John mackey free essay sample

John Mackey (born August 15, 1953) is 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. He is one of the most influential advocates in the movement for organic food. Early life and education John Mackey was born in Houston, Texas, in 1953 to Bill and Margaret Mackey. He has a sister and a brother. Mackey was a student of philosophy and religion at the University of Texas at Austin and Trinity University in the 1970s, and worked at a vegetarian co-op. [3] Mackey, who was a vegetarian for 30 years, now identifies as a vegan. [4] Career Mackey co-founded his first health food store, SaferWay, with his girlfriend Renee Lawson (Hardy) in Austin in 1978. They met while living in a vegetarian housing co-op. [3] They dropped out of college. They borrowed $10,000 and raised $35,000 more to start a vegetarian grocery store which they named SaferWay. We will write a custom essay sample on John mackey or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page At the time, Austin had several small health food stores. The two ran the market on the first floor, a health food restaurant on the second, and, for a short time, lived in the third story of their building. In two years, they merged SaferWay with Clarksville Natural Grocery run by Mark Skiles and Craig Weller and renamed the business Whole Foods Market. All four (Mackey, Hardy-Lawson, Skiles and Weller) are considered co-founders of the business. [3] Mackey built Whole Foods into an international organization, with outlets in major markets across the country, as well as Canada and the United Kingdom. Along the way he bought out smaller competitors. In 2007 Whole Foods purchased a major natural foods supermarket competitor, Wild Oats Markets, Inc. Animal welfare Whole Foods was the first grocery chain to set standards for humane animal treatment. [2] Mackey was influenced by animal rights activist, Lauren Ornelas, who criticized Whole Foods animal standards regarding ducks at a shareholder meeting in 2003. Mackey gave Ornelas his email address and they corresponded on the issue. He studied issues related to factory farming and decided to switch to a primarily vegan diet that included only eggs from his own chickens. Since 2006, he has followed an entirely plant-based diet. He advocates tougher animal standards. Despite Whole Foods welfare standards, Mackey has been criticized by abolitionist vegans such as Gary L. Francione, who believes the Whole Foods company policies betray the animal rightsposition. [6] By other accounts, Mackey is the driving force behind significant changes in animal welfare. For instance, he started a non-profit foundation, the Animal Compassion Foundation, to address making animal welfare more economically viable. [7] The Animal Compassion Foundation folded in 2008 with the formation of the Global Animal Partnership, a non-profit organization that is independent of Whole Foods Market. Mackey is on the Board of Directors of Global Animal Partnership. He has been a member of the Board of Directors for the Humane Society of the United States since 2009. Letter to employees In 2006, Mackey announced he was reducing his salary to $1 a year, would donate his stock portfolio to charity, and set up a $100,000 emergency fund for staff facing personal problems. He wrote: I am now 53 years old and I have reached a place in my life where I no longer want to work for money, but simply for the joy of the work itself and to better answer the call to service that I feel so clearly in my own heart. He has instituted caps on executive pay at the company. Political views Libertarianism In a debate in Reason magazine among Mackey, economist Milton Friedman, and entrepreneur T. J. Rodgers, Mackey said that he is a free market libertarian. [12] He said that he used to be ademocratic socialist in college. As a beginning businessman he was challenged by workers for not paying adequate wages and by customers for overcharging, during a time when he was hardly breaking even. He began to take a more capitalistic worldview, and discovered the works of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. [13] Mackey is an admirer of some of authorAyn Rands novels. [14] Mackey co-founded the organization, Freedom Lights Our World (FLOW), to combine his commitments to economic and political freedom as well as personal growth, social responsibility, and environmental stewardship. [15] He supports such changes as green tax shifts, environmental trusts, world legal systems to allow the poor to create legal businesses, and a citizens dividend to help the poor in the developed world. [16] The name and focus of FLOW have since become Conscious Capitalism, Inc. , which was initially created as a program of FLOW and evolved to the point at which it became the organizations principal focus. In 2010 the name of the organization was formally changed. The Conscious Capitalism Institute was chartered in 2009. In 2010 the original FLOW group merged with the Institute group to become one unified organization. [17] In 2013 Mackey was interviewed in Harvard Business Reviews Ideacast podcast about his views on Conscious Capitalism. [18] Mackey said, If you want to be competitive in the long term, your business needs to have discovered its higher purpose and it needs to adopt a stakeholder philosophy. He eschewed the conventional thinking that business has to be sort of ruthless and heartless to be successful. [19] Healthcare reform Mackey opposed the public health insurance option that ultimately did not become part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Mackey thinks a better plan would be allowing consumers to purchase health insurance across state lines and use a combination of health savings accounts and catastrophic insurance, as Whole Foods does. [20] Mackeys statement that Americans do not have an intrinsic right to healthcare led to calls for a boycott of Whole Foods Market from the Progressive Review and from numerous groups on Facebook. [21] Alternatively, Tea Party movement advocates organized a number of buycotts in support of Mackeys suggestions [22] In an NPR interview in 2013, Mackey compared the Obama administrations healthcare law to fascism instead of socialism, stating, [t]echnically speaking, it’s more like fascism. Socialism is where the government owns the means of production. In fascism, the government doesn’t own the means of production, but they do control it — and that’s what’s happening with our health care programs and these reforms. [23][24] The day following the interview, Mackey wrote in a blog post that he regretted having made the remark, stating that he made a poor word choice to describe [the U. S. ] healthcare system. [24][25] Instead, he called it government-controlled health care. Unions Mackey is known for his strong anti-union views, having once compared unions to herpes in that it wont kill you, but its very unpleasant and will make a lot of people not want to be your lover. [4]Whole Foods Market, along with Costco and Starbucks, teamed up in 2008 to create an alternative to the Employee Free Choice Act. The three companies invited other corporations, unions and public interest groups to join them, proposing instead that unions be given more access to meet with workers, stricter penalties for labor violations and a guaranteed right to request secret ballots in all circumstances. [26] Mackey commented in 2005: Its illegal in the United States for there to be company unions — special unions which are formed and controlled by the employees and managers of the company to represent their interests and collectively bargain on their behalf. These type of unions are legal in many countries such as Japan, but are illegal in the United States. Instead the law requires that all unions be outside unions. I believe this law should be repealed and that company unions should be as legal as any other kind of voluntary association. † Environment Mackey does not identify as a skeptic of scientific opinion on climate change; rather, he believes that climate change is perfectly natural and not necessarily bad. [28] In a 2010 discussion of books on his reading stack with journalist Nick Paumgarten, Mackey explained his views on human-caused climate change were similar to those of author Ian Plimer: Mackey told me that he agrees with the book [ Heaven and Earth ]s assertion that, as he put it, no scientific consensus exists regarding the causes of climate change; he added, with a candor you could call bold or reckless, that it would be a pity to allow hysteria about global warming to cause us to raise taxes and increase regulation, and in turn lower our standard of living and lead to an increase in poverty. † Yahoo! Finance postings On July 20, 2007, The Wall Street Journal[30] revealed that Mackey was, for at least seven years, using the pseudonym Rahodeb (an anagram of his wifes name, Deborah) to post to Yahoo Finance forums. He referred to himself in the third person and criticized rival supermarket chain Wild Oats Markets. [31] The Federal Trade Commission[32] approved a complaint challenging Whole Foods Market’s approximately $670 million acquisition of its chief rival, Wild Oats Markets, Inc. It authorized the FTC staff to seek a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction in federal district court to halt the deal, pending an administrative trial on the merits. After an extensive regulatory battle with the FTC, a federal appeals court consented to the deal. Whole Foods officially completed their buyout of Wild Oats on August 27, 2007. In May 2008, after an SEC investigation cleared him, Mackey started blogging again. In a 2,037 word post, he wrote about why he began blogging in the first place and how his upbringing drove him to defend himself and Whole Foods. He admitted he made a mistake in judgment, but not in ethics. Resignation as Whole Foods Market Chairman On December 24, 2009, Mackey resigned from the position of Chairman of the Board of Whole Foods Market, a position he held since 1978. On his blog he said, John Elstrott will now take the title of Chairman of the Board, which will accurately reflect the authority and the responsibilities that he has had for many years. Mackey remains a member of the Board of Directors. [34] Legacy and honors 2003, Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year May 2008, he received an honorary bachelors degree from Bentley College. [5] In your new book, â€Å"Conscious Capitalism,† you write thatWhole Foods sees its customers as its â€Å"most important stakeholders† and that the company is obsessed with their happiness. The biggest complaint I hear about Whole Foods is how expensive it is. Why not drop prices to make your customers happier? People always complain about prices being too high. Whole Foods prices have dropped every year as we get to be larger and we have economies of scale. Also, people are not historically well informed about food prices. We’re only spending about 7 percent of our disposable personal income on food. Fifty years ago, it was nearly 16 percent. Matthew Mahon for The New York Times John Mackey A paper from Stanford last year concluded that there is little evidence of greater health benefits from eating organic. If it were ever definitively proved that organic foods offered no health benefits, would you still be a proponent? Oh, absolutely. I’ve always thought the main argument for organic was more environmental than a health argument. I just don’t think spraying a lot of pesticides into the environment on a routine basis is a good thing. As I understand it, you’re on an organic vegan diet, and you don’t eat vegetable oil, sugar or processed food. That is certainly the goal. I travel a lot, so can I always avoid oil and sugar and salt? Not to the degree I would like. Oh, man. Salt too? I don’t completely avoid salt, I’m just trying to minimize it. In America, we’re addicted to sugar, fat and salt, and restaurants put all three of those in in abundance. I’m having a hard time imagining your diet being tasty. Give me an example of a delicious meal. What did I cook for dinner last night? A salad, with my own walnut-cashew-based dressing, a stir-fry that I made without any oil, because you can do that with just water. It had kale and chard, onions, mushrooms and tomatoes in it, and mashed potatoes without salt or dairy, but I added some almond milk. Considering your health consciousness, would you prefer Whole Foods not hire overweight people or smokers? In some cases we don’t hire smokers, but it’s hard not to hire people in America who are overweight, because 69 percent of adults are. We’re not discriminating against workers, but we are incentivizing them. Healthier team members get a bigger food discount. We give our sickest team members an option to go through what we call the Total Health Immersion, where we take them off for a week, and we do intensive diet-and-lifestyle education. Our regional president in the Southwest, Mark Dixon, was overweight. I got Mark to go. One year later he’s lost 95 pounds, and he’s biking over 180 miles a week. How did you get him to go? I nagged him. He didn’t have to go. Any thoughts about those stories in 2007 that you were active on a finance message board, anonymously saying negative things about a Whole Foods’ competitor? People make a big deal that I was hiding my identity. But message boards are like going to a Halloween masquerade party. Everybody has a screen name. I had a screen name too. So what? Now I have to be much more careful in what I say. In 2009, some Whole Foods customers organized boycotts after you wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal expressing opposition to Obama’s health care proposals. Do you wish you hadn’t written it? No, I don’t. I regret that a lot of people didn’t actually read it and it got taken out of context. President Obama asked for ideas about health care reform, and I put my ideas out there. Whole Foods has a good health care plan. It’s not a solution to America’s health care problems, but it’s part of the solution. So did you vote for Romney? I did. I imagine a certain percentage of Whole Foods customers will also boycott because of this. I don’t know what to say except that I’m a capitalist, first. There are many things I don’t like about Romney, but more things I don’t like about Obama. This is America, and people disagree on things.