An upbeat self-portrait of a business titan.
The co-founder of Whole Foods tells his story.
Mackey, co-author of Conscious Capitalism, recounts his spiritual, political, and entrepreneurial evolution as his supermarket company rose to astounding success. He started with a small grocery called Safer Way, which opened in Austin, Texas, in 1978, featuring natural foods. The store began to do well, but Mackey thought it could do much better if it expanded significantly. After some debate about the name, he and his co-founders decided on Whole Foods Market, and the first one opened in 1980. Mackey, intent on creating a “beautiful edifice of food, health, teamwork, and business,” was euphoric. Staffed by “an eclectic bunch—artists, lawyers, musicians, geologists, college dropouts, Vietnam War veterans, grad students, and more”—the store’s community all felt like family. However, as Whole Foods evolved into “an entire ecosystem of new products and businesses,” Mackey faced challenges to his leadership, which he sometimes barely survived. Through the confrontations, though, he “found a renewed connection to the higher purpose of Whole Foods and to the importance of love in both life and leadership.” Seeking insights about his life’s purpose led him to try ecstasy, LSD, and breathwork, all stops on his spiritual journey. Business setbacks, too, were stages in that journey. Clashes with unions, for example, taught him a lesson: to nurture trust in the company and faith in his leadership. “I didn’t want to just resist the unions,” he writes. “I wanted us to excel in creating cultures that made them irrelevant.” (That viewpoint is eminently debatable.) Mackey describes himself as joyfully competitive and a libertarian—far from the progressivism of many of his most loyal customers—who resists “governmental controls and subsidies” that move people “away from the natural discipline and innovation of free markets towards the stultifying inefficiencies of socialism.”
An upbeat self-portrait of a business titan.Pub Date: May 21, 2024
ISBN: 9781637745120
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Matt Holt/BenBella
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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