John Mackey Quotes

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

John Mackey

#2. I love my cooking tools because I enjoy cooking - a Vitamix for smoothies and a rice cooker for steel-cut oats. I travel with a small rice cooker. I soak oats overnight, and when I get up, I just turn the rice cooker on, and it cooks the oats perfectly every time.

John Mackey

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

John Mackey

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

John Mackey

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

John Mackey

#6. We've always tried to be good citizens in the communities that we do business in.

John Mackey

#7. I'm a huge NBA fan and watch many games each year. Following any sport is kind of bringing us back to our tribal roots.

John Mackey

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

John Mackey

#9. I started out young and idealistic, and it was all about social justice and fair distribution of resources. I didn't understand why everybody couldn't be equally prosperous.

John Mackey

#10. I sometimes think that unions don't understand that we live in a free society, and people have the right to not select union representation if they don't want it.

John Mackey

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

John Mackey

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

John Mackey

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

John Mackey

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

John Mackey

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

John Mackey

#16. More than once in the history of Whole Foods Market, the company was unable to collectively evolve until I myself was able to evolve - in other words, I was holding the company back. My personal growth enabled the company to evolve.

John Mackey

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

John Mackey

#18. The way yogurt works is you take the old yogurt culture and you put it in milk. You have to put enough of the old culture in, and then that old culture will convert the milk into yogurt.

John Mackey

#19. Examine our every action through the lens of how we would feel if it were to become front page news.

John Mackey

#20. The stakeholder approach to business sees integration rather than separation, and sees how things fit together.

John Mackey

#21. I tell students and young professionals all the time to follow their hearts, do what they truly love, and if it's business, run it by being grounded in ethical consciousness.

John Mackey

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

John Mackey

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

John Mackey

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

John Mackey

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

John Mackey

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

John Mackey

#27. You have to understand: the narrative that people have about business and capitalism is that they are fundamentally selfish, greedy, and exploitative. Of course, I don't agree with that narrative.

John Mackey

#28. Message boards are like going to a Halloween masquerade party. Everybody has a screen name.

John Mackey

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

John Mackey

#30. We believe that business is good because it creates value. It is ethical because it is based on voluntary exchange; it is noble because it can elevate our existence, and it is heroic because it lifts people out of poverty and creates prosperity.

John Mackey

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

John Mackey

#32. Good leaders need to be able to connect to all of those around them. This is especially true at Whole Foods, where we have a very team-oriented culture.

John Mackey

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

John Mackey

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

John Mackey

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

John Mackey

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

John Mackey

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

John Mackey

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

John Mackey

#39. In many companies, the person who talks the best usually gets the job. I got snowed by a few of those people over the years. I still think communication is important, but I don't think there's always a correlation between being a great communicator and other virtues that make for a great leader.

John Mackey

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

John Mackey

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

John Mackey

#42. Libertarians are constantly arguing with each other who is the most pure libertarian and who is most ideologically pure.

John Mackey

#43. Whole Foods has a good health care plan.

John Mackey

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

John Mackey

#45. I've been amazed at how quickly people can heal themselves, actually.

John Mackey

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

John Mackey

#47. It's competition that forces companies to get out of their complacency.

John Mackey

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

John Mackey

#49. I've always thought the main argument for organic was more environmental than a health argument. I just don't think spraying a lot of pesticides into the environment on a routine basis is a good thing.

John Mackey

#50. You can't live if you don't eat, but you don't live to eat. And neither does business exist primarily to make a profit. It exists to fulfill its purpose, whatever that might be.

John Mackey

#51. Food is intensely pleasurable, and people are afraid that if they change the way they eat, they'll stop having pleasure.

John Mackey

#52. Every man, woman and child consumes, on average, 43 teaspoons of sugar a day. In 13 days, that adds up to a five-pound bag of sugar.

John Mackey

#53. As the saying goes, The longest journey that people must take is the eighteen inches between their heads and their hearts.

John E. Mackey

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

John Mackey

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

John Mackey

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

John Mackey

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

John Mackey

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

John Mackey

#59. While we clearly need health-care reform, the last thing our country needs is a massive new health-care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new unfunded deficits and move us much closer to a government takeover of our health-care system.

John Mackey

#60. Back then, before the Internet, you had these paper catalogs that you ordered all the food from. So, we flipped through the catalogs, looked up the food we wanted, called them up, and they would show up in trucks.

John Mackey

#61. We knew it was going to be a market, and we knew it was a food market. Well, what kind of food market? It's kind of natural foods, kind of organic foods. So, we eventually settled on Whole Foods Market.

John Mackey

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

John Mackey

#63. I believe that all forms of socialism have been proven over time to result in a loss of both economic and civil liberties, with increasing poverty.

John Mackey

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

John Mackey

#65. I think for any small business that's bootstrapped, the overwhelming challenge initially is getting to positive cash flow.

John Mackey

#66. We should all have the legal right to purchase health insurance from any insurance company in any state, and we should be able use that insurance wherever we live. Health insurance should be portable.

John Mackey

#67. Healthier team members get a bigger food discount. We give our sickest team members an option to go through what we call the Total Health Immersion, where we take them off for a week, and we do intensive diet-and-lifestyle education.

John Mackey

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

John Mackey

#69. There are now more phone connections in the world than there are people.

John E. Mackey

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

John Mackey

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

John Mackey

#72. If you're growing very rapidly, it doesn't matter if you make mistakes, in a way, because the growth kind of bails you out.

John Mackey

#73. Whole Foods Market tries to embody all of the principles of conscious capitalism all the time, but like any person or company, we sometimes fall short.

John Mackey

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

John Mackey

#75. I really do believe that America has this weight problem - obesity issues - and we have all these diseases that we get - heart disease, cancer, diabetes, autoimmune diseases - that are primarily lifestyle diseases.

John Mackey

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

John Mackey

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

John Mackey

#78. A healthy diet is a solution to many of our health-care problems. It's the most important solution.

John Mackey

#79. People in America are addicted to sugar and to fat and to salt.

John Mackey

#80. Snatam Kaur is a yogini, and I find her music deeply spiritual. I feel more love and I feel more peace when I listen to her music.

John Mackey

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

John Mackey

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

John Mackey

#83. I think for leadership positions, emotional intelligence is more important than cognitive intelligence. People with emotional intelligence usually have a lot of cognitive intelligence, but that's not always true the other way around.

John Mackey

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

John Mackey

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

John Mackey

#86. My dad for a long time was an accounting professor at Rice University. And then he went out on his own, and he got hired by a client. He ended up being CEO of a hospital management company before he retired, called Lifemark.

John Mackey

#87. At the end of the day, the quality of life is all we have, and it's just as important to that lobster, the quality of life that it lives - even if it's not as long - as the quality of your life.

John Mackey

#88. I dropped out of college for the last time in 1977.

John Mackey

#89. When I'm hiring leaders, I pay a lot of attention to what their peers and what people who report to them say about them. We want people who relate well with their peers and cooperate in an exchange of information rather than being overly competitive.

John Mackey

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

John Mackey

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

John Mackey

#92. In general, when you travel, you get into a different reality and are able to more accurately reflect on your ordinary life. Hiking does that for me.

John Mackey