Blog: 
Aug
Jul
An All-Natural Problem
Jun
Suppose you're the CEO of the country's most successful all-natural grocery
store chain and are preparing for a hostile buyout of a close competitor.
What's something you absolutely do not do?
Flounder
around on
Yahoo message boards badmouthing people and hinting about your plans.
I'm not sure this natural foods kick is getting enough blood to the CEO's brain.
I kid you not. Quoting
CEO John Mackey directly:
From 1999 to mid-2006 I made a number of postings on the Yahoo! financial bulletin boards
concerning Whole Foods and Wild Oats under the user name "rahodeb." ... I posted on Yahoo!
under a pseudonym because I had fun doing it ... The views articulated by rahodeb sometimes represent
what I actually believed and sometimes they didn't. Sometimes I simply played "devil's advocate"
for the sheer fun of arguing. Anyone who knows me realizes that I frequently do this in person, too.
Hey John, I love to mess with the locals as much as the next guy, but I'm not the kind of person
that gets monitored by the Federal Trade Commission. Anything you say, no matter how much you try to
mask it by taking sides or using a nickname that is an anagram of your wife's first name (Deborah), is
subject to investigation by Uncle Sam.
Diane Brady of BusinessWeek is spot on with her evaluation of this debacle. Mackey is not only yammering where he shouldn't be,
he's also painted the FTC as a biased organization out to stop his takeover plans. This is not the way to win friends
and influence people.
Even huge, multi-billion dollar operations like Whole Foods can fall victim to bad communications by taking
unsound actions. Your parents told you it and it's still true: think before you speak.
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