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The Limits of John Mackey’s Brand of Enlightened Capitalism
Can Amazon-owned Whole Foods ever live up to its founder’s ideals?
If ever there were a moment in which the leaders of corporate America have been exploring a more enlightened form of capitalism — debating it, promising it, testing it, debunking it, retracting it, reviving it, promising it again — that moment is surely now. John Mackey, a member of that class as the co-founder of Whole Foods and its CEO for the past 40 years, is perhaps one of the earliest proselytizers of a strain he calls “conscious capitalism.”
A free-market enthusiast and now Amazon employee, Mackey, early on in his latest book, Conscious Leadership, reminds us of the ethos that he has long championed. “One of the foundational tenets of Conscious Capitalism,” he writes, name-checking his 2013 book of that title, “is stakeholder integration.” For the uninitiated, he explains, a stakeholder is “any person, company or other entity that interacts with the business.” Old-fashioned shareholders — investors with stock ownership — are stakeholders. But so, too, under this more humane theory of business, are a company’s customers and employees (and arguably other groups or entities like suppliers and the environment), who ought to be served by a company’s efforts.
