The trap of win-lose thinking (and how to escape it) | John Mackey

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1:34One of the gifts of being a professor is that I get to take a sabbatical. Every seven years at my institution, you can take time off for intellectual refreshment. I've done it twice now, and with each one, I'm as nervous as I am excited. For me, this opportunity to pause, sit with myself, and think more deeply about my relationship to work is very special. It brings up some big stuff. And for my next sabbatical, I'm going to ask myself, what do I love? How has that changed? How have I changed? And am I the person I want to be? I'm Madupa Akinola. This is TED Business, a podcast from TED. Our speaker today is John Mackey, the co-founder of Whole Foods, and he decided to get vulnerable up on the TED stage, sharing how a brush with disaster led him to embrace a win-win outlook on life.

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5:12And now, John Mackey takes the TED stage. Most people live in a win-lose paradigm, where self-interest is the thing they think of the most. There's a better way. A win-win-win paradigm. And this is more than just a game metaphor. It's a philosophy of human interaction that seeks mutual benefit for everyone. I had a major epiphany in the early days of Whole Foods that helped me wake up to this idea of a win-win-win way of life. It was Memorial Day, 1981. The very first Whole Foods we ever had went through the worst flood that Austin, Texas had experienced in over 70 years. Overnight, our store was completely destroyed.

6:16We were near bankruptcy. It looked like our story had ended only nine months after we started it. And then something really cool happened. When I went to the store the next morning to help clean up, there were a lot of people there helping us. Our team members were there, of course, but so were our customers, and so were our neighbors. And I was deeply moved by this. They were helping us because they loved our store, and they didn't want us to die.

6:56Over the next 30 days, our team members worked for free until we could get back open to begin to pay them. Our suppliers fronted us more inventory. Our investors invested more capital and our local bank loaned us more money. Whole Foods was resurrected from death by this interconnected group of stakeholders who saw 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, though, it's part of this larger community where there's a Whole Foods family.

7:52There'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.

8:44Let 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 farmer and communities that we worked with lived up to those ethical standards. It was very transformative. And this ended up being a huge success.

9:34And it was a win for the farmers because they got access to larger markets. It was a win for their communities because one of the things we had was social premiums. The farmer communities decided how to spend that money. Some spent it on opening schools, others medical clinics, others did community centers, and there were many, many other things. So the farming communities were benefiting. Whole Foods was also winning because we had, well, we had ethical trade. Our customers liked that. We also had higher quality products, and we were able to have competitive differentiation as well. So this is all great.

10:21What happens when we have conflicts? Conflicts happen all the time. Well, one thing that happens when you're working from a win-win framework, win-win-win framework, is you have a lot fewer conflicts. The reason why is you can solve problems before they escalate to even become conflicts. One of the ways that you do that is that you have to do three things. To put win-win-win into practice means that, one, you have to have a mind shift. You have to be able to shift out a strict self-interest. You have to be able to take the perspective of other people. Number two, you have to have a heart shift.

11:04You 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.

11:49And 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.

12:39He 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. So I asked him to trust me. I'll get it. And he did. So we announced it publicly. Whole Foods Market stock rocketed up. And it went up even more after I went on the roadshow and began to tout it to the investment community. Anthony ended up getting$32 million. So it was a huge win for him.

13:24But it was even a bigger win for Whole Foods because Bread and Circus had tremendous expertise in produce, meat, and seafood. We put that into Whole Foods and it transformed our company. That was the foundation for the explosive growth that Whole Foods market underwent over the next 30 years. When that merger happened, we were at$100 million in sales. 30 years later, we were over$20 billion in sales.

13:59It was also a win for the entire natural and organic foods industry because our growth enabled literally tens of thousands of farmers, ranchers, food manufacturers from all around the natural and organic foods industry to have tremendous financial success due to Whole Foods market success. That was the larger community that all benefited from it. So if you want to be good at win, win, win, you have to practice it. But here's the thing. It's a skill, but it's a skill very, very worthwhile to master because it's going to serve you in so many different ways in your life. I'm going to conclude by just telling you a little story.

14:47I was talking about win-win-win with my wife, Deborah. And she said, you know, John, I think it's even simpler than you're putting it. And I said, how is it simpler? She said, look, just love everyone all the time. No exceptions.

15:09She's right. because love is the ultimate win-win-win strategy. And I wish for all of you great love in your lives, and I hope together we'll practice win-win-win.

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16:50That was John Mackey at TED 2025. I appreciate that John is not only explaining what a win-win perspective is, he's also giving us some concrete steps on how to get there. We have to give up our own self-interest. we have to open our hearts, and we have to unleash our own creative imagination. With that, he explains, there'll be a lot less conflict. I think John's right, but I want to add one more thing to this equation. Being able to do these three things requires you to love who you're becoming in life. Now, this is different from self-interest or cockiness. I'm talking about extending some of that empathy and understanding and creativity to the people around you and to yourself.

17:37Because sometimes our problems actually stem from complicated feelings of internal conflict that bubble up across our lives. I know on my sabbatical, I'm going to be spending a lot of time considering and redefining my relationships with my work colleagues, the students I mentor, and the web of people connected to me. And I'll think about Debra's adage, Love everyone all the time, no exceptions. That includes yourself. That's it for today. TED Business is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced by Hannah Kingsley-Ma, edited by Alejandra Salazar, and fact-checked by Julia Dickerson.

18:23Special thanks to Maria Ladias, Farrah DeGrange, Daniela Ballarezzo, Tansika Sangmanivang, and Roxanne Heilash. I'm Madupa Akinola. Thanks for listening.

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