John Mackey opens up to founder Chris Benguhe in a conversation that covers the essence of conscious capitalism and the interconnection between personal and business life.

[From the Insider vault: a look back at an interview with John Mackey in May 2024.]

Chris Benguhe: John Mackey, I am so excited and so honored to speak with you today. So, thank you, first of all, for being here to chat with us at the Center for Social Capital. I appreciate it very much.

John Mackey: Thanks for inviting me to come on. I appreciate it.

Chris Benguhe: There are a lot of things I want to talk to you about today. Obviously, you have so much to say and you’ve said a lot of it. But first of all, I want to just let our readers and viewers know about this amazing opportunity to get to know you on a very deep and personal level — that maybe they haven’t been able to before — because of the very powerful and personal revelations in this new book that you have. It’s called The Whole Story: Adventures in Love, Life, and Capitalism, which is a marvelous title, by the way. Obviously, it’s a nice take-off on the name of the incredible retail outlet that you began so many years ago, and that changed the industry.

But I love the whole subtext and subtitle with Adventures in Love, Life, and Capitalism. It really digs into some very deep personal reasons, not just for how and why you founded the company but on your life, the direction you took with it. Though you decided not to be a philosopher, this is a very philosophical book in a whole lot of ways. I would just like to know, first of all, what made you write this type of book and why now?

John Mackey: Well, I’ve answered that question. I also want to point out that the title, The Whole Story, connects to Whole Foods, but the subtitle, Love, Life, and Capitalism, the “love life” refers to my new business that I’m starting up called Love.Life. So, I’ve tied these two together in the title and the subtitle.

Now, why did I write this book? Three reasons come to mind. The first one is that it’s my final gift to Whole Foods. I’m done with Whole Foods. I’m moving on. I’ve retired from Whole Foods a year and a half ago now, 18 months ago. I dedicated the book to all team members, all Whole Foods Market team members, past, present and future. And this is our story. Yes, it’s told from a first-person perspective, but I hope that this will be a book that team members at Whole Foods will read for, hopefully, decades to come. So, it completes me with Whole Foods. It’s my final gift, and that’s the first reason.

The second reason is that I wrote it for myself because the thing about writing is two things. One is that you learn a lot about yourself when you write a book like this. I had to relive almost 50 years of my life, and year by year, event by event. We also interviewed about 30 people that they remembered a few things I’d forgotten. When they reminded me of it, then I got back into that space. I’ve been able to relive it to a certain extent, and that’s been rich for me. Fifty years sounds like a long time, but it’s funny when you’re doing it. When you’re writing the book, it all flows together and it doesn’t seem like it’s that long of a period of time, but I realized it is a long period of time. It’s half a century.

The third reason I wrote it was: Tying in with that is that when you’re writing, writing is inherently creative. So, as you are writing, you are actually putting pieces together that you’d never put together before. You actually have certain realizations that you’d never realized before. The act of writing about it is inherently a creative act, and it’s also a synthesizing act. I came to understand myself better and Whole Foods better by writing this book. So, part of that was done for myself in a way. The third thing is I think this book, it’s written like a novel. It’s meant to be a narrative. It flows. It’s got dialogue in it. I tried to be as candid as possible and how naive I was when I started out, how many mistakes I made and how foolish I was in so many regards and mistakes and lessons that I learned.

So, I think it’s a book that can help entrepreneurs of any kind — business, social entrepreneurs — because it’s a journey. Entrepreneurship is creative, but it’s also this journey. The whole story describes my journey as a businessperson, but also as an entrepreneur and as a creative man. I think entrepreneurs will really like this book. It’s a good story. So, I think people that like stories will like this book. So, I did it. I wrote the book for all of these reasons and probably some other reasons that I haven’t yet made conscious to myself.

Chris Benguhe: I love what you said there, on so many levels. One of my businesses, I help people — CEOs — write their books, and I always talk about how it’s this journey. So often, they’ll come to me and they just start spitting out facts and talking about things they’ve done. I say, “Sit back and let’s think about the transformation that you’ve gone through and how that happened, how that relates to what you did.” So, I love that you said that from a writer’s perspective, from an editor’s perspective, but also from an entrepreneur’s perspective. So much of what you share in this book, it’s extraordinarily helpful I think. Not just from a business perspective but from a universal life perspective and the life of an entrepreneur, because I think being an entrepreneur is something wholly different than just being successful in business. I think you zero in on that in some pretty powerful ways, the way you tie it into things that happened in your life.

One of them that resonated with me so much was the emphasis on your dad and the relationship that you had with your dad. I grew up with what may have been one of the greatest salesmen and business thinkers in the world, who came from nothing in the Bronx and saw a man reading The Wall Street Journal one day and said, “I’m going to do that,” and became very successful. Every night at the dinner table, he was giving us business lessons. You talk about not just wanting your father’s buy-in and approval because he was an investor in the company but there was this very real rite of passage that you talk about, I think, in not just getting his advice but convincing him that what you were doing made sense, that the way you were going to do it made sense. Why was that such a big and important step for you?

John Mackey: I think the important thing to understand is that I had absolutely no background in business whatsoever. In fact, I disdained business when I was in my early 20s. I thought of myself, in my college days, as a democratic socialist, and that business was greedy and selfish. I couldn’t imagine myself doing business. I was pursuing a degree in philosophy. I was really a seeker looking for the meaning of life and the purpose of life. Why are we here? What does it mean? That theme, by the way, as you know, is woven all through the book. My own discovery of my own purpose and my own spiritual development is all woven into the book.

But going back to my dad, my dad had been a very … He was a businessman. He had been an accounting professor for 16 years at Rice University before he left Rice, and he was an accounting professor. So, he started working for some of his clients, and then he got hired. He moved up corporate ladders until he ended up … His final position was CEO of a public hospital management corporation called Lifemark. That business was sold eventually to, I think, Hospital Corporation of America (HCA). My dad retired at that point.

So, he knew a lot about business and he knew he was a great accountant. While we had been close when I was a younger boy growing up, because we shared a love of sports, we played: He hit fly balls to me for years and years and years. I played baseball. He taught me how to play golf, and then basketball became my sport. That was something my dad wasn’t interested in until I started playing it. And then he started getting interested in it. Of course, I got into high school, and I got older. I got into college, and I got a little alienated from both my parents.

And then, without going and telling my whole story of the book, when I got interested in business was when I wanted to start a natural food store. I moved in this vegetarian housing co-op, became a vegetarian and had a food awakening and got very excited about natural organic foods. I just was super pumped about it, very excited about it. I began to study it and read about it. And then I hatched this idea of starting my own small natural food store. It’s critical of the book. Not only was my dad instrumental, but my girlfriend at the co-op, Renee Lawson at that time — now Renee Lawson-Hardy — she was excited about it, too. [If] she hadn’t been excited, I’m not sure Whole Foods would exist, at least not the way that we created it. Some other thing would’ve probably existed, but not what we did.

Since I started this business up, I don’t know anything about business, I don’t have any money. So, first thing my father did was help invest in the business. But then he also took me under his wing and began to mentor me. This was extremely good for our relationship. I got very close to my father again. He was my most trusted advisor and mentor. The first 16 years of Whole Foods Market’s business existence, I really didn’t make any important decisions that I didn’t check out with him first, which was a really smart thing to do because we would’ve failed. I’m sure I would’ve … I always liked to say, “I would’ve driven the Whole Foods bus off a cliff if my dad wasn’t there to grab the wheel before I did so.” As a result, that helped us be successful. It brought us closer together.

So close, my dad was my best man at my wedding.

And then, of course, I do tell the story of the conflicts we began to have and me asking him to leave the board back in the year 2000; no, 19 … ; when was it? 1994 is when I asked my dad to leave the board, because we’d been having all these big disagreements and fights and whatnot. It was only a year later, after he left the board, that he got diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. That’s when I realized, “Oh, that’s why we were having all of those fights all the time — because he was having these emotional swings.”

My father was absolutely essential. I would say for the first half of the book, the book is written in the first person, he is the second main character to myself.

And then, of course, in the second half of the book, he goes into the darkness of Alzheimer’s and eventually passes away.

So, I don’t know if I’m answering your question, but I think my dad was absolutely essential to our success. He invested money, but mostly he trusted me; he taught me and trusted me, had faith in me. When you’re just a young man starting out in the world and you don’t have this background in business. Now, I did read literally hundreds of business books. I am a bibliophile and a sponge, so it wasn’t just my dad. By the way, when you’re really interested in something, your learning is accelerated. I was a sponge. I read these books and, because I had to apply this in everyday business, it all made sense to me. I totally got into business and my dad actually helped guide me on some of the books to read, which I mentioned in the book.

Chris Benguhe: No, what I love, though, so much and why I asked you that question — and I think you did a great job of answering it — is the humility and the humanity that comes out. That is a very important part of an entrepreneur, and we believe — and I think you believe as well — it is a very important part and integral part of business. You cannot just be this guy who thinks he knows it all, or this person who just thinks they know it all, and they’re all just about achieving some extraordinary business success. It’s more of a holistic idea of, “I want to learn, I want to grow, and I want to grow as a human being, as a person.” It’s all interconnected, and that’s why I loved what you talked about when you very humbly talked about how you didn’t know that much and needed advice and guidance and you reached out for it. But, at the same time, there’s that point at which you’ve got to stand up and find your own way as well.

So, it’s really an extraordinary template for the personal and business life of an entrepreneur. It’s so interesting how there are so many books that I’ve read by entrepreneurs and founders that don’t tell that personal story and that personal side, and don’t go deeply into the family background and whatnot.

My father, he was giving me advice till the day he died. I think it’s just something so age-old that maybe we’ve forgotten nowadays. But 1,000 years ago or even 100 years ago, the idea of seeking out our elders for wisdom and thought was commonplace. Now, you don’t hear about it as much. So, I loved that connection to something that I think is so age-old and so important, but it connects business to life, which it should never be separated from because …

John Mackey: No, it shouldn’t.

Chris Benguhe: … business is a part of life. I think you masterfully did that with this tie-in to your father.

You also did it with another very interesting chapter and anecdote when you talked about this 100-years flood that occurred in your early days, something that could have completely ruined you. You wrote something that just startled me, and I want to read it real quickly because it’s very stirring. You said, “As I stared at the soggy remains of Whole Foods Market, I felt much older than my 27 years. I wondered what it all meant about the future and about my future. It wasn’t immediately clear that we could recover from this. Maybe God or the universe had passed judgment upon this particular dream. Maybe John Mackey wasn’t meant to be a grocer after all. At the very least, I thought, ‘Riley, that would please my mother.’ But then I thought about my father who had been so supportive, investing his time and his money in the business; how would he feel if we failed? I didn’t want to let him down or our other investors.”

This was fascinating to me on so many levels. But the idea of not just succeeding for yourself but for others, and the idea of that very real doubt that we go through as human beings. I’ve read way too many books where I hear founders saying, “I never doubted myself for one minute.” I knew absolutely that this was their …

John Mackey: They’re lying.

Chris Benguhe: That’s what I think every time. I say, “That’s impossible. There’s no way a human being can be that confident.” So, I absolutely loved this. Beyond what you wrote there, obviously, how did you feel at that moment and what was it about wanting to achieve this for others that maybe pushed you forward more than anything else?

John Mackey: Well, imagine I’m trying to raise capital for this business, and the people that invested their money — invested it because they believed in me or trusted me — I had a responsibility to them. They’d invested money. My dad certainly had some money, but Renee is in; Renee’s family is invested; friends of our families are investing — it’s the friends and family round.

Renee and I were so young, and they believed in us. I didn’t want to let them down. I didn’t want to have to … Sure, you could make an excuse, “Hey, we were doing really well and this flood came along. What can we do? I’m not to blame.” But that wouldn’t matter. They had entrusted their money to us. That’s why I say the second-happiest day of my life was when we did our IPO, because everyone had initial public offering back in January of 1992; because everyone that had believed in Renee and I were now paid off. Not just paid off — they could exit the car. They could sell their shares if they wanted to.

We were publicly traded for a huge gain over what they had invested in initially back in 1978. Those 14 years, this was the first time they actually could exit after [investing]. They had had to invest for 14 years before they actually could get a payday. But then from that point onward, I felt like, “You know what? I have delivered to everyone that put their trust and faith in me and Renee. We have delivered on what we promised, and more so.” More so.

Of course, most people didn’t sell their stock immediately. It might’ve dribbled a little bit of it out, but they held on and had a much longer ride. But it was a relief for me. I still knew that there’s all this growth ahead and challenges for the business, but I did feel that I had not betrayed the trust that had been put in me. I had delivered on that. I felt like a load was lifted off my shoulders. New loads come on. You have new responsibilities, but that one was fulfilled with the IPO.

(Read Part II  here.)

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