Whole Foods ripples into a Catch 22 – The Wizard is Revealed to be Human

There are great ways to ripple that seemed to be a good idea at the time, and then they can turn on you. Then you get to meet your old foe, the Catch 22 marketing effect which I last wrote about with respect to Toronto’s refusal to allow Toyota Prius to be accepted as a limousine.

When your ripple becomes negative it creates a catch 22 for you and a ripple opportunity for some other organization.

Whole Foods’ CEO, John Mackey has apparently been posting anonymously on Yahoo Finance message boards tooting the WFMI stock and bashing Wild Oats. You may know that WFMI is now trying to buy Wild Oats but has been stymied by the FTC. So who benefits from WFMI’s catch 22?

1. The FTC may have additional ammunition information to block the merger.

2. Wild Oats gets the sympathy vote.

3. Cultural creatives (the educated shopper is WFMI’s target market) might see Mackey’s Wizard of Oz caper as a reason to stop shopping there and choose other options. Wild Oats stores may benefit.

4. Mackey could choose to spin his Wizard caper in his favor and come clean … but that train may have left already. What else could he do to turn this catch 22 back into a positive ripple? Start saying nice things about Wild Oats? He was already doing that since announcing the merger. Start his own blog to share his voracious desire to share? That would be sad.

5. Mackey might just have to do some self-reflection and ask himself what he was trying to accomplish in lurking around the message boards. His company is ten times bigger than Wild Oats. He was already a darling of the stock market. Why did he need to hoot louder? Understanding why you want to ripple a certain way is the first step to undoing the damage. The wizard of OZ is not all powerful. But sometimes he thinks he is. Maybe this is the curtain that the FTC was trying to open.

6. Remember, when you start on the journey down that yellow brick road to going green then your business practices are going to be viewed in the same light as your products on offer – walk the talk. Just because the label says its natural, doesn’t mean it’s organic through and through. We are still learning how to be congruent as leaders and in business – sustainability refers to the entire organization, not just to the pretty press release announcing you now carry organics and send your unsold produce to the food bank… or does Whole Foods do that?

OK… Mr. Mackey is probably feeling the effects of this catch 22 right now. What would we recommend his next steps are? a) Own up tomorrow. Apologize.

b) Meet with his executive team and all his store directors. Apologize.

c) Issue one press release. Apologize.

c) Don’t defend or explain. Talk about what he will do from now on to assuage the itch to communicate.

d) Spend time in reflection wondering what need he was trying to satisfy that he is not paying attention to. Get a coach who knows how to work with sticky situations in leadership to help him face the blind spot.

e) Examine where else in the organization this blind spot of his might be manifesting other brewing catch 22s. There will be more. Turn them into ripples.