[{"_1":2,"_3":-5,"_4":-5},"loaderData",{"_5":6,"_7":8},"actionData","errors","root",{"_138":-5,"_139":-5,"_140":141,"_142":143,"_144":145},"routes/clips.$id.$slug",{"_9":10,"_11":12},"clip",{"_13":14,"_15":16,"_17":-5,"_18":19,"_20":-5,"_21":22,"_23":24,"_25":26,"_27":28,"_29":30,"_31":32,"_33":34,"_35":36,"_37":38,"_39":40,"_41":-5,"_42":-5,"_43":-5,"_44":45,"_46":-5,"_47":48,"_49":50,"_51":-5},"canonicalUrl","https://howleaderslead.com/clips/2631/customers-cant-always-articulate-the-problems-they-need-solved","id",2631,"title","Customers can't always articulate the problems they need solved","subtitle","transcript","WEBVTT\n\n1\n00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:03.360\nBut whole foods changed the world in many ways.\n\n2\n00:00:03.360 --> 00:00:05.520\nBut we also kind of caught a wave.\n\n3\n00:00:05.520 --> 00:00:10.130\nI remember such a wall of skepticism we got going from the very beginning when\n\n4\n00:00:10.130 --> 00:00:10.440\nwe tried\n\n5\n00:00:10.440 --> 00:00:11.760\nto raise venture capital money.\n\n6\n00:00:11.760 --> 00:00:16.050\nI mean, even though we were successful, they just thought this was just a very\n\n7\n00:00:16.050 --> 00:00:16.600\nlimited\n\n8\n00:00:16.600 --> 00:00:18.760\nmarket for this hippie food.\n\n9\n00:00:18.760 --> 00:00:20.960\nAnd there wasn't very many people interested.\n\n10\n00:00:20.960 --> 00:00:23.600\nMy parents generation never really got it.\n\n11\n00:00:23.600 --> 00:00:26.200\nAnd so they just didn't believe it was even possible.\n\n12\n00:00:26.200 --> 00:00:27.440\nBut we were solving a problem.\n\n13\n00:00:27.440 --> 00:00:30.120\nI mean, you can reframe it that way.\n\n14\n00:00:30.120 --> 00:00:33.800\nEvery entrepreneur solves a problem or it wouldn't get any business.\n\n15\n00:00:33.800 --> 00:00:39.360\nBut sometimes like Steve Jobs said, nobody knew they needed an iPod until it\n\n16\n00:00:39.360 --> 00:00:40.480\nwas invented.\n\n17\n00:00:40.480 --> 00:00:44.630\nIf you'd done market research, he said they'd told you you need a bigger CD\n\n18\n00:00:44.630 --> 00:00:45.480\nthat can hold\n\n19\n00:00:45.480 --> 00:00:49.520\n30 or 40 songs instead of 12.\n\n20\n00:00:49.520 --> 00:00:53.040\nNot put something I can carry out in my pocket that will have 5,000 songs or\n\n21\n00:00:53.040 --> 00:00:53.640\nall my music\n\n22\n00:00:53.640 --> 00:00:54.640\non it.\n\n23\n00:00:54.640 --> 00:00:55.640\nHey, do that for me.\n\n24\n00:00:55.640 --> 00:00:56.640\nThat'd be great.\n\n25\n00:00:56.640 --> 00:00:58.760\nSo was he solving a problem?\n\n26\n00:00:58.760 --> 00:00:59.760\nNot really.\n\n27\n00:00:59.760 --> 00:01:01.880\nNo people didn't even know they had a problem.\n\n28\n00:01:01.880 --> 00:01:05.780\nHe was doing something he was passionate about and the result that changed the\n\n29\n00:01:05.780 --> 00:01:06.120\nworld\n\n30\n00:01:06.120 --> 00:01:08.320\nand the iPod morphed into the iPhone.\n\n31\n00:01:08.320 --> 00:01:10.960\nAnd now look where we are.\n","pretty_transcript","start_time",924660,"end_time",994379,"keywords","Problem, value proposition, steve jobs, apple, vision","slug","customers-cant-always-articulate-the-problems-they-need-solved","origin","cms","mux_playback_id","6TDKavBh2gLBa7eIzrbkdNECVJ1KKlQoWGXRaWfusjc","mux_asset_id","7uGjDtoBelKq02w9MGLFWNiPQ9TcTnqGvTqp5RySSnXU","leader_id",195,"episode_id",347,"updated_at","2025-02-26T19:57:14.000000Z","meta_title","meta_description","og_image_media_id","web_url","https://www.howleaderslead.com/clips/2631/customers-cant-always-articulate-the-problems-they-need-solved","og_image_url","leader",{"_13":36,"_101":102,"_103":104,"_105":106,"_25":107,"_108":109,"_62":110,"_59":111,"_112":113,"_69":114,"_39":115,"_116":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":-5,"_43":-5,"_117":118,"_89":119,"_44":120,"_121":122,"_123":124,"_46":-5,"_125":126,"_127":128,"_93":129,"_51":-5},"episode",{"_13":38,"_15":52,"_27":53,"_17":54,"_55":56,"_18":57,"_20":58,"_59":60,"_61":-5,"_62":60,"_63":-5,"_64":65,"_66":67,"_68":-5,"_69":-5,"_70":71,"_72":73,"_74":-5,"_35":36,"_39":75,"_41":-5,"_42":-5,"_43":-5,"_76":77,"_78":79,"_80":81,"_82":83,"_84":-5,"_85":-5,"_86":87,"_88":-5,"_89":-5,"_46":-5,"_90":91,"_92":-5,"_93":-5,"_51":-5},"og_image_media","Follow your own path","follow-your-own-path","Learn how to follow your own path instead of cowing to expectations and convention. Learn a practical meeting tip that can help you build a more caring culture. Plus, the one thing you need to focus on if you want to succeed in retail.","summary","

As a leader, you know…

There’s often tension between the big ideas and dreams you have and the pressure you feel to conform to convention or other people’s expectations.

If you want wisdom to navigate that tension, listen to this episode with John Mackey, the co-founder and former CEO of Whole Foods Market.

Whole Foods has got to be one of the most compelling retail success stories in recent memory.

But building it wasn’t easy. John had to stay attuned to his own passions, leadership style, and vision for the future—even when it went against the grain.

Hit play now for an inspiring look at what happens when you have the courage to follow your own path!

You’ll also learn:

The three strategic moves that drove Whole Foods’ growth the most
The #1 thing to focus on if you want to succeed in retail
The mistake Whole Foods made that resulted in the eventual acquisition by Amazon
How to start every meeting if you want to build a more caring culture

","WEBVTT\n\n1\n00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:04.280\nWhen you're truly authentic, a lot of good things happen.\n\n2\n00:00:04.280 --> 00:00:06.120\nEverybody doesn't like you.\n\n3\n00:00:06.120 --> 00:00:07.920\nLet's just state that for the record.\n\n4\n00:00:07.920 --> 00:00:09.760\nA lot of people won't like you when you're authentic.\n\n5\n00:00:09.760 --> 00:00:11.480\nAnd that's why most people aren't authentic\n\n6\n00:00:11.480 --> 00:00:13.440\nbecause they're worried people won't like them.\n\n7\n00:00:13.440 --> 00:00:16.200\nBut the thing is the people that like you,\n\n8\n00:00:16.200 --> 00:00:18.160\nthey really like you for who you are,\n\n9\n00:00:18.160 --> 00:00:21.280\nand not for who you're pretending to be.\n\n10\n00:00:21.280 --> 00:00:27.560\n- Welcome to How Leaders Lead.\n\n11\n00:00:27.560 --> 00:00:29.200\nWhere every week you get to listen in\n\n12\n00:00:29.200 --> 00:00:32.400\nwhile I interview some of the very best leaders in the world,\n\n13\n00:00:32.400 --> 00:00:35.400\nI break down the key learning so that by the end of the episode,\n\n14\n00:00:35.400 --> 00:00:36.640\nyou'll have something simple.\n\n15\n00:00:36.640 --> 00:00:39.880\nYou can apply as you develop into a better leader.\n\n16\n00:00:39.880 --> 00:00:42.840\nThat's what this podcast is all about.\n\n17\n00:00:42.840 --> 00:00:46.040\nAs a leader, you know, there's often tension\n\n18\n00:00:46.040 --> 00:00:48.720\nbetween the big ideas and dreams you have\n\n19\n00:00:48.720 --> 00:00:52.360\nand the pressure you feel to conform to convention\n\n20\n00:00:52.360 --> 00:00:55.800\nor other people's expectations of you.\n\n21\n00:00:55.800 --> 00:00:58.520\nSo how do you navigate that tension?\n\n22\n00:00:58.520 --> 00:01:00.240\n- Well, I can't think of a better person\n\n23\n00:01:00.240 --> 00:01:04.240\nto shed some light on that big question than my guest today.\n\n24\n00:01:04.240 --> 00:01:08.480\nJohn Mackie is the co-founder and former CEO of Whole Foods,\n\n25\n00:01:08.480 --> 00:01:11.320\nwhich has got to be one of the most compelling retail\n\n26\n00:01:11.320 --> 00:01:13.920\nsuccess stories in recent memory.\n\n27\n00:01:13.920 --> 00:01:17.520\nBut as you'll hear today, building it wasn't easy\n\n28\n00:01:17.520 --> 00:01:19.480\nand it wouldn't have happened at all\n\n29\n00:01:19.480 --> 00:01:21.880\nif John had caved to the expectations\n\n30\n00:01:21.880 --> 00:01:23.680\nand conventions around him.\n\n31\n00:01:23.680 --> 00:01:26.960\nInstead of following his own path,\n\n32\n00:01:26.960 --> 00:01:30.600\nevery leader needs to find their own path and follow it.\n\n33\n00:01:30.600 --> 00:01:33.440\nAnd when you have the courage to follow yours,\n\n34\n00:01:33.440 --> 00:01:35.880\nyou can make some big things happen.\n\n35\n00:01:35.880 --> 00:01:39.320\nThis episode is going to inspire you to do just that.\n\n36\n00:01:39.320 --> 00:01:40.720\nI guarantee it.\n\n37\n00:01:40.720 --> 00:01:43.560\nSo here's my conversation with my good friend\n\n38\n00:01:43.560 --> 00:01:46.160\nand soon to be yours, John Mackie.\n\n39\n00:01:46.160 --> 00:01:54.480\nYou know, you built this incredible\n\n40\n00:01:54.480 --> 00:01:57.360\nmulti-billion dollar business at Whole Foods\n\n41\n00:01:57.360 --> 00:02:02.240\nand you describe the process by using a very specific word.\n\n42\n00:02:02.240 --> 00:02:04.400\nYou say it was play.\n\n43\n00:02:04.400 --> 00:02:06.040\nWhy do you describe it that way?\n\n44\n00:02:06.040 --> 00:02:12.080\n- I contrast play and work in a way that play is fun.\n\n45\n00:02:12.080 --> 00:02:16.800\nWhen you're having fun doing something, it's play.\n\n46\n00:02:16.800 --> 00:02:20.960\nWork is something that you do because you have to do it,\n\n47\n00:02:20.960 --> 00:02:23.040\nbut you may not be having that much fun.\n\n48\n00:02:23.040 --> 00:02:25.760\nAnd if you have to do it and you're having fun,\n\n49\n00:02:25.760 --> 00:02:28.320\nthen it can be both work and play.\n\n50\n00:02:28.320 --> 00:02:33.400\nBut I was much more keen on the play part than the work part.\n\n51\n00:02:33.400 --> 00:02:37.360\nI just kind of always have done what I really liked to do.\n\n52\n00:02:37.360 --> 00:02:39.920\nI mean, from a very early age, I just broke away,\n\n53\n00:02:39.920 --> 00:02:42.120\nwent my own way as an entrepreneur,\n\n54\n00:02:42.120 --> 00:02:45.520\nfollowed my heart, answered the call to the hero's journey\n\n55\n00:02:45.520 --> 00:02:47.120\nthat came through my soul.\n\n56\n00:02:47.120 --> 00:02:49.600\nAnd when you're doing an adventure,\n\n57\n00:02:49.600 --> 00:02:52.160\nwhen you're doing what you really care about,\n\n58\n00:02:52.160 --> 00:02:54.920\nwhat you wanna do, it doesn't feel a lot like work.\n\n59\n00:02:54.920 --> 00:02:57.440\nIt's creative and it's fun.\n\n60\n00:02:57.440 --> 00:02:58.280\n- I love that.\n\n61\n00:02:58.280 --> 00:03:00.640\nThe hero's journey that comes to your soul.\n\n62\n00:03:00.640 --> 00:03:02.600\nTalk a little bit more about that.\n\n63\n00:03:02.600 --> 00:03:05.320\n- Well, originally that's from Joseph Campbell,\n\n64\n00:03:05.320 --> 00:03:06.800\nbut it's a really good metaphor.\n\n65\n00:03:06.800 --> 00:03:09.360\nAnd I actually sort of believe everyone's called\n\n66\n00:03:09.360 --> 00:03:11.520\na hero's journey in life.\n\n67\n00:03:11.520 --> 00:03:14.040\nBut most of us don't answer the call because we're,\n\n68\n00:03:14.040 --> 00:03:15.760\nwell, we're too afraid.\n\n69\n00:03:15.760 --> 00:03:19.080\nWe're afraid to break away from our family\n\n70\n00:03:19.080 --> 00:03:21.920\nif we have to or our parents.\n\n71\n00:03:21.920 --> 00:03:23.960\nWe're afraid that we might fail.\n\n72\n00:03:23.960 --> 00:03:26.320\nWe're afraid that we don't have what it takes.\n\n73\n00:03:26.320 --> 00:03:29.840\nWe're afraid that we may be rejected.\n\n74\n00:03:29.840 --> 00:03:30.800\nWe lose our friends.\n\n75\n00:03:30.800 --> 00:03:32.320\nThere are all these fears that come up.\n\n76\n00:03:32.320 --> 00:03:34.440\nAnd so people play it safe.\n\n77\n00:03:34.440 --> 00:03:36.040\nAnd I just didn't.\n\n78\n00:03:36.040 --> 00:03:37.920\nI just felt like life's an adventure\n\n79\n00:03:37.920 --> 00:03:39.360\nand we're not here that long.\n\n80\n00:03:39.360 --> 00:03:41.840\nSo yeah, go for it.\n\n81\n00:03:41.840 --> 00:03:43.600\n- You know, speaking of an adventure,\n\n82\n00:03:43.600 --> 00:03:46.720\nand I wanna get more into the whole foods in a minute,\n\n83\n00:03:46.720 --> 00:03:50.120\nbut you sold your business to Amazon in 2017\n\n84\n00:03:50.120 --> 00:03:51.600\nand then you stepped down to see you\n\n85\n00:03:51.600 --> 00:03:53.440\njust a couple years ago.\n\n86\n00:03:53.440 --> 00:03:57.080\nNow, how did this idea of play lead up\n\n87\n00:03:57.080 --> 00:03:58.600\nto what you're doing today\n\n88\n00:03:58.600 --> 00:04:01.320\nwith your new venture, Love Life?\n\n89\n00:04:01.320 --> 00:04:02.480\n- The great thing about writing\n\n90\n00:04:02.480 --> 00:04:04.800\nand then we're actually recommend everybody do that\n\n91\n00:04:04.800 --> 00:04:07.880\nin their own life because only looking backwards\n\n92\n00:04:07.880 --> 00:04:12.200\nretrospectively, can you see the patterns and the threads\n\n93\n00:04:12.200 --> 00:04:13.040\nyou've created?\n\n94\n00:04:13.040 --> 00:04:16.600\nAnd they, the meaning, although you can see some\n\n95\n00:04:16.600 --> 00:04:17.880\nof the meaning as you're going along,\n\n96\n00:04:17.880 --> 00:04:19.520\nit's when you look back\n\n97\n00:04:19.520 --> 00:04:21.200\nand you think about it in depth,\n\n98\n00:04:21.200 --> 00:04:22.960\nlike I did when I was writing the whole story\n\n99\n00:04:22.960 --> 00:04:25.640\nthat a lot of things clicked into place\n\n100\n00:04:25.640 --> 00:04:28.560\nthat I hadn't really completely understood before.\n\n101\n00:04:28.560 --> 00:04:30.320\nI wanted them, for example, for a long time,\n\n102\n00:04:30.320 --> 00:04:31.600\nI kind of thought my, you know,\n\n103\n00:04:31.600 --> 00:04:34.320\nmy higher purpose in life was to build whole foods.\n\n104\n00:04:34.320 --> 00:04:37.720\nAnd I concluded now that actually,\n\n105\n00:04:37.720 --> 00:04:39.000\nthat was part of the adventure\n\n106\n00:04:39.000 --> 00:04:41.720\ninstead of the end all of the adventure.\n\n107\n00:04:41.720 --> 00:04:45.640\nAnd so Love Life is like the next part,\n\n108\n00:04:45.640 --> 00:04:48.760\nAct Two, we could call it, even though I'm older,\n\n109\n00:04:48.760 --> 00:04:51.680\nbut I also believe in what I call the infinite game\n\n110\n00:04:51.680 --> 00:04:54.760\nthat you can create a business that will outlive you\n\n111\n00:04:54.760 --> 00:04:57.160\nand outlast you and you contribute to it.\n\n112\n00:04:57.160 --> 00:04:58.640\nAn infinite game is a game,\n\n113\n00:04:58.640 --> 00:05:00.000\nwe know what finite game is, right?\n\n114\n00:05:00.000 --> 00:05:04.080\nA finite game is like basketball or baseball or a card game\n\n115\n00:05:04.080 --> 00:05:07.760\nand you have a set of rules and you play for a certain amount\n\n116\n00:05:07.760 --> 00:05:10.040\nof hands or a certain amount of points or whatever\n\n117\n00:05:10.040 --> 00:05:12.440\nand then the game ends and you declare winners and losers.\n\n118\n00:05:12.440 --> 00:05:15.240\nAn infinite game is one that doesn't ever have to end.\n\n119\n00:05:15.240 --> 00:05:16.360\nIt goes on.\n\n120\n00:05:16.360 --> 00:05:20.520\nSo business itself in a way is an infinite game.\n\n121\n00:05:20.520 --> 00:05:22.440\nCapitalism is an infinite game.\n\n122\n00:05:22.440 --> 00:05:24.080\nYou could say life is an infinite game,\n\n123\n00:05:24.080 --> 00:05:25.920\nit's one that DNA keeps replicating\n\n124\n00:05:25.920 --> 00:05:28.600\nand the players change, they move in and out,\n\n125\n00:05:28.600 --> 00:05:31.120\npeople die, new players come on board,\n\n126\n00:05:31.120 --> 00:05:33.160\nbut the game itself goes on.\n\n127\n00:05:33.160 --> 00:05:36.040\nSo I see that with whole foods goes on,\n\n128\n00:05:36.040 --> 00:05:39.920\nit was great love in my life, a great creation\n\n129\n00:05:39.920 --> 00:05:41.880\nand it was a lot of fun,\n\n130\n00:05:41.880 --> 00:05:44.680\nbut I've moved on now and doing something else.\n\n131\n00:05:44.680 --> 00:05:48.720\nAnd what I'm doing now is also part of that hero's journey\n\n132\n00:05:48.720 --> 00:05:51.120\nor something I feel called to do, which is love life,\n\n133\n00:05:51.120 --> 00:05:54.680\nwhich is a business that is gonna be,\n\n134\n00:05:54.680 --> 00:05:58.800\nI think, I hope, over time transformative\n\n135\n00:05:58.800 --> 00:06:00.960\nof the way we manage healthcare.\n\n136\n00:06:00.960 --> 00:06:03.120\nIt's like a holistic health membership club.\n\n137\n00:06:03.120 --> 00:06:05.560\nSo we already have a telehealth business license\n\n138\n00:06:05.560 --> 00:06:08.720\nin all 50 states, but we wanna set up facilities.\n\n139\n00:06:08.720 --> 00:06:10.520\nWe wanna open up these flagship locations\n\n140\n00:06:10.520 --> 00:06:12.120\nall around the country and maybe eventually\n\n141\n00:06:12.120 --> 00:06:13.120\naround the world.\n\n142\n00:06:13.120 --> 00:06:14.880\nSo the first one's in an old Best Buy,\n\n143\n00:06:14.880 --> 00:06:17.400\nit happens to be in an LA area,\n\n144\n00:06:17.400 --> 00:06:19.520\nit happens to be located right next to\n\n145\n00:06:19.520 --> 00:06:21.520\nwhen a Whole Foods market's most successful stores\n\n146\n00:06:21.520 --> 00:06:23.080\nin Southern California.\n\n147\n00:06:23.080 --> 00:06:25.280\nI have the advantage of knowing all the highest\n\n148\n00:06:25.280 --> 00:06:29.080\nvolume stores, surprise, and Whole Foods.\n\n149\n00:06:29.080 --> 00:06:32.520\nI'd rather locate close to them when possible\n\n150\n00:06:32.520 --> 00:06:34.200\n'cause I think there's a good customer overlap,\n\n151\n00:06:34.200 --> 00:06:36.640\nbut we have, we'll have a healthy food restaurant,\n\n152\n00:06:36.640 --> 00:06:39.440\nwe'll have a state of the art fitness center,\n\n153\n00:06:39.440 --> 00:06:42.920\nwe'll have a spa, we'll have all kinds of alternative\n\n154\n00:06:42.920 --> 00:06:47.520\nhealth things from yoga, Pilates, physical therapy,\n\n155\n00:06:47.520 --> 00:06:51.920\nchiropractic, acupuncture, we'll have recovery modalities\n\n156\n00:06:51.920 --> 00:06:54.840\nlike cold plunges and infrared saunas\n\n157\n00:06:54.840 --> 00:06:56.720\nand hyperbaric oxygen chambers.\n\n158\n00:06:56.720 --> 00:06:59.960\nYou know, we'll have all the high tech stuff along with that.\n\n159\n00:06:59.960 --> 00:07:01.920\nWe'll also have a medical center,\n\n160\n00:07:01.920 --> 00:07:06.280\nand that's what sets us apart from like just a typical gym\n\n161\n00:07:06.280 --> 00:07:09.120\nbecause David, when do most people go see a doctor?\n\n162\n00:07:09.120 --> 00:07:12.000\nWhen they need it, they are when they're sick.\n\n163\n00:07:12.000 --> 00:07:15.640\nAnd oftentimes then the doctors just prescribe drugs\n\n164\n00:07:15.640 --> 00:07:17.760\nand they're managing symptoms.\n\n165\n00:07:17.760 --> 00:07:20.800\nVery seldom do they reverse a disease through pharmaceuticals\n\n166\n00:07:20.800 --> 00:07:25.800\nunless it's a vaccination or it's an antibiotic\n\n167\n00:07:25.800 --> 00:07:28.320\nand you have something into bacterial infection.\n\n168\n00:07:28.320 --> 00:07:30.920\nOtherwise, they're just really managing symptoms.\n\n169\n00:07:30.920 --> 00:07:33.800\nBut our philosophy that we wanna change is that\n\n170\n00:07:33.800 --> 00:07:37.440\nthe doctor's job comes from trying to tend the sick\n\n171\n00:07:37.440 --> 00:07:41.920\ninto almost being a coach, helping people by going in\n\n172\n00:07:41.920 --> 00:07:44.280\nand doing deep assessments and getting your kind\n\n173\n00:07:44.280 --> 00:07:46.400\nof your baseline health and then creating\n\n174\n00:07:46.400 --> 00:07:49.600\nan individualized plan for you personally\n\n175\n00:07:49.600 --> 00:07:52.720\nwith a health coach and the doctor standing above that,\n\n176\n00:07:52.720 --> 00:07:55.960\ndeveloping a plan for you to become the healthiest version\n\n177\n00:07:55.960 --> 00:07:59.400\nof yourself, physically, emotionally and spiritually.\n\n178\n00:07:59.400 --> 00:08:03.800\nAnd so I really think humanity could have this great lift off\n\n179\n00:08:03.800 --> 00:08:06.200\nin terms of our health and vitality\n\n180\n00:08:06.200 --> 00:08:09.560\nthat would transform the medical care system.\n\n181\n00:08:09.560 --> 00:08:12.760\nSo anyway, to me that's playful, it's a lot of work,\n\n182\n00:08:12.760 --> 00:08:15.320\nbut it's fun, it's creative, I'm doing something.\n\n183\n00:08:15.320 --> 00:08:17.080\nI'm back in startup mode, David, I mean--\n\n184\n00:08:17.080 --> 00:08:18.920\n- I know, you're starting it up.\n\n185\n00:08:18.920 --> 00:08:21.360\n- And that's the startup mode is really fun\n\n186\n00:08:21.360 --> 00:08:23.960\nbecause you haven't built a bureaucracy yet,\n\n187\n00:08:23.960 --> 00:08:26.600\nyou're not weighted down by the HR department\n\n188\n00:08:26.600 --> 00:08:29.400\nand the legal department and you could be highly creative\n\n189\n00:08:29.400 --> 00:08:31.920\nand playful and that stuff will come eventually\n\n190\n00:08:31.920 --> 00:08:34.760\nas it scales, but also I get the opportunity\n\n191\n00:08:34.760 --> 00:08:36.760\nto not repeat a few of the mistakes\n\n192\n00:08:36.760 --> 00:08:38.560\nI might have made along the way.\n\n193\n00:08:38.560 --> 00:08:39.640\nI make new ones.\n\n194\n00:08:39.640 --> 00:08:42.120\n- Once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur.\n\n195\n00:08:42.120 --> 00:08:43.760\n- You know, shifting gears for a minute,\n\n196\n00:08:43.760 --> 00:08:46.880\nI wanna take you back, John, tell us a story\n\n197\n00:08:46.880 --> 00:08:49.040\nfrom your childhood that shaped the kind of leader\n\n198\n00:08:49.040 --> 00:08:50.600\nyou are today.\n\n199\n00:08:50.600 --> 00:08:53.160\n- I grew up in a family, particularly with a father\n\n200\n00:08:53.160 --> 00:08:57.000\nthat liked to debate things, that you had to be able\n\n201\n00:08:57.000 --> 00:09:01.120\nto defend your point of view, you had to have logic, facts,\n\n202\n00:09:01.120 --> 00:09:03.400\nevidence, you had to be rational.\n\n203\n00:09:03.400 --> 00:09:05.480\nAnd if you can make a good argument,\n\n204\n00:09:05.480 --> 00:09:08.600\nthen maybe my father would change his mind.\n\n205\n00:09:08.600 --> 00:09:11.440\nThat was rare that you could make a good enough argument\n\n206\n00:09:11.440 --> 00:09:14.600\nthat changes mine, but I learned how to do that.\n\n207\n00:09:14.600 --> 00:09:18.680\nSo I became that kind of leader in the sense that\n\n208\n00:09:18.680 --> 00:09:21.600\nif people, I wasn't too attached to the idea of being my own,\n\n209\n00:09:21.600 --> 00:09:25.400\nif people had better ideas, I would wanna implement those ideas.\n\n210\n00:09:25.400 --> 00:09:28.240\nOr if I had an idea and they could improve on it\n\n211\n00:09:28.240 --> 00:09:31.200\nor iterate on it, I would go along with that.\n\n212\n00:09:31.200 --> 00:09:34.560\nOr if I had a bad idea, which wasn't a rare occurrence,\n\n213\n00:09:34.560 --> 00:09:36.880\npeople would tell me all the reasons why it was a bad idea\n\n214\n00:09:36.880 --> 00:09:38.160\nand we'd drop it.\n\n215\n00:09:38.160 --> 00:09:41.120\nSo I created a culture with my leadership team\n\n216\n00:09:41.120 --> 00:09:44.280\nwhere we were peers and best ideas won,\n\n217\n00:09:44.280 --> 00:09:45.680\nregardless of where they came from.\n\n218\n00:09:45.680 --> 00:09:48.880\nAnd an idea was one that people liked\n\n219\n00:09:48.880 --> 00:09:51.080\nand they would try to improve upon it.\n\n220\n00:09:51.080 --> 00:09:54.120\nAnd so I think that leads to better decision-making.\n\n221\n00:09:54.120 --> 00:09:56.600\nWhen ideas are thought through, well through,\n\n222\n00:09:56.600 --> 00:09:58.760\nthe team has to get behind them.\n\n223\n00:09:58.760 --> 00:10:01.000\nThey're dissected, they're debated,\n\n224\n00:10:01.000 --> 00:10:03.600\nand the best ideas stay on top.\n\n225\n00:10:03.600 --> 00:10:05.680\nIt took me a long time, David, to figure out\n\n226\n00:10:05.680 --> 00:10:07.600\nmost people aren't rational.\n\n227\n00:10:07.600 --> 00:10:09.160\nMost people don't change their minds\n\n228\n00:10:09.160 --> 00:10:11.800\nwhen you give them good facts, good arguments, good evidence.\n\n229\n00:10:11.800 --> 00:10:14.520\nMost people follow confirmation bias.\n\n230\n00:10:14.520 --> 00:10:16.280\nThey just wanna believe what they wanna believe\n\n231\n00:10:16.280 --> 00:10:19.240\nand they'll go find the facts to back them up.\n\n232\n00:10:19.240 --> 00:10:23.000\nThe internet's really good for reinforcing confirmation bias.\n\n233\n00:10:23.000 --> 00:10:25.120\nYou do a Google, it's coffee good for me,\n\n234\n00:10:25.120 --> 00:10:27.600\nand the Google again is coffee bad for me.\n\n235\n00:10:27.600 --> 00:10:29.920\nYou'll find good arguments on both sides\n\n236\n00:10:29.920 --> 00:10:32.640\nand you can pick which ones you wanna believe.\n\n237\n00:10:32.640 --> 00:10:33.960\n- That's great.\n\n238\n00:10:33.960 --> 00:10:35.760\nAnd you started what is now Whole Foods\n\n239\n00:10:35.760 --> 00:10:39.240\nwhen you were a self-professed hippie.\n\n240\n00:10:39.240 --> 00:10:41.920\nHippies are stereotypically laid back.\n\n241\n00:10:41.920 --> 00:10:44.920\nWhere'd you get the fire to build companies\n\n242\n00:10:44.920 --> 00:10:45.840\nfrom the ground up?\n\n243\n00:10:45.840 --> 00:10:48.040\nBecause this is not something you can do\n\n244\n00:10:48.040 --> 00:10:50.200\nwith the Laissez-Faire attitude.\n\n245\n00:10:50.200 --> 00:10:52.000\n- I think that's true I talked about the hippies\n\n246\n00:10:52.000 --> 00:10:54.880\nwas overdone, in other words,\n\n247\n00:10:54.880 --> 00:10:56.560\nthe media portrayed them that way\n\n248\n00:10:56.560 --> 00:10:59.840\nbecause they saw them as a bunch of way about no goods\n\n249\n00:10:59.840 --> 00:11:02.480\n'cause they weren't jumping into society.\n\n250\n00:11:02.480 --> 00:11:05.040\nBut what they really were doing was they were just following\n\n251\n00:11:05.040 --> 00:11:06.920\nkind of a different drummer.\n\n252\n00:11:06.920 --> 00:11:10.200\nBut that doesn't mean hippies didn't have a lot of passion.\n\n253\n00:11:10.200 --> 00:11:12.680\nThey didn't have a lot of things they were interested in.\n\n254\n00:11:12.680 --> 00:11:13.920\nThey dove deeply into them.\n\n255\n00:11:13.920 --> 00:11:16.280\nThey just might've been unconventional.\n\n256\n00:11:16.280 --> 00:11:17.800\nA lot of entrepreneurship.\n\n257\n00:11:17.800 --> 00:11:20.480\nI mean, somebody like Steve Jobs\n\n258\n00:11:20.480 --> 00:11:21.760\nwas pretty much a hippie.\n\n259\n00:11:21.760 --> 00:11:23.360\nIf you know his story, I mean,\n\n260\n00:11:23.360 --> 00:11:24.920\nhis lovers were Joan Baez\n\n261\n00:11:24.920 --> 00:11:27.040\nand definitely walking around barefoot,\n\n262\n00:11:27.040 --> 00:11:28.160\nI mean doing his own thing.\n\n263\n00:11:28.160 --> 00:11:31.280\nSo he wasn't branded that, but in fact, that's what he was.\n\n264\n00:11:31.280 --> 00:11:32.520\nHe was coming out of the counterculture.\n\n265\n00:11:32.520 --> 00:11:34.520\nHe never graduated from college.\n\n266\n00:11:34.520 --> 00:11:37.040\nSo I think that in that era,\n\n267\n00:11:37.040 --> 00:11:40.400\nthere was a counterculture movement\n\n268\n00:11:40.400 --> 00:11:43.200\nthat had three major sources to it.\n\n269\n00:11:43.200 --> 00:11:45.160\nIf you think about it, if you analyze it.\n\n270\n00:11:45.160 --> 00:11:47.680\nFirst was a kind of a great awakening\n\n271\n00:11:47.680 --> 00:11:50.160\nto alternative spirituality.\n\n272\n00:11:50.160 --> 00:11:53.000\nThe new age spirituality came out of that particular time,\n\n273\n00:11:53.000 --> 00:11:54.360\nas well as kind of a rebirth\n\n274\n00:11:54.360 --> 00:11:57.240\nof certain evangelical Christian forms came out as well.\n\n275\n00:11:57.240 --> 00:11:59.880\nWe also had a social justice movement\n\n276\n00:11:59.880 --> 00:12:04.880\nfor anti-racism, for more equity in society.\n\n277\n00:12:04.880 --> 00:12:08.920\nSocial justice really gained steam in the '60s and '70s.\n\n278\n00:12:08.920 --> 00:12:11.240\nAnd then finally, they had the environmental movement\n\n279\n00:12:11.240 --> 00:12:12.480\nthat really took off.\n\n280\n00:12:12.480 --> 00:12:15.160\nSo the counterculture had kind of streams\n\n281\n00:12:15.160 --> 00:12:17.800\ncoming in from those three different areas.\n\n282\n00:12:17.800 --> 00:12:19.760\nAnd I would also say that maybe there's a fourth\n\n283\n00:12:19.760 --> 00:12:21.760\nthat hasn't been fully identified.\n\n284\n00:12:21.760 --> 00:12:23.920\nIt was a great era for entrepreneurship.\n\n285\n00:12:23.920 --> 00:12:26.840\nI think that my father's generation had wanted to be,\n\n286\n00:12:26.840 --> 00:12:28.520\nthey're the organization men.\n\n287\n00:12:28.520 --> 00:12:31.040\nThey were the ones that just wanted to get a good job,\n\n288\n00:12:31.040 --> 00:12:33.560\nconform, earn a living for their family,\n\n289\n00:12:33.560 --> 00:12:36.840\nbe responsible providers, but they weren't really risk takers.\n\n290\n00:12:36.840 --> 00:12:39.680\nThey weren't out there trying to create new enterprises.\n\n291\n00:12:39.680 --> 00:12:43.560\nAnd then we had an explosion of entrepreneurship\n\n292\n00:12:43.560 --> 00:12:46.240\nthat began really in the '70s and '80s\n\n293\n00:12:46.240 --> 00:12:48.680\nand still going strong today, I think.\n\n294\n00:12:48.680 --> 00:12:50.920\n- Well, so as you think back,\n\n295\n00:12:50.920 --> 00:12:53.480\nand you think about Whole Foods\n\n296\n00:12:53.480 --> 00:12:55.760\nand what you were going through at that point in time\n\n297\n00:12:55.760 --> 00:12:58.760\nas an individual, what was the big problem\n\n298\n00:12:58.760 --> 00:13:00.880\nyou wanted to solve with Whole Foods?\n\n299\n00:13:00.880 --> 00:13:03.800\nI mean, what made you think there was opportunity?\n\n300\n00:13:03.800 --> 00:13:06.360\n- That's why we can go back to the play question,\n\n301\n00:13:06.360 --> 00:13:08.760\nbecause I wasn't trying to solve a problem.\n\n302\n00:13:08.760 --> 00:13:09.800\nI didn't go to business school,\n\n303\n00:13:09.800 --> 00:13:11.120\nI never took any business classes.\n\n304\n00:13:11.120 --> 00:13:12.320\nI wasn't trying to solve a problem.\n\n305\n00:13:12.320 --> 00:13:14.360\nI was just fascinated and very interested\n\n306\n00:13:14.360 --> 00:13:16.280\nin natural organic foods.\n\n307\n00:13:16.280 --> 00:13:17.640\nI had a food awakening,\n\n308\n00:13:17.640 --> 00:13:20.240\nI moved into this vegetarian commune.\n\n309\n00:13:20.240 --> 00:13:22.160\nI wasn't a vegetarian when I moved in,\n\n310\n00:13:22.160 --> 00:13:24.240\nbut I became one soon after.\n\n311\n00:13:24.240 --> 00:13:26.360\nI got interested in natural organic foods.\n\n312\n00:13:26.360 --> 00:13:30.400\nThe vision I had for before I moved in that co-op,\n\n313\n00:13:30.400 --> 00:13:33.200\nI was about 23 when I moved in, 22 or 23.\n\n314\n00:13:33.200 --> 00:13:35.160\nWe were like a car, we were like a machine.\n\n315\n00:13:35.160 --> 00:13:36.720\nAnd so what was food?\n\n316\n00:13:36.720 --> 00:13:39.120\nFood was fuel, food was gasoline.\n\n317\n00:13:39.120 --> 00:13:41.360\nSo you might as well eat what tastes good,\n\n318\n00:13:41.360 --> 00:13:42.320\n'cause it's all kind of the same.\n\n319\n00:13:42.320 --> 00:13:44.520\nSo you eat the food that tastes good,\n\n320\n00:13:44.520 --> 00:13:46.360\nand it's gonna give you the fuel you need\n\n321\n00:13:46.360 --> 00:13:48.320\nto get through the day.\n\n322\n00:13:48.320 --> 00:13:52.520\nAnd that, my awakening was the realization\n\n323\n00:13:52.520 --> 00:13:55.240\nthat actually we're this living organism\n\n324\n00:13:55.240 --> 00:13:57.480\nwith tens of trillions of cells in our bodies\n\n325\n00:13:57.480 --> 00:13:59.200\nthat need to be nourished.\n\n326\n00:13:59.200 --> 00:14:01.120\nIt's not just about calories,\n\n327\n00:14:01.120 --> 00:14:04.560\nit's not just about fuel, we're not a car.\n\n328\n00:14:04.560 --> 00:14:06.840\nGasoline was not gonna work for us.\n\n329\n00:14:06.840 --> 00:14:09.240\nWe need to nourish our bodies, nourish ourselves.\n\n330\n00:14:09.240 --> 00:14:13.360\nAnd if we do, we can enhance our vitality,\n\n331\n00:14:13.360 --> 00:14:17.840\nsupercharge our immune system, live longer,\n\n332\n00:14:17.840 --> 00:14:20.640\navoid getting the kind of chronic diseases,\n\n333\n00:14:20.640 --> 00:14:22.280\nat least for a long, long time,\n\n334\n00:14:22.280 --> 00:14:24.560\nthe bedevil people when they get older,\n\n335\n00:14:24.560 --> 00:14:27.160\nthat all happened to me when I was in my early 20s.\n\n336\n00:14:27.160 --> 00:14:29.480\nAnd then I was just on fire about it.\n\n337\n00:14:29.480 --> 00:14:31.200\nI was passionate about it.\n\n338\n00:14:31.200 --> 00:14:34.520\nAnd so I became a food buyer at the place I lived,\n\n339\n00:14:34.520 --> 00:14:35.560\nfor the food buyer there.\n\n340\n00:14:35.560 --> 00:14:38.960\nAnd then I became, I learned how to cook,\n\n341\n00:14:38.960 --> 00:14:41.040\nand I went to work for a small natural food store.\n\n342\n00:14:41.040 --> 00:14:44.880\nAnd I came back to the community one night,\n\n343\n00:14:44.880 --> 00:14:46.160\nand I talked to my girlfriend,\n\n344\n00:14:46.160 --> 00:14:48.480\nand I met in the commune, and I said,\n\n345\n00:14:48.480 --> 00:14:51.160\n\"Renee, what do you think if we open up our own natural food store?\"\n\n346\n00:14:51.160 --> 00:14:54.160\nAnd she loved the idea, and so that's what we did.\n\n347\n00:14:54.160 --> 00:14:58.440\nSo for us, it was play, it was an adventure, it was a game.\n\n348\n00:14:58.440 --> 00:15:00.040\nI wasn't trying to solve a problem.\n\n349\n00:15:00.040 --> 00:15:03.000\nI was just doing something I loved that I cared about.\n\n350\n00:15:03.000 --> 00:15:04.200\n- Yeah, well that's interesting,\n\n351\n00:15:04.200 --> 00:15:07.240\nbecause today, almost every entrepreneur I talk to,\n\n352\n00:15:07.240 --> 00:15:08.480\nand I talk to a lot of them,\n\n353\n00:15:08.480 --> 00:15:09.880\nthey build their whole business\n\n354\n00:15:09.880 --> 00:15:12.720\nand how they approach and develop that business\n\n355\n00:15:12.720 --> 00:15:14.600\non the notion of solving a big problem.\n\n356\n00:15:14.600 --> 00:15:16.280\nBut in reality, you did,\n\n357\n00:15:16.280 --> 00:15:19.280\nbecause there really wasn't a healthy grocery store.\n\n358\n00:15:19.280 --> 00:15:21.160\n- Sure, there were lots of problems,\n\n359\n00:15:21.160 --> 00:15:24.160\nthat just wasn't our motivation, it's a problem.\n\n360\n00:15:24.160 --> 00:15:27.200\nBut whole foods changed the world in many ways.\n\n361\n00:15:27.200 --> 00:15:29.440\nAnd but we also kind of caught a wave.\n\n362\n00:15:29.440 --> 00:15:32.320\nI remember such a wall of skepticism we got going\n\n363\n00:15:32.320 --> 00:15:33.880\nfrom the very beginning,\n\n364\n00:15:33.880 --> 00:15:35.840\nwhen we tried to raise venture capital money,\n\n365\n00:15:35.840 --> 00:15:38.440\nI mean, even though we were successful,\n\n366\n00:15:38.440 --> 00:15:41.040\nthey just thought this was just a very limited market\n\n367\n00:15:41.040 --> 00:15:42.520\nfor this hippie food.\n\n368\n00:15:42.520 --> 00:15:44.840\nAnd that there wasn't very many people interested in that.\n\n369\n00:15:44.840 --> 00:15:47.480\nMy parents' generation never really got it.\n\n370\n00:15:47.480 --> 00:15:50.080\nAnd so they just didn't believe it was even possible,\n\n371\n00:15:50.080 --> 00:15:51.400\nbut we were solving a problem.\n\n372\n00:15:51.400 --> 00:15:53.840\nI mean, you can reframe it that way.\n\n373\n00:15:53.840 --> 00:15:55.640\nEvery entrepreneur solves a problem,\n\n374\n00:15:55.640 --> 00:15:57.640\nor it wouldn't get any business.\n\n375\n00:15:57.640 --> 00:15:59.400\nBut sometimes like C job said,\n\n376\n00:15:59.400 --> 00:16:04.360\nnobody knew they needed an iPod until it was invented.\n\n377\n00:16:04.360 --> 00:16:05.960\nIf you'd done market research,\n\n378\n00:16:05.960 --> 00:16:08.840\nshe said they'd told you you need a bigger CD\n\n379\n00:16:08.840 --> 00:16:13.280\nthat can hold 30 or 40 songs instead of 12.\n\n380\n00:16:13.280 --> 00:16:15.440\nNot put something I can carry out in my pocket\n\n381\n00:16:15.440 --> 00:16:18.160\nthat will have 5,000 songs or all my music on it.\n\n382\n00:16:18.160 --> 00:16:20.200\nHey, do that for me, that'd be great.\n\n383\n00:16:20.200 --> 00:16:22.440\nSo was he solving a problem?\n\n384\n00:16:22.440 --> 00:16:25.760\nNot really, people didn't even know they had a problem.\n\n385\n00:16:25.760 --> 00:16:28.320\nHe was doing something he was passionate about.\n\n386\n00:16:28.320 --> 00:16:30.160\nAnd the result, that changed the world\n\n387\n00:16:30.160 --> 00:16:32.120\nand the iPod morphed into the iPhone.\n\n388\n00:16:32.120 --> 00:16:34.720\nAnd now look where we are.\n\n389\n00:16:34.720 --> 00:16:35.560\n- Yeah, and you did.\n\n390\n00:16:35.560 --> 00:16:38.960\nYou did change the way people look at food with whole foods.\n\n391\n00:16:38.960 --> 00:16:41.120\nIt's amazing success story.\n\n392\n00:16:41.120 --> 00:16:43.960\nBut I understand that your mom told you\n\n393\n00:16:43.960 --> 00:16:46.920\nwhen you restarted this to do something more meaningful\n\n394\n00:16:46.920 --> 00:16:50.640\nwith your life and just go into the grocery business.\n\n395\n00:16:50.640 --> 00:16:52.760\nObviously you followed your passion,\n\n396\n00:16:52.760 --> 00:16:55.160\nbut what advice can you give others on when\n\n397\n00:16:55.160 --> 00:16:58.680\nand how to follow the courage of conviction that you have?\n\n398\n00:16:58.680 --> 00:17:02.320\n- Well, and my mother's problem was,\n\n399\n00:17:02.320 --> 00:17:03.960\nhey, I didn't finish school.\n\n400\n00:17:03.960 --> 00:17:05.000\nSo that really bothered her\n\n401\n00:17:05.000 --> 00:17:07.080\nbecause she was a college graduate\n\n402\n00:17:07.080 --> 00:17:10.320\nand my mom was concerned about respectability.\n\n403\n00:17:10.320 --> 00:17:13.240\nAnd she wanted, she saw my IQ test,\n\n404\n00:17:13.240 --> 00:17:15.080\nall my aptitude tests, he thought,\n\n405\n00:17:15.080 --> 00:17:17.560\nyou could do anything you wanna do in life.\n\n406\n00:17:17.560 --> 00:17:20.440\nAnd John, you're choosing to be a grocer.\n\n407\n00:17:20.440 --> 00:17:23.480\nIn her mind, I was doubly mobile.\n\n408\n00:17:23.480 --> 00:17:24.960\nAnd I could have been a doctor.\n\n409\n00:17:24.960 --> 00:17:25.960\nI'd be respectable.\n\n410\n00:17:25.960 --> 00:17:26.800\nI'd be a doctor.\n\n411\n00:17:26.800 --> 00:17:29.080\nHer father was a doctor and I could be a doctor too.\n\n412\n00:17:29.080 --> 00:17:31.760\nAnd she could never figure it out, never understand\n\n413\n00:17:31.760 --> 00:17:34.600\nwhy I would choose to just be, for her,\n\n414\n00:17:34.600 --> 00:17:37.160\na grocer was a lowly position.\n\n415\n00:17:37.160 --> 00:17:38.440\nYou know, you have an apron on\n\n416\n00:17:38.440 --> 00:17:41.720\nand you're just selling fruits and vegetables and meat.\n\n417\n00:17:41.720 --> 00:17:44.400\nAnd she just saw that as, you know,\n\n418\n00:17:44.400 --> 00:17:46.440\nkind of not very important work.\n\n419\n00:17:46.440 --> 00:17:48.560\nAnd so she was ashamed of me.\n\n420\n00:17:48.560 --> 00:17:50.840\nShe was disappointed that I wasn't\n\n421\n00:17:50.840 --> 00:17:52.640\nfulfilling my potential.\n\n422\n00:17:52.640 --> 00:17:54.400\nBut I'd say my father,\n\n423\n00:17:54.400 --> 00:17:56.400\nbecause they're the generation that grew up\n\n424\n00:17:56.400 --> 00:17:58.480\nin the depression and the World War II hit.\n\n425\n00:17:58.480 --> 00:18:01.120\nMy dad was 20 when Pearl Harbor was bombed.\n\n426\n00:18:01.120 --> 00:18:03.320\nHe joined the military.\n\n427\n00:18:03.320 --> 00:18:05.240\nHe had to grow up really, really fast.\n\n428\n00:18:05.240 --> 00:18:07.560\nHe never got, he got to follow his own hero's journey.\n\n429\n00:18:07.560 --> 00:18:09.240\nHe didn't answer the call at his heart.\n\n430\n00:18:09.240 --> 00:18:11.280\nHe did the responsible thing.\n\n431\n00:18:11.280 --> 00:18:13.960\nHe was always supporting me tacitly.\n\n432\n00:18:13.960 --> 00:18:16.120\nI mean, because I think in some ways,\n\n433\n00:18:16.120 --> 00:18:19.080\nI was his astronaut that he was launching out into space.\n\n434\n00:18:19.080 --> 00:18:21.720\nI was doing the things I think he might have wanted to do,\n\n435\n00:18:21.720 --> 00:18:24.920\nbut life didn't really give him the opportunity to do it.\n\n436\n00:18:24.920 --> 00:18:26.640\nSo I had my father supporting me,\n\n437\n00:18:26.640 --> 00:18:29.200\nmy mother is just shaking her head saying,\n\n438\n00:18:29.200 --> 00:18:31.040\nyou know, so.\n\n439\n00:18:31.040 --> 00:18:32.160\n- What are you doing, John?\n\n440\n00:18:32.160 --> 00:18:33.280\n- Yeah, I know her deathbed.\n\n441\n00:18:33.280 --> 00:18:35.520\nShe tried to get me to promise that I'd go back to school\n\n442\n00:18:35.520 --> 00:18:37.240\nand make something to myself.\n\n443\n00:18:37.240 --> 00:18:39.640\n(both laughing)\n\n444\n00:18:39.640 --> 00:18:41.760\n- So you have your mom telling you this,\n\n445\n00:18:41.760 --> 00:18:43.200\nyour dad's spurring you on.\n\n446\n00:18:43.200 --> 00:18:46.000\nSo is that what gave you the courage and conviction?\n\n447\n00:18:46.000 --> 00:18:49.120\nHow should people look at getting that fire\n\n448\n00:18:49.120 --> 00:18:51.080\nto go do something like you did?\n\n449\n00:18:51.080 --> 00:18:52.960\n- It's like I said, I really think most people\n\n450\n00:18:52.960 --> 00:18:54.480\nare just too scared.\n\n451\n00:18:54.480 --> 00:18:57.120\nThey're too worried about what other people think.\n\n452\n00:18:57.120 --> 00:18:58.600\nThey're too worried about failure.\n\n453\n00:18:58.600 --> 00:19:01.080\nAnd quite frankly, I just didn't care.\n\n454\n00:19:01.080 --> 00:19:02.960\nI talked about in the book early on,\n\n455\n00:19:02.960 --> 00:19:06.960\nI did psychedelic drugs first time when I was about 19 or 20.\n\n456\n00:19:06.960 --> 00:19:09.120\nAnd it kind of knocked me off this path.\n\n457\n00:19:09.120 --> 00:19:12.080\nI had a, I saw that there was this deeper universe\n\n458\n00:19:12.080 --> 00:19:14.160\nthat I had not, that I was just living\n\n459\n00:19:14.160 --> 00:19:15.600\non the surface of reality\n\n460\n00:19:15.600 --> 00:19:17.480\nand that there was this much deeper reality.\n\n461\n00:19:17.480 --> 00:19:20.760\nAnd then I became, I'd say, a seeker.\n\n462\n00:19:20.760 --> 00:19:24.400\nI was questing for the meaning of life, seeking for purpose.\n\n463\n00:19:24.400 --> 00:19:26.280\nI no longer wanted to follow the path\n\n464\n00:19:26.280 --> 00:19:28.120\nthat my friends were following\n\n465\n00:19:28.120 --> 00:19:30.520\nfor my parents wanted me to follow.\n\n466\n00:19:30.520 --> 00:19:32.360\nI just was, it was my life\n\n467\n00:19:32.360 --> 00:19:34.560\nand I was gonna do what I wanted to do.\n\n468\n00:19:34.560 --> 00:19:36.920\nI will tell you a story that kind of sums it up.\n\n469\n00:19:36.920 --> 00:19:38.520\nI'm how old am I now?\n\n470\n00:19:38.520 --> 00:19:41.880\nI'm 19 years old and I decide me and a buddy,\n\n471\n00:19:41.880 --> 00:19:43.120\nfirst time I drop out of school,\n\n472\n00:19:43.120 --> 00:19:44.800\nwe're gonna go hitchhiking around the country,\n\n473\n00:19:44.800 --> 00:19:47.440\ngoing up to New York from Houston.\n\n474\n00:19:47.440 --> 00:19:49.360\nAnd my mother was so freaked out about it.\n\n475\n00:19:49.360 --> 00:19:50.320\nShe was so upset about it.\n\n476\n00:19:50.320 --> 00:19:53.760\nShe said, if you walk out that door,\n\n477\n00:19:53.760 --> 00:19:57.520\nI'm telling you right now, you can never come home again.\n\n478\n00:19:57.520 --> 00:19:59.680\nAnd I gotta tell you that shipped me up.\n\n479\n00:19:59.680 --> 00:20:02.360\nI paused, I was afraid.\n\n480\n00:20:02.360 --> 00:20:03.560\nIt's like my mother's rejecting me.\n\n481\n00:20:03.560 --> 00:20:05.560\nI'm never gonna be able to come home again.\n\n482\n00:20:05.560 --> 00:20:06.520\nAnd then I thought to myself,\n\n483\n00:20:06.520 --> 00:20:08.360\nwell, if that's really how she feels,\n\n484\n00:20:08.360 --> 00:20:10.400\nI guess I don't wanna come home again.\n\n485\n00:20:10.400 --> 00:20:11.440\nAnd I left.\n\n486\n00:20:11.440 --> 00:20:13.560\nAnd of course, a few months later,\n\n487\n00:20:13.560 --> 00:20:16.680\nshe was crying and begging me to come home.\n\n488\n00:20:16.680 --> 00:20:17.840\nOf course.\n\n489\n00:20:17.840 --> 00:20:18.680\nOf course.\n\n490\n00:20:18.680 --> 00:20:20.360\nThat was a pivotal point in my life, David,\n\n491\n00:20:20.360 --> 00:20:21.880\nbecause that was when I decided\n\n492\n00:20:21.880 --> 00:20:23.560\nto take control of my own life.\n\n493\n00:20:23.560 --> 00:20:24.680\nIt was gonna be my life.\n\n494\n00:20:24.680 --> 00:20:26.560\nI was gonna do what I wanna do.\n\n495\n00:20:26.560 --> 00:20:28.440\nAnd I think people have to make that decision.\n\n496\n00:20:28.440 --> 00:20:31.520\nI think entrepreneurs, if you ask entrepreneurs,\n\n497\n00:20:31.520 --> 00:20:33.280\nthey generally go to work when they're very young.\n\n498\n00:20:33.280 --> 00:20:35.960\nAs soon as I could, I started to earn money.\n\n499\n00:20:35.960 --> 00:20:39.440\nEven before I was a legal age, I would do odd jobs.\n\n500\n00:20:39.440 --> 00:20:41.720\nI really like to have money that I can spend on things\n\n501\n00:20:41.720 --> 00:20:43.480\nI wanted to spend it on.\n\n502\n00:20:43.480 --> 00:20:45.640\nAnd I wanted to be free.\n\n503\n00:20:45.640 --> 00:20:48.320\nI have a great zest for freedom in life.\n\n504\n00:20:48.320 --> 00:20:50.120\nI had it at a very young age.\n\n505\n00:20:50.120 --> 00:20:53.960\nAnd so I don't know how to tell somebody else what to do.\n\n506\n00:20:53.960 --> 00:20:56.280\nI mean, everybody has to find their own way.\n\n507\n00:20:56.280 --> 00:20:57.840\nI just followed my heart.\n\n508\n00:20:57.840 --> 00:21:00.720\nAnd it led me on this wondrous adventure.\n\n509\n00:21:00.720 --> 00:21:01.560\nFantastic.\n\n510\n00:21:01.560 --> 00:21:05.600\nAnd I've written a new book myself called How Leaders Learn.\n\n511\n00:21:05.600 --> 00:21:09.080\nI'd like to know how you went about building your know-how\n\n512\n00:21:09.080 --> 00:21:12.120\nto run a business that when you didn't have the MBA,\n\n513\n00:21:12.120 --> 00:21:13.760\nyou'd really never done that before.\n\n514\n00:21:13.760 --> 00:21:15.040\nSo what was your approach?\n\n515\n00:21:15.040 --> 00:21:18.560\nWell, first of all, I'm a fanatical reader.\n\n516\n00:21:18.560 --> 00:21:20.760\nI am totally a voracious reader.\n\n517\n00:21:20.760 --> 00:21:21.600\nI still am.\n\n518\n00:21:21.600 --> 00:21:23.240\nI devour books.\n\n519\n00:21:23.240 --> 00:21:25.440\nI love the creation of Audible Books now\n\n520\n00:21:25.440 --> 00:21:28.400\nbecause I can listen to books when I'm in my car.\n\n521\n00:21:28.400 --> 00:21:31.480\nI can listen to them when I'm hiking or walking.\n\n522\n00:21:31.480 --> 00:21:32.480\nAnd I can read them.\n\n523\n00:21:32.480 --> 00:21:36.080\nAnd the great thing is that I can be reading a book on Kendall.\n\n524\n00:21:36.080 --> 00:21:38.880\nAnd then I can be listening to it on an audiobook.\n\n525\n00:21:38.880 --> 00:21:40.760\nAnd then they sync up with each other.\n\n526\n00:21:40.760 --> 00:21:42.560\nIt's amazing technology.\n\n527\n00:21:42.560 --> 00:21:43.960\nAnd we're passionate about something.\n\n528\n00:21:43.960 --> 00:21:46.760\nSo I had no business background when I start this business up.\n\n529\n00:21:46.760 --> 00:21:48.000\nZero.\n\n530\n00:21:48.000 --> 00:21:49.880\nMy resume goes like this.\n\n531\n00:21:49.880 --> 00:21:54.920\nDishwasher, busboy, boys camp counselor,\n\n532\n00:21:54.920 --> 00:21:57.360\nassistant manager, good food store,\n\n533\n00:21:57.360 --> 00:21:59.400\nCEO, Whole Foods Market.\n\n534\n00:21:59.400 --> 00:22:01.640\nAnd now CEO of Love Live.\n\n535\n00:22:01.640 --> 00:22:03.480\nActually, I left out, I worked in AstroWorld\n\n536\n00:22:03.480 --> 00:22:06.920\nfor a while I scooped my screen there when I was 16.\n\n537\n00:22:06.920 --> 00:22:10.760\nSo the point is that I didn't have this background in business.\n\n538\n00:22:10.760 --> 00:22:12.400\nI didn't take any business classes.\n\n539\n00:22:12.400 --> 00:22:14.600\nNone of that, I didn't study philosophy, religion,\n\n540\n00:22:14.600 --> 00:22:17.840\nand the humanities when I was at the universities.\n\n541\n00:22:17.840 --> 00:22:21.160\nBut once I started a business, I was all in.\n\n542\n00:22:21.160 --> 00:22:23.760\nIt's like, wow, I didn't know anything.\n\n543\n00:22:23.760 --> 00:22:26.880\nI just go down to the library and I pick up books on accounting,\n\n544\n00:22:26.880 --> 00:22:31.120\nfinance, marketing, H-human resources,\n\n545\n00:22:31.120 --> 00:22:34.600\nevery different aspect of the business I began to study.\n\n546\n00:22:34.600 --> 00:22:38.280\nAnd when you're doing it, you're reading with intensity.\n\n547\n00:22:38.280 --> 00:22:40.040\nBecause all of the stuff you're reading,\n\n548\n00:22:40.040 --> 00:22:43.040\nyou can see how you could apply it that worked.\n\n549\n00:22:43.040 --> 00:22:46.960\nNow, at the same time, my father became my mentor.\n\n550\n00:22:46.960 --> 00:22:49.520\nAnd he was very successful in business.\n\n551\n00:22:49.520 --> 00:22:51.920\nHe was an accounting professor for 19 years\n\n552\n00:22:51.920 --> 00:22:53.480\nat Rice University.\n\n553\n00:22:53.480 --> 00:22:56.200\nBut then he went out and he ended up being the CEO\n\n554\n00:22:56.200 --> 00:22:58.320\nof a publicly traded hospital management company\n\n555\n00:22:58.320 --> 00:22:59.520\ncalled Lifemark.\n\n556\n00:22:59.520 --> 00:23:01.960\nHe ended up selling out to back in the 80s\n\n557\n00:23:01.960 --> 00:23:04.960\nthat was sold out to Hospital Corporation of America.\n\n558\n00:23:04.960 --> 00:23:09.000\nAnd so my dad took me under-- we got really close.\n\n559\n00:23:09.000 --> 00:23:13.040\nBecause for the first 16 years of Whole Foods existence,\n\n560\n00:23:13.040 --> 00:23:15.480\nall the big decisions he was in on.\n\n561\n00:23:15.480 --> 00:23:18.600\nAnd so he saved me from driving the bus off the cliff\n\n562\n00:23:18.600 --> 00:23:20.200\nmore than once.\n\n563\n00:23:20.200 --> 00:23:23.360\nAnd then the third thing is when I did make mistakes,\n\n564\n00:23:23.360 --> 00:23:25.000\nyou learn from your mistakes.\n\n565\n00:23:25.000 --> 00:23:28.040\nAs an entrepreneur, I've made a lot of mistakes.\n\n566\n00:23:28.040 --> 00:23:28.800\nBut you know what?\n\n567\n00:23:28.800 --> 00:23:30.040\nI do learn from them.\n\n568\n00:23:30.040 --> 00:23:33.200\nI don't keep repeating the same mistake over and over and over\n\n569\n00:23:33.200 --> 00:23:33.800\nagain.\n\n570\n00:23:33.800 --> 00:23:37.960\nSo reading, guidance from my father,\n\n571\n00:23:37.960 --> 00:23:40.800\nand making mistakes, but learning the lessons,\n\n572\n00:23:40.800 --> 00:23:42.000\nthat's how I've learned.\n\n573\n00:23:42.000 --> 00:23:43.120\nAnd I'm still learning.\n\n574\n00:23:43.120 --> 00:23:46.800\nMy dad's not with me anymore, but I'm still voraciously reading.\n\n575\n00:23:46.800 --> 00:23:48.480\nI'm still an entrepreneur.\n\n576\n00:23:48.480 --> 00:23:50.880\nI've gathered enough wisdom up over the years\n\n577\n00:23:50.880 --> 00:23:54.600\nwhere I'm now imparting wisdom as much as I am soaking it up\n\n578\n00:23:54.600 --> 00:23:55.320\nfrom other people.\n\n579\n00:23:55.320 --> 00:24:02.160\nHey, everyone.\n\n580\n00:24:02.160 --> 00:24:03.960\nIt's Kula here from Three More Questions.\n\n581\n00:24:03.960 --> 00:24:07.280\nAnd if you haven't downloaded the New How Leaders Lead App,\n\n582\n00:24:07.280 --> 00:24:09.240\nyou are missing out.\n\n583\n00:24:09.240 --> 00:24:11.840\nIf you're leading a team, I know it's really hard to find\n\n584\n00:24:11.840 --> 00:24:14.520\ntime to consume leadership development content\n\n585\n00:24:14.520 --> 00:24:16.720\nand continue investing in yourself.\n\n586\n00:24:16.720 --> 00:24:19.400\nThat's the whole reason we launched this app.\n\n587\n00:24:19.400 --> 00:24:22.320\nIf you just take two minutes a day each morning\n\n588\n00:24:22.320 --> 00:24:25.360\nto watch the Daily Leadership Insight in the How Leaders Lead\n\n589\n00:24:25.360 --> 00:24:28.720\nApp, you'll stay inspired with practical leadership lessons\n\n590\n00:24:28.720 --> 00:24:30.760\nfrom the world's greatest leaders.\n\n591\n00:24:30.760 --> 00:24:33.120\nImagine starting your day with inspiration\n\n592\n00:24:33.120 --> 00:24:36.440\nfrom Condoleezza Rice, Tom Brady, and Jamie Diamond,\n\n593\n00:24:36.440 --> 00:24:37.920\njust to name a few.\n\n594\n00:24:37.920 --> 00:24:39.400\nI've started using the app, and I\n\n595\n00:24:39.400 --> 00:24:42.720\nlove how the Daily Leadership Insight gets my mind right\n\n596\n00:24:42.720 --> 00:24:45.120\nbefore the busyness of my day starts.\n\n597\n00:24:45.120 --> 00:24:47.720\nDownload the How Leaders Lead App today in the App Store\n\n598\n00:24:47.720 --> 00:24:50.600\nand stay inspired with amazing leadership wisdom\n\n599\n00:24:50.600 --> 00:24:52.080\nand just two minutes a day.\n\n600\n00:24:52.080 --> 00:25:00.960\nIn your father, he was a great mentor to you,\n\n601\n00:25:00.960 --> 00:25:03.440\nand he was on your board of one of the original investors.\n\n602\n00:25:03.440 --> 00:25:08.680\nAnd I understand you actually had a really tough decision\n\n603\n00:25:08.680 --> 00:25:12.040\nto make as it relates to his involvement to the business.\n\n604\n00:25:12.040 --> 00:25:13.760\nCan you share that with us?\n\n605\n00:25:13.760 --> 00:25:17.680\nThis was after Whole Foods Market had gone public in 1992.\n\n606\n00:25:17.680 --> 00:25:21.320\nAfter we went public, we went on a bit of an acquisition spree\n\n607\n00:25:21.320 --> 00:25:23.640\nbecause we had this currency, our stock.\n\n608\n00:25:23.640 --> 00:25:28.160\nSo we became an exit strategy for companies\n\n609\n00:25:28.160 --> 00:25:29.560\nthat were like Whole Foods Market,\n\n610\n00:25:29.560 --> 00:25:31.840\nwhere you had these little small chains\n\n611\n00:25:31.840 --> 00:25:34.920\nof natural food stores around the country,\n\n612\n00:25:34.920 --> 00:25:36.680\nand the entrepreneurs had no effective way\n\n613\n00:25:36.680 --> 00:25:38.200\nto be able to cash out.\n\n614\n00:25:38.200 --> 00:25:40.720\nBut now they could sell the business to Whole Foods,\n\n615\n00:25:40.720 --> 00:25:43.800\nand they know that their employees and team members\n\n616\n00:25:43.800 --> 00:25:46.400\nare going to be part of this larger company.\n\n617\n00:25:46.400 --> 00:25:48.600\nI had relationships with all these people,\n\n618\n00:25:48.600 --> 00:25:51.080\nand so we bought Bread and Circus in Boston.\n\n619\n00:25:51.080 --> 00:25:53.520\nWe bought Mrs. Gucci's in Los Angeles.\n\n620\n00:25:53.520 --> 00:25:57.280\nWe bought Unicorn Village and Bread of Life down in Florida.\n\n621\n00:25:57.280 --> 00:26:00.000\nThere were many, many others that occurred over the years.\n\n622\n00:26:00.000 --> 00:26:02.440\nBut my father, after we went public,\n\n623\n00:26:02.440 --> 00:26:05.400\nhe began to resist these acquisitions.\n\n624\n00:26:05.400 --> 00:26:07.680\nHe thought, \"You're growing too fast.\n\n625\n00:26:07.680 --> 00:26:09.760\n\"We don't need to take on all their problems.\n\n626\n00:26:09.760 --> 00:26:11.920\n\"We have enough problems of our own.\"\n\n627\n00:26:11.920 --> 00:26:14.240\nAnd he just saw the downside of it,\n\n628\n00:26:14.240 --> 00:26:16.240\nand we began to fight a lot.\n\n629\n00:26:16.240 --> 00:26:18.440\nNow, I'm going to jump ahead a little bit,\n\n630\n00:26:18.440 --> 00:26:22.360\nbecause I did ask him to get off the board in 1994,\n\n631\n00:26:22.360 --> 00:26:24.280\nafter I'd had a big blowout fight with him\n\n632\n00:26:24.280 --> 00:26:26.960\nabout Mrs. Gucci's, and asked him to resign,\n\n633\n00:26:26.960 --> 00:26:28.440\nbecause it was wrecking our relationship.\n\n634\n00:26:28.440 --> 00:26:30.800\nWe'd been super close, and now we were fighting.\n\n635\n00:26:30.800 --> 00:26:33.200\nI was also worried it might leak out to the media,\n\n636\n00:26:33.200 --> 00:26:36.760\nthat this father/son blowout arguments were having,\n\n637\n00:26:36.760 --> 00:26:38.840\nwas unseemly.\n\n638\n00:26:38.840 --> 00:26:39.680\nBut here's the thing.\n\n639\n00:26:39.680 --> 00:26:40.640\nMy dad did resign.\n\n640\n00:26:40.640 --> 00:26:42.680\nIt was probably the most difficult decision\n\n641\n00:26:42.680 --> 00:26:43.920\nI've ever had to do.\n\n642\n00:26:43.920 --> 00:26:44.880\nI turned 40.\n\n643\n00:26:44.880 --> 00:26:46.080\nI really didn't.\n\n644\n00:26:46.080 --> 00:26:48.120\nI told him the mentorship's over.\n\n645\n00:26:48.120 --> 00:26:50.400\nI'm still going to seek your advice from time to time,\n\n646\n00:26:50.400 --> 00:26:52.320\nbut I'm going to run this thing out.\n\n647\n00:26:52.320 --> 00:26:56.400\nAnd it hurt him a lot, but I asked him to sell half of his stock,\n\n648\n00:26:56.400 --> 00:26:59.560\nand he'd have all the financial security he'd need after that.\n\n649\n00:26:59.560 --> 00:27:01.080\nIn the other half, we were going to grow the company\n\n650\n00:27:01.080 --> 00:27:02.640\nto be worth a lot more.\n\n651\n00:27:02.640 --> 00:27:04.560\nHowever, David, here's the key thing.\n\n652\n00:27:04.560 --> 00:27:06.240\nOne year after I kicked him off the board,\n\n653\n00:27:06.240 --> 00:27:08.080\nhe got diagnosed with Alzheimer's.\n\n654\n00:27:08.080 --> 00:27:10.280\nHe already had it.\n\n655\n00:27:10.280 --> 00:27:12.800\nIf you read up on the early signals of Alzheimer's,\n\n656\n00:27:12.800 --> 00:27:15.920\none is an irrational emotional outburst.\n\n657\n00:27:15.920 --> 00:27:18.160\nMy dad was no longer that guy that we used to argue\n\n658\n00:27:18.160 --> 00:27:19.600\nat the dinner table.\n\n659\n00:27:19.600 --> 00:27:22.520\nI'd make rational arguments, and he'd get all emotional.\n\n660\n00:27:22.520 --> 00:27:24.560\nThat was so out of character for him.\n\n661\n00:27:24.560 --> 00:27:27.120\nSo after he got the diagnosis, and I read up on it,\n\n662\n00:27:27.120 --> 00:27:30.200\nit's like, oh my God, that's what was happening.\n\n663\n00:27:30.200 --> 00:27:32.480\nThis were the first signs of his Alzheimer's,\n\n664\n00:27:32.480 --> 00:27:34.720\nwhich by the way, that's a horrible disease.\n\n665\n00:27:34.720 --> 00:27:37.120\nI don't wish that went on anyway.\n\n666\n00:27:37.120 --> 00:27:39.160\nNo, I've witnessed that myself.\n\n667\n00:27:39.160 --> 00:27:40.120\nIt's really tough.\n\n668\n00:27:41.400 --> 00:27:46.200\nNow, I understand that your first brand was Safer Way.\n\n669\n00:27:46.200 --> 00:27:48.480\nThat's what you called your first store.\n\n670\n00:27:48.480 --> 00:27:52.280\nHow'd you end up with Whole Foods Markets brand name?\n\n671\n00:27:52.280 --> 00:27:55.080\nSo Safer Way was a store, Renee and I,\n\n672\n00:27:55.080 --> 00:27:59.120\nmy girlfriend from the commune that we created together.\n\n673\n00:27:59.120 --> 00:28:00.200\nAnd we didn't know anything.\n\n674\n00:28:00.200 --> 00:28:02.440\nI started working on it with her when I was 24,\n\n675\n00:28:02.440 --> 00:28:04.120\nand she was 20.\n\n676\n00:28:04.120 --> 00:28:06.760\nIt was in a big, old Victorian house,\n\n677\n00:28:06.760 --> 00:28:09.560\nand which is not a great retail storefront,\n\n678\n00:28:09.560 --> 00:28:13.120\nbut it was zoned commercial, and it was essential Austin.\n\n679\n00:28:13.120 --> 00:28:16.480\nSo it didn't have a very, it wasn't on a busy road.\n\n680\n00:28:16.480 --> 00:28:18.000\nSo it wasn't, it wasn't all the things\n\n681\n00:28:18.000 --> 00:28:20.400\nthat I know about retailing now, I didn't know that.\n\n682\n00:28:20.400 --> 00:28:24.160\nBut Safer Way was also a vegetarian,\n\n683\n00:28:24.160 --> 00:28:27.560\nand it didn't sell alcohol or sugar.\n\n684\n00:28:27.560 --> 00:28:30.440\nIt didn't sell coffee or caffeine.\n\n685\n00:28:30.440 --> 00:28:32.120\nIt was very, very pure.\n\n686\n00:28:32.120 --> 00:28:33.720\nWe just wanted to sell only self food.\n\n687\n00:28:33.720 --> 00:28:34.840\nIt was good for people.\n\n688\n00:28:34.840 --> 00:28:37.560\nAnd this may not surprise you,\n\n689\n00:28:37.560 --> 00:28:39.880\nbut Safer Way was not very successful.\n\n690\n00:28:39.880 --> 00:28:42.400\n(both laughing)\n\n691\n00:28:42.400 --> 00:28:45.800\nWell, it wouldn't have worked at Pizza Taco Bell or KMC.\n\n692\n00:28:45.800 --> 00:28:47.440\nI can tell you that much.\n\n693\n00:28:47.440 --> 00:28:50.680\nSo we capitalized the business with 45,000,\n\n694\n00:28:50.680 --> 00:28:53.920\nand Renee and I, even though we were only taking $200 a month,\n\n695\n00:28:53.920 --> 00:28:56.280\nwe lost 23,000 in the first year.\n\n696\n00:28:56.280 --> 00:29:00.840\nAnd we eked out a small profit of about $5,000 a year too,\n\n697\n00:29:00.840 --> 00:29:03.600\nbut I was learning and getting the hang of it.\n\n698\n00:29:03.600 --> 00:29:05.400\nAnd but one thing I learned was we were\n\n699\n00:29:05.400 --> 00:29:07.680\nextreme competitive disadvantages.\n\n700\n00:29:07.680 --> 00:29:10.560\nI was beginning to understand a little bit of business strategy,\n\n701\n00:29:10.560 --> 00:29:13.320\nand I thought, we have a terrible location,\n\n702\n00:29:13.320 --> 00:29:16.040\nwe have no visibility, we don't have very good parking,\n\n703\n00:29:16.040 --> 00:29:17.920\nwe don't have good access.\n\n704\n00:29:17.920 --> 00:29:21.600\nOur product mixes too narrow, we're vegetarian,\n\n705\n00:29:21.600 --> 00:29:24.520\nwe're not selling the products people wanna buy.\n\n706\n00:29:24.520 --> 00:29:27.680\nAnd so we made a decision,\n\n707\n00:29:27.680 --> 00:29:30.440\ncounterintuitive decision to try to expand it,\n\n708\n00:29:30.440 --> 00:29:32.440\nrelocate it and expand it.\n\n709\n00:29:32.440 --> 00:29:34.360\nAnd we merged with a small natural food store\n\n710\n00:29:34.360 --> 00:29:36.600\nthat was kind of a friendly competitor.\n\n711\n00:29:36.600 --> 00:29:39.160\nAnd we changed the name to Whole Foods Market\n\n712\n00:29:39.160 --> 00:29:40.480\nbecause they didn't like our name,\n\n713\n00:29:40.480 --> 00:29:41.520\nand we didn't like their name,\n\n714\n00:29:41.520 --> 00:29:44.320\nand that was gonna be a name we could both get behind.\n\n715\n00:29:44.320 --> 00:29:46.760\nAnd that first Whole Foods Market sold meat,\n\n716\n00:29:46.760 --> 00:29:49.160\nsold seafood, sold beer and wine,\n\n717\n00:29:49.160 --> 00:29:50.800\nsold some sugars,\n\n718\n00:29:50.800 --> 00:29:53.240\nand within six months of opening,\n\n719\n00:29:53.240 --> 00:29:54.840\nit was the highest volume natural food store\n\n720\n00:29:54.840 --> 00:29:55.720\nin the United States.\n\n721\n00:29:55.720 --> 00:29:56.760\nIt just took off.\n\n722\n00:29:56.760 --> 00:29:58.320\nIt was a, people asked me,\n\n723\n00:29:58.320 --> 00:30:00.160\nhow long gonna take your first Whole Foods Market\n\n724\n00:30:00.160 --> 00:30:01.200\nsort of be successful?\n\n725\n00:30:01.200 --> 00:30:03.160\nAnd I say about two o'clock in the afternoon\n\n726\n00:30:03.160 --> 00:30:04.440\nand the first day.\n\n727\n00:30:04.440 --> 00:30:06.120\nAnd so we didn't,\n\n728\n00:30:06.120 --> 00:30:08.440\nall the mistakes we made to save for a week,\n\n729\n00:30:08.440 --> 00:30:10.960\nagain, I learned and we didn't make 'em at Whole Foods.\n\n730\n00:30:10.960 --> 00:30:13.600\nMade some new mistakes, but not those old ones.\n\n731\n00:30:13.600 --> 00:30:14.960\n- When I told my daughter, Ashley,\n\n732\n00:30:14.960 --> 00:30:17.400\nI was gonna have this conversation with you, John.\n\n733\n00:30:17.400 --> 00:30:18.280\nShe was so excited.\n\n734\n00:30:18.280 --> 00:30:21.440\nShe's such a huge Whole Foods Market customer.\n\n735\n00:30:21.440 --> 00:30:22.400\n- Where does she live?\n\n736\n00:30:22.400 --> 00:30:25.040\n- She's in Louisville, Kentucky.\n\n737\n00:30:25.040 --> 00:30:28.080\nShe goes, and dad, the minute I walked in that store,\n\n738\n00:30:28.080 --> 00:30:29.480\nI absolutely loved it.\n\n739\n00:30:29.480 --> 00:30:30.960\nAnd I guess that was the case\n\n740\n00:30:30.960 --> 00:30:33.840\nwhen you started your very first store.\n\n741\n00:30:33.840 --> 00:30:36.520\nHow do you sustain that kind of customer love?\n\n742\n00:30:36.520 --> 00:30:40.360\n- Well, first, let me tell you a story before I get to that.\n\n743\n00:30:40.360 --> 00:30:41.720\nThe story is something like this\n\n744\n00:30:41.720 --> 00:30:44.800\nthat about the first 20 years\n\n745\n00:30:44.800 --> 00:30:47.480\nwhen people go into Whole Foods Market for the first time,\n\n746\n00:30:47.480 --> 00:30:49.560\nyou could just see it over and over again.\n\n747\n00:30:49.560 --> 00:30:51.280\nPeople would never see a store like that\n\n748\n00:30:51.280 --> 00:30:52.400\nwhen they first went into it.\n\n749\n00:30:52.400 --> 00:30:53.800\nNow the world has changed.\n\n750\n00:30:53.800 --> 00:30:55.560\nWhole Foods helped change the world.\n\n751\n00:30:55.560 --> 00:30:57.600\nBut in the day, at least for the first 20 years\n\n752\n00:30:57.600 --> 00:30:59.280\nof our existence, we were so different\n\n753\n00:30:59.280 --> 00:31:00.440\nthan every other store out there,\n\n754\n00:31:00.440 --> 00:31:02.120\nthat people would like your daughter\n\n755\n00:31:02.120 --> 00:31:04.880\nor go into it and they'd be kind of blown away\n\n756\n00:31:04.880 --> 00:31:06.440\nand get excited about it.\n\n757\n00:31:06.440 --> 00:31:08.760\nBy the way, I'm expecting the same thing to happen\n\n758\n00:31:08.760 --> 00:31:10.480\nwhen we go into love life.\n\n759\n00:31:10.480 --> 00:31:12.160\nIt's gonna be like, wow,\n\n760\n00:31:12.160 --> 00:31:13.560\nhow come nobody's done this before?\n\n761\n00:31:13.560 --> 00:31:15.320\nThis is such a good idea.\n\n762\n00:31:15.320 --> 00:31:16.160\n- Well, it's a great idea.\n\n763\n00:31:16.160 --> 00:31:18.200\nI gotta tell you, I love the idea.\n\n764\n00:31:18.200 --> 00:31:20.480\nI mean, I wish I had one near me.\n\n765\n00:31:20.480 --> 00:31:22.120\nWe're gonna have imitators there quicker\n\n766\n00:31:22.120 --> 00:31:24.400\nbecause we live in a world where you can't keep secrets\n\n767\n00:31:24.400 --> 00:31:26.280\nas well as you used to be able to.\n\n768\n00:31:26.280 --> 00:31:28.520\nI can't fly under the radar so much anymore.\n\n769\n00:31:29.520 --> 00:31:32.200\nBut how do you get that kind of sustained?\n\n770\n00:31:32.200 --> 00:31:35.760\nThe secret, I believe, is it's simpler than it sounds.\n\n771\n00:31:35.760 --> 00:31:37.800\nI always say that the retail business\n\n772\n00:31:37.800 --> 00:31:40.400\nis kind of simple to understand in a way\n\n773\n00:31:40.400 --> 00:31:42.840\nthat management's jobs to hire the very best people\n\n774\n00:31:42.840 --> 00:31:46.080\nyou can find, make sure they're well-trained\n\n775\n00:31:46.080 --> 00:31:48.160\nand that they're service-oriented,\n\n776\n00:31:48.160 --> 00:31:49.280\nand then do everything you can\n\n777\n00:31:49.280 --> 00:31:51.600\nto help them be happy in their work.\n\n778\n00:31:51.600 --> 00:31:55.280\nBecause if the employees/team members are happy,\n\n779\n00:31:55.280 --> 00:31:57.120\nthey will make the customers happy\n\n780\n00:31:58.360 --> 00:31:59.600\nif they're well-trained.\n\n781\n00:31:59.600 --> 00:32:03.080\nAnd then the happy customers make the investors happy\n\n782\n00:32:03.080 --> 00:32:06.040\nbecause they not only come back,\n\n783\n00:32:06.040 --> 00:32:07.640\nbut they become your...\n\n784\n00:32:07.640 --> 00:32:11.320\nWord of mouth will always be every business's most\n\n785\n00:32:11.320 --> 00:32:13.840\nimportant marketing strategy it can ever have.\n\n786\n00:32:13.840 --> 00:32:17.120\nSatisfied customers bring their friends in\n\n787\n00:32:17.120 --> 00:32:19.280\nand that businesses grow virally.\n\n788\n00:32:19.280 --> 00:32:21.160\nParticularly if you don't have a brand,\n\n789\n00:32:21.160 --> 00:32:23.160\nif you're starting up an entrepreneurial site,\n\n790\n00:32:23.160 --> 00:32:26.160\nit's gonna be, you count on your customers\n\n791\n00:32:26.160 --> 00:32:27.760\ngoing out and selling their friends\n\n792\n00:32:27.760 --> 00:32:29.080\nand what you're doing.\n\n793\n00:32:29.080 --> 00:32:30.800\nI think most of the great brands,\n\n794\n00:32:30.800 --> 00:32:33.440\nI challenge you to name a great brand\n\n795\n00:32:33.440 --> 00:32:37.320\nthat was probably built primarily with advertising,\n\n796\n00:32:37.320 --> 00:32:40.280\nsay right from the beginning, as opposed to\n\n797\n00:32:40.280 --> 00:32:43.440\nbecoming sort of a cult brand that grew through\n\n798\n00:32:43.440 --> 00:32:45.400\nWord of mouth and through public relations,\n\n799\n00:32:45.400 --> 00:32:47.400\nbecause the media would get excited about it.\n\n800\n00:32:47.400 --> 00:32:50.880\n- Every great brand starts out by gets momentum,\n\n801\n00:32:50.880 --> 00:32:53.200\nby getting talked about and the word of mouth\n\n802\n00:32:53.200 --> 00:32:54.320\nreally builds a business.\n\n803\n00:32:54.320 --> 00:32:57.200\nYou know, and, you know, looking back, John,\n\n804\n00:32:57.200 --> 00:33:00.000\nwhat would you say would be the three biggest moves\n\n805\n00:33:00.000 --> 00:33:02.440\nin your opinion that had the greatest impact\n\n806\n00:33:02.440 --> 00:33:03.920\non the growth of Whole Foods?\n\n807\n00:33:03.920 --> 00:33:05.400\nIf you could pick three.\n\n808\n00:33:05.400 --> 00:33:07.200\n- Well, that's a great question, David.\n\n809\n00:33:07.200 --> 00:33:08.200\nI've done a lot of interviews,\n\n810\n00:33:08.200 --> 00:33:09.440\nno one's ever asked me that question,\n\n811\n00:33:09.440 --> 00:33:11.000\nI think it's a really good one.\n\n812\n00:33:11.000 --> 00:33:12.720\n'Cause you're asking a strategy question.\n\n813\n00:33:12.720 --> 00:33:15.600\nThe first one was opening up the original\n\n814\n00:33:15.600 --> 00:33:17.320\nbig natural food supermarket,\n\n815\n00:33:17.320 --> 00:33:18.840\nbecause there were only a couple in the whole\n\n816\n00:33:18.840 --> 00:33:21.680\nUnited States and that one just took off.\n\n817\n00:33:21.680 --> 00:33:25.200\nIt's going from a small store to a larger store\n\n818\n00:33:25.200 --> 00:33:27.600\nthat meant we had a full selection\n\n819\n00:33:27.600 --> 00:33:29.560\nso people could one-stop shop.\n\n820\n00:33:29.560 --> 00:33:31.000\nWhen you're a small natural food store,\n\n821\n00:33:31.000 --> 00:33:33.160\npeople might come in there and pick up a few things.\n\n822\n00:33:33.160 --> 00:33:35.280\nThink of something like Trader Joe's, for example,\n\n823\n00:33:35.280 --> 00:33:36.560\nwhich is a very great company\n\n824\n00:33:36.560 --> 00:33:39.400\nand I'm only going to have nice things to say about it.\n\n825\n00:33:39.400 --> 00:33:41.200\nYou can't do all your shopping in the Trader Joe's.\n\n826\n00:33:41.200 --> 00:33:43.040\nIt's a limited assortment store.\n\n827\n00:33:43.040 --> 00:33:45.280\nSo people, they're filling in at Whole Foods,\n\n828\n00:33:45.280 --> 00:33:46.960\nbut they're shopping somewhere else.\n\n829\n00:33:46.960 --> 00:33:48.360\nWith a natural food supermarket,\n\n830\n00:33:48.360 --> 00:33:51.320\nif you are, you don't really have to go to another store\n\n831\n00:33:51.320 --> 00:33:54.160\n'cause you all the categories are covered, right?\n\n832\n00:33:54.160 --> 00:33:56.120\nYou may not have all the brands that you want,\n\n833\n00:33:56.120 --> 00:33:57.640\nbut the categories are covered.\n\n834\n00:33:57.640 --> 00:34:00.480\nSo that was the first and most important move we ever made.\n\n835\n00:34:00.480 --> 00:34:03.240\nThat's what led to the revolution\n\n836\n00:34:03.240 --> 00:34:05.000\nthat Whole Foods ended up creating,\n\n837\n00:34:05.000 --> 00:34:08.120\nwas people that wanted to live this natural food lifestyle\n\n838\n00:34:08.120 --> 00:34:10.120\ndidn't go, need to go anywhere else.\n\n839\n00:34:10.120 --> 00:34:13.920\nThe second one for us was when we got out of Texas\n\n840\n00:34:13.920 --> 00:34:16.520\nand we went to Northern California\n\n841\n00:34:16.520 --> 00:34:19.600\nbecause they didn't have any natural food supermarkets there\n\n842\n00:34:19.600 --> 00:34:21.120\nand it was kind of the birth,\n\n843\n00:34:21.120 --> 00:34:22.280\nthat's where the hippies came from,\n\n844\n00:34:22.280 --> 00:34:24.040\nthat was the birth of the counterculture,\n\n845\n00:34:24.040 --> 00:34:28.480\nbetween San Francisco, Marin County, Berkeley,\n\n846\n00:34:28.480 --> 00:34:30.840\nand the explosion you were having in Silicon Valley,\n\n847\n00:34:30.840 --> 00:34:33.760\nthe Bay Area was about as hot as you could possibly be\n\n848\n00:34:33.760 --> 00:34:37.040\nand we surprisingly had very little competition.\n\n849\n00:34:37.040 --> 00:34:39.040\nOnce we proved we could do that,\n\n850\n00:34:39.040 --> 00:34:42.220\nit was easy to raise venture capital money, not easy,\n\n851\n00:34:42.220 --> 00:34:43.520\nbut we could get it.\n\n852\n00:34:43.520 --> 00:34:47.000\nAnd then as we grew into other regions after that,\n\n853\n00:34:47.000 --> 00:34:49.520\nwe could see we could be a national company\n\n854\n00:34:49.520 --> 00:34:52.880\nand that gave us this huge potential market\n\n855\n00:34:52.880 --> 00:34:54.640\nthat got the investment community excited.\n\n856\n00:34:54.640 --> 00:34:56.880\nWow, these guys could be really big someday\n\n857\n00:34:56.880 --> 00:34:58.560\nand that's exactly how it played out.\n\n858\n00:34:58.560 --> 00:35:01.360\nSo those two strategies were very important.\n\n859\n00:35:01.360 --> 00:35:04.280\nThen I would say, I'd actually say the IPO\n\n860\n00:35:04.280 --> 00:35:06.720\nwas very important to our success.\n\n861\n00:35:06.720 --> 00:35:09.680\nYou'll get a lot richer if you can hold on to your stock\n\n862\n00:35:09.680 --> 00:35:12.000\nfor a long time without diluting it down,\n\n863\n00:35:12.000 --> 00:35:14.840\nbut it's a slower path, right?\n\n864\n00:35:14.840 --> 00:35:18.320\nOnce we got that IPO money and we got our stock\n\n865\n00:35:18.320 --> 00:35:21.160\nas a currency, we were able to consolidate\n\n866\n00:35:21.160 --> 00:35:23.320\nand smaller players into our business,\n\n867\n00:35:23.320 --> 00:35:25.640\ngain territory and talent that way\n\n868\n00:35:25.640 --> 00:35:27.280\nand we could scale quicker.\n\n869\n00:35:27.280 --> 00:35:29.800\nSo I'd say those were the three biggest moves.\n\n870\n00:35:29.800 --> 00:35:32.400\nYou know, I've heard you also say that\n\n871\n00:35:32.400 --> 00:35:35.660\nyou really need to have patience as you grow,\n\n872\n00:35:35.660 --> 00:35:37.920\nparticularly a retail business.\n\n873\n00:35:37.920 --> 00:35:41.480\nDoes that hold true for you on a personal level as well, John?\n\n874\n00:35:41.480 --> 00:35:43.680\nI'm not very patient.\n\n875\n00:35:43.680 --> 00:35:46.120\nI've met very few entrepreneurs,\n\n876\n00:35:46.120 --> 00:35:47.620\nyou're actually a very patient.\n\n877\n00:35:47.620 --> 00:35:49.480\nI'm a very impatient person,\n\n878\n00:35:49.480 --> 00:35:52.400\nbut that's a lesson I learned kind of the hard way\n\n879\n00:35:52.400 --> 00:35:54.560\nthat when, before our brand was well known,\n\n880\n00:35:54.560 --> 00:35:56.440\nanytime we go to a new market,\n\n881\n00:35:56.440 --> 00:35:58.560\nwe had to start over from scratch.\n\n882\n00:35:58.560 --> 00:36:02.080\nWe had to cultivate a customer from nothing\n\n883\n00:36:02.080 --> 00:36:03.520\nand grow it over time.\n\n884\n00:36:03.520 --> 00:36:05.000\nNow the good news about that, David,\n\n885\n00:36:05.000 --> 00:36:07.120\nis that our same store sales,\n\n886\n00:36:07.120 --> 00:36:09.440\nwe average double-dibs at same store sales\n\n887\n00:36:09.440 --> 00:36:11.340\nfor over 30 years.\n\n888\n00:36:11.340 --> 00:36:12.180\nThink about that.\n\n889\n00:36:12.180 --> 00:36:14.200\nWe're almost double-digit for 30 years.\n\n890\n00:36:14.200 --> 00:36:15.160\nThat's incredible.\n\n891\n00:36:15.160 --> 00:36:17.200\nBut then as we got better known,\n\n892\n00:36:17.200 --> 00:36:19.680\nthe stores would start out at really high sales volume.\n\n893\n00:36:19.680 --> 00:36:21.880\nWe didn't have that same store sales,\n\n894\n00:36:21.880 --> 00:36:23.160\nwent into an S-curve,\n\n895\n00:36:23.160 --> 00:36:26.480\nwe'd start high, fall off, and then build it back.\n\n896\n00:36:26.480 --> 00:36:28.560\nBut for many, many years,\n\n897\n00:36:28.560 --> 00:36:30.680\nwe had such great same store sales\n\n898\n00:36:30.680 --> 00:36:31.880\nbecause the store would start.\n\n899\n00:36:31.880 --> 00:36:33.080\nI'll give you an example.\n\n900\n00:36:33.080 --> 00:36:38.080\nAn Arbor store, first one started at $75,000 a week,\n\n901\n00:36:38.080 --> 00:36:42.720\nand it comes between 25 and 30%\n\n902\n00:36:42.720 --> 00:36:45.600\nfor like 15 years in a row.\n\n903\n00:36:45.600 --> 00:36:46.440\nDo the math.\n\n904\n00:36:46.440 --> 00:36:47.920\nYou know the rule of 72.\n\n905\n00:36:47.920 --> 00:36:49.960\nSo if it's growing at 24%,\n\n906\n00:36:49.960 --> 00:36:52.440\nwe're doubling the sales every three years.\n\n907\n00:36:52.440 --> 00:36:57.440\nSo it went 75 to 150 to 300 to 600 to over a million dollars.\n\n908\n00:36:57.440 --> 00:37:03.760\nSo we had so many stores that followed similar\n\n909\n00:37:03.760 --> 00:37:05.080\nto type trajectories.\n\n910\n00:37:05.080 --> 00:37:06.640\nAnd of course, the market, as you know,\n\n911\n00:37:06.640 --> 00:37:08.840\nthey get excited about your same store sales.\n\n912\n00:37:08.840 --> 00:37:10.440\n- Yeah, you have to do that.\n\n913\n00:37:10.440 --> 00:37:12.320\nIn the retail, it's same store sales,\n\n914\n00:37:12.320 --> 00:37:15.400\nnew unit development, the return on capital.\n\n915\n00:37:15.400 --> 00:37:17.040\nThose are the three things that drive your style.\n\n916\n00:37:17.040 --> 00:37:19.160\n- Those are the three most important metrics, I agree.\n\n917\n00:37:19.160 --> 00:37:20.000\n- Absolutely.\n\n918\n00:37:20.000 --> 00:37:23.240\nAnd you always have a lot of new brands of Whole Foods.\n\n919\n00:37:23.240 --> 00:37:25.640\nIt's one of the reasons why I like to go in there\n\n920\n00:37:25.640 --> 00:37:28.400\njust to kind of see what's happening and what's new.\n\n921\n00:37:28.400 --> 00:37:30.000\nBesides getting my New York strips,\n\n922\n00:37:30.000 --> 00:37:31.120\nwhich I love your beats there,\n\n923\n00:37:31.120 --> 00:37:33.240\nI know you didn't start out thinking that way,\n\n924\n00:37:33.240 --> 00:37:35.840\nbut I'm glad you partnered up with someone\n\n925\n00:37:35.840 --> 00:37:37.840\nthat showed you the light on that subject.\n\n926\n00:37:37.840 --> 00:37:40.680\nYou know, what did they take for a new brand\n\n927\n00:37:40.680 --> 00:37:43.180\nor a product to earn its way on the shelves?\n\n928\n00:37:44.280 --> 00:37:46.640\n- Well, the Pins-upon source of that new product,\n\n929\n00:37:46.640 --> 00:37:49.680\nif it's coming from an established company\n\n930\n00:37:49.680 --> 00:37:52.280\nthat we already have a relationship with,\n\n931\n00:37:52.280 --> 00:37:53.920\nthat brand would have that new product\n\n932\n00:37:53.920 --> 00:37:57.240\nwould have an easy on-ramp, so to speak,\n\n933\n00:37:57.240 --> 00:37:59.960\nbecause their salespeople would come in and present it\n\n934\n00:37:59.960 --> 00:38:03.440\nand we'd almost always pick it up, for sure.\n\n935\n00:38:03.440 --> 00:38:05.120\nBut I think what said Whole Foods Apart\n\n936\n00:38:05.120 --> 00:38:09.680\nfor a long time was our commitment to local products.\n\n937\n00:38:09.680 --> 00:38:11.840\nOne of the things that began to happen\n\n938\n00:38:11.840 --> 00:38:14.760\nis the natural foods industry gained steam,\n\n939\n00:38:14.760 --> 00:38:17.800\nis you had not only entrepreneurship on the retail side,\n\n940\n00:38:17.800 --> 00:38:21.200\nyou had massive entrepreneurship on the manufacturing side\n\n941\n00:38:21.200 --> 00:38:22.520\nand then the agricultural side,\n\n942\n00:38:22.520 --> 00:38:24.080\nyou had all kinds of, you know,\n\n943\n00:38:24.080 --> 00:38:26.560\nthe farmers markets didn't really exist.\n\n944\n00:38:26.560 --> 00:38:29.320\nI'm not saying Whole Foods contributed to the farmers markets,\n\n945\n00:38:29.320 --> 00:38:30.280\nbut what I'm saying is,\n\n946\n00:38:30.280 --> 00:38:32.640\nis that we were riding the same kind of wave.\n\n947\n00:38:32.640 --> 00:38:35.160\nThere weren't hardly any farmers markets\n\n948\n00:38:35.160 --> 00:38:37.400\nin the United States 40 years ago.\n\n949\n00:38:37.400 --> 00:38:40.040\nThere was one in New York, it's the only one I knew about,\n\n950\n00:38:40.040 --> 00:38:43.040\nbut now every place has got farmers markets\n\n951\n00:38:43.040 --> 00:38:46.520\nbecause so many people have kind of started,\n\n952\n00:38:46.520 --> 00:38:47.680\nsome are just gardeners,\n\n953\n00:38:47.680 --> 00:38:50.040\nbut a lot of them have started up these businesses\n\n954\n00:38:50.040 --> 00:38:53.560\nwith organic agriculture or regenerative agriculture.\n\n955\n00:38:53.560 --> 00:38:57.520\nYou have local manufacturers of saucers.\n\n956\n00:38:57.520 --> 00:38:58.960\nThere was no craft beer.\n\n957\n00:38:58.960 --> 00:39:01.320\nWhen I was a kid, the beers that you could get were,\n\n958\n00:39:01.320 --> 00:39:05.400\nyou know, like Budweiser, Schlitz, Paps.\n\n959\n00:39:05.400 --> 00:39:07.560\nMichelot was the gourmet beer.\n\n960\n00:39:07.560 --> 00:39:10.560\nI remember cores when I grew up in Texas,\n\n961\n00:39:10.560 --> 00:39:13.440\ncores was like we had friends in high school\n\n962\n00:39:13.440 --> 00:39:15.160\nget drink at 18 when I was a kid\n\n963\n00:39:15.160 --> 00:39:17.800\nand they would actually go to Colorado\n\n964\n00:39:17.800 --> 00:39:19.640\nacross the border to pick up cores beer\n\n965\n00:39:19.640 --> 00:39:21.000\nand bring it back.\n\n966\n00:39:21.000 --> 00:39:24.560\nSo that was considered to be like a craft beer.\n\n967\n00:39:24.560 --> 00:39:26.240\nAnd now you have not just craft beers,\n\n968\n00:39:26.240 --> 00:39:28.400\nbut you've got wineries popping up all around,\n\n969\n00:39:28.400 --> 00:39:29.960\nyou think you used to be California,\n\n970\n00:39:29.960 --> 00:39:32.080\nwineries are everywhere in America now.\n\n971\n00:39:32.080 --> 00:39:35.240\nThere's so much entrepreneurship that's occurred.\n\n972\n00:39:35.240 --> 00:39:37.160\nAnd Whole Foods Market was a platform\n\n973\n00:39:37.160 --> 00:39:38.920\nfor that entrepreneurship.\n\n974\n00:39:38.920 --> 00:39:41.200\nIf you had local entrepreneurs in Louisville,\n\n975\n00:39:41.200 --> 00:39:43.400\nthey could try it out in our stores there.\n\n976\n00:39:43.400 --> 00:39:44.920\nAnd then if it was successful,\n\n977\n00:39:44.920 --> 00:39:48.120\nthey could spread to a wider geographical region.\n\n978\n00:39:48.120 --> 00:39:50.320\nWell, when I was there, we were changed since I left,\n\n979\n00:39:50.320 --> 00:39:53.360\nbut we were divided into 10 geographical regions.\n\n980\n00:39:53.360 --> 00:39:55.960\nAnd so with their own regional president.\n\n981\n00:39:55.960 --> 00:39:58.280\nSo if it was successful in one store,\n\n982\n00:39:58.280 --> 00:40:00.760\nit could spread to the rest of the region.\n\n983\n00:40:00.760 --> 00:40:02.920\nAnd then if it was successful in the region,\n\n984\n00:40:02.920 --> 00:40:06.040\nthe region would champion it to go to a second region.\n\n985\n00:40:06.040 --> 00:40:09.000\nIf it was successful in two regions, it could go national.\n\n986\n00:40:09.000 --> 00:40:13.160\nSo we saw lots and lots of entrepreneurs build their dreams.\n\n987\n00:40:13.160 --> 00:40:16.120\nAnd we didn't charge them slotting allowances,\n\n988\n00:40:16.120 --> 00:40:17.960\nand we made it easy to get in.\n\n989\n00:40:17.960 --> 00:40:21.520\nAnd we weren't trying to make it difficult for them to grow.\n\n990\n00:40:21.520 --> 00:40:23.480\nAnd so we were a logical place.\n\n991\n00:40:23.480 --> 00:40:25.360\nThey didn't have to pay to play.\n\n992\n00:40:25.360 --> 00:40:26.720\nThey could just come in,\n\n993\n00:40:26.720 --> 00:40:29.440\nif the products worked and they sold well,\n\n994\n00:40:29.440 --> 00:40:31.240\nthen they knew they could grow with us.\n\n995\n00:40:31.240 --> 00:40:35.440\nAnd so we fulfilled literally hundreds and hundreds,\n\n996\n00:40:35.440 --> 00:40:38.520\nperhaps even thousands of entrepreneurs' dreams.\n\n997\n00:40:38.520 --> 00:40:40.480\nThey got started at Whole Foods.\n\n998\n00:40:40.480 --> 00:40:42.560\nThat is just such a great insight\n\n999\n00:40:42.560 --> 00:40:44.960\nnot to have them pay the slotting allowances.\n\n1000\n00:40:44.960 --> 00:40:47.080\nJust get them in on the shelf,\n\n1001\n00:40:47.080 --> 00:40:49.800\nearn your way on the shelf.\n\n1002\n00:40:49.800 --> 00:40:50.640\nThat's right.\n\n1003\n00:40:50.640 --> 00:40:52.120\nThey weren't trying to differentiate.\n\n1004\n00:40:52.120 --> 00:40:53.440\nI mean, think about it.\n\n1005\n00:40:53.440 --> 00:40:55.600\nI always say one of the best allies Whole Foods market had\n\n1006\n00:40:55.600 --> 00:40:57.360\nwas actually Walmart.\n\n1007\n00:40:57.360 --> 00:41:00.360\nBecause Walmart, when they started doing their super centers,\n\n1008\n00:41:00.360 --> 00:41:04.080\nthey scared the crap out of the entire conventional supermarket\n\n1009\n00:41:04.080 --> 00:41:06.160\nand they said, \"How are we going to compete with Walmart?\"\n\n1010\n00:41:06.160 --> 00:41:07.600\nThere's this juggernaut,\n\n1011\n00:41:07.600 --> 00:41:09.680\nand their prices were so low.\n\n1012\n00:41:09.680 --> 00:41:11.480\nSo the first thing they tried to do to compete\n\n1013\n00:41:11.480 --> 00:41:13.760\nwas they tried to become more like Walmart.\n\n1014\n00:41:13.760 --> 00:41:16.000\nThey spent less capital on their facilities.\n\n1015\n00:41:16.000 --> 00:41:18.160\nThe stores were more warehouse-y.\n\n1016\n00:41:18.160 --> 00:41:20.360\nThey were more sterile.\n\n1017\n00:41:20.360 --> 00:41:22.400\nKeep the capital expenses down.\n\n1018\n00:41:22.400 --> 00:41:25.240\nThen they cut the labor, so they gave less service.\n\n1019\n00:41:25.240 --> 00:41:26.720\nThey just tried to do everything they could.\n\n1020\n00:41:26.720 --> 00:41:29.400\nThey tried to buy, and with Costco came along,\n\n1021\n00:41:29.400 --> 00:41:30.640\nthey tried to do club packs,\n\n1022\n00:41:30.640 --> 00:41:33.280\nand they were really trying to compete on price.\n\n1023\n00:41:33.280 --> 00:41:35.280\nWhole Foods was just going in a completely different direction.\n\n1024\n00:41:35.280 --> 00:41:38.240\nWe were trying to compete on quality and service\n\n1025\n00:41:38.240 --> 00:41:39.720\nand having different kinds of products\n\n1026\n00:41:39.720 --> 00:41:41.520\nthat they weren't available.\n\n1027\n00:41:41.520 --> 00:41:44.760\nSo Walmart did us a favor by basically making our competition\n\n1028\n00:41:44.760 --> 00:41:47.920\nobsessed with them and not pay much attention to us,\n\n1029\n00:41:47.920 --> 00:41:50.800\nas we flew under the radar.\n\n1030\n00:41:50.800 --> 00:41:54.080\nThat's when we jumped away from just the hippie customers.\n\n1031\n00:41:54.080 --> 00:41:57.120\nBecause the middle class housewives started coming in,\n\n1032\n00:41:57.120 --> 00:41:59.240\nbecause our produce was fresher and better,\n\n1033\n00:41:59.240 --> 00:42:02.320\nbecause our team members might have had piercings and tattoos,\n\n1034\n00:42:02.320 --> 00:42:04.160\nbut they were awfully nice to them.\n\n1035\n00:42:04.160 --> 00:42:06.800\nAnd they reminded them of their kids anyway.\n\n1036\n00:42:06.800 --> 00:42:08.960\nThat all kind of grew for Whole Foods,\n\n1037\n00:42:08.960 --> 00:42:13.880\nand part of that was not charging these local suppliers\n\n1038\n00:42:13.880 --> 00:42:16.640\nto play with us. We didn't pay to play.\n\n1039\n00:42:16.640 --> 00:42:18.760\nWhat was the biggest surprise you've ever had\n\n1040\n00:42:18.760 --> 00:42:21.240\nwith a product that came into Whole Foods\n\n1041\n00:42:21.240 --> 00:42:23.760\nthat you thought, there's no way it's going to win?\n\n1042\n00:42:23.760 --> 00:42:27.120\nWell, what I missed a boat on was Whole Foods\n\n1043\n00:42:27.120 --> 00:42:28.640\nHousewives and Venture Capital Arms.\n\n1044\n00:42:28.640 --> 00:42:31.040\nSo we invested in a lot of suppliers.\n\n1045\n00:42:31.040 --> 00:42:35.680\nI think the one I overlooked the most when Beyond Meat came out,\n\n1046\n00:42:35.680 --> 00:42:38.480\nI kind of looked at their ingredients and I said,\n\n1047\n00:42:38.480 --> 00:42:40.320\nthis is not a healthy product.\n\n1048\n00:42:40.320 --> 00:42:43.320\nAnd I just didn't account for the fact that it was a--\n\n1049\n00:42:43.320 --> 00:42:45.760\nas I'm personally a vegan, it wasn't really a product\n\n1050\n00:42:45.760 --> 00:42:47.720\nI was particularly interested in, because why\n\n1051\n00:42:47.720 --> 00:42:49.240\ndidn't think it was a healthy product.\n\n1052\n00:42:49.240 --> 00:42:51.960\nBut it really caught on and it just exploded.\n\n1053\n00:42:51.960 --> 00:42:54.720\nAnd then impossible burgers came out,\n\n1054\n00:42:54.720 --> 00:42:57.240\nand you had this whole new category of products.\n\n1055\n00:42:57.240 --> 00:43:00.920\nI completely didn't see that a younger generation\n\n1056\n00:43:00.920 --> 00:43:02.680\nwanted to get their burger and fries,\n\n1057\n00:43:02.680 --> 00:43:05.400\nbut they were happy to have one that wasn't actually\n\n1058\n00:43:05.400 --> 00:43:07.800\nreally actually beef or real meat.\n\n1059\n00:43:07.800 --> 00:43:09.200\nSo I missed that one.\n\n1060\n00:43:09.200 --> 00:43:10.680\nThere are plenty of other ones.\n\n1061\n00:43:10.680 --> 00:43:17.840\nWe'll be back with the rest of my conversation\n\n1062\n00:43:17.840 --> 00:43:20.480\nwith John Mackie in just a moment.\n\n1063\n00:43:20.480 --> 00:43:22.280\nAs you've heard us talk about, John\n\n1064\n00:43:22.280 --> 00:43:25.920\nfelt like he overlooked an opportunity with Beyond Meat.\n\n1065\n00:43:25.920 --> 00:43:27.200\nWell, wouldn't you know it?\n\n1066\n00:43:27.200 --> 00:43:30.880\nOne of my earliest episodes here on How Leaders Lead\n\n1067\n00:43:30.880 --> 00:43:33.240\nis with none other than Ethan Brown,\n\n1068\n00:43:33.240 --> 00:43:35.920\nthe founder and CEO of Beyond Meat.\n\n1069\n00:43:35.920 --> 00:43:38.560\nAnd like John, Ethan also stresses\n\n1070\n00:43:38.560 --> 00:43:41.920\nthe importance of bringing your authentic self to work.\n\n1071\n00:43:41.920 --> 00:43:45.000\nWe're all mix of confidence and insecurity.\n\n1072\n00:43:45.000 --> 00:43:48.480\nAnd it's OK to be insecure about things\n\n1073\n00:43:48.480 --> 00:43:49.760\nand to try to address them.\n\n1074\n00:43:49.760 --> 00:43:53.240\nAnd so much of the work of being a better leader\n\n1075\n00:43:53.240 --> 00:43:55.240\nat this point is now internal work.\n\n1076\n00:43:55.240 --> 00:43:57.920\nHow do I work through issues within myself\n\n1077\n00:43:57.920 --> 00:43:59.280\nthat I want to address, right?\n\n1078\n00:43:59.280 --> 00:44:01.760\nAnd the better that I can do that, the more effective\n\n1079\n00:44:01.760 --> 00:44:02.880\nI'll be as a leader.\n\n1080\n00:44:02.880 --> 00:44:05.520\nI'm less into management books and I'm more\n\n1081\n00:44:05.520 --> 00:44:08.520\ninto that process of better understanding\n\n1082\n00:44:08.520 --> 00:44:11.560\nwhy I make the decisions that I make, why do what I do\n\n1083\n00:44:11.560 --> 00:44:13.760\nso that I can improve on weaknesses\n\n1084\n00:44:13.760 --> 00:44:17.080\nand be a better person and be a better leader as a result.\n\n1085\n00:44:17.080 --> 00:44:20.160\nGo all the way back to episode six\n\n1086\n00:44:20.160 --> 00:44:24.120\nand listen to my entire conversation with Ethan Brown.\n\n1087\n00:44:24.120 --> 00:44:27.880\nHere on How Leaders Lead, episode six,\n\n1088\n00:44:27.880 --> 00:44:30.200\nand now we're over 200.\n\n1089\n00:44:30.200 --> 00:44:31.200\nOh my gosh.\n\n1090\n00:44:31.200 --> 00:44:42.240\nYou've got a lot of accolades thrown your way.\n\n1091\n00:44:42.240 --> 00:44:44.080\nI mean, you've built this big business.\n\n1092\n00:44:44.080 --> 00:44:47.280\nYou know, yet, you know, at least on the surface\n\n1093\n00:44:47.280 --> 00:44:49.400\nof this conversation, you seem like you're pretty\n\n1094\n00:44:49.400 --> 00:44:51.160\nhumbled down to Earth guy.\n\n1095\n00:44:51.160 --> 00:44:54.720\nHow does John Mackie stay John Mackie in that sense?\n\n1096\n00:44:54.720 --> 00:44:57.760\nI always try to show up in the world as I really am.\n\n1097\n00:44:57.760 --> 00:45:00.920\nIt's that going back to that breaking away from my family\n\n1098\n00:45:00.920 --> 00:45:03.000\nand doing what I wanted to do,\n\n1099\n00:45:03.000 --> 00:45:05.760\nI've always had a passion to just be authentic,\n\n1100\n00:45:05.760 --> 00:45:07.560\nto just be myself.\n\n1101\n00:45:07.560 --> 00:45:11.560\nWhen you're truly authentic, a lot of good things happen.\n\n1102\n00:45:11.560 --> 00:45:13.680\nEverybody doesn't like you.\n\n1103\n00:45:13.680 --> 00:45:15.480\nLet's just state that for the record.\n\n1104\n00:45:15.480 --> 00:45:17.320\nA lot of people won't like you when you're authentic\n\n1105\n00:45:17.320 --> 00:45:19.560\nand that's why most people aren't authentic\n\n1106\n00:45:19.560 --> 00:45:21.560\n'cause their worried people won't like them.\n\n1107\n00:45:21.560 --> 00:45:24.400\nBut the thing is the people that like you,\n\n1108\n00:45:24.400 --> 00:45:26.280\nthey really like you for who you are.\n\n1109\n00:45:26.280 --> 00:45:27.560\n(laughing)\n\n1110\n00:45:27.560 --> 00:45:29.960\nAnd not for who you're pretending to be.\n\n1111\n00:45:29.960 --> 00:45:33.320\nAnd if you're kind of putting a false persona out there,\n\n1112\n00:45:33.320 --> 00:45:35.000\nthen people might like the false persona,\n\n1113\n00:45:35.000 --> 00:45:37.400\nbut not really know the real person.\n\n1114\n00:45:37.400 --> 00:45:40.480\nSo I've never been very good at pretending\n\n1115\n00:45:40.480 --> 00:45:41.640\nto be somebody I wasn't.\n\n1116\n00:45:41.640 --> 00:45:44.440\nSo I just thought, I better just be who I am\n\n1117\n00:45:44.440 --> 00:45:46.600\nbecause that's really all I'm any good at anyway.\n\n1118\n00:45:46.600 --> 00:45:47.760\n(laughing)\n\n1119\n00:45:47.760 --> 00:45:50.800\n- You know, with the kind of success that your company had,\n\n1120\n00:45:50.800 --> 00:45:53.080\nhubris sometimes can bring you down.\n\n1121\n00:45:53.080 --> 00:45:55.160\nI mean, you can get really, really cocky.\n\n1122\n00:45:55.160 --> 00:45:58.440\nTell us a time when maybe you saw that creeping in\n\n1123\n00:45:58.440 --> 00:46:01.920\nat Whole Foods Market and what did you do to combat it?\n\n1124\n00:46:01.920 --> 00:46:05.080\n- The main thing is just to always get people\n\n1125\n00:46:05.080 --> 00:46:07.520\nto be focusing on what the competitors\n\n1126\n00:46:07.520 --> 00:46:09.240\nare doing better than you\n\n1127\n00:46:09.240 --> 00:46:11.440\n'cause they're always doing some things better than you.\n\n1128\n00:46:11.440 --> 00:46:13.080\nWe spend a lot of time going in\n\n1129\n00:46:13.080 --> 00:46:15.360\nand seeing what our competitors are doing.\n\n1130\n00:46:15.360 --> 00:46:17.120\nAnd I'd always ask the challenge,\n\n1131\n00:46:17.120 --> 00:46:19.720\nI'd always bet our team and we'd be going in there is.\n\n1132\n00:46:19.720 --> 00:46:20.960\nI don't want you to come back and tell me\n\n1133\n00:46:20.960 --> 00:46:23.320\nwhat we're doing better than them.\n\n1134\n00:46:23.320 --> 00:46:25.560\nYou got to come back and tell me at least three things\n\n1135\n00:46:25.560 --> 00:46:27.520\nare doing better than us.\n\n1136\n00:46:27.520 --> 00:46:30.400\nBecause I already know we're doing some things better\n\n1137\n00:46:30.400 --> 00:46:33.160\nthan them, but so what, it's just arrogance.\n\n1138\n00:46:33.160 --> 00:46:36.400\nIf you can learn from anybody and everyone,\n\n1139\n00:46:36.400 --> 00:46:39.480\nbut if you have hubris, then you no longer\n\n1140\n00:46:39.480 --> 00:46:41.000\nare able to learn and grow.\n\n1141\n00:46:41.000 --> 00:46:43.120\nYou're gonna be stuck.\n\n1142\n00:46:43.120 --> 00:46:45.800\nAnd so I've always put that challenge.\n\n1143\n00:46:45.800 --> 00:46:47.800\nI also think the team that I had,\n\n1144\n00:46:47.800 --> 00:46:50.160\npeople like Walter Rob and AC Gallo,\n\n1145\n00:46:50.160 --> 00:46:52.400\nthey were very driven, competitive people\n\n1146\n00:46:52.400 --> 00:46:53.920\nwho wanted to be the best,\n\n1147\n00:46:53.920 --> 00:46:57.920\nbut we're always seeing around the corner\n\n1148\n00:46:57.920 --> 00:47:00.680\nthat somebody was coming up behind them.\n\n1149\n00:47:00.680 --> 00:47:02.000\nAnd so they had to run faster.\n\n1150\n00:47:02.000 --> 00:47:04.440\nI just, I think our culture was such a culture\n\n1151\n00:47:04.440 --> 00:47:06.680\nthat we really weren't resting on our laurels.\n\n1152\n00:47:06.680 --> 00:47:08.760\nI think that people asked me\n\n1153\n00:47:08.760 --> 00:47:10.600\nwhat I think the biggest mistake that I made was.\n\n1154\n00:47:10.600 --> 00:47:14.280\nAnd I think it was when we came out of that 2008,\n\n1155\n00:47:14.280 --> 00:47:16.560\n2007, 2008 recession, David,\n\n1156\n00:47:16.560 --> 00:47:20.800\nour stock had dropped, imagine it had dropped 90%.\n\n1157\n00:47:20.800 --> 00:47:23.040\nAnd we were trading at three times\n\n1158\n00:47:23.040 --> 00:47:25.280\nour operating cash flow.\n\n1159\n00:47:25.280 --> 00:47:27.120\nSo you could have bought our company and paid for it\n\n1160\n00:47:27.120 --> 00:47:29.360\nwith our own money in just three years.\n\n1161\n00:47:29.360 --> 00:47:31.800\nSo that was a very scary time.\n\n1162\n00:47:31.800 --> 00:47:33.680\nAnd we took in some private equity money\n\n1163\n00:47:33.680 --> 00:47:36.240\nand got it in friendly hands to get the voting shares\n\n1164\n00:47:36.240 --> 00:47:38.040\nso that we wouldn't have an activist\n\n1165\n00:47:38.040 --> 00:47:39.480\nwouldn't take us over.\n\n1166\n00:47:39.480 --> 00:47:41.560\nBut then when we came out of that,\n\n1167\n00:47:41.560 --> 00:47:43.800\nwe came out of it and our same sort of sales\n\n1168\n00:47:43.800 --> 00:47:46.160\nwent quickly into double digits again,\n\n1169\n00:47:46.160 --> 00:47:48.640\nand our profits just went through the roof.\n\n1170\n00:47:48.640 --> 00:47:50.920\nCooper stood kick in at that point a little bit\n\n1171\n00:47:50.920 --> 00:47:53.360\nbecause we had this near-death experience.\n\n1172\n00:47:53.360 --> 00:47:55.680\nAnd as we were back into double-digit cops\n\n1173\n00:47:55.680 --> 00:47:58.960\nfor the first time in a few years, we got giddy.\n\n1174\n00:47:58.960 --> 00:48:00.560\nAnd stock prices were going up\n\n1175\n00:48:00.560 --> 00:48:03.320\nand that was the missed opportunity,\n\n1176\n00:48:03.320 --> 00:48:06.160\nwhole few tad, to cut prices.\n\n1177\n00:48:06.160 --> 00:48:08.440\nWe could see that our competitors were beginning,\n\n1178\n00:48:08.440 --> 00:48:10.000\nthe conventional supermarkets were beginning\n\n1179\n00:48:10.000 --> 00:48:11.840\nto pick up more and more of our products.\n\n1180\n00:48:11.840 --> 00:48:14.240\nThey were changing the design of their stores.\n\n1181\n00:48:14.240 --> 00:48:16.840\nThey were becoming more of a competitive threat.\n\n1182\n00:48:16.840 --> 00:48:18.240\nWe didn't pay enough attention to it.\n\n1183\n00:48:18.240 --> 00:48:19.360\nWe sort of blew it off.\n\n1184\n00:48:19.360 --> 00:48:21.720\nWe had hubris collectively.\n\n1185\n00:48:21.720 --> 00:48:25.280\nAnd what we needed to do was,\n\n1186\n00:48:25.280 --> 00:48:27.120\nwe always thought we were gonna have better quality,\n\n1187\n00:48:27.120 --> 00:48:29.240\nbetter service, better selection.\n\n1188\n00:48:29.240 --> 00:48:32.320\nAnd so we didn't take that threat strong enough.\n\n1189\n00:48:32.320 --> 00:48:35.640\nAnd that was kind of the best opportunity we ever had.\n\n1190\n00:48:35.640 --> 00:48:38.480\nIf we'd cut our prices into that climb\n\n1191\n00:48:38.480 --> 00:48:40.200\nout of that recession,\n\n1192\n00:48:40.200 --> 00:48:42.800\nwe'd still be an independent company today.\n\n1193\n00:48:42.800 --> 00:48:44.720\nshareholder activists wouldn't have come along.\n\n1194\n00:48:44.720 --> 00:48:45.560\nWe'd be independent.\n\n1195\n00:48:45.560 --> 00:48:47.600\nI would have retired in anyway,\n\n1196\n00:48:47.600 --> 00:48:49.880\nbut Amazon wouldn't own the company most likely.\n\n1197\n00:48:49.880 --> 00:48:52.560\nSo I don't think we didn't completely escape from hubris.\n\n1198\n00:48:52.560 --> 00:48:54.280\nWe made a mistake there.\n\n1199\n00:48:54.280 --> 00:48:55.480\nAnd I think at the end of the day,\n\n1200\n00:48:55.480 --> 00:48:58.160\nthat had consequences down the road for us.\n\n1201\n00:48:58.160 --> 00:49:00.000\n- Do you think your, what is it?\n\n1202\n00:49:00.000 --> 00:49:02.960\nThe whole paycheck perception was the reason\n\n1203\n00:49:02.960 --> 00:49:04.960\nwhy you ultimately end up having to sell?\n\n1204\n00:49:04.960 --> 00:49:07.080\n- Yes.\n\n1205\n00:49:07.080 --> 00:49:09.400\nAnd the fact that we couldn't easily,\n\n1206\n00:49:09.400 --> 00:49:11.800\nonce the activists came on board, we couldn't change it.\n\n1207\n00:49:11.800 --> 00:49:13.200\nWe needed to cut our prices.\n\n1208\n00:49:13.200 --> 00:49:14.440\nBut you know how it is,\n\n1209\n00:49:14.440 --> 00:49:15.640\nif you're selling something for a,\n\n1210\n00:49:15.640 --> 00:49:17.160\nyou have shareholder activists,\n\n1211\n00:49:17.160 --> 00:49:19.480\nthey wanna get the stock price up.\n\n1212\n00:49:19.480 --> 00:49:20.720\nAnd you, if you go in,\n\n1213\n00:49:20.720 --> 00:49:21.920\nyou're selling something for a dollar\n\n1214\n00:49:21.920 --> 00:49:24.520\nand you're selling it for 90 cents.\n\n1215\n00:49:24.520 --> 00:49:26.280\nThat might be a great decision long term,\n\n1216\n00:49:26.280 --> 00:49:29.200\nbut in the short run, your sales are gonna go down,\n\n1217\n00:49:29.200 --> 00:49:30.720\nyour same store sales are gonna go down,\n\n1218\n00:49:30.720 --> 00:49:32.280\nand your profits are gonna go down,\n\n1219\n00:49:32.280 --> 00:49:34.680\nand the activists are gonna take over your company.\n\n1220\n00:49:34.680 --> 00:49:37.360\nSo we needed to do that sooner.\n\n1221\n00:49:37.360 --> 00:49:40.280\nBut I will tell you something that Amazon,\n\n1222\n00:49:40.280 --> 00:49:43.520\nlet Whole Foods market, cut its prices significantly\n\n1223\n00:49:43.520 --> 00:49:46.200\nfour separate times in the first two years,\n\n1224\n00:49:46.200 --> 00:49:49.480\ncosting Amazon hundreds of millions of dollars.\n\n1225\n00:49:49.480 --> 00:49:52.000\nBut Whole Foods market's prices are far more competitive.\n\n1226\n00:49:52.000 --> 00:49:54.120\nIf we got them to where they needed to be,\n\n1227\n00:49:54.120 --> 00:49:56.840\nfor us to be a sustainable business\n\n1228\n00:49:56.840 --> 00:49:58.520\nin that competitive marketplace,\n\n1229\n00:49:58.520 --> 00:49:59.880\nif we could have done that on our own,\n\n1230\n00:49:59.880 --> 00:50:00.800\nwe'd be independent.\n\n1231\n00:50:00.800 --> 00:50:02.960\nWe didn't do it when we had a chance,\n\n1232\n00:50:02.960 --> 00:50:06.280\nand when we realized we had to do it, it was too late.\n\n1233\n00:50:06.280 --> 00:50:09.200\n- It's interesting, you just created such a buzz\n\n1234\n00:50:09.200 --> 00:50:11.560\nwhen you were acquired by Amazon.\n\n1235\n00:50:11.560 --> 00:50:14.280\nTell us a story behind that decision.\n\n1236\n00:50:14.280 --> 00:50:19.040\n- Well, we had Jana Partners took the activist position in us,\n\n1237\n00:50:19.040 --> 00:50:21.200\nand I met with those guys, right?\n\n1238\n00:50:21.200 --> 00:50:22.600\nYou meet with the activists.\n\n1239\n00:50:22.600 --> 00:50:25.000\nA lot of times we have a common goal.\n\n1240\n00:50:25.000 --> 00:50:26.240\nThey wanna get to stock price up,\n\n1241\n00:50:26.240 --> 00:50:27.880\nwe wanna get to stock price up.\n\n1242\n00:50:27.880 --> 00:50:30.360\nLet's strategize on how we can do that.\n\n1243\n00:50:30.360 --> 00:50:32.080\nWhen our team met with them,\n\n1244\n00:50:32.080 --> 00:50:33.080\nit came down to Austin,\n\n1245\n00:50:33.080 --> 00:50:34.840\nthey had this PowerPoint presentation,\n\n1246\n00:50:34.840 --> 00:50:37.080\nwhich is one they were showing to Wall Street.\n\n1247\n00:50:37.080 --> 00:50:40.280\nI looked at it, and of course they'd taken our stock price\n\n1248\n00:50:40.280 --> 00:50:41.760\nat the all time, all time high,\n\n1249\n00:50:41.760 --> 00:50:45.160\nand it's seen it as this negative story ever since.\n\n1250\n00:50:45.160 --> 00:50:47.600\nAnd they had some inaccuracies in that presentation.\n\n1251\n00:50:47.600 --> 00:50:49.240\nI remember when it was over, I said,\n\n1252\n00:50:49.240 --> 00:50:50.840\nthat's a very interesting presentation.\n\n1253\n00:50:50.840 --> 00:50:53.000\nI disagree with some of the points.\n\n1254\n00:50:53.000 --> 00:50:54.200\nWould you give me a copy of that,\n\n1255\n00:50:54.200 --> 00:50:56.320\nand I'd like to address some of your concerns?\n\n1256\n00:50:56.320 --> 00:50:59.760\nThey said, no, well, we're not gonna give you a copy.\n\n1257\n00:50:59.760 --> 00:51:01.520\nAnd I said, well, I can't address your concerns.\n\n1258\n00:51:01.520 --> 00:51:02.960\nHe says, we don't care.\n\n1259\n00:51:02.960 --> 00:51:07.000\nAnd then he said, listen, John,\n\n1260\n00:51:07.000 --> 00:51:09.640\nI'm gonna tell you exactly what we're gonna do.\n\n1261\n00:51:09.640 --> 00:51:11.440\nThe first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna take over\n\n1262\n00:51:11.440 --> 00:51:13.320\nyour board of directors.\n\n1263\n00:51:13.320 --> 00:51:16.640\nYou guys have a board that's too old,\n\n1264\n00:51:16.640 --> 00:51:18.600\nit's been with you too long,\n\n1265\n00:51:18.600 --> 00:51:20.880\nand we're gonna put up alternative candidates,\n\n1266\n00:51:20.880 --> 00:51:22.240\nand we're gonna take over your board.\n\n1267\n00:51:22.240 --> 00:51:24.920\nAfter we take over your board, we're gonna fire you,\n\n1268\n00:51:24.920 --> 00:51:26.960\nand we're gonna fire the rest of your team.\n\n1269\n00:51:26.960 --> 00:51:29.160\nWe'll keep a few, but we're gonna fire most of them.\n\n1270\n00:51:29.160 --> 00:51:31.000\nAnd then we're gonna put your company up for sale\n\n1271\n00:51:31.000 --> 00:51:32.840\nto the highest bidder.\n\n1272\n00:51:32.840 --> 00:51:35.960\nAnd there's not a damn thing you can do about it.\n\n1273\n00:51:35.960 --> 00:51:39.120\nAnd then they stood up and walked out of the room.\n\n1274\n00:51:39.120 --> 00:51:40.640\n(laughing)\n\n1275\n00:51:40.640 --> 00:51:42.560\nOh, and by the way, let's go have dinner.\n\n1276\n00:51:42.560 --> 00:51:44.000\n(laughing)\n\n1277\n00:51:44.000 --> 00:51:46.120\n- So then we looked at the alternatives\n\n1278\n00:51:46.120 --> 00:51:47.000\nthat are facing us, right?\n\n1279\n00:51:47.000 --> 00:51:48.200\nSo there are different alternatives.\n\n1280\n00:51:48.200 --> 00:51:51.880\nWe did hire, we had bankers, we hired Evercore,\n\n1281\n00:51:51.880 --> 00:51:56.560\nas defense bankers, we hired WalkTill to be our attorneys.\n\n1282\n00:51:56.560 --> 00:51:59.760\nAnd we began to create strategies\n\n1283\n00:51:59.760 --> 00:52:01.040\nwhere we'd fight these guys off\n\n1284\n00:52:01.040 --> 00:52:03.040\nand keep them from taking over our board.\n\n1285\n00:52:03.040 --> 00:52:05.280\nWe actually turned over a lot of our board\n\n1286\n00:52:05.280 --> 00:52:06.760\nthat Evercore recommended we do\n\n1287\n00:52:06.760 --> 00:52:09.120\nbecause they just had too much tenure.\n\n1288\n00:52:09.120 --> 00:52:10.320\nApparently it's bad governance\n\n1289\n00:52:10.320 --> 00:52:12.480\nand somebody's on your board 15 or 20 years.\n\n1290\n00:52:12.480 --> 00:52:13.880\nUsed to think that would be a good thing,\n\n1291\n00:52:13.880 --> 00:52:16.600\nbut no, that means they're too close to management.\n\n1292\n00:52:16.600 --> 00:52:19.240\nSo we had to get rid of our long tenured ones\n\n1293\n00:52:19.240 --> 00:52:20.960\nor anybody that had any conflicts of interest\n\n1294\n00:52:20.960 --> 00:52:24.280\nwe got rid of, brought in some new high power directors.\n\n1295\n00:52:24.280 --> 00:52:26.680\nSo we were prepared to fight,\n\n1296\n00:52:26.680 --> 00:52:28.680\nbut I still knew we needed to lower our prices\n\n1297\n00:52:28.680 --> 00:52:29.640\nand that wasn't gonna be able\n\n1298\n00:52:29.640 --> 00:52:31.240\nsomething we could do in the short run.\n\n1299\n00:52:31.240 --> 00:52:32.160\nThat was the only way Whole Foods\n\n1300\n00:52:32.160 --> 00:52:34.480\nwas gonna sustain up a long term.\n\n1301\n00:52:34.480 --> 00:52:37.120\nNumber two, we could take it private.\n\n1302\n00:52:37.120 --> 00:52:38.560\nWe certainly had a lot of interest\n\n1303\n00:52:38.560 --> 00:52:40.600\nin taking the company private.\n\n1304\n00:52:40.600 --> 00:52:43.800\nBut the risk of taking the company private is\n\n1305\n00:52:43.800 --> 00:52:48.360\nwhat if we had another 2000, 2008, seven, 2008 downturn?\n\n1306\n00:52:48.360 --> 00:52:51.080\nWell, we'd had so much debt on our own balance sheet\n\n1307\n00:52:51.080 --> 00:52:52.960\n'cause they do a bridge loan.\n\n1308\n00:52:52.960 --> 00:52:56.000\nOnce they get control, they refinance it\n\n1309\n00:52:56.000 --> 00:52:58.440\nand borrow the money against the company's cash flow\n\n1310\n00:52:58.440 --> 00:52:59.600\nand it's balance sheet.\n\n1311\n00:52:59.600 --> 00:53:01.480\nWe had good cash flow.\n\n1312\n00:53:01.480 --> 00:53:03.960\nBut that was assuming the market was gonna be good.\n\n1313\n00:53:03.960 --> 00:53:07.040\nAnd if it turned down, we might go bankrupt.\n\n1314\n00:53:07.040 --> 00:53:08.720\nAnd then thirdly, we did,\n\n1315\n00:53:08.720 --> 00:53:10.040\nwell, maybe they were friendly hands.\n\n1316\n00:53:10.040 --> 00:53:12.320\nLike we talked to Warren Buffett.\n\n1317\n00:53:12.320 --> 00:53:13.640\nHe had good sense of humor.\n\n1318\n00:53:13.640 --> 00:53:14.800\nHe made a joke about it and said,\n\n1319\n00:53:14.800 --> 00:53:18.120\n\"Well, I own Dairy Queen.\n\n1320\n00:53:18.120 --> 00:53:20.480\n\"I don't think it's a good brand fit for me.\"\n\n1321\n00:53:20.480 --> 00:53:23.640\n(laughing)\n\n1322\n00:53:23.640 --> 00:53:25.120\nBut I think he'd probably looked at it\n\n1323\n00:53:25.120 --> 00:53:27.720\nand thought it was too pricey, you know, my guess.\n\n1324\n00:53:27.720 --> 00:53:29.960\nI met with Albertsons on an informal basis\n\n1325\n00:53:29.960 --> 00:53:32.440\nto just talk to them and I could see right away\n\n1326\n00:53:32.440 --> 00:53:34.560\nthat was not gonna be a good fit for us.\n\n1327\n00:53:34.560 --> 00:53:36.040\nSo what are we gonna do?\n\n1328\n00:53:36.040 --> 00:53:38.280\nSo we probably were gonna fight.\n\n1329\n00:53:38.280 --> 00:53:41.720\nBut I kept asking this question over and over and over again.\n\n1330\n00:53:41.720 --> 00:53:45.520\nWhat's the win-win-win solution?\n\n1331\n00:53:45.520 --> 00:53:48.120\nWhat's the best solution for our investors,\n\n1332\n00:53:48.120 --> 00:53:50.640\nfor our customers, for our team members,\n\n1333\n00:53:50.640 --> 00:53:52.800\nfor our suppliers and the communities we're part of?\n\n1334\n00:53:52.800 --> 00:53:56.040\nIs there a solution that'll be a win for all of them?\n\n1335\n00:53:56.040 --> 00:53:57.800\nOf course, I couldn't figure it out.\n\n1336\n00:53:57.800 --> 00:54:00.000\nBut then I woke up one morning\n\n1337\n00:54:00.000 --> 00:54:03.200\nand it popped in my brain right when I woke up.\n\n1338\n00:54:03.200 --> 00:54:04.400\nI must've been dreaming about it.\n\n1339\n00:54:04.400 --> 00:54:06.360\nWhat about Amazon?\n\n1340\n00:54:06.360 --> 00:54:09.120\nAnd I'd met Jeff Bezos about a year before\n\n1341\n00:54:09.120 --> 00:54:11.920\nand a Microsoft CEO, someone I really liked him.\n\n1342\n00:54:11.920 --> 00:54:13.160\nWe had a great talk together.\n\n1343\n00:54:13.160 --> 00:54:15.720\nWe served on a panel just the two of us.\n\n1344\n00:54:15.720 --> 00:54:17.560\nHe's interested in scuba diving.\n\n1345\n00:54:17.560 --> 00:54:18.400\nI am too.\n\n1346\n00:54:18.400 --> 00:54:20.600\nWe'd like to read science fiction and fantasy books.\n\n1347\n00:54:20.600 --> 00:54:22.280\nWe talked about that a little bit.\n\n1348\n00:54:22.280 --> 00:54:24.240\nYou know, I'd always admire Jeff in Amazon\n\n1349\n00:54:24.240 --> 00:54:25.760\nwhen the greatest companies ever created.\n\n1350\n00:54:25.760 --> 00:54:28.840\nAnd I was a very enthusiastic customer\n\n1351\n00:54:28.840 --> 00:54:31.120\nof one-click shopping on Amazon.\n\n1352\n00:54:31.120 --> 00:54:32.680\nThat's a very transformative technology,\n\n1353\n00:54:32.680 --> 00:54:34.360\nhighly addicting, I might add.\n\n1354\n00:54:34.360 --> 00:54:36.840\nSo I asked the question, what about Amazon?\n\n1355\n00:54:36.840 --> 00:54:40.920\nAnd we contacted them and they were very interested.\n\n1356\n00:54:40.920 --> 00:54:43.400\nAnd we flew down there just a couple of days after\n\n1357\n00:54:43.400 --> 00:54:45.000\nI went to three of my leaders.\n\n1358\n00:54:45.000 --> 00:54:46.840\nSenior leaders came with me and met with Jeff\n\n1359\n00:54:46.840 --> 00:54:48.720\nand three of his senior leaders.\n\n1360\n00:54:48.720 --> 00:54:51.040\nAnd we had an amazing conversation.\n\n1361\n00:54:51.040 --> 00:54:53.080\nThe first conversation was amazing.\n\n1362\n00:54:53.080 --> 00:54:55.360\nAnd we talked about all the ways we could work together,\n\n1363\n00:54:55.360 --> 00:54:56.600\nall the synergies it could be.\n\n1364\n00:54:56.600 --> 00:54:58.680\nThey're explaining the whole situation with whole foods,\n\n1365\n00:54:58.680 --> 00:55:00.360\nhow we needed to cut our prices\n\n1366\n00:55:00.360 --> 00:55:03.440\nto take out the whole paycheck narrative.\n\n1367\n00:55:03.440 --> 00:55:05.520\nYou know, one thing I love about Amazon is,\n\n1368\n00:55:05.520 --> 00:55:07.080\nthey think long-term.\n\n1369\n00:55:07.080 --> 00:55:09.480\nThey're really willing to think 10, 15, 20 years\n\n1370\n00:55:09.480 --> 00:55:10.400\ninto the future.\n\n1371\n00:55:10.400 --> 00:55:13.000\nJeff is that kind of visionary leader.\n\n1372\n00:55:13.000 --> 00:55:14.120\nTwo days after that visit,\n\n1373\n00:55:14.120 --> 00:55:17.640\nthey sent a team down to Austin and due diligence was on.\n\n1374\n00:55:17.640 --> 00:55:20.440\nWe came to price agreement pretty quickly\n\n1375\n00:55:20.440 --> 00:55:22.480\nand we'd signed a merger agreement like six weeks\n\n1376\n00:55:22.480 --> 00:55:24.240\nafter the first contact with them.\n\n1377\n00:55:24.240 --> 00:55:25.720\n- Wow. (laughs)\n\n1378\n00:55:25.720 --> 00:55:26.560\nThat's great.\n\n1379\n00:55:26.560 --> 00:55:28.920\n- And it was a win-win-win for all of our stakeholders.\n\n1380\n00:55:28.920 --> 00:55:30.680\nOur customers did get lower prices.\n\n1381\n00:55:30.680 --> 00:55:33.880\nWe cut prices four times in the first two years.\n\n1382\n00:55:33.880 --> 00:55:35.640\nWithin two months of the merger happening,\n\n1383\n00:55:35.640 --> 00:55:38.800\nAmazon raised wages for every hourly person\n\n1384\n00:55:38.800 --> 00:55:41.280\nin their company and that included whole foods market.\n\n1385\n00:55:41.280 --> 00:55:43.400\nNumber three, our suppliers.\n\n1386\n00:55:43.400 --> 00:55:45.160\nThey not only didn't get cut,\n\n1387\n00:55:45.160 --> 00:55:48.840\nbut Amazon studied all our velocity of every product we sold\n\n1388\n00:55:48.840 --> 00:55:50.640\nand they picked up a lot of our suppliers\n\n1389\n00:55:50.640 --> 00:55:53.280\nand took them into the .com\n\n1390\n00:55:53.280 --> 00:55:56.360\nor they took them into Amazon Fresh.\n\n1391\n00:55:56.360 --> 00:55:58.320\nSo that was good for our suppliers.\n\n1392\n00:55:58.320 --> 00:56:00.560\nOur investors got a 30% pop\n\n1393\n00:56:00.560 --> 00:56:02.920\non the stock price from before that came out.\n\n1394\n00:56:02.920 --> 00:56:04.760\nSo they got a nice gain\n\n1395\n00:56:04.760 --> 00:56:07.640\nand the government got lots of money in taxes\n\n1396\n00:56:07.640 --> 00:56:10.040\nfrom a lot of capital gains taxes that were realized.\n\n1397\n00:56:10.040 --> 00:56:11.640\n(both laugh)\n\n1398\n00:56:11.640 --> 00:56:13.920\nIt was a win-win-win-win all the way around.\n\n1399\n00:56:13.920 --> 00:56:15.120\n- Absolutely.\n\n1400\n00:56:15.120 --> 00:56:16.840\nYou know, John, it's been so much fun\n\n1401\n00:56:16.840 --> 00:56:17.680\nand I wanna have some more\n\n1402\n00:56:17.680 --> 00:56:19.200\nwith my lightning round of questions\n\n1403\n00:56:19.200 --> 00:56:21.920\nand then we'll wrap this up very quickly here.\n\n1404\n00:56:21.920 --> 00:56:24.720\nWhat three words best describe you?\n\n1405\n00:56:24.720 --> 00:56:26.960\n- Playful, creative and loving.\n\n1406\n00:56:26.960 --> 00:56:29.480\n- If you could be one person for a day beside yourself,\n\n1407\n00:56:29.480 --> 00:56:30.760\nwho would it be?\n\n1408\n00:56:30.760 --> 00:56:31.600\n- Buddha.\n\n1409\n00:56:31.600 --> 00:56:34.000\n- What's your biggest pet peeve?\n\n1410\n00:56:34.000 --> 00:56:37.360\n- People that are chronically late.\n\n1411\n00:56:37.360 --> 00:56:39.680\n- Who would play you in a movie?\n\n1412\n00:56:39.680 --> 00:56:42.040\n- I hope Ryan Gosling or Matthew McConaughey.\n\n1413\n00:56:42.040 --> 00:56:43.520\n(both laugh)\n\n1414\n00:56:43.520 --> 00:56:45.040\n- You Texans, you know.\n\n1415\n00:56:45.040 --> 00:56:46.760\nWhat is it about Austin, Texas\n\n1416\n00:56:46.760 --> 00:56:49.240\nthat feels most like home to you?\n\n1417\n00:56:49.240 --> 00:56:52.240\n- That's a tough one for me, David, it's changed so much.\n\n1418\n00:56:52.240 --> 00:56:54.840\nMy home is where my wife is.\n\n1419\n00:56:54.840 --> 00:56:56.080\n- What's something you'd only know\n\n1420\n00:56:56.080 --> 00:56:59.000\nabout Whole Foods Market if you were a co-founder?\n\n1421\n00:56:59.000 --> 00:57:00.480\n(both laugh)\n\n1422\n00:57:00.480 --> 00:57:03.760\n- The only thing you know is how little we knew\n\n1423\n00:57:03.760 --> 00:57:05.080\nwhen we started the business.\n\n1424\n00:57:05.080 --> 00:57:08.800\n- What's your favorite thing to do in your spare time?\n\n1425\n00:57:08.800 --> 00:57:10.720\n- Go hiking or play pickleball.\n\n1426\n00:57:10.720 --> 00:57:12.720\n- I understand you're a really good chef.\n\n1427\n00:57:12.720 --> 00:57:16.000\nWhat's your favorite meal that you serve your guests?\n\n1428\n00:57:16.000 --> 00:57:18.640\n- A bean investable stew\n\n1429\n00:57:18.640 --> 00:57:22.440\nand a chocolate avocado pudding for dessert.\n\n1430\n00:57:22.440 --> 00:57:25.880\n- If I turned on the radio in your car, what would I hear?\n\n1431\n00:57:25.880 --> 00:57:28.520\n- You'd hear podcasts or book\n\n1432\n00:57:28.520 --> 00:57:29.920\nand I'm listening to.\n\n1433\n00:57:29.920 --> 00:57:31.400\n- What's one of your daily rituals,\n\n1434\n00:57:31.400 --> 00:57:33.480\nsomething that you never miss?\n\n1435\n00:57:33.480 --> 00:57:35.720\n- A daily ritual that I try to never miss\n\n1436\n00:57:35.720 --> 00:57:39.080\nis I always try to practice gratitudes in the morning.\n\n1437\n00:57:39.080 --> 00:57:41.800\n- What's something about you that few people would know?\n\n1438\n00:57:41.800 --> 00:57:44.240\n- A few people would know,\n\n1439\n00:57:44.240 --> 00:57:47.000\nI share things about myself,\n\n1440\n00:57:47.000 --> 00:57:49.120\nso I don't keep that many secrets.\n\n1441\n00:57:49.120 --> 00:57:50.880\nBut now I just wrote a book about myself,\n\n1442\n00:57:50.880 --> 00:57:53.120\nso a lot of secrets, I would have said people wouldn't know\n\n1443\n00:57:53.120 --> 00:57:55.400\nthat I've done a like a psychedelics in my life,\n\n1444\n00:57:55.400 --> 00:57:57.680\nbut now I just wrote a book and I talk about it in there,\n\n1445\n00:57:57.680 --> 00:57:59.600\nso I guess that one's out in the,\n\n1446\n00:57:59.600 --> 00:58:00.800\ncats out of the bag on that one.\n\n1447\n00:58:00.800 --> 00:58:04.040\nSo something people don't know about me right now,\n\n1448\n00:58:04.040 --> 00:58:06.720\nI really, really, really love music.\n\n1449\n00:58:06.720 --> 00:58:08.480\n- You know, appreciate that.\n\n1450\n00:58:08.480 --> 00:58:10.720\nThat's a good light to be around and we'll wrap this up.\n\n1451\n00:58:10.720 --> 00:58:13.040\nYou know, when we were talking before we started\n\n1452\n00:58:13.040 --> 00:58:16.760\nthis conversation or the official podcast, so to speak,\n\n1453\n00:58:16.760 --> 00:58:19.000\nyou said there's big difference between\n\n1454\n00:58:19.000 --> 00:58:21.160\nan entrepreneur and a professional manager.\n\n1455\n00:58:21.160 --> 00:58:22.760\nHow would you sum that up?\n\n1456\n00:58:22.760 --> 00:58:25.960\n- The entrepreneurs are generally, by the way,\n\n1457\n00:58:25.960 --> 00:58:28.480\nI see this happen to corporations again and again,\n\n1458\n00:58:28.480 --> 00:58:29.800\nit's happened to Whole Foods,\n\n1459\n00:58:29.800 --> 00:58:31.640\nis you have entrepreneurs that are founders\n\n1460\n00:58:31.640 --> 00:58:33.600\nthat create a business and then you bring\n\n1461\n00:58:33.600 --> 00:58:35.240\nthe professional managers in.\n\n1462\n00:58:35.240 --> 00:58:38.080\nSo the entrepreneur is very purpose driven,\n\n1463\n00:58:38.080 --> 00:58:41.560\nthey're actually, can be obsessive about something\n\n1464\n00:58:41.560 --> 00:58:44.280\nthat they see a potential, something they're trying to create,\n\n1465\n00:58:44.280 --> 00:58:46.520\nsomething they're trying to bring into life,\n\n1466\n00:58:46.520 --> 00:58:49.320\nit can be extremely driven in that regard.\n\n1467\n00:58:49.320 --> 00:58:54.360\nAnd the professional manager is oftentimes\n\n1468\n00:58:54.360 --> 00:58:56.760\nmuch more interested in their careers\n\n1469\n00:58:56.760 --> 00:58:58.520\nthan they are about the company.\n\n1470\n00:58:58.520 --> 00:59:00.480\nI'm not saying they don't care about the company,\n\n1471\n00:59:00.480 --> 00:59:03.680\nbut it's also just to stop along the resume, so to speak,\n\n1472\n00:59:03.680 --> 00:59:05.520\nfor the entrepreneurs, they're child\n\n1473\n00:59:05.520 --> 00:59:07.040\nand they love it like a child.\n\n1474\n00:59:07.040 --> 00:59:09.040\nThe entrepreneur will always love their business\n\n1475\n00:59:09.040 --> 00:59:11.000\nmore than any professional manager will.\n\n1476\n00:59:11.000 --> 00:59:13.080\nIt's their child, they created it.\n\n1477\n00:59:13.080 --> 00:59:16.800\nNo one loves your children like the parents do.\n\n1478\n00:59:16.800 --> 00:59:19.720\n- And John, you're the founder of Whole Foods now,\n\n1479\n00:59:19.720 --> 00:59:23.200\nI'm sure you go into Whole Foods and it's your baby.\n\n1480\n00:59:23.200 --> 00:59:25.640\nHow do you let go or have you?\n\n1481\n00:59:25.640 --> 00:59:29.360\nI mean, you've got these professional managers running it now.\n\n1482\n00:59:29.360 --> 00:59:32.040\nYou ever have any bitterness about what's going on\n\n1483\n00:59:32.040 --> 00:59:33.880\nor how do you feel?\n\n1484\n00:59:33.880 --> 00:59:36.480\n- Well, great question and the answer is that\n\n1485\n00:59:36.480 --> 00:59:41.040\nwriting the book, let me finish completely with Whole Foods.\n\n1486\n00:59:41.040 --> 00:59:43.000\nMy final gift to Whole Foods is this book.\n\n1487\n00:59:43.000 --> 00:59:45.320\nThis is a story, this is our story.\n\n1488\n00:59:45.320 --> 00:59:50.040\nAnd secondly that I already knew this would be a problem,\n\n1489\n00:59:50.040 --> 00:59:54.040\nso I deliberately do not interfere in any way\n\n1490\n00:59:54.040 --> 00:59:54.880\nwith Whole Foods.\n\n1491\n00:59:54.880 --> 00:59:58.360\nI don't stay up on stuff, I'm not staying up on the gossip.\n\n1492\n00:59:58.360 --> 01:00:00.760\nI really want my successor Jason Beeckel\n\n1493\n01:00:00.760 --> 01:00:04.120\nwho has very intelligent guy, great integrity,\n\n1494\n01:00:04.120 --> 01:00:06.480\nand he's got to take the company in the direction\n\n1495\n01:00:06.480 --> 01:00:08.720\nthat he and Amazon think is best for it.\n\n1496\n01:00:08.720 --> 01:00:10.760\nAnd I just wish him the very best.\n\n1497\n01:00:10.760 --> 01:00:14.200\nAnd the other thing is create another business\n\n1498\n01:00:14.200 --> 01:00:17.080\nlike Love Life that takes your interest\n\n1499\n01:00:17.080 --> 01:00:18.600\nand your passion to that.\n\n1500\n01:00:18.600 --> 01:00:19.720\n- Last question.\n\n1501\n01:00:19.720 --> 01:00:22.480\nWhat's one piece of advice you'd give to someone\n\n1502\n01:00:22.480 --> 01:00:24.560\nwho wants to be a better leader?\n\n1503\n01:00:24.560 --> 01:00:27.080\n- Spend more time appreciating people doing things\n\n1504\n01:00:27.080 --> 01:00:28.960\nthat are good and right.\n\n1505\n01:00:28.960 --> 01:00:30.840\nAnd never criticize publicly.\n\n1506\n01:00:30.840 --> 01:00:34.000\nAll criticism always needs to be done privately.\n\n1507\n01:00:34.000 --> 01:00:36.640\nIt prays publicly, criticize privately.\n\n1508\n01:00:36.640 --> 01:00:38.640\nIf you don't do that, I can almost guarantee\n\n1509\n01:00:38.640 --> 01:00:41.040\nyou won't be a very effective leader in the long run.\n\n1510\n01:00:41.040 --> 01:00:44.240\n- And I want to end this podcast by asking you\n\n1511\n01:00:44.240 --> 01:00:46.760\nhow you would end the meeting at Whole Foods.\n\n1512\n01:00:46.760 --> 01:00:49.320\n- We'd end all our meetings at Whole Foods\n\n1513\n01:00:49.320 --> 01:00:50.680\nand I believe I still do.\n\n1514\n01:00:50.680 --> 01:00:53.160\nWe end them with appreciations.\n\n1515\n01:00:53.160 --> 01:00:55.840\nAppreciations are the single biggest thing you can do\n\n1516\n01:00:55.840 --> 01:00:59.160\nto open up a more caring culture.\n\n1517\n01:00:59.160 --> 01:01:02.040\nSo they're voluntary, no one has to appreciate.\n\n1518\n01:01:02.040 --> 01:01:05.040\nBut people know the difference between an authentic\n\n1519\n01:01:05.040 --> 01:01:08.440\nappreciation when you're just sort of flattering somebody\n\n1520\n01:01:08.440 --> 01:01:10.080\n'cause the authentic appreciation,\n\n1521\n01:01:10.080 --> 01:01:12.160\nyou have to open your heart to do it.\n\n1522\n01:01:12.160 --> 01:01:15.680\nAnd so this is a very simple technique.\n\n1523\n01:01:15.680 --> 01:01:17.920\nDoesn't take very much time.\n\n1524\n01:01:17.920 --> 01:01:21.000\nBut the leader has to be the one to lead the way on that\n\n1525\n01:01:21.000 --> 01:01:22.680\nif you're trying to bring it into your culture.\n\n1526\n01:01:22.680 --> 01:01:23.760\nIt's very powerful.\n\n1527\n01:01:23.760 --> 01:01:25.800\nYou create a more loving, caring culture.\n\n1528\n01:01:25.800 --> 01:01:28.800\nIt's the single most important thing I can tell you to do\n\n1529\n01:01:28.800 --> 01:01:31.800\nif you want to create a culture that has more love\n\n1530\n01:01:31.800 --> 01:01:32.640\nand more care in it.\n\n1531\n01:01:32.640 --> 01:01:35.040\nJust begin intermating with appreciation.\n\n1532\n01:01:35.040 --> 01:01:36.920\nSimple to do and it's very powerful.\n\n1533\n01:01:36.920 --> 01:01:37.760\n- It's leader led.\n\n1534\n01:01:37.760 --> 01:01:39.600\nSo if you're the leader, how would you start that\n\n1535\n01:01:39.600 --> 01:01:41.120\njust so people can get a great tip\n\n1536\n01:01:41.120 --> 01:01:43.000\nto take to work tomorrow?\n\n1537\n01:01:43.000 --> 01:01:46.120\n- So David, I've really appreciate this podcast.\n\n1538\n01:01:46.120 --> 01:01:50.440\nYou obviously have your very seasoned business executive\n\n1539\n01:01:50.440 --> 01:01:51.920\nwith great accomplishments on your own,\n\n1540\n01:01:51.920 --> 01:01:54.160\nbut you're remarkably open-minded.\n\n1541\n01:01:54.160 --> 01:01:56.840\nI can feel your joy and your joy,\n\n1542\n01:01:56.840 --> 01:01:59.840\nyour day of re and your good sense of humor.\n\n1543\n01:01:59.840 --> 01:02:01.400\nJust the first time I've met you,\n\n1544\n01:02:01.400 --> 01:02:05.200\nI can feel that you were probably an outstanding leader\n\n1545\n01:02:05.200 --> 01:02:08.280\njust because of how you showed up in this podcast.\n\n1546\n01:02:08.280 --> 01:02:10.400\nAnd I really appreciate that about you.\n\n1547\n01:02:10.400 --> 01:02:12.920\n- Well, John, I really appreciate the fact\n\n1548\n01:02:12.920 --> 01:02:14.240\nthat you're a real deal,\n\n1549\n01:02:14.240 --> 01:02:16.400\nthat you've really changed America for the better,\n\n1550\n01:02:16.400 --> 01:02:18.480\nchanged the world with what you've done,\n\n1551\n01:02:18.480 --> 01:02:20.240\nthat you've got the vision to say,\n\n1552\n01:02:20.240 --> 01:02:21.920\n\"Hey, I'm not done yet.\"\n\n1553\n01:02:21.920 --> 01:02:25.160\nAnd I've got this new concept called Love Life,\n\n1554\n01:02:25.160 --> 01:02:27.480\nwhich is gonna change the world as well.\n\n1555\n01:02:27.480 --> 01:02:30.680\nI love it when I see people make a difference in the world\n\n1556\n01:02:30.680 --> 01:02:34.440\nand they truly do care about people.\n\n1557\n01:02:34.440 --> 01:02:35.680\nAnd you obviously do.\n\n1558\n01:02:35.680 --> 01:02:37.680\nAnd I know you couldn't build Whole Foods\n\n1559\n01:02:37.680 --> 01:02:41.040\nwithout that passion, not only for the brand,\n\n1560\n01:02:41.040 --> 01:02:43.720\nbut for the people that you had the privilege of working with.\n\n1561\n01:02:43.720 --> 01:02:46.200\nSo thank you very much for being on this podcast.\n\n1562\n01:02:46.200 --> 01:02:47.040\n- Thank you, David.\n\n1563\n01:02:47.040 --> 01:02:49.120\nYou're a natural lit appreciation.\n\n1564\n01:02:49.120 --> 01:02:50.880\nI don't think it's the first rodeo.\n\n1565\n01:02:50.880 --> 01:02:53.200\n- I've read the book on it.\n\n1566\n01:02:53.200 --> 01:02:55.960\n(both laughing)\n\n1567\n01:02:55.960 --> 01:03:08.360\nTo quote John, \"When you're truly authentic,\n\n1568\n01:03:08.360 --> 01:03:10.440\na lot of good things happen.\n\n1569\n01:03:10.440 --> 01:03:13.440\nThe success of Whole Foods is certainly proof of that.\n\n1570\n01:03:13.440 --> 01:03:15.960\nAnd if you really wanna dig into those lessons,\n\n1571\n01:03:15.960 --> 01:03:18.640\nI encourage you to pick up a copy of John's book,\n\n1572\n01:03:18.640 --> 01:03:20.200\nthe whole story.\n\n1573\n01:03:20.200 --> 01:03:22.560\nOne thing's for sure is you will read,\n\n1574\n01:03:22.560 --> 01:03:25.640\nand as you heard, to build his business,\n\n1575\n01:03:25.640 --> 01:03:28.040\nJohn had to follow his own path,\n\n1576\n01:03:28.040 --> 01:03:30.280\neven when it went against the grain.\n\n1577\n01:03:30.280 --> 01:03:34.000\nAnd that's something every leader needs the courage to do.\n\n1578\n01:03:34.000 --> 01:03:37.120\nThe ideas you're drawn to, the career path you're on,\n\n1579\n01:03:37.120 --> 01:03:40.640\nthe way you learn, it's all unique to you.\n\n1580\n01:03:40.640 --> 01:03:43.440\nHave the courage to understand what makes you tick,\n\n1581\n01:03:43.440 --> 01:03:46.200\nand then live with that authenticity.\n\n1582\n01:03:46.200 --> 01:03:49.560\nYeah, it may mean that you're not universally liked.\n\n1583\n01:03:49.560 --> 01:03:52.000\nIt may mean that you forged ground\n\n1584\n01:03:52.000 --> 01:03:54.560\nthat other people don't wanna go on,\n\n1585\n01:03:54.560 --> 01:03:57.640\nbut you'll be appreciated for who you are\n\n1586\n01:03:57.640 --> 01:03:59.960\nand what you're trying to do,\n\n1587\n01:03:59.960 --> 01:04:03.360\nand you will find the version of success\n\n1588\n01:04:03.360 --> 01:04:05.920\nthat really fulfills you.\n\n1589\n01:04:05.920 --> 01:04:07.960\nSo this week, here's what I want you to do.\n\n1590\n01:04:07.960 --> 01:04:12.600\nSpend a few minutes each day listening to decisions you made\n\n1591\n01:04:12.600 --> 01:04:15.760\nor actions you took that felt authentic to you.\n\n1592\n01:04:15.760 --> 01:04:21.120\nAnd then take some time to think about the actions\n\n1593\n01:04:21.120 --> 01:04:22.600\nthat you might have taken\n\n1594\n01:04:22.600 --> 01:04:26.840\nthat just didn't feel true to who you really are.\n\n1595\n01:04:26.840 --> 01:04:29.160\nWell, these moments of reflection\n\n1596\n01:04:29.160 --> 01:04:33.000\nare gonna help you follow your own unique path as a leader\n\n1597\n01:04:33.000 --> 01:04:36.080\ninstead of conforming for the sake of being liked\n\n1598\n01:04:36.080 --> 01:04:39.760\nor upholding other people's expectations of you.\n\n1599\n01:04:39.760 --> 01:04:42.160\nSo do you wanna know how leaders lead?\n\n1600\n01:04:42.160 --> 01:04:44.520\nWhat we learned today is the great leaders\n\n1601\n01:04:44.520 --> 01:04:47.200\nhave the courage to follow their own path.\n\n1602\n01:04:47.200 --> 01:04:49.320\nComing up next on How Leaders Lead,\n\n1603\n01:04:49.320 --> 01:04:51.680\nit's our quarterly best-of episode,\n\n1604\n01:04:51.680 --> 01:04:54.160\nwhich is jam-packed with our favorite insights\n\n1605\n01:04:54.160 --> 01:04:55.660\nfrom the last three months.\n\n1606\n01:04:55.660 --> 01:04:58.800\nThanks again for tuning in to another episode\n\n1607\n01:04:58.800 --> 01:05:00.600\nof How Leaders Lead where every Thursday\n\n1608\n01:05:00.600 --> 01:05:02.520\nyou get to listen in while I interview\n\n1609\n01:05:02.520 --> 01:05:04.840\nsome of the very best leaders in the world.\n\n1610\n01:05:04.840 --> 01:05:06.880\nI make it a point to give you something simple\n\n1611\n01:05:06.880 --> 01:05:10.240\non each episode that you can apply to your business\n\n1612\n01:05:10.240 --> 01:05:12.840\nso that you will become the best leader you can be.\n\n1613\n01:05:12.840 --> 01:05:16.000\n(audience applauding)\n\n1614\n01:05:16.000 --> 01:05:19.160\n(audience applauding)\n\n1615\n01:05:19.160 --> 01:05:22.320\n(audience applauding)\n\n1616\n01:05:22.320 --> 01:05:25.480\n(audience applauding)\n\n1617\n01:05:25.480 --> 01:05:27.660\n(buzzer)\n","

John Mackey 0:00

When you're truly authentic, a lot of good things happen. Everybody doesn't like you. Let's just state that for the record, a lot of people won't like you when you're authentic, and that's why most people aren't authentic, because they're worried people won't like them. But the thing is, the people that like you, they really like you for who you are, and not for who you're pretending to be.

David Novak 0:26

Welcome to how leaders lead, where every week, you get to listen in while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world. I break down the key learning so that by the end of the episode, you'll have something simple you can apply as you develop into a better leader. That's what this podcast is all about. As a leader, you know, there's often tension between the big ideas and dreams you have and the pressure you feel to conform to convention or other people's expectations of you. So how do you navigate that tension? Well, I can't think of a better person to shed some light on that big question than my guest today, John Mackey is the co founder and former CEO of Whole Foods, which has got to be one of the most compelling retail success stories in recent memory. But as you'll hear today, building it wasn't easy, and it wouldn't have happened at all if John had caved to the expectations and conventions around him instead of following his own path. Every leader needs to find their own path and follow it, and when you have the courage to follow yours, you can make some big things happen. This episode is going to inspire you to do just that. I guarantee it. So here's my conversation with my good friend and soon to be yours. John Mackey,

you know, you built this incredible, multi billion dollar business at Whole Foods, and you describe the process by using a very specific word, you say it was play. Why do you describe it that way?

John Mackey 2:07

I contrast play and work in a way that play is fun. When you're having fun doing something, it's play. Work is something that you do because you have to do it, but you may not be having that much fun. And if you're have to do it and you're having fun, then it can be both work and play. But I was much more keen on the play part than the work part. I just kind of always have done what I really like to do. I mean, from a very early age, I just broke away, went my own way as an entrepreneur, followed my heart, answered the call to the hero's journey that that came through my soul and and when you're doing an adventure, when you're doing what you really care about, what you want to do, it doesn't feel a lot like work. It's creative and it's fun. I love

David Novak 2:57

that the hero's journey that comes to your soul. Talk a little bit more about that,

John Mackey 3:01

well, that, you know, originally, that's from Joseph Campbell, but it's a really good metaphor. And I actually sort of believe everyone's called to a hero's journey in life, but most of us don't answer the call because we're well, we're too afraid. We're afraid to break away from our family if we have to, or our parents, we're afraid that we might fail, we're afraid that we don't have what it takes. We're afraid that we may be rejected, we lose our friends, or all these fears that come up and so people play it safe. And I just didn't, I just felt like life's an adventure, and we're not here that long. So, yeah, go for it. You know, speaking

David Novak 3:42

of an adventure, and, you know, I want to get more into Whole Foods in a minute. But you sold your business to Amazon in 2017 and then you stepped down the CEO just a couple years ago. Now, how did this idea of play lead up to what you're doing today with your your new venture, love life.

John Mackey 4:00

The great thing about writing a memoir, actually recommend everybody do that in their own life, because only looking backwards retrospectively, can you see the patterns and the threads you've created, and they the meaning. Although you can see some of the meaning as you're going along, it's when you look back and you think about it in depth, like I did when I was writing the whole story, that a lot of things clicked into place that I hadn't really completely understood before. And one of them, for example, a long time, I kind of thought my, you know, my higher purpose in life was to build Whole Foods and and I concluded now that actually, that was part of the adventure, instead of the end all of the adventure and so love life is like the next the next part, act two. We could call it, even though I'm older. But I also believe in what I call the infinite game, that you can create a business that will outlive you and outlast you and you contribute to it. An infinite game is a game we know what finite game is, right? Finite game is like basketball or baseball or or a card game, and you have a set of rules, and you play for a certain amount of hands or a certain amount of points or whatever, and then the game ends, and you declare winners and losers. An infinite game is one that doesn't ever have to end. It goes on. So business itself, in a way, is an infinite game. Capitalism is an infinite game. You could say life is an infinite game. It's one that DNA keeps replicating and the players change. They move in and out. People die. New players come on board. But the game itself goes on. So I see that with Whole Foods goes on, it's it was great love of my life, a great creation, and it's a lot of fun, but I've moved on now. I'm doing something else, and what I'm doing now is is also part of that hero's journey, or something I feel called to do, which is love life, which is, which is a business that is going to be, I think, I hope, over time, transformative of the way we manage healthcare. It's like a holistic health membership club. So we already have a telehealth business license in all 50 states, but we want to set up facilities. We want to open up these flagship locations all around the country and maybe eventually around the world. So the first one's in an old Best Buy. It happens to be in an LA area. It happens to be located right next to one of Whole Foods Market's most successful stores in Southern California, I had the advantage of knowing all the highest stores, surprise, surprise, at Whole Foods. I'd rather locate close to them when possible, because I think there's a good customer overlap. But we have we'll have a healthy food restaurant, we'll have a state of the art fitness center, we'll have a spa, we'll have all kinds of alternative health things, from yoga, pilates, physical therapy, chiropractic, acupuncture. We'll have recovery modalities like cold plunges and infrared saunas and hyperbaric oxygen chambers. You know, we'll have the all the high tech stuff. Along with that, we'll also have a medical center, and that's what sets us apart from like just a typical gym, because David, when do most people go see a doctor when they need it? Yeah, when they're sick? And oftentimes, then the doctors just prescribe drugs and they're managing symptoms. Very seldom do they reverse a disease through pharmaceuticals, unless it's a vaccination or it's an antibiotic and you have something that's a bacterial infection, otherwise, they're just really managing symptoms. But our philosophy that we want to change is that the doctor's job comes from trying to tend the sick into almost being a coach, helping people by going in and doing deep assessments and getting your your kind of your baseline health, and then creating an individualized plan for you personally, with a health coach and the doctor standing above that, developing a plan for you to become the healthiest version of yourself, physically, emotionally and spiritually. And so I really think humanity could have this great liftoff in terms of our health and vitality that would transform the medical care system. So anyway, to me, that's playful. It's a lot of work, but it's fun. It's creative. I'm doing something. I'm back in startup mode. David, I mean, I know you're starting it up, and that's the startup mode is really fun because you don't have you haven't built a bureaucracy yet. You're not weighted down by the HR department, the legal department, and you can be highly creative and playful, and that stuff will come eventually as it scales. But also, I get the opportunity to not repeat a few of the mistakes I might have made along the way. Make new ones. Once

David Novak 8:39

an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur, you know, shifting gears for a minute. I want to take you back, John, tell us a story from your childhood that shaped the kind of leader you are today.

John Mackey 8:49

I grew up in a in a family, particularly with a father that liked to debate things that you had to be able to defend your point of view. You had to have logic, facts, evidence. You had to be rational, and if you could make a good argument, then you know, maybe my father would change his mind. That was rare that you could make a good enough argument that changed his mind. But I learned how to do that. So I became that kind of leader in the sense that if people I wasn't too attached to the idea of being my own. If people had better ideas, I would want to implement those ideas. Or if I had an idea and they could improve on it or iterate on it, I would go along with that. Or if I had a bad idea, which wasn't, wasn't a rare occurrence, people would tell me all the reasons why it was a bad idea, and we drop it. So I created a culture with my leadership team, where we were peers, and best ideas one regardless of where they came from, and an idea was one that that people liked and that they would try to improve upon it. And so I think that leads to better decision making. When ideas are thought through, well through, the team has to get behind them. They're dissected. They're. Debated and the best ideas stay on top. It took me a long time, David, to figure out most people aren't rational. Most people don't change their mind when you give them good facts, good arguments and good evidence. Most people are follow confirmation bias. They just want to believe what they want to believe, and they'll go find the facts to back them up. The internet's really good for reinforcing confirmation bias. You do a Google is coffee good for me, and the Google again, and that is coffee bad for me. You'll find good arguments on both sides, and you can pick which ones you want

David Novak 10:31

to believe. That's great, you know? And you started what is now Whole Foods when you were a self professed hippie. You know, hippies are stereotypically laid back. Where'd you get the fire to build companies from the ground up? Because this is not something you can do with the laissez faire attitude. I

John Mackey 10:50

think that's true. I talked about the hippies was overdone. In other words, the media portrayed them that way because they saw them as a bunch of layabout no goods, because they weren't jumping into society and but what they really were doing was they were just following kind of a different drummer. But that doesn't mean hippies didn't have a lot of passion. They didn't have a lot of things they were interested in. They dove deeply into them. They just were, might have been unconventional, a lot of entrepreneurship. I mean, somebody like Steve Jobs was pretty much a hippie, if you know his story. I mean, his lovers were Joan Baez and definitely walking around barefoot. I mean, doing his own thing. And so he wasn't branded that. But in fact, that's what he was. He was coming out of the counterculture. He never graduated from college. So I think that in that era, there was a counterculture movement that had three major sources to it, if you think about, if you analyze it, first was a kind of a great awakening to alternative spirituality, the New Age spirituality came out of that particular time, as well as kind of a rebirth of certain evangelical Christian forms came out as well. You also had a social justice movement for anti racism, for more equity in society. Social Justice really gained steam in the 60s and 70s. And then finally, they had the environmental movement. It really took off. So the counterculture was had kind of streams coming in from those three different areas. And I would also say that maybe there's a fourth that hasn't been fully identified. It was a great era for entrepreneurship. I think that my father's generation had wanted to be they're the organization men. They were the ones that just wanted to get a good job, conform, earn a living for their family, be responsible providers, but they weren't really risk takers. They weren't out there trying to create new enterprises. And then we had an explosion of entrepreneurship that began really in the 70s and 80s, and still going strong today, I think,

David Novak 12:48

well, so you know, as you, as you think back and you think about Whole Foods and what you were going through at that point in time as an individual, what was the big problem you wanted to solve with whole foods? I mean, what? What made you think there was an opportunity?

John Mackey 13:03

That's why we can go back to the play question. Because I wasn't trying to solve a problem. I didn't go to business school. I never took any business classes. I wasn't trying to solve a problem. I was just fascinated and very interested in natural, organic foods. I had a food awakening. I moved into this vegetarian commune I had. Wasn't a vegetarian when I moved in, but I became one soon after. I got interested in natural and organic foods. The vision I had for before I went to that when I before I moved in that Co Op, I was about 23 when I moved in, 22 or 23 we were like a car. We were like a machine. And so what was food? Food was fuel. Food was gasoline. So you might as well eat what tastes good, because it's all kind of the same. So you eat the food that tastes good and it's going to give you the fuel you need to get through the day. And that my awakening was the realization that actually, we're this living organism with 10s of trillions of cells in our bodies that need to be nourished. It's not just about calories. It's not just about fuel. We're not a car. Gasoline was not going to work for us. We need to nourish our bodies, nourish ourselves, and if we do, we can enhance our vitality, supercharge our immune system, live longer, avoid getting the kind of chronic diseases, at least for a long, long time, that bedevil people when they get older. That all happened to me when I was in my early 20s, and then I was just on pat on fire about it. I was passionate about it. And so I became a food buyer at the place I lived for the food buyer there, and then I became, I learned how to cook, and I went to work for a small natural food store. And I came back to the community one night, and I talked to my girlfriend that I met in the commune, and I said, Renee, what do you think we open up our own natural food store? And she loved the idea, and so that's what we did. So for us, it was play, and being it was an adventure. It was a game. I wasn't trying to solve a problem. I was just doing something I loved that I

David Novak 15:01

cared about. Yeah, well, that's interesting, because today, almost every entrepreneur I talk to, and I talk to a lot of them, you know, they build their whole business and how they approach and develop that business on the notion of solving a big problem, but in reality, you did, because there really wasn't a healthy grocery store.

John Mackey 15:19

Sure, there were lots of problems that just wasn't our motivation. But Whole Foods changed the world in many ways and but we also kind of caught a wave. I remember such a wall of skepticism we got going from the very beginning when we tried to raise venture capital money. I mean, even though we were successful, they just thought this was just a very limited market for this hippie food, and that there wasn't very many people interested in that my parents' generation never really got it, and so they just didn't believe it was even possible. But we were solving a problem. I mean, you can reframe it that way. Every entrepreneur solves a problem or wouldn't get any business, but sometimes, like Steve Jobs said, nobody knew they needed an iPod until it was invented. If you'd done market research, he said they told you you need a you need a bigger CD that can hold, you know, 30 or 40 songs instead of 12. Not put something I can carry around in my pocket that'll have 5000 songs or all my music on it. Hey, do that for me. That'd be great. So was he solving a problem? Not really that no, people didn't even know they had a problem. He was doing something he was passionate about, and a result that changed the world, and the iPod morphed into the iPhone. And now look where we are.

David Novak 16:34

Yeah, and you did. You did change the way people look at food with whole foods. It's amazing success story, but I understand that your mom told you, when you were started this to do something more meaningful with your life than just going to the grocery business. You know, obviously you followed your passion. But what advice can you give others on when and how to follow the courage of conviction that you have? Well?

John Mackey 16:58

And my mother's problem was a I didn't finish school, so that really bothered her, because she was a college graduate, and my mom was concerned about respectability, and she wanted she saw my IQ test, on my aptitude test, she thought, you know, you could do anything you want to do in life, and John, you're choosing to be a grocer. In her mind, I was downwardly mobile, and I could have been a doctor. I'd be respectable. I'd be a doctor. Her father was a doctor, and I could be a doctor too. And she could never figure out, never understand why I would choose to just be, for her, a grocer was a lowly position. You know, you have an apron on and you're just selling fruits and vegetables and meat, and she just saw that as, you know, kind of not very important work, and so she was ashamed of me. She was disappointed that I wasn't fulfilling my potential. But I'd say my father, because they're the generation that grew up in the depression and the World War Two hit. My dad was 20 when Pearl Harbor was bombed, he joined the military. He had to grow up really, really fast. He never really got to follow his own hero's journey. He didn't answer the call of his heart. He did the responsible thing. He was always supporting me tacitly. I mean, because I think in some ways, I was his astronaut that he was launching out into space. I was doing the things I think he might have wanted to do but life didn't really give him the opportunity to do it. So I had my father supporting me. My mother just shaking her head saying, What are you doing? John, yeah, and on her deathbed, she tried to get me to promise that I'd go back to school and make something of myself.

David Novak 18:39

So you have your mom telling you this, your dad's spurring you on. So is that's what gave you the courage of conviction? Or how should people look at getting that fire to go do something like you did, just

John Mackey 18:50

like I said, I really think most people are just too scared. They're too worried about what other people think. They're too worried about failure. And quite frankly, I just didn't care. I talk about in the book. Early on, I did psychedelic drugs first time when I was, like 19 or 20, and it, it kind of knocked me off this path. I had a I saw that there was this deeper universe that I had, not that I was just living on the surface of reality, and that there was this much deeper reality. And then I, I became, I'd say, a seeker. I was questing for the meaning of life, seeking for purpose. I no longer wanted to follow the path that my friends were following or my my parents wanted me to follow. I just was was my life, and I was going to do what I wanted to do. I will tell you a story that kind of sums it up. I'm How old am I now? I'm 19 years old, and I decided, me and a buddy, first time I drop out of school, we're going to go hitchhiking around the country, going up to New York from Houston. And my mother was so freaked out about it. She was so upset about it. She said, if you walk out that door, I'm telling you right now, you can never come home again. And I gotta tell you, that shook me up. I. I paused. I was afraid, you know, it's like my mother's rejecting me. I'm never gonna come home again. And then I thought to myself, Well, if that's really how she feels, I guess I don't want to come home again. And I left. And of course, you know, a few months later, she was crying and begging me to come home. Of course, that was a pivotal point in my life, David, because that was when I decided to take control of my own life. It was going to be my life. I was going to do what I want to do. And I think people have to make that decision. I think entrepreneurs, if you ask entrepreneurs, they generally go to work when they're very young. As soon as I could, I started to earn money, even before I was legal age. I would do odd jobs. I really like to have money that I could spend on things I wanted to spend it on, and I wanted to be free. I have a great zest for freedom in life. I had it at a very young age, and so I don't know how somebody to tell somebody else what to do. I mean, everybody has to find their own way. I just followed my heart, and it led me on this wondrous adventure,

David Novak 20:59

fantastic I've written a new book myself called how leaders learn. I'd like to know how you went about building your know how to run a business that when you didn't have the MBA, you'd really never done that before. So what was your approach?

John Mackey 21:16

Well, first of all, I'm a fanatical reader. I am totally a voracious reader. I still am. I devour books. I love the creation of audible books now, because I can listen to books when I'm in my car, I can listen to them when I'm hiking or walking, and I can read them. And the great thing is that I can be reading a book on Kindle, and then I can be listening to it on an audiobook, and then those they sync up with each other. It's amazing technology and when you're passionate about something. So I had no business background when I started this business up zero, my resume goes like this, dishwasher, busboy boys, camp counselor, Assistant Manager, good food store, CEO, Whole Foods Market and now CEO of love life. Actually, I left out. I worked at AstroWorld for a while. I scooped ice cream there when I was 16. So the point is that I didn't have this background in business. I didn't take any business classes, none of that. I didn't study philosophy, religion and the humanities when I was at the universities. But once I started a business, I was all in it's like, wow, I didn't know anything. I just go down to the library and I pick up books on accounting, finance, marketing, H, human resources, every different aspect of the business I began to study. And when you're doing it, you're reading with intensity, because all of this stuff you're reading, you can see that how you could apply it at work. Now, at the same time, my father became my mentor, and he was very successful in business. He was an accounting professor for 19 years at Rice University, but then he went out, and he ended up being the CEO of a publicly traded hospital management company called Lifemark. Ended up selling out to back in the 80s, it was sold out to Hospital Corporation of America. And so my dad took me under we got really close, because for the first 16 years of Whole Foods existence, all the big decisions he was in on. And so he saved me from driving the bus off the cliff more than once. And then the third thing is, when I did make mistakes, you learn from your mistakes. As an entrepreneur, I've made I've made a lot of mistakes, but you know what I do? Learn from them. I don't keep repeating the same mistake over and over and over again. So reading guidance from my father and making mistakes, but learning the lessons. That's how I've learned, and I'm still learning. My dad's not with me anymore, but I'm still voraciously reading. I'm still an entrepreneur. I've gathered enough wisdom up over the years where I'm now imparting wisdom as much as I am soaking it up from other people.

Koula Callahan 24:01

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David Novak 24:58

And your father, he was a. Great mentor to you, and he was on your board, one of the original investors and and I understand you, you actually had a really tough decision to make, is as it relates to his involvement to the business. Can you share that with us? This

John Mackey 25:13

was after Whole Foods Market had gone public in 1992 after we went public, we kind of went on a bit of an acquisition spree, because we had this currency our stock, so we became a an exit strategy for companies that were like Whole Foods Market, where you had these little, small chains of natural food stores around the country, and the entrepreneurs had no effective way to be able to cash out, but now they could sell the business to Whole Foods, and they know that that their employees and team members are going to be part of this larger company. I had relationships with all these people, and so we bought bread and circus in Boston. We bought Mrs. Gucci's in Los Angeles, we bought unicorn village and bread of lifetown in Florida. There were many, many others that occurred over the years, but my father, after we went public, he began to resist these acquisitions. He thought, you're growing too fast. We don't need to take on all their problems. We have enough problems of our own. And he just saw the downside of it, and we began to fight a lot. Now I'm going to jump ahead a little bit, because I did ask him to get off the board in 1994 after I'd had a big blowout fight with him about Mrs. Gooch's and asked him to resign because it was wrecking our relationship. We'd been super close, and now we were fighting. I was also worried it might leak out to the media. You know that this father son blowout arguments were having was unseemly, but here's the thing, my dad did resign. It was difficult. That's probably the most difficult decision I've ever decision I've ever had to do. I turned 40. I really didn't I told him, the mentorships over, I'm still going to seek your advice from time to time, but I'm going to run this thing now, and it hurt him a lot, but I asked him to sell half of his stock, and he'd have all the financial security he'd need after that, the other half, we were going to grow the company to be worth a lot more. However, David, here's the key thing. One year after I kicked him off the board, he got diagnosed with Alzheimer's. He already had it. If you read up on the early signals of Alzheimer's, one is an irrational emotional outburst. My dad was no longer that guy that we used to argue at the dinner table. I'd make rational arguments, and he'd get all emotional. That was so out of character for him. So after he got the diagnosis, and I read up on it, it's like, oh my God, that's what was happening. These were the first signs of his Alzheimer's, which, by the way, that's a horrible disease. I don't wish that one on anyone. No,

David Novak 27:37

I've witnessed that myself. It's really tough. Now I understand that you your first brand was safer way. That's what you called your first store, right? How'd you end up with Whole Foods Markets? Uh, brand name,

John Mackey 27:51

so safer way was the store. Renee and I, my girlfriend from the commune that we created together, and we didn't know anything. I started working on it with her when I was 24 and she was 20. It was in a big old Victorian house, and which was not a great retail storefront, but it was zoned commercial, and it was in central Austin, so it didn't have a very It wasn't on a busy road. So it wasn't it was all the things you don't know about retailing now I didn't know then, but safer way was also vegetarian and didn't sell alcohol or sugar. It didn't sell coffee or caffeine. It was very, very pure. We just wanted to sell only sell food that was good for people. And this may not surprise you, but safer way was not very successful.

David Novak 28:42

Well, it wouldn't it wouldn't have worked. It beats that Taco Bell or KFC,

John Mackey 28:45

I can tell you that much. So we capitalized the business with 45,000 and Renee and I, even though we were only taking $200 a month, we lost 23,000 in the first year, and we eked out a small profit of about $5,000 a year too. But I was learning and getting the hang of it and but one thing I learned was we were extreme competitive disadvantages. I was beginning to understand a little bit of business strategy, and I thought, we have a terrible location. We have no visibility, we don't have very good parking, we don't have good access. Our product mix is too narrow. We're vegetarian. We're not selling the products people want to buy. And so we made a decision, counterintuitive decision, to try to expand it, relocate it, and expand it. And we merged with a small natural food store that was kind of a friendly competitor, and we changed the name to Whole Foods Market because they didn't like our name and we didn't like their name, and that was going to be a name we could both get behind. And that first Whole Foods Market sold meat, sold seafood, sold beer and wine, sold some sugars, and within six months of opening, it was the highest volume natural food store in the United States. It just took off. It was people asked me, How long did it take your first Whole Foods Market? Sort of be successful, and I say about two o'clock in the afternoon on the first day. And so we didn't, you know, all the mistakes we made to save her way again, I learned, and we didn't make them at Whole Foods made some new mistakes, but not those old ones. When

David Novak 30:13

I told my daughter, Ashley, I was going to have this conversation with you, John, she was so excited. She's such a huge Whole Foods Market customers in Where does she live? She's in Louisville, Kentucky. She goes and dad, the men and I walked into that store. I absolutely loved it, and I guess that was the case when you started your very first store. How do you sustain that kind of customer love? Well,

John Mackey 30:36

first, let me tell you a story before I get to that. The story is something like this, that about the first 20 years when people go into Whole Foods Market for the first time, you could just see it over and over again. People would never seen a store like that when they first went into it. Now the world has changed. Whole Foods helped change the world, but in the day, at least for the first 20 years of our existence, we were so different than every other store out there that people would like your daughter would go into it, and they'd be kind of blown away and get excited about it. By the way, I'm expecting the same thing to happen. When we open they go into love life. It's going to be like, Wow, how come nobody's done this before. This is such a good idea.

David Novak 31:14

Well, it's a great idea. I got to tell you, I love the idea. I mean, I was, I said, I wish I had one near me. We're going

John Mackey 31:20

to have imitators there quicker, because we live in a world where you can't keep secrets as well as you used to be able to. You can't fly under the radar so much anymore. But how do you get that kind of sustained the secret, I believe, is, is it's simpler than it sounds. I always say that the retail business is kind of simple to understand, in a way that management's jobs to hire the very best people you can find, make sure they're well trained and that they're service oriented, and then do everything you can to help them be happy in their work. Because if the employees, slash team members, are happy, they will make the customers happy if they're well trained, and then the happy customers make the investors happy, because they not only come back, but they become your word of mouth will always be every business's most important marketing strategy it can ever have. Satisfied customers bring their friends in, and that businesses grow virally, particularly if you don't have a brand, if you're starting up an entrepreneurial site, it's going to be you count on your customers going out and selling their friends on what you're doing. I think most of the great brands, I challenge you to name a great brand that was probably built primarily with advertising safe and right from the beginning, as opposed to becoming sort of a cult brand that grew through word of mouth and through public relations because the media would get excited about

David Novak 32:47

it. Every great brand starts out by gets momentum by getting talked about, and word of mouth really builds a business, you know, and you know, looking back, John, what would you say would be the three biggest moves in your opinion, that had the greatest impact on the growth of Whole Foods, if you could pick three? Well,

John Mackey 33:05

that's a great question. David, I've done a lot of interviews. No one's ever asked me that question. I think it's a really good one, because you asked me a strategy question. The first one was opening up the original big natural food supermarket, because there were only a couple in the whole United States, and that one just took off is going from a small store to a larger store. That meant we had a full selection. So people could one stop shop. When you're a small natural food store, people might come in there and pick up a few things. Think of something like Trader Joe's, for example, which is a very great company, and I'm only going to have nice things to say about it. You can't do all your shopping at a Trader Joe's. It's a limited assortment store. So people are, they're filling in at a whole foods, but they're shopping somewhere else with a natural food supermarket. If you are, you don't really have to go to another store, because you all the categories are covered, right? May not have all the brands that you want, but the categories are covered. So that was the first and most important move we ever made. That's what led to the revolution that Whole Foods ended up creating. Was people that wanted to live this natural food lifestyle didn't go need to go anywhere else. The second one for us was when we got out of Texas and we went to Northern California because they didn't have any natural food supermarkets there. And it was kind of the birth, that's where the hippies came from. That was the birth of the counterculture between San Francisco, Marin County, Berkeley, and the explosion you were having in Silicon Valley, the Bay Area, was about as hot as you could possibly be, and we, surprisingly, had very little competition. Once we proved we could do that, it was easy to easy to raise venture capital money, not easy, but we could get it, and then as we grew into other regions after that, we could see we could be a national company, and that gave us this huge potential market that got the investment community excited. Wow, these guys could be really big someday, and that's exactly how it played out. So those. Strategies were very important, then I would say, I'd actually say the IPO was very important to our success. You'll get a lot richer if you can hold on to your stock for a long time without diluting it down. But it's a slower path, right? Once we got that IPO money and we got our stock as a currency, we were able to consolidate the smaller players into our business, gain territory and talent that way, and we could scale quicker. So I'd say those were the three biggest moves,

David Novak 35:29

you know, and I've heard you also say that you really need to have patience as you grow, particularly a retail business. Does that hold true for you on a personal level as well. John,

John Mackey 35:42

I'm not very patient. I've met very few entrepreneurs who actually are very patient. I'm a very impatient person, but that's a lesson I learned kind of the hard way, that when before our brand was well known, anytime we go to a new market, we had to start over from scratch. We had to cultivate a customer from nothing and grow it over time. Now the good news about that, David, is that our same store sales, we average double digits same store sales for over 30 years. Think about that, or almost almost double digit for 30 years. That's incredible. But then, as we got better known, the stores would start out at really high sales volume, and we didn't have that same store sales went into an S curve. We start high, fall off, and then build it back. But for many, many years, we had such great same store sales because the store would start. I'll give you an example. Ann Arbor store. First one started at $75,000 a week, and it comped between 25 and 30% for like 15 years in a row. Do the math, you know, the rule of 72 so if it's growing at 24% we're doubling the sales every three years. So it went 75 to 150, to 300 to 600 to over a million dollars. So we had so many stores that followed similar type trajectories. And of course, the market as you know, they get excited about your same store sales.

David Novak 37:08

Yeah, you have to do that in the retail. It's same store sales, new unit development and return on capital. Those are the three things that drive your stuff. Those are the three most important metrics, absolutely, and you always have a lot of new brands at Whole Foods. It's one of the reasons why I like to go in there, just to kind of see what's happening and what's what's new, besides getting my New York strips, which I love, your beats there, I know you didn't start out thinking that way, but I'm glad, glad you partnered up with someone that showed you the light on that subject. You know, what did it take for a new brand or a product to earn its way on the shelves?

John Mackey 37:44

Well, the pencil pond source of that new product, if it's coming from an established company that we already have a relationship with, that brand would have that new product would have an easy on ramp, so to speak, because their salespeople would come in and present it, and we'd almost always pick it up, for sure. But I think what set Whole Foods apart for a long time was our commitment to local products. One of the things that began to happen is the natural foods industry gained steam is you had not only entrepreneurship on the retail side, you had massive entrepreneurship on the manufacturing side and in the agricultural side, you had all kinds of you know, the farmers markets didn't really exist. I'm not saying Whole Foods contributed to the farmers markets, but what I'm saying is, is that we were riding the same kind of wave. There weren't hardly any any farmers markets the United States. 40 years ago, there was one in New York. It's the only one I knew about. But now every place has got farmers markets because so many people have kind of started. Some are just gardeners, but a lot of them have started up these businesses with organic agriculture or regenerative agriculture. You have local manufacturers of salsas. There was no craft beer when I was a kid. The beers that you could get were, you know, like Budweiser, Schlitz, Pabst Michelob was a gourmet beer. I remember Coors when I grew up in Texas. Coors was like, We had friends in high school get drink at 18 when I was a kid, and they would actually go to Colorado, cross the border to pick up Coors beer and bring it back. So that was considered to be like a craft beer. And now you have not just craft beers, but you've got wineries popping up all around you. Think used to be California, wineries are everywhere in America. Now there's so much entrepreneurship that's occurred, and Whole Foods Market was a platform for that entrepreneurship. If you had local entrepreneurs in Louisville. They could try it out in our stores there and then. If it was successful, they could spread to a wider geographical region. Well, when I was there, we're changed since I left, but we were divided into 10 geographical regions, and so with their own regional president. So if it was successful in one store, it could spread to the rest of the. Region, and then if it was successful in the region, the region would champion it to go to a second region. If it was successful in two regions, it could go national. So we saw lots and lots of entrepreneurs build their dreams, and we didn't charge them slotting allowances, and we made it easy to get in. We weren't trying to make it difficult for them to grow, and so we were a logical place. They didn't have to pay to play. They could just come in, if the products worked and they sold well, then we they knew they could grow with us. And so we fulfilled literally hundreds and hundreds, perhaps even 1000s, of entrepreneurs dreams. They got started at Whole Foods. That

David Novak 40:40

is just such a great insight, not to have them pay the slotting allowances, just get them then on the shelf. Earn your way on the earn your way on the shelf. That's right. They weren't trying to differentiate.

John Mackey 40:52

I mean, think about it, I would say one of the best allies Whole Foods Market had was actually Walmart, because Walmart, when they started doing their super centers, they scared the crap out of the entire conventional supermarket industry is like, how are we going to compete with Walmart? There's this juggernaut, and their prices are so low. So the first thing they tried to do to compete was they tried to become more like Walmart. They spent less capital on their facilities. The stores were more warehousey, they were more sterile. Keep the capital expenses down. Then they cut the labor so they gave less service. They just tried to do everything they could. They tried to buy and if Costco came along, they tried to do club packs, and they really trying to compete on price. And Whole Foods was just going a completely different direction. We were trying to compete on quality and service and having different kinds of products that they weren't available. So Walmart did us a favor by basically making our competition obsessed with them and not pay much attention to us, as we kind of flew under the radar. And that's when we jumped away from just sort of the hippie customers, because the middle class housewives started coming in because our produce was fresher and better, because our team members might have had piercings and tattoos, but they were awfully nice to them, and they reminded them of their kids anyway, that all kind of grew for Whole Foods, and part of that was not charging these local suppliers to play with us. We didn't pay to play what

David Novak 42:16

was the biggest surprise you've ever had with a product that came into Whole Foods? If you thought there's no way it's going to win. Well,

John Mackey 42:23

one I missed the boat on was Whole Foods also has a venture capital arm, and so we invested in a lot of suppliers. I think that the one I overlooked the most, when Beyond Meat came out, I kind of looked at their ingredients and I said, you know this, this is not a healthy product. And I just didn't account for the fact that it was a as I'm personally vegan, it wasn't really a product I was particularly interested in, because why? Didn't think it was healthy product, but it really caught on, and it just exploded. And then impossible burgers came out, and you had this whole new category of products. I completely didn't see that a younger generation wanted to get their burger and fries, but they were happy to have one that wasn't actually the real it really actually be for real meat. So I missed that one. There are plenty of other ones.

David Novak 43:15

We'll be back with the rest of my conversation with John Mackey in just a moment. As you've heard us talk about, John felt like he overlooked an opportunity with Beyond Meat. Well, wouldn't you know it, one of my earliest episodes here on how leaders lead is with none other than Ethan Brown, the founder and CEO of Beyond Meat, and like John, Ethan also stresses the importance of bringing your authentic self to work. We're

Ethan Brown 43:42

all mix of confidence and insecurity. And, you know, it's okay to be insecure about things and to try to address them. And so so much of the work of being a better leader at this point is now internal work. You know, how do I work through issues within myself that I want to address? Right? And the better that I can do that, the more effective I'll be as a leader. I'm less into management books, and I'm more into that process of better understanding why I make the decisions that I make, why I do what I do, so that I can improve on weaknesses and be a better person and be a better leader as a result.

David Novak 44:17

Go all the way back to Episode Six and listen to my entire conversation with Ethan brown here on how leaders lead, episode six, and now we're over 200 Oh my gosh.

You got a lot of accolades thrown your way. I mean, you built this big business, you know, it's yet, you know, at least on the surface of this conversation, you seem like you're pretty humble, down to earth guy. How does John Mackey stay? John Mackey, in that sense,

John Mackey 44:54

I always try to show up in the world as I really am. It's that going back to that breaking away. My family and doing what I wanted to do. I've always had a passion to just be authentic, to just be myself when you're truly authentic. A lot of good things happen. Everybody doesn't like you. Let's just state that for the record, a lot of people won't like you when you're authentic, and that's why most people don't aren't authentic because they're worried people won't like them. But the thing is, the people that like you, they really like you for who you are, and not for who you're pretending to be. And if you're if you're kind of putting a false persona out there, then people might like the false persona, but not really know the real person. So I've never been very good at pretending to be somebody I wasn't. So I just thought, I better just be who I am, because that's really all I'm any good at. Anyway.

David Novak 45:47

You know, with the kind of success that your company had, hubris sometimes can bring you down. I mean, you can get really, really cocky. Tell us a time when maybe you saw that creeping in at Whole Foods Market, and what did you do to combat it?

John Mackey 46:01

The main thing is, is to always get people to be focusing on what the competitors are doing better than you, because they're always doing some things better than you. We spend a lot of time going in and seeing what our competitors are doing, and I'd always ask the challenge I'd always put to our team and we'd be going in there is, I don't want you to come back and tell me what we're doing better than them. You got to come back and tell me at least three things are doing better than us, because I already know for doing some things better than them. But so what? That's just arrogance, if you can learn from anybody and everyone, but if you have hubris, then you no longer are able to learn and grow, you're going to be stuck, and so I've always put that challenge. I also think the team that I had people like Walter Rob and AC Gallo, they were very driven, competitive, people who wanted to be the best, but were always seeing around the corner that somebody was coming up behind them, and so they had to run faster. I just I think our culture was such a culture that we really weren't resting on our laurels. I think that people asked me what I think the biggest mistake that I made was, and I think it was when we came out of that 2008 2007 2008 recession. David, our our stock had dropped. Imagine it had dropped 90% and we were trading at three times our operating cash flow, so you could have bought our company and paid for it with our own money in just three years. So that was a very scary time, and we took in some private equity money and got it in friendly hands to get the voting shares so that we wouldn't have an activist wouldn't take us over. But then when we came out of that. We came out of it, and our same store sales went quickly into double digits again, and our profits just went through the roof. Hubris did kick in at that point a little bit, because we had this near death experience. And as we were back into double digit comps for the first time in a few years, we got giddy, and stock prices were going up, and that was the missed opportunity. Whole Foods had to cut prices. We could see that our competitors were beginning this. Conventional supermarkets were beginning to pick up more and more of our products. They were changing the design of their stores. They were becoming more of a competitive threat. We didn't pay enough attention to it. We sort of blew it off. We had hubris, collectively and what we needed to do was we always thought we were going to have better quality, better service, better selection, and so we didn't take that threat strong enough. And that was the kind of the best opportunity we ever had. If we'd cut our prices into that climb out of that recession, we'd still be an independent company today. Shareholder activists wouldn't have come along. We'd be independent. I would have retired and anyway, but Amazon wouldn't own the company most likely. So I don't think we didn't completely escape from hubris. We made a mistake there, and I think at the end of the day that that had consequences down the road for us.

David Novak 48:58

Do you think your your what is it? The whole paycheck, perception was the reason why you ultimately end up having to sell,

John Mackey 49:05

yes, and the fact that we we couldn't, easily once the activists came on board, we couldn't change it. We needed to cut our prices. But you know how it is, if you're selling something for you have shareholder activists, they want to get the stock price up. And you and you, if you go and you're selling something for $1 and you start selling it for 90 it for 90 cents, that might be a great decision long term, but in the short run, your sales are going to go down. Your same store sales are going to go down, and your profits are going to go down, and the activists are going to take over your company. So we needed to do that sooner. But I will tell you something that Amazon let Whole Foods Market cut its prices significantly four separate times in the first two years, costing Amazon hundreds of millions of dollars. But Whole Foods Markets prices are far more competitive if we got them to where they needed to be for us to be a sustainable business in that competitive marketplace, if we could have done that on our own, we. Be independent. We didn't. We didn't do it. We had a chance, and when, when we realized we had to do it, it was too late. It's

David Novak 50:06

interesting. You know, you just created such a buzz when you were acquired by Amazon. Tell us a story behind that decision. Well,

John Mackey 50:16

we had Jana partners took the activist position in us, and I met with those guys, right? You meet with the activists a lot of times. We have a common goal. They want to get the stock price up. We want to get the stock price up. Let's strategize on how we can do that. When our team met with them, they came down to Austin. They had this PowerPoint presentation, which this one they were showing to Wall Street. I looked at it, and of course, they'd taken our stock price at the all time, all time high, and it's seen it as this, you know, negative story, ever since, and they had some inaccuracies in that presentation. I remember when it was over, I said, that's a very interesting presentation. I disagree with some of the points. Would you give me a copy of that and I'd like to address some of your concerns? They said, No, well, we're not going to give you a copy. And I said, Well, I can't address your concerns. He says, We don't care. Then he said, listen, John, I'm going to tell you exactly what we're going to do. The first thing we're going to do is we're going to take over your board of directors. You guys have a board that's it's too old. It's been with you too long, and we're going to we're going to put up alternative candidates, and we're going to take over your board. After we take over your board, we're going to fire you, and we're going to fire the rest of, most of the rest of your team. We'll keep a few, but we're going to fire most of them, and then we're going to put your company up for sale to the highest bidder. And there's not a damn thing you can do about it. And then they stood up and walked and walked out of the out of the room.

Unknown Speaker 51:40

Oh, by the way, let's go have dinner.

John Mackey 51:43

So then we, you know, we looked at the alternatives that are facing us, right? So there are different alternatives. We did hire we had bankers. We hired Evercore as defense bankers. We hired walktail to be our attorneys. And, you know, we began to create strategies where we'd fight these guys off and keep them from taking over our board. We actually turned over a lot of our board that Evercore recommended we do, because they just had too much tenure. Apparently, it's bad governance. If somebody's on your board 15 or 20 years used to think that would be a good thing, but no that means they're too close to management. So we had to get rid of our long tenured ones or anybody that had any conflicts of interest. We got rid of brought in some new high powered directors, so we were prepared to fight, but I still knew we needed to lower our prices, and that wasn't going to be able to something we could do in the short run. That was the only way Whole Foods was going to be sustainable long term. Number two, we could, we could take it private. We certainly had a lot of interest in taking the company private. But you know, the risk of taking a company private is, what if we had another 2000 2008 72,008 downturn? Well, we'd have so much debt on our own balance sheet because, you know, they do a bridge loan, once they get control, they refinance it and borrow the money against the company's cash flow and its balance sheet. We had good cash flow, so, but that was assuming the market was going to be good, and if it turned down, we might go bankrupt. And then, thirdly, we did. I well, maybe there were friendly hands, like I talked to we talked to Warren Buffett. He had good sense of humor. He made a joke about it. He said, Well, you know, I own Dairy Queen. I don't think it's a good brand fit for me. But I think he probably looked at it and thought it was too pricey, my guess, I met with Albertsons on an informal basis to just talk to them, and I could see right away that was not going to be a good fit for us. So what are we going to do? So we probably were going to fight, but I kept asking this question over and over again. What's the win, win, win solution? What's the best solution for our investors, for our customers, for our team members, for our suppliers and the communities we're part of? Is there a solution that will be a win for all of them? Of course, I couldn't figure it out, but then I woke up one morning and it popped in my brain right when I woke up. I must have been dreaming about it. What about Amazon? And I'd met Jeff Bezos about a year before, and a Microsoft CEO Summit. I really liked him. We had a great talk together. We served on a panel just the two of us. He's interested in scuba diving. I am too. We like to read science fiction and fantasy books. We talked about that a little bit. You know, I'd always admired Jeff and Amazon, when the greatest companies ever created, and I was a very enthusiastic customer of one click shopping on Amazon. That's a very transformative technology, highly addicting, I might add. So I asked the question, What about Amazon? And we contacted them, and they were very interested, and we flew down there just a couple of days after I brought with three of my leaders, senior leaders, came with me and met with Jeff and three of his senior leaders. And we had an amazing conversation. The first conversation was amazing. And we talked about all the ways we could work together, all the synergies it could be there. I explained the whole situation with whole foods, how we needed to cut our prices. Us to take out the whole paycheck narrative. You know, one thing I love about Amazon is they think long term. They're really willing to think 1015, 20 years into the future. Jeff is that kind of visionary leader. Two days after that visit, they sent a team down to Austin, and due diligence was on. We came to price agreement pretty quickly, and we'd signed a merger agreement like six weeks after the first contact with them. Wow, that's great, and it was a win, win, win for all of our stakeholders, our customers did get lower prices. We cut prices four times in the first two years. Within two months of the merger happening, Amazon raised wages for every hourly person in their company, and that included Whole Foods Market number three, our suppliers. They not only didn't get cut, but Amazon studied all our velocity of every product we sold, and they picked up a lot of our suppliers and took them into the.com or they took them into Amazon Fresh. So that was good for our suppliers. Our investors got a 30% pop on the stock price from before that came out. So they got a nice gain, and the government got a lots of money in taxes from a lot of capital gains taxes that were realized. It was a win, win, win, win, win all the way around. Absolutely.

David Novak 56:13

You know, John, it's been so much fun, and I want to ask some more of my lightning round of questions, and then we'll sure. We'll wrap this up very quickly here. What three words best describe you,

John Mackey 56:23

playful, creative and loving.

David Novak 56:26

If you could be one person for a day beside yourself, who would it be?

John Mackey 56:30

Buddha?

David Novak 56:32

What's your biggest pet peeve?

John Mackey 56:35

People that are chronically late,

David Novak 56:36

who would play you in a movie?

John Mackey 56:38

I hope Ryan Gosling or Matthew McConaughey.

David Novak 56:43

Oh, you Texans. You know, what is it about Austin, Texas that feels most like home to you?

John Mackey 56:49

That's a tough one for me. David has changed so much. My home is wherever my wife is.

David Novak 56:54

What's something you'd only know about Whole Foods Market if you were a co founder,

John Mackey 57:00

the only thing you know is, is how little we knew when we started the business.

David Novak 57:06

What's your favorite thing to do in your spare time,

John Mackey 57:08

go hiking or play pickleball.

David Novak 57:10

I understand you're a really good chef. What's your favorite meal that you serve your guests,

John Mackey 57:15

a bean and vegetable stew and a chocolate avocado pudding for dessert.

David Novak 57:21

If I turned on the radio in your car, what

John Mackey 57:24

would I hear? You'd hear podcasts or book that I'm listening to.

David Novak 57:29

What's one of your daily rituals, something that you'd never miss,

John Mackey 57:32

a daily ritual that I try to never miss is, I always try to practice gratitudes in the morning.

David Novak 57:38

What's something about you that few people would know,

John Mackey 57:42

a few people would know I share things about myself. So there's, I don't keep that many secrets, but and now I just wrote a book about myself, so a lot of secrets, I would have said people wouldn't know that I've done a like a psychedelics in my life. But now I just wrote a book, and I talk about it in there, so I guess that one's out in the cat's out of the bag on that one. So something people don't know about me right now. I really, really, really love music,

David Novak 58:06

you know, appreciate that does good lightning round, and we'll wrap this up. You know, at the time when we were talking, before we started this conversation, or the official podcast, so to speak, you said there's big difference between an entrepreneur and a professional manager. How would you sum that up?

John Mackey 58:23

The entrepreneurs are generally, by the way, I see this happen to corporations again and again. It's happened to Whole Foods, is you have entrepreneurs that are founders, that create a business, and then you bring the professional managers in. So the entrepreneur is very purpose driven. They're actually can be obsessive about something that they see, a potential, something they're trying to create, something they're trying to bring into life, that can be extremely driven in that regard. And the professional manager is oftentimes much more interested in their careers than they are about the company. I'm not saying they don't care about the company, but it's also just a stop along the resume, so to speak, for the entrepreneurs their child, and they love it like a child, the entrepreneur will always love their business more than any professional manager will. It's their child. They created it. No one loves your children like the parents do.

David Novak 59:16

And John, you know you're the founder of Whole Foods now, I'm sure you go into Whole Foods and it's your baby, you know, how do you let go? Or have you, I mean, you know, you've got these professional managers running it. Now. You ever have any bitterness about what's going on? Or do you how do you feel?

John Mackey 59:33

Well, great question, and the answer is that writing the book, let me finish completely with whole foods. My final gift to Whole Foods is this book. This is a story. This is our story. And secondly, that I already knew this would be a problem, so I deliberately do not interfere in any way with whole foods. I don't stay up on stuff. I'm not staying up on the gossip. I really want my successor. Jason beekle, who has very intelligent guy, great integrity, and he's got to take the company in the direction that he and Amazon think is best for it. And I just wish him the very best and and the other thing is create another business like love life takes your interest and your passion to that last

David Novak 1:00:18

question. What's one piece of advice you'd give to someone who wants to be a better leader, spend

John Mackey 1:00:24

more time appreciating people doing things that are good and right, and never criticize publicly. All criticism always needs to be done privately, and praise publicly. Criticize privately. If you don't do that, I can almost guarantee you won't be a very effective leader in the long run. And

David Novak 1:00:40

I want to end this podcast by asking you how you would end a meeting at Whole Foods.

John Mackey 1:00:47

We'd end all our meetings at Whole Foods, and I believe they still do. We end them with appreciations. Appreciations are the single biggest thing you can do to open up a more caring culture. So they're voluntary. No one has to appreciate. But people know the difference between an authentic appreciation and when you're just sort of flattering somebody, because the authentic appreciation, you have to open your heart to do it. And so this is a very simple technique. Doesn't take very much time, but the leader has to be the one to lead the way on that. If you're trying to bring it into your culture, it's very powerful. You'll create a more loving, caring culture. It's the single most important thing I can tell you to do if you want to create a culture that has more love and more care in it, just begin in your meetings with appreciation. Simple do, and it's very powerful.

David Novak 1:01:36

It's leader, LED. So if you're the leader, how would you start that? Just so people can get a great tip to take to work tomorrow.

John Mackey 1:01:42

So David, I I've really appreciate this podcast. You've been you obviously have. You're a very seasoned business executive with great accomplishments on your own, but you're remarkably open minded. I can feel your joy and your joy Dave ree and your and your good sense of humor, just this first time I've met you, I can feel that you were probably an outstanding leader just because of who you how you showed up in this podcast. And I really appreciate that about you. Well, John, I

David Novak 1:02:11

really appreciate the fact that you're a real deal, that you've really changed America for the better, changed the world with what you've done, that you've got the vision to say, Hey, I'm not done yet, and I've got this new concept called Love Life, which is going to change the world as well. I love it when I see people make a difference in the world, and they truly do care about people, and you obviously do. And I know you couldn't build Whole Foods without that passion, not only for the brand, but for the people that you had the privilege of working with. So thank you very much for being on this podcast.

John Mackey 1:02:46

Thank you, David. You're You're a natural at appreciation. I don't think it's the first rodeo.

David Novak 1:02:51

I've written a book on it. You

to quote John, when you're truly authentic, a lot of good things happen. The success of Whole Foods is certainly proof of that. And if you really want to dig into those lessons, I encourage you to pick up a copy of John's book the whole story. One thing's for sure is you will read and as you heard to build his business, John had to follow his own path, even when it went against the grain, and that's something every leader needs the courage to do. The ideas you're drawn to, the career path you're on, the way you learn it's all unique to you. Have the courage to understand what makes you tick and then live with that authenticity. Yeah, it may mean that you're not universally liked. It may mean that you forge ground that other people don't want to go on, but you'll be appreciated for who you are and what you're trying to do, and you will find the version of success that really fulfills you. So this week, here's what I want you to do, spend a few minutes each day listing the decisions you made or actions you took that felt authentic to you, and then take some time to think about the actions that you might have taken that just didn't feel true to who you really are. Well, these moments of reflection are going to help you follow your own unique path as a leader, instead of conforming for the sake of being liked or upholding other people's expectations of you. So do you want to know how leaders lead, what we learned today is that great leaders have the courage to follow their own path. Coming up next on how leaders lead, it's our quarterly best of episode, which is jam packed with our favorite insights from the last three months. Thanks again for tuning in to another episode of how leaders lead wherever. Thursday, you get to listen in while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world. I make it a point to give you something simple on each episode that you can apply to your business, so that you will become the best leader you can be. You

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