John Mackey Quotes

One of the most important things we do is we've organized our stores and our workforce into teams.

When we start a new store, we make sure that we transfer enough starter culture from other stores that are already Whole Fooders, who've already incorporated our values and our culture within themselves into the ... into the store.

I really think people should live to be 100 years old pretty much disease-free. I think that's our genetic potential.

The right actions undertaken for the right reasons generally lead to good outcomes over time.

I kind of have this sense of mission now when we talk about success: I'd really like Whole Foods to contribute to the healing of America, and the success of that may be measured in decades rather than in months, but I think we're on the way to doing it.

The original entrepreneur may initiate the initial purpose, but, in a sense, like a parent that has children, the children have their own destiny, and at some point, that can veer off away from the wishes the parent might have for it.

Any type of political ideology is going to have a lot of different variants of it.

Some of the greatest businesses operating from a deeper purpose have a real commitment to service, like Four Seasons, Joie de Vivre hotels, Southwest Airlines, and JetBlue.

I always like to say that our brand or our philosophy has always been kind of this marriage between the 'food as indulgence,' and it's also been about 'food as health,' that food is vitality.

I like games that are complex - the deeper you get into the game, the more there is to learn.

Starting my own business was kind of a wakeup call in a number of different ways. I had to meet a payroll every week, and we had to satisfy customers, and we had competitors that we had to compete with in order to have those customers come into our stores, and we had to compete with other employers for our employees.

Free-enterprise capitalism is the most powerful system for social cooperation and human progress ever conceived. It is one of the most compelling ideas we humans have ever had. But we can aspire to something even greater.

I'm very encouraged by millennials and their drive to make the world a better place.

I was in my early 20s and open to alternative lifestyles. I thought, 'I bet you get a lot of attractive, interesting women in a vegetarian co-op.'

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.

I learned how to cook, began reading books on food. I began to understand about nutrition. It never had occurred to me that what you ate could affect how you felt. It could affect your health. It seems obvious now, but at age 23 or 22 or whatever I was, it wasn't obvious at all.

Profits are one of the most important goals of any successful business, and investors are one of the most important constituencies of public businesses.

To me, you make a tradeoff. It might be a little bit more expensive. But you're getting a better tasting, higher quality food that's going to be better for your health and better for the environment.

Operating under the conscious capitalism model will show that businesses are the true value creators that can push all of humanity upward for continuous improvement.

One of the sad things about retiring is that you just become increasingly irrelevant. The world flows around you, and you don't seem to be impacting it any longer.

It's not Apple's fault that they're seeking to avoid paying taxes. They're not lying, cheating or stealing. They're following the rules that were created by governments. If the government doesn't like the rules, they can change them.

People need to eat whole food plant foods, primarily ... whole grains, fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds. That diet supports our lives. We ought to live to be 90 or 100 without getting any diseases.

I reject the premise that liberal and libertarian values are necessarily in conflict. In fact, I often self-identify as a 'classical liberal.'

We do take seriously our responsibility, and growing ability, to educate people about healthy eating and giving them greater access to nourishing and affordable fresh food.

A healthy society rests on three pillars: business, government and civil society, or non-profits. Each has a distinct and important role to play, and all three need to work together synergistically to create the most value for society.

What I know is that we no longer have free enterprise capitalism in health care; it's not a system any longer where people are able to innovate. It's not based on voluntary exchange. The government is directing it.

Free enterprise capitalism has been the most powerful creative system of social cooperation and human progress ever conceived, but its perception and its role in society have been distorted.

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.

I've been doing long-distance backpacking since 2002 when I hiked the Appalachian Trail. You start to calm down and relax and get into the slower rhythm of nature.

At a lot of companies founded on principles, the notion of making money is almost antithetical to the ethos of the place. From the very beginning, our business has existed to meet the needs and desires of multiple constituencies: customers, team members, vendors, shareholders, the community.

The idea that in the system, if you manage it in an optimum way, all of the constituent parts of the system also win, flourish, and benefit, is intrinsic to business and even to capitalism itself, properly understood. But people don't understand it because we're not taught to think that way.

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.

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.

Customers want high-quality food, good service, and good store experience, and most retailers fail to deliver on those.

The world is getting more connected through technology and travel. Cuisines are evolving. Some people are scared of globalization, but I think people will always take pride in cultural heritage.

The way most people approach business - and the way they mostly teach in business school - involves the analytical mind. It divides it up and looks at parts in isolation.

At Whole Foods, we allow our team members to vote on what benefits they most want the company to fund.

I was looking for the meaning of life when I was in college. And my deal with my dad was as long as I was taking a full course load, then he would pay. And the times that I wasn't taking a full course load, then I was off the dole and I was working.

I would say you have an ethical obligation to pay the taxes that you owe, but you don't have an ethical obligation to pay taxes that you don't owe. In fact, you should be seeking ways to legally minimise your taxes.

I slow down when hiking. The rhythm of nature is more leisurely. The sun comes up, it moves across the sky, and you begin to synchronize to that rhythm.

Not everyone is born to run a $4 billion company. There is no magic formula. I've learned, and I've grown by learning. That's why I've enjoyed being in business so much: It's stretched me.

Amazon is certainly not a perfect company. However, doctors, teachers, engineers, journalists, politicians, and labor unions are also on a continuum of consciousness, and none are perfect either. It is easy to judge and find fault with any company if that is what one's ideological biases wish to see.

The great thing about a culture is that once you really get it going, it evolves on its own. It's self-organizing. It's dynamic. It just feeds on itself.

If you have a mental model that says big corporations are fundamentally greedy and selfish and exploitative, you don't really want to have an exception to that model. It's much easier to say, 'Yes, Whole Foods has been corrupted.'

We wanted to preserve as many jobs as possible, so when our sales continued to decline in August 2008, we did about a 5 percent reduction of our global staff. But in order not to cut any more jobs, we froze everybody's pay and put a hiring freeze on.

Health care is a service that we all need, but just like food and shelter, it is best provided through voluntary and mutually beneficial market exchanges.

Human beings are made up of many different values, and sometimes those values are in tension with each other.

I believe our philosophy of conscious capitalism will eventually be widely adopted primarily because it is a better way to do business, and it creates more total value in the world for all of its stakeholders.

Use the energy that fear creates to focus the mind more intently on the present moment - where fear doesn't exist.

As a company grows, its purpose grows with it. It has the potential to evolve your purpose.

The more profit we make, the more stores we can open, the more donations we can make to our community, the more responsible citizens we can be for the environment. It's all interactive. It's all connected together. There's no separation.

I used to boast that Whole Foods was sort of recession-proof. And obviously I've been proven wrong. So I'm not boasting about that any longer.

Shopping for groceries for most people is like a chore. It's like doing the laundry or taking out the garbage. And we strive to make shopping engaging, fun and interactive.

I think it's absolutely essential that the people that work for a company need to feel that they're part of something bigger - that it's not just a job.

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.