Your "Company Values" Aren't Working

Here’s why (and what Whole Foods co-founder John Mackey taught me about fixing them)

Matt Hunter • July 28, 2026

Today, I am talking about company values and creating values that actually drive performance and alignment, which is the fourth installment in my series on creating a great manifesto. You can read the first three posts here, here, and here to get up to speed. Before we get into the post, here is a quick word from our sponsor.

Values are your culture’s source code. They define who you are, who you intend to be, and what matters most to you.

Your core values are the few nonnegotiable beliefs you hold. They must inspire specific, observable behaviors that you can hire for, and train, promote, and enforce. Choose values that, when practiced daily throughout the company, give you the best shot at fulfilling your mission. Our clients have achieved powerful results by adopting values such as truth over comfort; an ownership mentality; and healthy, passionate debate.

Values are a performance tool, not merely a moral decoration. When you get it just right, you choose values that are both meaningful and conducive to success. More comfortable companies often choose values based on their inherent rightness or importance, without considering how those values actually drive results. To leverage the performance aspect of values, choose tougher ones, such as grit and speed. Avoid anything that undercuts excellence. Comfortable, feel-good values sound appealing in a welcome package but are useless in a crunch.

Make establishing values a collective effort. While vision and mission come from the leader, values are best developed with leadership and key team members to foster a shared sense of ownership.

I sat down with John Mackey, values-driven Whole Foods cofounder and CEO (for forty-two years), to get a behind-the-scenes look at how his company created, evolved, and enforced its values on quality food. In 1978 Mackey and his cofounder (and then-girlfriend) Renee Lawson opened Safer Way in an old Victorian house in Austin, Texas. The couple had been living in a vegetarian commune and had just had their own “food awakening.” They wanted to share it with the world. At the time, the quality food value was implicit yet very important.

“It was a very pure store—vegetarian only, no coffee, alcohol, sugar, or additives,” said Mackey. “But the store nearly failed because it didn’t offer enough of what people wanted. I could not have changed the world with that original value. A value must inspire and sustain the business. Too strict and you have no customers; too loose and you stand for nothing.”

Although his personal values didn’t change (he was a vegetarian from 1976 to 2003 and has been a vegan since 2003), the company’s value regarding quality food had to evolve. “I don’t try to force my diet on the rest of the world anymore. I tried, and the world doesn’t want it. I learned a valuable lesson,” he said.

In 1980, when Safer Way merged with Clarksville Natural Grocery to form the first Whole Foods, Mackey and a small senior team ran a democratic process to establish their values. Their value about quality food became “We Sell the Highest Quality Natural and Organic Foods.” They kept the health commitment in place but expanded their offerings, adding meat, seafood, beer, wine, coffee, and some sweeter products. They established a set of clear standards to support their value, including “no artificial ingredients, flavorings, preservatives, or colorings, with a bias toward natural and organic.” Anticipating the difficulty of enforcing this standard across hundreds of different products, they created a quality standards team led by Margaret Wittenberg, whose job was to enforce this value. She did this by reviewing the latest research and recommending which products to discontinue.

As the science evolved, the recommendations shifted too. Sometimes this meant pulling popular items that were selling well. Whole Foods was so committed to this value that they almost always resisted inertia and followed the recommendation, discontinuing items at every one of their hundreds of stores. As the years went on, Whole Foods amassed enough power to go back to food producers and say “No more of this ingredient,” and the producers would find a way to make the same product without it.

So what's the lesson here? By choosing a bold value that customers cared about—and going above and beyond to do the inconvenient work of enforcing it—Whole Foods earned exceptional trust and a strong reputation with customers, propelling the brand to more than five hundred stores by 2024.
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PS. I have started to give many keynote talks and workshops. If you're interested in bringing me into your organization, please shoot me a note. These talks have been a wonderful experience and we are finalizing my schedule for the fall now. Getting back in the public speaking arena has led me to discover the work of my friend Nausheen Chen, who is a leadership communications coach who works with leaders at Google, Amazon, NASA, and LinkedIn on how to public speak. She's created a free resource that takes you through her strategies for overcoming nerves before a big presentation - it's a course where you get videos every day for a week on how to build confidence in any setting. You can get it here. Definitely check it out!