Amazon's acquisition of Whole Foods is a big deal in the supermarket sector, but its's also deeply ironic and instructive for those familiar with the business philosophy of Whole Foods founder John Mackey— that business can and should operate on a higher moral plane, striving to manage itself in ways not just profitable but also that would serve some of the purposes of traditional philanthropy.
Riding high in 2013, Mackey coauthored Conscious Capitalism, a Harvard Business Review Press book envisioning a “heroic spirit of business” that would benefit society. Instead of trying to please corporate shareholders, the conscious capitalist would serve a wide array of “stakeholders” by “focusing some of their attention on social and environmental challenges.” Conscious-capitalist business would be “built on love and care rather than stress and fear”; workdays would “race by in a blur of focused intensity, collaboration, and camaraderie.” All this contrasts favorably, wrote Mackey, with the narrow horizons of “traditional businesses,” which “give their managers hard targets for metrics like market share, profit margins, and earnings per share.”
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