Don’t be… defamatory?

Whole Foods CEO John Mackey must have been thinking something along those lines when he invented an on-line alter ego that praised him and his company and bashed rival Wild Oats. BusinessWeek, CNNMoney and the PRSA have read-worthy commentary and Valleywag’s Owen Thomas shares an entertaining tidbit related to the fiasco.

Mackey’s actions are now the subject of an SEC investigation and after it was announced that the Whole Foods Board is also looking at it, he today reacted by publishing an apology - interestingly enough not through his blog (which is “temporarily closed”) but through the PR section of the company site (link).

The way the apology is worded demonstrates that there is pressure mounting. Some are calling for Mackey’s head and there is a considerable amount of confusion as to why he chose to anonymously bad-mouth the competition on a Yahoo! finance forum in the first place.

I’m still looking both at the entries in Mackey’s blog and at the Yahoo! board - it seems like a fascinating case, certainly worth a little linguistic investigation. Here is a list of all postings Mackey wrote under his pseudonym, if you care to do a little detective work. What’s strange is that the responses to his final post in August 2006 suggest that the other board users were quite aware of his identity (one participant responds with “Goodbye JM!” to his farewell message). Has this incident taken almost a year to show up on the media’s radar? It seems so, which makes me wonder who or what made it show up right now…

A close reading of some of the Yahoo! postings provides an interesting insight into the psyche of an executive who is truly “mission-driven” (see below) and has apparent trouble dealing with criticism.

Here’s a sample:

unibomber999, radmok is interested in neither facts nor logic. He or she, like so many other shorts on this Board, love to spin their fantasies about the future while completely ignoring the facts of both the past and the present. radmok (hubris, liberfar and many other shorts & bashers) choose to focus on Whole Foods competition improving, while completely ignoring the reality that Whole Foods is improving & evolving far faster. They don’t seem to realize that Whole Foods isn’t sitting still, but learning and growing as an organization at a very rapid rate. They wrongly believe that Whole Foods competitive advantage is all about organic foods and that once Whole Foods competitors are all selling it (which has already been the case for nearly a decade now) Whole Foods will fade into the sunset. They refuse to recognize that Whole Foods is a mission driven retailer that has evolved numerous competitive advantages including a superior business model of optimizing stakeholder relationships, a unique company culture based on empowerment, service and innovation that cannot be duplicated by a command and control supermarket company, a happy and motivated work force, and highly motivated, skilled, and knowledgable leadership throughout the company. The shorts and bashers keep waiting for the whole thing to collapse, not understanding that Whole Foods has been continuously growing and evolving for 26 years now. This ain’t no overnight success story. One thing I’ve enjoyed about this Board is watching the shorts come and go every year. They come on to this Board making highly arrogant and “original” proclamations that this is just a stupid grocery store which is ridiculously overvalued and is going to get its comeuppance very, very soon. How many shorts have the long-term participants on this Board watched disappear every year with large losses on their shorts? Several hundreds now. Surely we must be getting close to a thousand or so by now. This current batch of shorts (with one or two exceptions) won’t be here a year from now. They will have disappeared. However, new shorts will take their place (for the shorts we will always have with us) and they will say the same stupid and unoriginal things that their predecessors said before them, believing themselves to be both original and brilliant. There is nothing we can do, but regularly flush out the old shorts from the ignore button and replace them with the current crop. Meanwhile, Whole Foods will keep doing its thing–producing unmatched same store sales growth and continue its irresistable growth, driving the stock price up and the shorts off of the Board.

(link)

This, I believe is not what happens when you drink your own Kool-Aid. It’s what happens when you bathe in it, drink it and then bake a cake with it.

I’ll be posting more on the matter as it “evolves and grows”.

Edit: Eddy Elfenbein also has some nice Mackey quotes.