Whole Foods (WFMI) CEO John Mackey on Creating the High Trust Organization:
"We have the opportunity to create more conscious and higher trust organizations in the 21st century. To do so will require three major changes.
- First, the organization must become conscious of its higher purposes. Without consciousness of higher purposes, organizations will not reach their fullest potential because the creative energy within the organization will not be fully expressed.
- Second, we’ll need our leaders to evolve to higher levels of consciousness and trust. We will not be able to create high trust organizations without more conscious and high trust leaders. Less conscious leaders will tend to hold their organizations back.
- Third, we will need to evolve the cultures of our organization in ways that create processes, strategies, and structures that encourage higher levels of trust. These will necessarily include the important ideals of teams, empowerment, transparency, authentic communication, fairness, love and care."
WFMI's Shared Fate Policy
"We recognize there is a community of interest among all of our stakeholders. There are no entitlements; we share together in our collective fate. To that end we have a salary cap that limits the compensation (wages plus profit incentive bonuses) of any Team Member to nineteen times the average total compensation of all full-time Team Members in the company."
Salary Caps Work. Authenticity and Transparency Work. The neuroeconomics of Neurosociety awakens.
Not only can we chart a more adaptive future beyond the unsustainable resource skews born of fundamentalist 19th century industrial capitalism, we must do so. It is a simply matter of sustainability and survival. And so, we are doing so, as demonstrated by WFMI and other progressive companies like Nika Water, "by donating 100% of our profits to support clean water projects in impoverished countries, NIKA will provide the basic tools and critical assistance to help thousands of families improve their lives in a meaningful way and end the cycle of poverty. Mindful of our duties as stewards of the Earth, NIKA has been certified as CarbonFree by Carbonfund.org through our investment in carbon offsetting program."
