Words matter. These are the best John Mackey Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
People in America are addicted to sugar and to fat and to salt.
Human beings are made up of many different values, and sometimes those values are in tension with each other.
I always like to say that our brand or our philosophy has always been kind of this marriage between the ‘food as indulgence,’ and it’s also been about ‘food as health,’ that food is vitality.
We do take seriously our responsibility, and growing ability, to educate people about healthy eating and giving them greater access to nourishing and affordable fresh food.
I like games that are complex – the deeper you get into the game, the more there is to learn.
A healthy diet is a solution to many of our health-care problems. It’s the most important solution.
People need to eat whole food plant foods, primarily… whole grains, fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds. That diet supports our lives. We ought to live to be 90 or 100 without getting any diseases.
I really do believe that America has this weight problem – obesity issues – and we have all these diseases that we get – heart disease, cancer, diabetes, autoimmune diseases – that are primarily lifestyle diseases.
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.
The way most people approach business – and the way they mostly teach in business school – involves the analytical mind. It divides it up and looks at parts in isolation.
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.’
The stakeholder approach to business sees integration rather than separation, and sees how things fit together.
Every man, woman and child consumes, on average, 43 teaspoons of sugar a day. In 13 days, that adds up to a five-pound bag of sugar.
Whole Foods Market tries to embody all of the principles of conscious capitalism all the time, but like any person or company, we sometimes fall short.
Customers want high-quality food, good service, and good store experience, and most retailers fail to deliver on those.
At the end of the day, the quality of life is all we have, and it’s just as important to that lobster, the quality of life that it lives – even if it’s not as long – as the quality of your life.
I dropped out of college for the last time in 1977.
We wanted to preserve as many jobs as possible, so when our sales continued to decline in August 2008, we did about a 5 percent reduction of our global staff. But in order not to cut any more jobs, we froze everybody’s pay and put a hiring freeze on.
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.
I’ve been amazed at how quickly people can heal themselves, actually.
We believe that business is good because it creates value. It is ethical because it is based on voluntary exchange; it is noble because it can elevate our existence, and it is heroic because it lifts people out of poverty and creates prosperity.
I think it’s absolutely essential that the people that work for a company need to feel that they’re part of something bigger – that it’s not just a job.
Profits are one of the most important goals of any successful business, and investors are one of the most important constituencies of public businesses.
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.
Free-enterprise capitalism is the most powerful system for social cooperation and human progress ever conceived. It is one of the most compelling ideas we humans have ever had. But we can aspire to something even greater.
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.
In general, when you travel, you get into a different reality and are able to more accurately reflect on your ordinary life. Hiking does that for me.
Examine our every action through the lens of how we would feel if it were to become front page news.
I slow down when hiking. The rhythm of nature is more leisurely. The sun comes up, it moves across the sky, and you begin to synchronize to that rhythm.
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.
When I’m hiring leaders, I pay a lot of attention to what their peers and what people who report to them say about them. We want people who relate well with their peers and cooperate in an exchange of information rather than being overly competitive.
I’m a huge NBA fan and watch many games each year. Following any sport is kind of bringing us back to our tribal roots.
I think for any small business that’s bootstrapped, the overwhelming challenge initially is getting to positive cash flow.
As a company grows, its purpose grows with it. It has the potential to evolve your purpose.
I’ve always thought the main argument for organic was more environmental than a health argument. I just don’t think spraying a lot of pesticides into the environment on a routine basis is a good thing.
I was looking for the meaning of life when I was in college. And my deal with my dad was as long as I was taking a full course load, then he would pay. And the times that I wasn’t taking a full course load, then I was off the dole and I was working.
The more profit we make, the more stores we can open, the more donations we can make to our community, the more responsible citizens we can be for the environment. It’s all interactive. It’s all connected together. There’s no separation.
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.
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.
The way yogurt works is you take the old yogurt culture and you put it in milk. You have to put enough of the old culture in, and then that old culture will convert the milk into yogurt.
The great thing about a culture is that once you really get it going, it evolves on its own. It’s self-organizing. It’s dynamic. It just feeds on itself.
Use the energy that fear creates to focus the mind more intently on the present moment – where fear doesn’t exist.
You can’t live if you don’t eat, but you don’t live to eat. And neither does business exist primarily to make a profit. It exists to fulfill its purpose, whatever that might be.
Free enterprise capitalism has been the most powerful creative system of social cooperation and human progress ever conceived, but its perception and its role in society have been distorted.
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.
It’s competition that forces companies to get out of their complacency.
You have to understand: the narrative that people have about business and capitalism is that they are fundamentally selfish, greedy, and exploitative. Of course, I don’t agree with that narrative.
The world is getting more connected through technology and travel. Cuisines are evolving. Some people are scared of globalization, but I think people will always take pride in cultural heritage.
Amazon is certainly not a perfect company. However, doctors, teachers, engineers, journalists, politicians, and labor unions are also on a continuum of consciousness, and none are perfect either. It is easy to judge and find fault with any company if that is what one’s ideological biases wish to see.
The original entrepreneur may initiate the initial purpose, but, in a sense, like a parent that has children, the children have their own destiny, and at some point, that can veer off away from the wishes the parent might have for it.
