Whole Foods CEO Says Amazon Merger Enabled Long-Term Thinking

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Wrenching events like the pandemic put a business’s commitment to its values to the test, says Whole Foods Market CEO John Mackey. But his company has stuck to its focus on healthy fare and small suppliers during the crisis.

●John Mackey, a vegan, co-founded Whole Foods in 1980 ● He sold the company to Amazon for $13.7 billion in 2017, months after an activist investor pushed for changes ● Mackey in September released his latest book, Conscious Leadership: Elevating Humanity Through Business

How did the pandemic affect you?

Whole Foods has done a lot better than other businesses, because we weren’t shut down. We saw our sales go up, and our online sales went way up. But it’s been incredibly stressful on the company, make no mistake about that.

Was there a leadership lesson here?

A company is ultimately about relationships, about trust, and about partnership. And the hardest thing in Covid has been the difficulty, other than virtually, to connect with people. More people may work at home when this is over, but in reality, if you’re going to maintain a culture, you have to have people connecting with each other, and there’s no real substitute for doing that in person.

How is the merger with Amazon going?

A big merger is a little bit like a marriage. I’ve been married 30 years. I love my wife, and I love maybe 99% of everything about her, and 1% I’m not so fond of. A merger’s similar. Amazon has a different culture than Whole Foods. We love most things about Amazon, and they probably love most things about Whole Foods. But, you know, not everything.

So what works? Amazon thinks long term, and they’re enabling Whole Foods to think long term. We’ve had three major price reductions, we’re beginning a fourth. They’re making investments in technology for Whole Foods that I think will be transformative. And they’ve been respectful of our culture; they haven’t tried to just turn us into Amazon. So the best way to answer that question is, “John, if you could do it all over again, would you make the same decision?” And the answer is, yes. It was the right decision for us.

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