Whole Foods by John Mackey

http://seek2know.gaia.com — Sun, 20 May 2007 16:20:34 GMT

I landed into John's conscious Capitalism blog while doing a search on it. I heard Brian mention it at times, but didn't know much about the philosophy and Man behind it, and had time to comment only a few times on the Flow project.

I appreciate many of the innovations John envisioned and implemented in Whole Foods

1) Redefine the purpose of business from profit maximization to Value fulfillment.

He saw these values as

The Good: Service to Others (all stakeholders)
The True: Excitement of discovery and pursuit of truth
The Beautiful: Unique expression of individual creativity and gift
The Heroic: powerful promethean impulse to change things in the world for better

Management's role is to optimize the health and value of the entire complex, evolving, and self-adaptive system

The Whole Foods Business Model: Conscious Capitalism

Our emphasis on team member happiness is working and when team members provide us with feedback, we respond. We are very proud of the fact that Whole Foods Market has been named by Fortune Magazine as one of the 100 best companies to work for during the last nine consecutive years through 2006.

Fortune's "100 Best Employers" vs. Stock Market 1998-2005

Read more here

I posted a comment there...don't know whether it went through. Here it is.

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Dear John

Thanks a lot for posting and openly sharing your thoughts and personal business experience and experiments with conscious capitalism. I've no personal experience with Whole Foods, but feel much encouraged and inspired by your philosophy and conscious actions to realize a new vision of Business success on a daily basis.

And it is cetainly a no small feat to accomplish, harmonize and balance what you have already done given the many competing interests of all the stakeholders you mention! I haven't read all your thoughts and others' comments here...

Just wondering whether you have thought about including in your business model allowing a gradual mixing of traditional centralized value or core mission based corporate philosophy and structure with some local control, self-sufficiency, coop like ownership based on local-investors and local-decision making, building sustainable long-term relation with local small farms, organic dairy-poultry etc and environment friendly products and businesses. I actually suggested this to Wal-mart and kroger, but your kind of business would be most suitable for incorporating and implementing this kind of model.

Warm regards
Susmita

Gaia: Transforming the "Capital" in Capitalism ~ Change The System - Best Examples of Conscious Business and Biz Models - Whole Foods by John Mackey

Whole Foods by John Mackey

The Whole Foods Business Model: Conscious Capitalism

Fortune's "100 Best Employers" vs. Stock Market 1998-2005