Zitat des Tages von John Mackey:
The idea that in the system, if you manage it in an optimum way, all of the constituent parts of the system also win, flourish, and benefit, is intrinsic to business and even to capitalism itself, properly understood. But people don't understand it because we're not taught to think that way.
The stakeholder approach to business sees integration rather than separation, and sees how things fit together.
I think for leadership positions, emotional intelligence is more important than cognitive intelligence. People with emotional intelligence usually have a lot of cognitive intelligence, but that's not always true the other way around.
Libertarians are constantly arguing with each other who is the most pure libertarian and who is most ideologically pure.
Profits are one of the most important goals of any successful business, and investors are one of the most important constituencies of public businesses.
Healthier team members get a bigger food discount. We give our sickest team members an option to go through what we call the Total Health Immersion, where we take them off for a week, and we do intensive diet-and-lifestyle education.
Health care is a service that we all need, but just like food and shelter, it is best provided through voluntary and mutually beneficial market exchanges.
Snatam Kaur is a yogini, and I find her music deeply spiritual. I feel more love and I feel more peace when I listen to her music.
One of the most important things we do is we've organized our stores and our workforce into teams.
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.
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.
Whole Foods has a good health care plan.
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.
I kind of have this sense of mission now when we talk about success: I'd really like Whole Foods to contribute to the healing of America, and the success of that may be measured in decades rather than in months, but I think we're on the way to doing it.
What I know is that we no longer have free enterprise capitalism in health care; it's not a system any longer where people are able to innovate. It's not based on voluntary exchange. The government is directing it.
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.
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.
As a company grows, its purpose grows with it. It has the potential to evolve your purpose.
One of the sad things about retiring is that you just become increasingly irrelevant. The world flows around you, and you don't seem to be impacting it any longer.
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 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.
Any type of political ideology is going to have a lot of different variants of it.
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.
The right actions undertaken for the right reasons generally lead to good outcomes over time.
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.
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.
Starting my own business was kind of a wakeup call in a number of different ways. I had to meet a payroll every week, and we had to satisfy customers, and we had competitors that we had to compete with in order to have those customers come into our stores, and we had to compete with other employers for our employees.
I learned how to cook, began reading books on food. I began to understand about nutrition. It never had occurred to me that what you ate could affect how you felt. It could affect your health. It seems obvious now, but at age 23 or 22 or whatever I was, it wasn't obvious at all.
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.
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.
Customers want high-quality food, good service, and good store experience, and most retailers fail to deliver on those.
At Whole Foods, we allow our team members to vote on what benefits they most want the company to fund.
Shopping for groceries for most people is like a chore. It's like doing the laundry or taking out the garbage. And we strive to make shopping engaging, fun and interactive.
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.
It's competition that forces companies to get out of their complacency.
I think for any small business that's bootstrapped, the overwhelming challenge initially is getting to positive cash flow.
