John Mackey

You have to be able to open your heart, let go of your ego and your defensiveness, and open up with empathy, with better listening skills.

And third, you have to unleash your creative imagination, because it's the creative imagination that will come up with the win-win-win solutions that we need.

So let me give you an example of a time we had a win-lose situation that we turned into a win-win-win.

The most important acquisition that Whole Foods ever did was back in late 1992, about one year after we'd done our initial public offering.

Bread and Circus, a company very similar to Whole Foods, they had six stores at that time located in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

And I was very good friends with the owner of Bread and Circus, Anthony Harnett.

And he and I had been talking for a while about Bread and Circus selling to Whole Foods.

And I wanted to buy it.

for Whole Foods, and Anthony wanted to sell it.

The problem was he wanted $30 million for his business, and it was losing money at that time.

So there's no way I could sell it to our board of directors.

So we sort of were in an impasse, $5 million apart, approximately.

And so the win-win-win solution to that was he wanted all cash.

We couldn't get there.

So I said, Anthony, what we can do is I can do part cash and part stock, but we can get the stock price up.

He didn't like that idea at first.

He thought that was very risky because he was going to be risking that maybe the stock wouldn't trade up.

Here's the thing.

I had made a heart shift.

Anthony became convinced that I wanted what was best for everyone, including him, that he could see I genuinely wanted to get his $30 million to him.