John Mackey
John Mackey
John Mackeyis an American businessman. He is the current co-CEO of Whole Foods Market, which he co-founded in 1980. Named the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year in 2003, Mackey is a strong supporter of free market economics, has strong anti-union views, and co-wrote the best-selling book Conscious Capitalism, which was released in 2013. He is one of the most influential advocates in the movement for organic food...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionBusinessman
Date of Birth15 August 1953
CountryUnited States of America
My dad for a long time was an accounting professor at Rice University. And then he went out on his own, and he got hired by a client. He ended up being CEO of a hospital management company before he retired, called Lifemark.
I tell students and young professionals all the time to follow their hearts, do what they truly love, and if it's business, run it by being grounded in ethical consciousness.
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.
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.
The right actions undertaken for the right reasons generally lead to good outcomes over time.
I dropped out of college for the last time in 1977.
I believe that all forms of socialism have been proven over time to result in a loss of both economic and civil liberties, with increasing poverty.
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.
We knew it was going to be a market, and we knew it was a food market. Well, what kind of food market? It's kind of natural foods, kind of organic foods. So, we eventually settled on Whole Foods Market.
You have to understand: the narrative that people have about business and capitalism is that they are fundamentally selfish, greedy, and exploitative. Of course, I don't agree with that narrative.
Every man, woman and child consumes, on average, 43 teaspoons of sugar a day. In 13 days, that adds up to a five-pound bag of sugar.
At the end of the day, the quality of life is all we have, and it's just as important to that lobster, the quality of life that it lives - even if it's not as long - as the quality of your life.
While we clearly need health-care reform, the last thing our country needs is a massive new health-care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new unfunded deficits and move us much closer to a government takeover of our health-care system.
We should all have the legal right to purchase health insurance from any insurance company in any state, and we should be able use that insurance wherever we live. Health insurance should be portable.