A couple of years ago the founder of Whole Foods gave a speech at FreedomFest in Las Vegas. Now John Mackey has revised and extended his remarks in Liberty.
Mackey started out in the Sixties as the classic hippie/commune type. He “studied eastern philosophy and religion,” lived in a commune, and believed “that business and corporations were essentially evil because they selfishly sought profits.”
Then in 1978 he and his girl-friend started “a natural foods market called Safer Way” with $45,000 in startup capital. Of course, starting a business changed his life. Everything he “believed about business was proven to be wrong.” He discovered that
business is based on voluntary cooperation. No one is forced to trade with a business; customers have competitive alternatives in the market place; employees have competitive alternatives for their labor; investors have different alternatives and places to invest their capital. Investors, labor, management, suppliers — they all need to cooperate to create value for their customers.
Of course, he did find out that not everything was a bed of roses in the business world.
[O]ur customers thought our prices were too high, our employees thought they were underpaid, the vendors would not give us large discounts, the community was forever clamoring for donations, and the government was slapping us with endless fees, licenses, fines, and taxes.
Now, of course, Safer Way is Whole Foods, the most profitable food retailer in the nation.
But is Whole Foods purely about profit? Not at all, says Mackey. Business must go beyond the selfish pursuit of profit to something more. Mackey sees business
as an interdependent system of constituencies connected together in a "harmony of interests."
Freedom and prosperity must be thought of as “beginning goals.” But the freedom movement must get beyond that, and a negative emphasis of “freedom ‘from’ government coercion” must give way to
the freedom "to" take responsibility for our own lives; the freedom "to" take responsibility for our own communities and our planet.
Mackey uses Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to develop a vision of the good, the true, and the beautiful in a concrete discussion of health, peace, education, environmental sustainability, globalization, and his own initiative, FLOW, or Freedom Lights Our World.
John Mackey has gone a long way from his youth in the counter-culture movement. And he raises the great question.
How can anyone believe that you can make the world good and noble through ruthless application of force—using government, the agency of coercion and compulsion?
John Mackey has found a way to build a better world based on a “harmony of interest.” But what about the rest of us?
No comments:
Post a Comment