Business Insight Zone

In the comments to yesterday’s post on Whole Foods, Jon Harmon made an excellent point, worthy of quoting at length here:

What else could [Mackey] do [but make a wishy-washy apology]? His behaviour was highly unethical, perhaps criminal. He has for years been touting himself (on his own blog) as the paragon of transparency, and then it was revealed that for seven-plus years he was touting himself and his company, and ripping a competitor, under an alias. The guy’s hubris is so great it took him a week of heat to force him to apologize. Actually it took several days for the media and the blogosphere to really turn on him. Why?

To answer that question, Harmon pointed to this post on his own blog. In fact, Jon — a p.r. professional with a specialty in issues of corporate ethics and reputation — has given sustained attention to the Whole Foods fracas. (See more posts here, here, and here.) From my reading, this excerpt seems to represent the crux of Jon’s argument:

[In an earlier post] I described the archetypal blinders that seemed to be restraining both mass media and bloggers from going after Mackey with the fury that surely would have been unleashed if, say, the CEO of Exxon or Wal-mart had done the anonymous postings praising himself and putting down a smaller rival in advance of a hostile take-over. As a “good company” committed to social responsibility, Whole Foods earns a lighter treatment than other corporations might. Companies that do the right thing often do earn at least a temporary benefit of the doubt but should not abuse that right.

I think Jon’s exactly right here. As I may have mentioned before, I have a soft spot for Whole Foods because it was started here in Austin, and because I started shopping there back when it was a little organic grocery store on Lamar Boulevard (as opposed to a ginormous organic grocery palace on Lamar Boulevard). And the company does do many things well in terms of corporate citizenship. But that doesn’t give John Mackey — or anybody — the right to play by different rules than everyone else.

Jon’s also right to mention Exxon Mobil and Wal-Mart, because these two behemoths are stereotypical “bad guys” of the U.S. corporate world. Clearly they’re not the only companies cast that way, but they certainly draw lots of fire, in some cases whether they’ve earned it or not. What’s difficult — but sorely needed — is a sober appraisal of a company’s strengths and weaknesses.

An example from my own life: Thanks to an intensely controversial plan to build a big store in my neighborhood, Wal-Mart has made lots of enemies among my neighbors. Some of them have become so anti-Wal-Mart that they can’t even acknowledge the things the company does right, like promoting green products in a big way, or, you know, providing good shopping choices for poor people by selling products at rock-bottom prices. Now, Wal-Mart’s no cupcake, as its record of labor troubles might indicate, and plenty of small communities have complained about locally owned businesses dying off after Wal-Mart comes to town. But CEO Lee Scott and the folks working for him are probably not the actual spawn of the Devil.

Part of this is human nature: we form opinions, especially by putting things into groups, and then we look for confirmation of those opinions. But whether the subject is Whole Foods or Frank Sinatra* or, I don’t know, agricultural subsidies, the prescription is the same: critical thinking, and plenty of it. I imagine, given the whole “rahodeb” craziness and the stakes of the proposed Whole Foods buyout of Wild Oats, John Mackey’s now going to, uh, receive the benefit of a lot more people’s critical thinking in the coming weeks. Including Jon Harmon’s, for one.

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* I was living in New York City when Frank Sinatra died. A radio station I liked ran a full-day remembrance of him, playing lots of his best songs, re-running old interviews with him, and taking calls from listeners who wanted to talk about him. What was striking to me was how many listeners had an impervious opinion of him, positive or negative. Either he was the “great guy” who stood up for Sammy Davis, Jr. despite Hollywood’s color line, who gave millions to charity, who lived life to the fullest, etc., or else he was the “bad guy” who consorted with gangsters, womanized remorselessly, beat Mia Farrow, etc. The reality, of course, is that he was both: like Teddy Roosevelt or Princess Diana or Bill Gates or so many other characters who fascinate us, he was a complex entity with good and bad sides. So are most companies.

Category: The language of business