The Future of Business Is Integral

John Mackey

John Mackey is Chairman and CEO of Whole Foods Market, a $4 billion Fortune 500 company, the largest natural foods retail chain in the world, and a “Fortune 100 Best Companies To Work For” for 8 years running.

Ken begins the conversation by asking John to speak about his latest enterprise, FLOW, co-founded with Michael Strong. As John shares, both he and Michael have extensive libertarian backgrounds—in which the freedom of the individual is primary—but with an equally strong interest in social responsibility. "FLOW is healthy Western Enlightenment, healthy rationality, healthy science, healthy economics, combined with the recognition that we are not social atoms. We're connected in societies, and we're citizens in those societies, and so we have responsibilities to those societies.... And then combine that with personal growth, human potential, and spirituality, and you've got the FLOW vision." Picking up on John's point about autonomy and responsibility, Ken jumps into the best short explanation of Integral Politics we've ever heard (some of which is summarized here):

In integral political theory, each party/camp/affiliation can be understood in terms of what aspect of the AQAL model—Quadrants, Levels, Lines, States, and Types—it emphasizes, and therefore also how it originally arose, and its relationship to all of the other orientations. How does this work? Let's take a look—and be sure to refer to the illustration below, which summarizes these main points:

First let's look at the four quadrants, which are simply the interior and exterior of the individual and collective, all of which are present in any occasion. Concerning the debate on rights versus responsibility: an emphasis on the sovereignty of the individual (rights) yields positions such as libertarianism; an emphasis on the sovereignty of the collective (responsibility) yields positions such as socialism. Concerning the debate on the cause of human suffering: an emphasis on interior factors yields a more republican position (if a person is suffering it is because they lack work ethic, family values, etc); an emphasis on exterior factors yields a more democratic position (if a person is suffering it is because they lack opportunities, have been downtrodden by an oppressive system, etc).“The number of people lifted out of poverty, even in the last decade, by these economic gains is greater than the number of people lifted out ofpoverty in history up to this time....”

In any individual holon (meaning "whole/part") there are four drives. Within a level—horizontal translation—a holon has drives towards autonomy (rights) and communion (responsibility), and between levels—vertical transformation—a holon has Eros (to reach beyond) and Agape (to embrace and preserve). We've already seen how autonomy and communion can function in the political arena, and now we see how the progressive (move things forward!) and conservative (preserve the status quo!) wings within a given party can be explained by Eros and Agape.

And what is it that various political groups seek to either progress towards or diligently conserve? Often it is a particular wave or level of development, and these unfold from archaic, to magic, to mythic, to rational, to pluralistic, to integral (and beyond). Different wings of a political party—conservative, to moderate, to progressive—are, in fact, often representing different waves of development.

Taken together, the various elements of a truly Integral Politics represent an astonishing breakthrough for political theory, and as yet there is nothing else that can approach the explanatory power of AQAL.

John goes on to give examples of how, by using an intuitively integral approach, people at each wave of development flourish at Whole Foods, and are encouraged to keep growing: "It creates more value for all of the participants—including the shareholders!"