Whole Foods co-founder John Mackey discusses their conservative, disciplined real estate site selection strategy versus aggressive competitors.
Opinion
Mackey: Intellectuals have historically disliked business and distrusted its motives
“Intellectuals are the ones that don't like business, and intellectuals have never really liked business. I'm not saying all intellectuals, just as a general rule, as Deidre McCloskey calls it, the clerisy. Has always been skeptical about business, and has alwa…”
Insight
Mackey: Maximizing shareholder value requires optimizing the entire stakeholder system
“If you cheat any of your constituencies, any of your stakeholders, or try to sell them short, you can get away with it in the short term. In the long run, feedback loops are created, and your business sub-optimizes. So, I just realized to create the most value…”
Insight
Mackey: CEOs should stay out of politics to avoid hurting their business
“So the short answer, Jeff, in a way, is I think you should stay out of politics if you're a CEO. You can obviously have your personal opinions, but you're always going to be seen as speaking for the company, and if you do controversial things, you're going to …”
Disclosure
Mackey: Whole Foods considered going private with up to $13B in debt
“If you go private, which is an alternative Whole Foods looked at, you're taking on, we'd have been taking on, gosh, probably 1211, 12, thirteen billion dollars in debt under our balance sheet, and if the business turned down, you could go bankrupt.”
Disclosure
Mackey: Stepping down as Whole Foods CEO involved conflict with Amazon executives
“I didn't want to work as hard, and I wanted to do some other things in life, and I just knew, and I was having some conflict with some of the Amazon executives as well.”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Mackey: Whole Foods was the highest-volume US natural grocery within six months
“Within six months, we believe, based on our own research, we were the highest volume natural food store in the United States.”