Good morning.
When John Mackey wrote about “conscious capitalism” in 2013, he didn’t get much push-back. The co-founder and former CEO of Whole Foods had long walked the walk when it came to living the values he espouses. He famously capped cash compensation at 19 times average worker pay and distributed stock options widely. (Equilar reports median CEO-to-worker pay ratio among the highest-paid 100 CEOs last year was close to 300 times median worker pay.)
Mackey is back with a new book The Whole Story, which publishes today. It’s a reflection on how he built the natural foods chain from a single store in Austin in 1980 to a grocery giant that he sold to Amazon for $13.7 billion in 2017. He wanted to chronicle Whole Foods’ history and convey what a fun and creative adventure building a business can be. It’s “not just about making money,” he says. “It’s about the relationships and the team. It’s about love and creating value together.”
And he’s ready to reexamine how conscious capitalism is faring today; “it’s misunderstood and being attacked on both sides,” he says. “Shareholder capitalists are attacking it because they believe it’s undermining the control of business by the owners … And anti-capitalists are trying to weaponize it to take power away from the investors and owners of the business to redistribute that power to other stakeholders.” His goal: “To get people to see that business has potential for higher purpose; that all stakeholders matter.”
Mackey is also reflecting on the deal that forever altered the business he’d built: Whole Foods’ sale to Amazon. He says selling was the best option for Whole Foods since he was battling shareholder activist Jana Partners at the time. “I’ll always wonder if we had fought Jana Partners could we have won? But [Amazon has] been a good steward of the brand…They let us drop our prices and they enabled Whole Foods to think long term.”
In addition to his new book, Mackey is launching a new health and wellness company called Love.Life focused on democratizing wellness in the same way that Whole Foods gave consumers access to more natural and gourmet food.
“I found out at a pretty early age that the most important thing in life is love,” says Mackey, who took over an old Best Buy in El Segundo, Calif., to build the first Love.Life center, due to open this summer. “If you have a lot of gratitude in your life and you have a lot of love, you’re going to have a lot of joy and happiness.”
More news below.
Diane Brady
diane.brady@fortune.com
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This edition of CEO Daily was curated by Nicholas Gordon.
