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 rags-to-riches how-to as entertaining as it is wise.
In this debut memoir, Bahamian millionaire Bastian offers insight into building a business.
The author was a millionaire by the time he was 19, an impressive feat considering he began his working life filling stockpots and rolling napkins in his father’s Nassau restaurant, a locals’ hole-in-the-wall far from the city’s tourist hotels. “In many ways, I started ten steps behind the starting line in a world where opportunities felt few and far between,” writes Bastian in his introduction. A poor student with a gambler’s risk tolerance and a salesman’s eye for an unserved market, the author dropped out of college to launch his own satellite installation business—the first of its kind in the Bahamas—eventually expanding into prepaid phones and other electronics. With this book, Bastian uses his personal experiences to illustrate the steps aspiring entrepreneurs should consider when building their own empires. “My goal isn’t just to tell my story,” he explains; “it’s to provide you with a starting point, a strategy, and the encouragement you need to take your first step toward something bigger.” The book alternates between memoiristic chapters describing the author’s youth and career and instructional chapters outlining the best practices to “become a lion” (his preferred metaphor for a brave, risk-taking captain of industry). From evaluating one’s skill set and choosing a suitable goal to the practicalities of regulation and taxes, Bastian walks the reader through the complicated processes of starting and maintaining a successful enterprise. While much of the advice is of the boilerplate variety, the author offers it with clarity and candor, devoting an entire chapter, for example, on how to fail productively. It is the biographical material that lends his advice unusual weight—Bastian’s stories of flying back and forth between the Bahamas and Miami to personally import satellite dishes are fascinating enough to stand on their own. Readers may be unable to replicate his success, but there is no denying that his tale is inspiring.
A rags-to-riches how-to as entertaining as it is wise.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9798891882485
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Advantage Media Group
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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