The-Morality-of-Capitalism-PDF

Mackey: I guess I’m a little bit odd in this respect, because Ihaven’t taken any salary from Whole Foods for almost five yearsnow. Or bonuses. The stock options, which I would be entitled to,are given to The Whole Planet Foundation to make micro-creditloans to poor people around the world. I’m highly motivated bythe purpose of Whole Foods, rather than by how much money Icould potentially extract from the business in terms of compensation.I believe that I personally have more than enough wealthfrom the stock that I still own in the company.Palmer: And, once again, how do you define that purpose?Mackey: The purpose of Whole Foods is . . . well, if we had moretime, we could talk at some length about the higher purpose ofWhole Foods. I gave a talk to our Leadership Group about twoweeks ago. What I can say in about a minute is that our companyis organized around seven core values. Our first core valueis to satisfy and delight our customers. Our second core valueis team member happiness and excellence. (This is all on ourwebsite, by the way, so we make it quite public.) Our third corevalue is creating wealth through profits and growth. The fourthcore value is being good citizens in the communities where wedo business. The fifth core value is to try to do our business withenvironmental integrity. The sixth core value is that we view oursuppliers as partners and we try to engage in win-win relationshipswith them. And seventh we wish to educate all of ourstakeholders about healthy lifestyle and healthy eating. So ourhigher purposes are a direct extension of those core values. Someof these include: trying to heal America; our nation’s fat and sickand we eat terrible diets and we die of heart disease and cancerand diabetes. Those are lifestyle diseases—those are largely avoidableor reversible diseases, so that’s one of our higher purposes.We have a higher purpose about our agricultural system, to tryto make it a more sustainable agricultural system that also has ahigh degree of productivity.The third higher purpose is connected to our Whole PlanetFoundation, working with Grameen Trust and other micro-creditorganizations [Editor’s Note: Grameen Bank and Grameen Trust19