Foods Leadership Team (except for me) has been approached multiple times by “headhunters” (Executive Search Firms) with job offers to leave Whole Foods and go to work for our competitors. Raising the salary cap to 19 times the average pay has become necessary to help ensure the retention of our key leadership.

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Detailed Reply to Pollan Letter

by John Mackey, June 26, 2006 | Permalink

Hi Michael,

Thanks for your recent letter to me. I appreciate the fact that you wrote the letter in an overall positive tone. I want to respond to your letter with an equally positive tone and match your efforts in “constructive criticism.” I’ll take your letter section by section, with my responses below each section. I will then conclude by writing about some of the new initiatives Whole Foods Market will be beginning very soon, which I hope you’ll find exciting. I know that I’m very excited about them.

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Michael Pollan’s Response to Whole Foods Market

by John Mackey, June 26, 2006 | Permalink

Last month, John Mackey, the president of Whole Foods, wrote me a letter (also published on the Whole Foods Web site), taking issue with some of the points I have made about his grocery chain-in my book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” in my column for TimesSelect and in some of my public remarks. What follows is my response to Mr. Mackey.
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An Open Letter to Michael Pollan

by John Mackey, May 26, 2006 | Permalink

Michael Pollan’s new book The Omnivore’s Dilemma has been near the top of the best seller’s list since it was published in April, and it deserves to be. This is mostly an excellent book which I strongly recommend people read, along with Peter Singer and Jim Mason’s new book The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter. Both books are real wakeup calls about how our food is being produced in the United States today, and how our food choices potentially can make a positive difference in the world. While Singer and Mason have many nice things to say about Whole Foods Market in their book (especially regarding our approach to improving farm animal welfare), Pollan is far more critical and skeptical about many of Whole Foods Market’s practices, both in his book and in subsequent interviews about the book in the media. Unfortunately Pollan did not carefully research Whole Foods Market’s actual practices while writing his book so many of his comments about us are either inaccurate or misinformed. The letter that follows is one I gave to Pollan in person on May 25th after I spent a delightful hour and a half in productive dialog with him. (I have also included an additional section called “Creating a Third Way with Country Natural Beef” that was emailed to Pollan a few days after our meeting.) I found him to be highly intelligent, a good listener, open minded, thoughtful, and idealistic—all in all quite an interesting and impressive person. I came away from my dialog with him convinced that we will likely become proactive allies working together in our joint quest to reform “industrial agriculture.” I only wish we had met and had this productive dialog before he wrote his book. Unfortunately we didn’t and as result many misunderstandings are now circulating about Whole Foods Market as a result of his book and recent interviews. This letter is an attempt to address those misunderstandings.
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The Upward Flow of Human Development

by John Mackey, May 1, 2006 | Permalink

What follows is a modified version of John Mackey’s Keynote Speech at the March, 2006, Tribal Gathering of Whole Foods Market in Austin, Texas. Every few years, approximately 600 members of Whole Foods Market leadership come together for a long weekend dedicated to networking, education and inspiration. This speech was delivered on the final day of the gathering.

Much loud and sustained applause

Let’s hope you feel the same after hearing this speech. I went back and forth over whether to play it safe and give a typical keynote speech, but I decided to go for it and see if we can take Whole Foods Market to the next level—on our growing edge.

Today I’m going to paint a really big picture, a picture of “everything,” of how I think the world really works, and where Whole Foods Market and Grameen Bank fit into it. [Muhammad Yunus of Grameen Bank spoke immediately following this speech.] If I communicate this information in the way that I hope to, I guarantee you will never look at the world in the same way again. You won’t look at Whole Foods Market in quite the same way, either. So that is my goal.

My philosophy is that life is all about learning and growing, and that life can be a real adventure of learning, growing, compassion, and joyfulness. We all have the capability to grow all our lives—if we don’t get stuck—in emotional intelligence, wisdom, consciousness, ethical development, and love. And not only individuals are capable of growth. So are organizations such as Whole Foods Market and Grameen Bank, as well as larger collective societies, such as the United States.

One way to view human development is to see a decline in egocentrism. As Henry Gardner said, “The whole history of human development can be viewed as a progressive decline in egocentrism.” Consciousness development engenders a decrease in narcissism and an increase in caring and consciousness. Humans move from ego-centric to ethno-centric to world-centric as they develop in consciousness. The upward spiral of development is at the same time a spiral of compassion—from me to us to all of us.

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Winning the Battle for Freedom and Prosperity

by John Mackey, February 27, 2006 | Permalink

With a few minor edits, this is the speech I gave as the keynote speaker at FreedomFest in May of 2004. In it, I critique the freedom movement and highlight mistakes that have greatly lessened its impact and influence in the world, and I spell out specific actions the movement should take to evolve its purpose and values.

What I hope to accomplish tonight is to challenge your thinking about the modern freedom movement. I believe the freedom movement has been its own worst enemy by foolishly limiting its appeal and impact with an overly narrow interpretation about the meaning and purpose of freedom. From a business perspective, the freedom movement faces major marketing challenges, the result of its poor job of branding itself to the world.

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20 Questions with Sunni’s Salon

by John Mackey, October 20, 2005 | Permalink

This interview was originally published in Sunni’s Salon, Sunni Maravillosa’s monthly ‘zine of individualistic, pro-freedom culture.

SUNNI: Hi, John, and thanks for letting me play my version of “20 Questions” with you today. How are you?

JOHN: Great!

SUNNI: Glad to hear it! I have a lot of things I’d like to touch on with you, and I don’t want to take too much of your time, so let’s jump right in. In doing some research, I found you being referred to as an “ex-leftist libertarian”. I thought that a very odd phrase, since many individuals come to the freedom philosophy from a left perspective — and lots of pro-freedom people are more concerned with personal and social issues than economic ones; that’s generally considered to be a “leftist” slant. What do you think of that phrase? Does it fit you?

JOHN: I think that depends upon how “leftist” is defined. Usually people who define themselves as “leftists” are opposed to capitalism, economic freedom, and believe that the coercive power of government should be used to create more equality and social justice in society. Usually people on the left have sympathy for democratic socialism. When I was in my very early 20’s I believed that democratic socialism was a more “just” economic system than democratic capitalism was. However, soon after I opened my first small natural food store back in 1978 with my girlfriend when I was 25, my political opinions began to shift. Operating a business was a real education for me. There were bills to pay and a payroll to be met and we had trouble doing either because we lost half of our initial $45,000 of capital in our first year. Our customers thought our prices were too high and our employees thought they were being underpaid, and we were losing money. Renee and I were only being paid about $200 a month and the business was a real struggle. Nobody was very happy and Renee and I were now seen as capitalistic exploiters by friends on the left who believed we were overcharging our customers and exploiting our workers — all because we were apparently selfish and greedy.

I didn’t think the charge of capitalist exploiters fit Renee and myself very well. In a nutshell the economic system of democratic socialism was no longer intellectually satisfying to me and I began to look around for more robust theories which would better explain business, economics, and society. Somehow or another I stumbled on to the works of Mises, Hayek, and Friedman, and had a complete revolution in my world view. The more I read, studied, and thought about economics and capitalism, the more I came to realize that capitalism had been misunderstood and unfairly attacked by the left. In fact, democratic capitalism remains by far the best way to organize society to create prosperity, growth, freedom, self-actualization, and even equality.

I no longer think of myself as a leftist, but I definitely don’t think of myself as from the right either. For the past 25 years I’ve thought of myself as a libertarian, but I’m now beginning to move away from that label as well. I have a number of intellectual problems with libertarianism as a political philosophy as it currently exists. I believe we need a new social/political/economical/environmental movement in the world today and I’ve got some definite ideas what this movement should look like.

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Rethinking the Social Responsibility of Business

by John Mackey, September 28, 2005 | Permalink

A debate reprinted with permission from Reason magazine featuring Milton Friedman, Whole Foods’ John Mackey, and Cypress Semiconductor’s T.J. Rodgers.

Thirty-five years ago, Milton Friedman wrote a famous article for The New York Times Magazine whose title aptly summed up its main point: “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” The future Nobel laureate in economics had no patience for capitalists who claimed that “business is not concerned ‘merely’ with profit but also with promoting desirable ’social’ ends; that business has a ’social conscience’ and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of re formers.”

Friedman, now a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Paul Snowden Russell Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Chicago, wrote that such people are “preaching pure and unadulterated socialism. Businessmen who talk this way are unwitting pup pets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades.”

John Mackey, the founder and CEO of Whole Foods, is one businessman who disagrees with Friedman. A self-described ardent libertarian whose conversation is peppered with references to Ludwig von Mises and Abraham Maslow, Austrian economics and astrology, Mackey believes Friedman’s view is too narrow a description of his and many other businesses’ activities. As important, he argues that Friedman’s take woefully undersells the humanitarian dimension of capitalism.

In the debate that follows, Mackey lays out his personal vision of the social responsibility of business. Friedman responds, as does T.J. Rodgers, the founder and CEO of Cypress Semiconductor and the chief spokesman of what might be called the tough love school of laissez faire. Dubbed “one of America’s toughest bosses” by Fortune, Rodgers argues that corporations add far more to society by maximizing “long-term shareholder value” than they do by donating time and money to charity.

Reason offers this exchange as the starting point of a discussion that should be intensely important to all devotees of free minds and free markets. Subscribe to Reason.
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