John Mackey

Businessman

1953-08-15

Quotes by John Mackey

• I love my cooking tools because I enjoy cooking - a Vitamix for smoothies and a rice cooker for steel-cut oats. I travel with a small rice cooker. I soak oats overnight, and when I get up, I just turn the rice cooker on, and it cooks the oats perfectly every time.

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• Some of the greatest businesses operating from a deeper purpose have a real commitment to service, like Four Seasons, Joie de Vivre hotels, Southwest Airlines, and JetBlue.

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• I believe our philosophy of conscious capitalism will eventually be widely adopted primarily because it is a better way to do business, and it creates more total value in the world for all of its stakeholders.

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• When we start a new store, we make sure that we transfer enough starter culture from other stores that are already Whole Fooders, who've already incorporated our values and our culture within themselves into the... into the store.

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• It's not Apple's fault that they're seeking to avoid paying taxes. They're not lying, cheating or stealing. They're following the rules that were created by governments. If the government doesn't like the rules, they can change them.

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• Not everyone is born to run a $4 billion company. There is no magic formula. I've learned, and I've grown by learning. That's why I've enjoyed being in business so much: It's stretched me.

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• Your typical business just measures the metrics that have to do with the profitability of the business one way or another. But you can have metrics that measure employee happiness and the morale. You can also do direct customer surveys; you can track it over time. You can do supplier satisfaction scores as well.

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• While we clearly need health-care reform, the last thing our country needs is a massive new health-care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new unfunded deficits and move us much closer to a government takeover of our health-care system.

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• To me, you make a tradeoff. It might be a little bit more expensive. But you're getting a better tasting, higher quality food that's going to be better for your health and better for the environment.

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• Back then, before the Internet, you had these paper catalogs that you ordered all the food from. So, we flipped through the catalogs, looked up the food we wanted, called them up, and they would show up in trucks.

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• Operating under the conscious capitalism model will show that businesses are the true value creators that can push all of humanity upward for continuous improvement.

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• I sometimes think that unions don't understand that we live in a free society, and people have the right to not select union representation if they don't want it.

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• At a lot of companies founded on principles, the notion of making money is almost antithetical to the ethos of the place. From the very beginning, our business has existed to meet the needs and desires of multiple constituencies: customers, team members, vendors, shareholders, the community.

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• I used to boast that Whole Foods was sort of recession-proof. And obviously I've been proven wrong. So I'm not boasting about that any longer.

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• Good leaders need to be able to connect to all of those around them. This is especially true at Whole Foods, where we have a very team-oriented culture.

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• More than once in the history of Whole Foods Market, the company was unable to collectively evolve until I myself was able to evolve - in other words, I was holding the company back. My personal growth enabled the company to evolve.

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• We knew it was going to be a market, and we knew it was a food market. Well, what kind of food market? It's kind of natural foods, kind of organic foods. So, we eventually settled on Whole Foods Market.

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• Whole Foods has a good health care plan.

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• At Whole Foods, we allow our team members to vote on what benefits they most want the company to fund.

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• If you have a mental model that says big corporations are fundamentally greedy and selfish and exploitative, you don't really want to have an exception to that model. It's much easier to say, 'Yes, Whole Foods has been corrupted.'

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