John Mackey

our success as their own success.

Whole Foods surviving meant that we were all simultaneously winning.

This had a profound effect on me.

I had always thought business was just about kind of, you know, making money, serving customers and making money.

But for the first time I began to see, no, it's part of this larger community.

There's a Whole Foods family, there's a Whole Foods network of relationships.

And I began to see that my job was to nurture that community, nurture that network, take care of all of the stakeholders.

Ever since the flood, I have been trying to apply this framework of win-win-win, not just to business, but to everyday life.

And I have found it to be a universal ethical framework.

It is useful in almost every situation you can find yourself in.

So what is win-win-win?

It means you're looking for the good of the person you're interacting with, you're looking for the good for yourself, and you're looking for the good for the larger community.

Let me give you an example.

So at Whole Foods, we struggled as we began to build up our supply chain internationally for produce.

We struggled with, how can we do this with ethical trade?

How can we ensure that we have better working conditions, higher pay, environmental sustainability, and community development?

That was our challenge.

And so we created our Whole Trade program.

And we worked with certifiers such as Fair Trade and Rainforest Alliance to help ensure that the farming communities that we worked with lived up to those ethical standards.

It was very transformative.