John Mackey CEO, Whole Foods: Great Companies Have Great Purposes

Whole Foods Market co-founder and CEO John Mackey

John Mackey: Maximizing Purposes — Not Just Profit

Back their political agenda

In 1980, John Mackey co-founded Whole Foods Market, which combined the ethos of natural-foods stores with the larger range of offerings found in traditional supermarkets. The first store was located in Austin, Texas, but the company quickly expanded; it now has more than five hundred stores. In 2017, Amazon purchased Whole Foods for nearly fourteen billion dollars.

Mackey also founded a business management movement called Conscious Capitalism. He regrets if Conscious Capitalism inadvertently pushed some companies toward bullying Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) trends. He thinks businesses should be more than just profit maximizers: They need to be purpose maximizers.

“It’s very hard to sell people on, ‘Hey, your job at Whole Foods is to make as much money for the shareholders as possible,’” he said. “That’s not aspirational, and every business has potential for a higher purpose besides maximizing profits. And that comes in because ultimately the purpose of business is to create value for customers — goods and services that other people want to buy. That’s the essence of business. And so, the higher purpose of the business will come from that type of value creation.”

According to Mackey, businesses should be operating in a way that strives for all six of the stakeholders in a company: customers, employees, suppliers, investors, communities, and the environment to win, rather than just gaining profits.

Higher Purpose | Company Info | Whole Foods Market

“Once you begin to reframe business to think about it that way, you see it completely differently,” Mackey says. “You don’t see it in the either-or binary — for-profit or non-profit.”

Large parts of ensuring that Win6 is achieved, Mackey says, are competition and entrepreneurship.

Business leaders are commonly portrayed as caring only about profit, but Mackey thinks this rhetoric is unfair. While he acknowledges that the private sector holds a different role than the public sector, he still thinks businesses have the ability to make a change.

“There’s never been a better time to be alive than right now,” Mackey says. “This is the best humanities ever had. And we can make it better. That’s what conscious capitalism is trying to do, make it better.”

Sources: