Our Blog: Think Personality
- RSS Feeds
- Atom
- RSS 1.0
- 2.0
- RSD
- (What's RSS?)
« Don't Play with Your Food | Giving vs. Advertising »
January 31, 2007
Whole Foods & CEO Pay
Posted by Brad Abare | Filed under: Inspiration
In November of last year, upscale grocer Whole Foods CEO and co-founder John Mackey wrote a letter to all of his employees/team about compensation. He announced that Whole Foods was increasing its salary cap (from 14 times the average pay to 19 times the average pay) to allow for more competitive executive salaries. It's worth noting that the average CEO of a Fortune 500 company earned 431 times as much as their average employee.
The highlight of Mackey's letter was that effective January 1, 2007, his own salary was being reduced to $1. "I am now 53 years old and I have reached a place in my life where I no longer want to work for money, but simple for the joy of the work itself and to better answer the call to service that I feel so clearly in my own heart."
Furthermore, the Whole Foods board of directors chose to contribute $100,000 annually to a new "Global Team Member Emergency Fund" that will be distributed to team members based on need.
It's great to see examples of the head and heart working so well together!
Thanks to Fast Company for re-printing the letter in their February 2007 issue.
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://thinkpersonality.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb2006.cgi/233
Comments
At a time in corporate history when CEO compensation is facing broad scrutinization, its interesting if not strangely coincidental that on the same day this letter was distributed, the grocery chain warned that sales growth would slow in the year ahead. Its stock dropped 23% on the news.
Posted by: Tim Abare at February 11, 2007 1:07 PM