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

You're listening to Ted Talk's Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. What do you get when you combine a major flood and near bankruptcy? In this case, the unexpected awakening that reshaped an entire business into a brand that much of the world knows. Ted Talk, Whole Foods co-founder John Mackie, takes us back to the night his first store was destroyed, and how a community rising from the mud inspired his lifelong philosophy of win, win, win, doing good for yourself, the community, and the world around you. Those people live in a win-lose paradigm, where self-interest is the thing I 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. We were near bankruptcy. It looked like our store 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 are our customers and so are 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. Over 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 making money, serving customers and making money. But for the first time I began to see, no, it's part of this larger community. There's a Whole Foods family, there'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 a 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. Let 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. And 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 with 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 community for benefiting Whole Foods was also winning because we had well, we had ethical trade, our customers like that. We also had higher quality products. And we were able to have competitive differentiation as well. So this is all great. What 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 win win-win-win into practice means that one, you have to have a mind shift. You have to be able to shift out of strict self-interest. You have to be able to take the perspective of other people. Number two, you have to have a heart shift. You 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. And I was very good friends with the owner of Bread and Circus, Anthony Harnette. 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 a part 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. He 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 road show and began to tout it to the investment community. Anthony ended up getting $32 million, so it was a huge win for him. And 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. It 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. I 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. She'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. Thank you so very much." That was John Mackie speaking at TED 2025. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED.com/curationguidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talk Staley is part of the TED Audio Collective. TED Talk was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, and Tonsaca, Songmarnivong. This episode was mixed by Christopher Faisy-Bogan, additional support from Emma Tobner and Deniella Balorezzo. I'm Elise Hugh. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.