FLOW Vision News: MARCH 2007

Dear Friends in FLOW,

On Tuesday evening, February 27, 2007, I attended a public dialogue between Michael Pollan and John Mackey in Berkeley.  It was an extraordinary event by any standard.

Last April, Michael Pollen’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma was published and quickly became a New York Times best seller and has stayed on the list ever since.  It was named one of the “10 Best Books of 2006” by the New York Times Sunday Book Review.

The book is a meticulous account of four meals:  One from McDonald’s, a second from “Industrial Organic,” a.k.a. Whole Foods Market (WFM), a third from Joel Salatin’s organic farm in Virginia, and the fourth one that Pollen hunted, gathered, and prepared himself.  Not surprisingly, the dramatic narrative is from the “worst,” at McDonald’s, to the “most authentic,” his own hunter-gatherer meal.  In this continuum, the “industrial organic” meal from Whole Foods comes off as better than McDonald’s but still relatively corrupt and impure.  A Google search on “Whole Foods” and “Michael Pollan” yields 78,400 hits.  Pollan’s book has had a substantial impact on our culture, especially on that sub-culture of people who are especially interested in food.

When Pollan was in Austin for his book tour, John Mackey, Whole Foods CEO, invited him by to have a conversation about the book.  John had felt that Pollan’s book was not an entirely fair and accurate perspective on Whole Foods Market, and wanted to talk about the issues directly with Michael Pollan.  This first conversation evolved into an exchange of letters between the two, which are available to the public at John’s blog.   Eventually Michael invited John to debate him in public in Berkeley, and John agreed; thus the event last Monday evening.

To Michael’s credit, he introduced John by explaining just how unusual this situation was.  In general, when a journalist writes a book or article critical of a particular corporation, the corporation either ignores it or sends out a press release to counter the criticisms.  For the CEO of a corporation that had been criticized in a prominent book to engage in the writer in an extended dialogue on the merits of the criticism was in itself unprecedented.  For the CEO to then appear in public to discuss the criticism was even more unusual.  And it goes without saying that Berkeley audiences are not the most corporate-friendly audiences in the U.S.

John began with a forty-five minute presentation (the entire evening, including John’s presentation, may be viewed here.  In it he surveyed the history of our food system, thus putting Pollan’s criticisms in a historical context, and pointing out that the much criticized “industrial” food system had, in fact, been enormously successful at alleviating hunger around the world.  He then explained Whole Foods Market’s positive role in changing the way that people eat.  His presentation went on to explain both existing and new initiatives that WFM is undertaking to make the world a better place.

I won’t summarize John’s talk here, or the subsequent conversation with Pollan, nor the Q&A session afterwards.  Suffice it to say that in this history of corporate – press relationships, I am not aware of any comparable in depth exchange of views.  It is fair to say that Pollan, starting off as a critic of WFM, was won over by Mackey’s transparency, integrity, and sense of fair play.  The Berkeley audience was similarly won over, and constantly interrupted John to applaud WFM initiatives.

John made it clear during the conversation that Pollan’s attacks had been costly to WFM:  in the time since Pollan’s book came out, WFM has lost $2 billion in stock market capitalization.  Although it is unlikely that Pollan’s attacks are solely responsible for that drop, John did point out that Pollan’s charges that WFM represented “industrial organic” led to a media “feeding frenzy” attacking and ridiculing the idea of “industrial organic,” with WFM the main target.  Given that current and prospective WFM customers would be the demographic most likely to have read Pollan’s book and related media articles, it is likely that a book as high profile as Pollan’s was did indeed have a large negative impact on WFM revenues and, consequently, stock price (Googling “Michael Pollan” results in about 700,000 hits).

Given this context, John’s response to Pollan was even more astonishing.  He thanked Pollen for bringing to light justifiable criticisms of WFM that, in the end, led to new initiatives.  And at the same time he clearly pointed out the ways in which Pollan’s expectations regarding large-scale natural foods production and distribution were simply unrealistic in historical context.  John calmly and appropriately brought the conversation around to a FLOW motto, taken from Michelangelo:  “Criticize by creating.”

One of FLOW’s programs in development is “Conscious Capitalism.”  The goal of Conscious Capitalism is to move beyond the limited purview of “Corporate Social Responsibility,” which sometimes amount to somewhat arbitrary, superficial, and even wrong-headed checklists, (Enron was at one time regarded as a model of Corporate Social Responsibility) to a new perspective:  One in which corporate purpose, integrity in pursuing that purpose, and transparency with respect to how an organization pursues that purpose are key, along with a deep recognition of the interdependent system of multiple stakeholders in which business functions.  In a world of corporations that are purpose-driven, and which are acting out of integrity and therefore willing to be transparent regarding their practices, the reputation of corporations and respect for capitalism will improve dramatically.  John provided an exemplary manifestation of Conscious Capitalism Tuesday evening (and the night before he spoke on Conscious Capitalism at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business).

At the same time, we need to encourage Conscious Journalism, Conscious Activism, Conscious Politics, etc., all driven by purpose, integrity, and transparency, and a sensitivity to the interconnected system in which all function.  For me one of the most telling moments of the evening was when Pollan expressed his surprise that his book might have cost WFM significant loss in revenues.  Pollan’s perspective was that he was simply practicing the art of journalism to the best of his ability.  It had not occurred to him that he could cause great damage to others by means of his reporting.  If he had actively believed that harming WFM was a necessary and justified action to take, then his journalism would have been conscious.  His lack of awareness alone (watch the video and judge for yourself) reveals a lack of conscious action and intention on his part.

John’s mature, relaxed perspective on Pollan’s often misguided attacks are also an exemplary manifestation of the spirit of constructive dialogue.  We live in an increasingly polarized world in which there are voices from both the political right and political left that want to tell us that we should not criticize certain things (the right sometimes tells us that we should not criticize the war in Iraq because doing so shows a lack of support for troops, the left sometimes tells us we should not criticize global warming science because doing so may undermine the formation of a policy consensus).  When emotions run high we are most likely to regard acts of speech as treasonous.  But as John has shown, one can be civil and constructive even in dialogue with someone who may harm us or a cause we care passionately about.  This is, in part, what it once meant to be “liberal.”

The classical liberals were known for creating our present commitment to tolerance, together with freedom of thought, of speech, of the press, and of association.  J. S. Mill gave a classic statement of this commitment in his 1856 work “On Liberty,”

“But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it.  If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth:  if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”

Without having read Mill, John’s ethos vis-á-vis Pollan was a direct expression of Mill’s ethos:  He was sincerely grateful to Pollan for helping him to develop a clearer perception of the path that WFM should take going forwards.

In celebration of the FLOW principle of radical tolerance, and in honor of John’s example of dialoguing with one who might have been perceived as “the enemy,” on the FLOW home page this month, we offer two other inspirations for dialogue:  a narrative by peace activist Tom Atlee on his transformative experience in engaging in a transpartisan dialogue, “A Personally Transformational Encounter of Left and Right,” together with J.S. Mill’s classic statement “On Liberty.”  We are also highlighting Interaction Associates, a FLOW partner that specializes in facilitating collaborative process for corporate America.

May we all learn to become more conscious and thoughtful in all of our actions and responses, and may we all also learn to be more generous to those who fail to do so.

Towards peace, prosperity, happiness and well-being for all,

Michael Strong
CEO & Chief Visionary Officer
FLOW, Inc.

Please contact us at contact@flowidealism.org with ideas, insights, and inspiration. And remember that FLOW is a non-profit organization that promotes economic freedom and broadly distributed prosperity. You can support FLOW through your financial contributions among other means.