World Changers

When John Mackey and his then girlfriend Renee Lawson opened their first vegetarian food store in 1978, their ambition was to make a simple living, have fun, and help people live healthy lives by eating better. A bearded, shaggy-haired college dropout, Mackey had just turned twenty-five years of age and thought profit was a “necessary evil.”

Yet in an old Victorian home in Austin, Texas, he and his girlfriend began selling bulk foods and produce and slept on a futon in the third-floor office above the store. They called their little grocery Safer Way, a cheeky play off the behemoth chain Safeway. Even though they didn’t take any salary, the pair managed to lose half their capital in the first year—$23,000 out of $45,000. In year two, they turned a $5,000 profit but realized the store was too small to compete over the long haul. “I wanted to do a bigger store and I pitched the original investors who had already lost half their money,” recalls Mackey. “Of course, they didn’t think it was a very good idea.”

They told Mackey to stay in his current location and prove that his concept could be successful. “I think if we stay here we’ll probably fail over the long term,” Mackey retorted. “I learned enough by then to know we needed to be in a bigger location. They said, ‘If you can find somebody else to put in more money—another $25,000 to $50,000—we’ll look at it.’ Their basic strategy was to hope that I wouldn’t be able to find someone dumb enough to invest any more money in this thing.”

His investors underestimated Mackey’s persuasive abilities. The entrepreneur convinced a person with whom he played pickup basketball to toss in the extra money. With the cash in hand, Mackey merged his business with a competing natural foods store, Clarksville Natural Grocery, and in 1980 they opened the first Whole Foods Market in a former Austin nightclub. It was a ten-thousand-square-foot store at a time when there were fewer than half a dozen natural foods supermarkets in the United States.

It was an immediate success. “We were profitable by three in the afternoon on the first day,” says Mackey, “which was a good thing because we were broke by the time we got that store opened. We ran out of money and couldn’t make payroll. We had to open the store in order to sell some food to pay our employees. We didn’t have a meat department. We didn’t have any beer and wine. We just sort of filled the store with what we had and it was a hit.”

Within a couple of years, Mackey says the supermarket was racking up the highest volume of any natural food store in the United States. But as any entrepreneur knows, there were endless setbacks and hurdles to overcome. After Whole Foods had been in business eight months, Austin suffered its worst flood in one hundred years. Eight feet of water flooded the store, nearly wiping Mackey and his partners out of business. But the flood had a positive impact as well. Customers came back to the store to help clean it up and get it reopened, and it convinced Mackey that he couldn’t have all his eggs in one basket. He would have to expand.

Today, Whole Foods Market has more than three hundred supermarkets in North America and the United Kingdom. It employs 61,000 team members, and its revenues will top $10 billion in 2011. More important, however, cofounder and co—chief executive Mackey has helped to change the daily diets of millions of consumers and has transformed the way Americans produce, buy, and consume food.

Whole Foods’s remarkable success also has had a transformative impact on the industry’s mainstream competitors. It’s now impossible to walk the aisles of any supermarket and not find natural foods on the shelves. Even Mackey is astonished at the changes that have worked their way through the entire food system. “If you told me twenty years ago that Walmart would be one of the leading sellers of organic foods in the world, I would have thought that was ridiculous,” he says. “But I’ve seen big changes occur.”

Not only has his company evolved to a spectacular success; so has Mackey. As one writer so elegantly put it, “The evolution of the corporation has often traced his own as a man; it has been an incarnation of his dreams and quirks, his contradictions and trespasses, and whatever he happened to be reading and eating, or not eating.”

Once a person with, in his own words, “socialistic leanings,” Mackey is now an unabashed evangelist for capitalism, an avid admirer of Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, and Ronald Reagan. One of his life’s passions has become what he calls “conscious capitalism”—the attempt to make more people conscious of the fact that business creates great value for everyone—employees, customers, suppliers, and communities. Central to this belief is the requirement that every business pursue a higher purpose than the goal to maximize profits or share price.

It has evolved a lot over time and it is an important thing because the two most common questions I get from journalists are “Gosh, did you ever think you would get this big when you started it?” And the answer to that is, of course not. And the second most frequently asked question is, “Did you have this purpose when you started?” And of course the answer is no. A business evolves over time and purpose evolves over time.

The original purpose when we created the company was a simple one: we wanted to sell healthy food that we thought was going to be good for people and better for the environment and we could earn a living doing it. As the company has grown and evolved, that purpose has gone through several phases. I just did a keynote talk at our tribal gathering—which we do every three years—on the higher purpose of Whole Foods. The original purpose I just articulated lasted until about 1985.

We had a crisis at that point. We had gotten up to six stores and a couple of the new stores were losing money. In fact, the company lost money for the first time. That really upset one of the cofounders and he ended up leaving the company. Before he left, the company split into camps. To sort of heal that division, we went through what we called a vision clarification process. We brought an outside consultant in and we went through our purpose and mission. The company was pretty small back then. We ended up going through that process and came up with our mission statement called the declaration of independence. That was the first time we articulated our ideas to stakeholders: customers, team members, suppliers, investors, communities, and the environment.

The next evolution occurred because we realized that the declaration was long and we wanted to distill that down and so we came out with our five core values that we used as a shortcut for the purpose of the business: selling the highest quality natural and organic foods, satisfying and delighting our customers, striving for team member happiness and excellence, creating wealth through profits and growth, and being good citizens in our communities and environment. Those are our five core values. With that in place, the company raised venture capital money. We went public. We began to do some acquisitions. We rapidly increased our growth. That carried us for ten to fifteen years and then the purpose began to evolve again as we added two new core values in the past few years. Our suppliers felt like we didn’t single them out, so we committed ourselves to a core value to create win-win partnerships with our suppliers, and then we came out with our healthy eating education program. So we also said we are dedicated to healthy eating education for all of our stakeholders.

In my keynote speech I identified four higher purposes. The highest purpose is a heroic one. I came up with that in the highest ideals humans can strive for: the good, the truth, the beautiful. I added “heroic” a few years ago. Our team members are pretty clear that the heroic purpose most resonates with our team member base: to have the courage to change and improve the world. What we’re doing there is to help evolve our agricultural system to one that is more sustainable yet has a high degree of creativity to it. We are trying to help people have a healthy lifestyle and we are really ratcheting that up because of the deep problems we see in America with the lifestyles Americans have with heart disease, cancer, diabetes. We are doing many things but we are going to do a lot more to help people change their diets to avoid these diseases and try to help them achieve their optimum health.

The third purpose is through our Whole Planet Foundation. We are now in twenty-nine countries. We will be in fifty-six countries in a couple of years. We have helped literally hundreds of thousands of people lift themselves out of poverty working with Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank.

And the fourth higher purpose is helping people reconceptualize what business and capitalism is. We think both are misunderstood by the critics and the defenders. We are attempting to rebrand, remarket, and reconceptualize business and capitalism. Those are the four higher purposes we have identified. They are all big hairy audacious goals. Heroic is not a bad category for us to identify with.

It’s very important. One way to think about business is that it is not any different than any other human community in the sense that humans seek to be fulfilled within their communities. The ideals that motivate humans in their daily lives are the same ideals that can motivate people when they go to work for a corporation. To be fully human, to represent the aspirations of people, it’s important for businesses to have purpose. It’s not very inspiring for most people to be told that the purpose of business is to maximize profits and shareholder value. Maybe that’s highly motivating for people who work on Wall Street. For most people that just doesn’t cut it. Most people want more transcendent values. They want to believe and understand how their work is contributing to helping other people and making the world a better place.

Purpose inspires people. Purpose releases creativity. When people are really enthusiastic about the purpose of the business, they’re going to bring a greater depth of commitment and a greater level of creativity to their work. That is good for the business and obviously good for all the stakeholders who trade with our business. It is the first principle of conscious capitalism.

When we came up with our original core values and our original declaration of independence, we went into retreat mode. We were a much smaller company then but we had sixty team members—roughly 10 percent of the company in 1985—volunteering to help us come up with our mission statement and create our core values. The purpose evolves not just by the team members’ interacting with it but by all the stakeholders, the customers, the suppliers, the investors. They all interact with the business. They all have aspirations for the business as well. They all have desires and needs. So the business is interacting with that. Whole Foods has a very participatory and inclusive type of culture.

I sometimes think that my job is to help interpret that. Let me give you an example. When I came up with those four higher purposes and put it under the category of heroic, I didn’t think Whole Foods was heroic. I had us in the category of good. We were a retailer, fundamentally a service business trying to take care of its customers. And to do that, you have to be a good place to work. We were primarily focused on hiring the best team members we could find and making sure they were well trained and well motivated to really care for the customers. I really saw us in the service business or, in that sense, the pursuit of the good. And yet as I would go around and talk to team members and customers, they had bigger aspirations for Whole Foods than I did. They would consistently tell me that I had it wrong. That Whole Foods actually had higher purposes than I was giving it credit for and I needed to get with it. So I do think that the stakeholders of a living organization coevolve it and they do that through their passion, their interactions with the business. Obviously, the leadership has to evolve along with it.

These decisions get made through the dialogue. A business is always talking to its stakeholders. Someone may put out an idea. I might grab on to it and then articulate it to the larger group. And you see how people react to it. Does it resonate with them? Is it something they agree with? Or do they disagree with it? When I was articulating my belief that my deepest purpose was about service and the pursuit of the good, the team members pushed back. They said, “No, we think it’s more than that. We think it’s about changing and improving the world. You’re selling us short.”

I articulate it. I put it out there. And then everybody else makes it real. Whole Foods is different from many other companies. It’s not this top-down organization where the CEO develops the mission statement and then issues a bunch of directives. A month ago, at our tribal gathering, when I did my higher purpose talk, there were eight hundred leaders in the company that heard it. That has now rippled out and inspired a lot of people. They are going out and making it happen in their own unique and creative ways. Innovation flourishes at Whole Foods because we aren’t this top-down, command-and-control organization. In terms of making it happen, I am giving permission for it to happen. I am encouraging it to happen. But it has to resonate with people so that they sign up for it and believe in it because they have to make it happen.

If it doesn’t resonate I can give all the speeches I want, but nothing is going to happen. In Whole Foods’ case, people get jazzed up and then they go out and do things. We’ve got sixty thousand people working for us and I’m not saying that every team member who works for us is passionately on fire about everything we’re doing. But a pretty large percentage are, and they are out there living the core values every single day, talking it up with our customers and our vendors. That’s how things happen at Whole Foods. You turn on the team member base and they interact with the other stakeholders and stuff happens.

I don’t think about it in those terms. That is almost like a consultant’s way to speak. If you want to think in those terms, I do think Whole Foods has a disruptive business model. But we don’t think about it in those ways. We are not a bunch of business school graduates who are trying to come up with a disruptive business model. We are a purpose-driven business, which is attempting to fulfill its mission. It just so happens that a lot of what we’re doing is disruptive, but that is accidental rather than deliberate. We are not attempting to come up with a disruptive business model. We are just attempting to fulfill our mission and that is disruptive because it’s so different from how other food retailers are doing.

Over the years, you’ve faced growing competition from even mainstream retailers. There have been long-expressed worries that when Walmart started stocking natural foods, it would impact Whole Foods. It hasn’t really happened. Why?

I think there are a lot of reasons. Again, even though it’s not intentional, the fact is we do have a disruptive business model. We do things very differently from conventional supermarkets, from our purpose to our stakeholder principles to the way we organize, our decentralization, our empowerment, our entire business strategy is very different than any other food retailer. These more traditional food retailers are attempting to be one-stop shopping. They are attempting to be all things to all people. When they look at what Whole Foods is doing, they say, “Hmm ... these guys are stealing our market share. We need to sell some organic foods.” They come in, look at the products we’re selling and try as much as possible to knock those products off. And that’s their strategy. But they are not focused on it. They don’t have the same kind of depth of product mix dedicated to what we’re doing so they just skim off a selected number of the products they think are the bestsellers.

Meanwhile, our company is not sitting still. We are coming up with new products and new services all the time, including private label brands that they aren’t able to knock off and copy, even if they wanted to. At the same time, as people begin to make changes in their dietary patterns and lifestyles, they tend to want to come to Whole Foods Market because in a sense we’re dedicated to it. We’re authentic. Even though you can find some of our products at Walmart or Safeway, you can’t get the same selection. So that is one way that makes it difficult to compete. We have a depth in our products, a different atmosphere and service environment to what we think our customers want. Walmart and the supermarkets are mass merchants. They’re attempting to please everyone. We’re not.

We’re attempting to fulfill our mission with a customer base that resonates with that mission. Admittedly, it’s a small percentage of the total population, but a big enough percentage that we will do $10 billion in sales this year and keep growing at a very rapid rate. But still that only ends up being 1 percent of the total market share of food retailing in the United States.

Our stores look different. They feel different. They have a much bigger selection of prepared foods. They’ve got a different kind of atmosphere. Our service levels by our team members are extraordinarily high. We have high levels of customer service. We don’t appeal to everyone. But we do appeal to a sizable sector of the population. And year by year, it is getting larger and larger. People thought that when Walmart said it was going to sell organic Whole Foods would be in trouble. They weren’t understanding that most of our customers don’t want to shop at Walmart. They don’t resonate with Walmart’s values or with Walmart as a company. So Walmart isn’t a threat to Whole Foods. In fact, you could argue the opposite might be true. As Walmart and these other supermarkets legitimize a lot of these natural products, they are helping to speed people to make lifestyle shifts. When those lifestyle shifts occur, they are more likely to want to shop at Whole Foods Market. Here is the key fact: we are not losing market share to those guys. We are gaining market share, and that has been the case for thirty years. We’re taking it away from them.

I’m a little bit of a Civil War buff, and the officers who reported to General Grant would say, “What are we going to do about what Lee is doing? We have to adjust to account for that.” And Grant said, “You don’t understand. Lee has to adjust to what we’re doing. We’re the aggressor.” And Whole Foods is the aggressor in this category. We’re the innovator.

We’re now really putting a commitment into our healthy eating programs. First with our team members with healthy incentive discount cards. We are going to create wellness clubs. This is a whole other way that our company is going to create disruptive technologies with our emphasis on healthy eating. We are very early in this process. But I think it is a totally disruptive idea. I think it will change health care in America. I really do. Because most of what is killing us is lifestyle diseases: heart disease, diabetes, obesity, life cell diseases, and cancer. Whole Foods is going to lead the way on that.

That has always been in the DNA of the company from the very beginning. What’s different now is the science. We knew intuitively when we got started that you ought to eat a whole foods diet—mostly plants, fruits, and vegetables. But now the science is really coming through to show the relationships between what people eat and the diseases they get. If you make lifestyle alterations, you can in many cases prevent or reverse these diseases. So the science is lining up with what we intuitively knew a long time ago.

Let me give you an example of how it is transforming Whole Foods. A year and a half ago, we began to do what we now call Total Health Immersions. What that means is we take our most sick team members, those who are obese, those who have diabetes, heart disease, or those who are at high risk because they have high blood pressure or high cholesterol and are on a lot of medications. They have to apply for this, but then we allow them to go to one of these Total Health Immersions. We do three in the spring and three in the fall. We’ve taken 1,200 team members through it in a year and a half. It has been unbelievable.

They go off on these retreats for about a week and have intensive education about healthy eating and they eat a really healthy diet for about a week. We teach them how to cook and raise their consciousness about food and lifestyle. And it’s simply been phenomenal. We have literally had dozens and dozens of team members lose over one hundred pounds in less than a year. We’ve had many people reverse type-two diabetes, which is supposed to be a noncurable disease.

Yet we found if you make radical shifts in your diet and lifestyle, you can get off your insulin and return to a normal life. The way we treat heart disease in America is through bypass surgery. We give people drugs to lower their blood pressure and their cholesterol. And yet we found that through making dietary and lifestyle shifts you can get people off their cholesterol medicine. It can plummet to very low levels very quickly. You can get off your high blood pressure medicines. We’re seeing these amazing shifts in the health of our team members. We think this has huge implications for our society and for health care.

Our company spent $200 million on health care for our team members in 2010, and yet most of that is spent on a relatively small percentage of the team members. And a lot of it is these lifestyle diseases. We believe that we can radically reduce our costs in health care and this is something other corporations will be able to do as well. This is how purpose evolves. We do this and find out, “Oh my God, I had no idea people could heal this quickly.” It was a total wake-up call for me.

One of our regional presidents who is obese went to an Immersion a month ago. He was skeptical. He really didn’t want to go. He felt it would be a waste of time and money, but he had heard so many good things that he decided to go. I saw him because I stopped in at that Immersion and spent a couple of days there. The first thing you do when you go in is you do your blood and they check your weight and you get your blood pressure checked. And you do the same thing after a week. I saw him right after he had gotten his blood work done the second time. In that week, he had already lost ten pounds, his blood pressure dropped thirty points, and his cholesterol dropped forty points and he loved the food. “This is going to change my life,” he said. He has already sent me two thank-you e-mails and he has already dropped thirty pounds in the first month. And he is the president of one of our twelve regions. This is what purpose is about and it is also how purpose evolves. He is going to enlist other leaders in his region. You can force this, but when people see the good effects people are having, more people are going to want to sign up.

The next step for us is what we call these Wellness Clubs. We need to take this to our customer base. Why should this be restricted just to our team members? So we are going to be creating these Wellness Clubs and we’re basically going to have customers join this for a monthly fee and they will have unrestricted access to cooking classes, healthy eating classes, and they will also get 10 percent off on all the healthiest whole foods we sell. We’re doing a prototype store. We’re going to work out the business model. That is a disruptive business model. Time will tell. The first one opens in September (2011). Then five will open within eight weeks of each other: Boston, Oakland, New York, Chicago, and Princeton. Five different regions and once we work the bugs out, we’re going to roll that out throughout the country.

We’ve recruited three of the doctors who were on our medical advisory board. So it’s outsourced, but they are doing our programs. And now we hired two doctors who have become full-time team members to put our Wellness Clubs together. So we are beginning to hire doctors. We may outsource it or may end up bringing more doctors in-house. Beginning in 2012, we are going to take the Immersion concept to our customer base. We are going to make it public. It’s very important to understand that, because we’re taking high-risk people with diseases for which they receive intensive medical care. This is a medical program. There is all this education, but when people are on all these medications, you need a doctor who can help you with it. It’s not something that Whole Foods could do by itself. You need experts to do this.

There is a sort of premise in that question. Your premise is that as you get larger it must get harder to innovate. I think it’s the opposite. With our culture, it’s easier to innovate because we have more creative people working for us. Because we are a decentralized, empowered organization, we have more people generating good ideas. We are innovating more rapidly today than we were innovating five years ago or ten years ago. Our innovations are accelerating.

Why would we want to? I can see the innovations because I tour our stores. And I see more creative ideas springing up every place I go than we used to have five years ago. I don’t need to measure because I’m certain that innovation is accelerating at Whole Foods. The Total Health Immersions and the Wellness Clubs are big innovations, but in fact most of the innovations are occurring at the store level and they are occurring every day because the team members are encouraged and allowed to be innovative and creative.

Again, this is one of our competitive advantages because in most other food retailing companies the innovations are done at corporate. At Whole Foods, we’re allowing them to occur at the store level. We have a lot more people involved in innovation and unleashing their creative instincts. Most of the innovations are incremental type improvements. They occur in teams that run our produce, grocery, and meat departments. They are organized into self-managing work teams that have a team leader and the team underneath them is empowered. They are running a little business. They have the ability to spend capital within certain constraints. They are allowed to evolve and change their departments. So the innovations occur in a lot of bubble-up stuff.

Let me give you an example. We actually own a coffee company called Allegro. And the team in our New York store asked, “Why should we buy all these beans from Allegro and have them roast it and then transport it here? That means the beans aren’t as fresh. What if we started roasting the beans in our store? We would be doing something that no one else is doing and we would have a fresher product.” So we did that in one store and it was hugely successful. It was cool. It created theater. You could see the beans being roasted. And pretty soon that began to spread. Nobody made it spread. It did naturally all over the company. We found out that for this to pay, a store has to have a certain sales volume in coffee. Otherwise, it’s not turning the inventory fast enough to justify the labor cost of those doing the roasting. That is a bubble-up innovation that occurred at one store and spread and then got altered by other stores. Where they did the roasting and when they did it created incremental innovations along the way, much like the Japanese philosophy of Kaizen, of continuous improvement. We now have hundreds of these coffee roasters in our stores.

I have become a total radical for capitalism. I’m a student of history, and the human lot for most of history has been pretty miserable. Just two hundred years ago, 85 percent of the people alive on the planet earth lived on less than one dollar a day. That percentage has now dropped, due to capitalism, down to 20 percent. Still, that’s over one billion people, but that’s a lot better than having 85 percent of the people on the earth in that situation. If you look at the trend lines, we will end poverty at the end of the twenty-first century, if we don’t destroy ourselves.

Capitalism is the engine for almost all the progress that is occurring in the world. It doesn’t get credit for it, but it is, in fact, what is radically different about humanity today than what it was any time prior to the birth of capitalism.

Capitalism spreads prosperity and allows more and more humans to live the good life and that is a good thing in my opinion. But capitalism is misunderstood. It’s attacked. It’s criticized. Inequality is blamed on capitalism when in fact humanity has always had inequality and it has always been dirt poor. What capitalism has been doing is unleashing the minds of billions of people, allowing them to aspire to a better life and a higher living standard. Just look at India and China as they have embraced market reforms. Hundreds of millions of people in those two countries alone have escaped poverty because they have moved away from socialism toward capitalism. So I think the critics and the defenders misunderstand capitalism. They don’t understand how much value capitalism creates, and what conscious capitalism does is it helps people understand that. It helps them understand that business is not just about maximizing profits and shareholder value.

I’ve known hundreds of entrepreneurs in my time and very few have told me they started their business to get as rich as possible. They want to make money. There’s nothing wrong with making money. But they started the business to actualize a dream. This is true in most of the other professions. If you ask a doctor why he devoted his life to medicine, he doesn’t say “I wanted to make as much money as possible and I try to maximize revenues as a doctor.” A doctor will tell you he wants to make a good living, but he wants to cure sick people. A teacher wants to educate people. Architects design buildings. Even lawyers are taught in law school to promote justice. It’s only in business that the critics have come out and said business is primarily about making money and therefore business becomes susceptible to all the attacks of selfishness and greed and exploitation.

Business is a value creator because capitalism is based on a voluntary exchange in the marketplace. No one is forced to trade at Whole Foods Market. Our customers have alternative places to shop. Our employees have alternative places to work. Our suppliers have alternatives to where they can sell. Investors have alternative places to invest their capital. Our communities have alternatives as to which businesses they will allow in their communities. So you’ve got a voluntary exchange at the core of business and capitalism. And because that is there, the value that is being created by business is being created for all of these stakeholders trading with the business.

I’ve watched hundreds of our suppliers become prosperous over the years, partially as a result of trading with our company. When we started in 1980 we were worth nothing. Today our market cap is about $11 billion. Capitalism is about creating value for people—not just for a few, but for the many. Conscious capitalism is trying to make people more conscious of the purpose of the business and the value that it creates for other people. It is a value-creating machine. It’s awesome. That’s what people don’t understand.

Of course. Business is seen as greedy, selfish, exploitative, and evil. People think business has to redeem itself through good works. Because people don’t understand that business is creating value. Business is already on the defensive and somehow or another has to atone. That’s how the critics see it. I see that business is fine if it is socially responsible and if it is focused on the community stakeholder. But even if it didn’t, business is naturally socially responsible because it is creating value for customers, employees, suppliers, investors, taxes for the government, donations to nonprofits. That is all highly desirable. That’s good.

It is all part of my own evolution. I am probably less conscious today than I will be in five years. I’m a human being, like anybody else. I’m learning. I’m growing. I’m evolving just as our company is. I know a lot more today than I knew thirty years ago. In fact, when I started the company, I would have categorized myself as a progressive. I would have considered myself as someone with socialistic leanings. I came from the point of view that business was not such a good thing and that government was good. But having to meet a payroll and then seeing that we were creating value for customers and employees, I realized that business has been misunderstood. So I have become an evangelist to see the good and the beauty that is inherent in business and capitalism.

Sometimes when I’m making these arguments people will say, “Well, yeah, that’s true for Whole Foods but it’s not true for most other businesses.” I really disagree with that. I think it’s true for most businesses. You can always find some exceptions for businesses that are not creating as much value but they are the exceptions to the rule. Sometimes some businesses or individuals can act unethically but that doesn’t make all businesses bad. Business is often judged by the Enrons or Bernie Madoffs. The whole of business has been tarnished by the actions of a few bad people. And that is unfair. Most businesses are creating great value for the people who trade with them. Business should not be judged and condemned for the actions of a few.

You want to have a higher purpose and think in terms of all your stakeholders. Oftentimes when people criticize the stakeholder model, they say “Well, that all sounds good, but there are all these inevitable trade-offs.” They still have a zero-sum mentality where if you are doing good for one stakeholder you are cheating another stakeholder. They see these stakeholders in conflict with each other. If we pay our employees better, that must mean we are going to have less profit for investors, not understanding the synergies and harmonies that exist in business. It’s not that there are never any trade-offs, but when you are managing the business in a conscious way to create value for all your stakeholders you usually find innovative solutions that allow you to avoid the trade-offs. That is not always easy and it can be a challenge but that is what business should strive for.

You’ve said in the past that you feel as if you’ve been in the jungle, hacking out a path for organic foods, conscious capitalism, and animal welfare. What do you mean by that and how far do you think you’ve been able to cut through the jungle?

I’ve watched organic foods go from nowhere to getting a 3 percent share. And I’ve watched Whole Foods now go from nothing to a $10 billion business. And yet the critics will say, “Well, you should have done more. Couldn’t you have gone further?” You know what? It’s easy to be a critic. It’s a lot harder to create anything. I have been out in the wilderness hacking away trying to create a path on these different things I care about and am passionate about. Why don’t you get out of your car and take a machete and hack along with me? Why don’t you create something?

My advice to them: Don’t just be a critic. Go out and use your own creative energies to make a difference in the world. We need more innovation and creativity. Humanity has serious problems. So when I talk to young people, I usually put that challenge out there because oftentimes I get these questions that somehow put responsibility on me. I say when I was born the world was totally screwed up. I found it screwed up just like you. And I have given my life energy to try and be creative and come up with some solutions. I think we’ve done a pretty good job. Now this is a challenge I put to you: You’re young. You’re idealistic. Don’t just tell me what is wrong with the world. Get out there and make a difference. Start a company. Start a not-for-profit. Use your creative energies to try to make the world a better place.