An upbeat self-portrait of a business titan.
The co-founder of Whole Foods tells his story.
Mackey, co-author of Conscious Capitalism, recounts his spiritual, political, and entrepreneurial evolution as his supermarket company rose to astounding success. He started with a small grocery called Safer Way, which opened in Austin, Texas, in 1978, featuring natural foods. The store began to do well, but Mackey thought it could do much better if it expanded significantly. After some debate about the name, he and his co-founders decided on Whole Foods Market, and the first one opened in 1980. Mackey, intent on creating a “beautiful edifice of food, health, teamwork, and business,” was euphoric. Staffed by “an eclectic bunch—artists, lawyers, musicians, geologists, college dropouts, Vietnam War veterans, grad students, and more”—the store’s community all felt like family. However, as Whole Foods evolved into “an entire ecosystem of new products and businesses,” Mackey faced challenges to his leadership, which he sometimes barely survived. Through the confrontations, though, he “found a renewed connection to the higher purpose of Whole Foods and to the importance of love in both life and leadership.” Seeking insights about his life’s purpose led him to try ecstasy, LSD, and breathwork, all stops on his spiritual journey. Business setbacks, too, were stages in that journey. Clashes with unions, for example, taught him a lesson: to nurture trust in the company and faith in his leadership. “I didn’t want to just resist the unions,” he writes. “I wanted us to excel in creating cultures that made them irrelevant.” (That viewpoint is eminently debatable.) Mackey describes himself as joyfully competitive and a libertarian—far from the progressivism of many of his most loyal customers—who resists “governmental controls and subsidies” that move people “away from the natural discipline and innovation of free markets towards the stultifying inefficiencies of socialism.”
An upbeat self-portrait of a business titan.Pub Date: May 21, 2024
ISBN: 9781637745120
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Matt Holt/BenBella
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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