John Mackey

And so the thing about professionals, this is why most corporations over time begin to decline.

Once the founders leave, that entrepreneurial spirit begins to go out of the company, and it's less creative, less innovative.

And it's true of almost all businesses, unless they're family-owned.

Right.

So what ends up happening is the professionals are very smart people.

They get MBAs from Harvard and Wharton and Stanford.

They're very bright people.

But their first loyalty is to their careers.

And oftentimes...

A company like Whole Foods or Amazon is just kind of a stop along the way.

It's an addition to the resume.

And then they're going to leverage that to another higher paying job.

And so their first loyalty is going to be to their own careers.

And then the second loyalty is to their profession itself, because they think of themselves as professional.

So as we were building the company, it was very hard.

It was very easy to enlist people that were coming up through the ranks into our purpose and our mission.

In our stakeholder theory, people bought into that.

It got harder to do that with the professionals because, again, their loyalties were not first to the company.

And so I do think that's why over time, despite all that intelligence and market research and all the things they do, that sort of the creative spark oftentimes goes out of companies as they age.

But, you know, capitalism solves for it.