Has The Whole Foods’ C.E.O. Learned From Past Mistakes?

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Here’s an interesting article from the New Yorker, “Does Whole Foods’ C.E.O. Know Whats Best for You?”

They sat down with the embattled C.E.O. for a conversation that included a discussion about his past behavior, and how he has made changes in his life to prevent future mistakes. Some choice quotes:

He couldn’t “embarrass the company,” he told me. “I have to grow up”—he is fifty-six. “I can’t have affairs with women. One of the things that happened was you have more money and you have more opportunities for such things. And those are sort of off-limits. You can’t do that. Think of Mark Sanford, in South Carolina.”

His vows of discretion apparently allow for a great deal of latitude. He talks openly about his fixations and eccentricities—most of them, anyway. (“I am not going to talk about my sex life,” he told me, without my having asked him to.) His blend of guile and guilelessness is peculiar. “I no longer drink alcohol around journalists,” he said. He worries that he reveals too much. He can’t help but speak his mind, out of which spring confounding ideas and conventionally irreconcilable contradictions. The man who has perhaps done as much as anyone to bring the natural-foods movement from the crunchy fringe into the mainstream is also a vocal libertarian, an orthodox free-marketer, an admirer of Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan, and Ayn Rand. In the 2008 Presidential election, he voted for Bob Barr—Ron Paul wasn’t on the ballot.

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