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
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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