couldn't think of anything i would rather be doing. thanks for your time today, thanks, everyone, for joining us, we look forward to being back before too long doing events in person, stay safe and speak again soon. thanks so much. >> each night this week we are bringing you booktv to showcase what is available every sunday on c-span2. tonight we will have a look at the military with malcolm gladwell's book the bomber mafia which describes the developers of precision bombing during world war ii. that is followed by or other margaret mcmillan looking at how military conflict has affected various aspects of society throughout history and patrick o donald with his book the indispensables about the

marvel head regiment and how they played a crucial role in battle and as protectors of general george washington. watch booktv tonight beginning at 8:00 eastern on c-span2. >> good afternoon. i'm robert doar of the american enterprise institute. it is my pleasure to welcome you to this afternoon's conversation with john mackey. john mackey is co-founder and ceo of full synapse market and cofounder of the nonprofit conscious capitalism. he's here to talk about his new book "conscious leadership: elevating humanity through business". i can't think of a better guest to have on thanksgiving week. a pleasure to have you. welcome to our discussion this afternoon. >> thanks for having me on the show. >> i loved your book and i recommend the book.

almost 18 months into my term and while i have been a ceo of previous businesses it is good to be reminded of what makes leadership work in any institution of any size. you have a lot of great lessons about how to be a good leader and having a purpose having to do with innovation and integrity. i want to ask these lessons, which do you think is the most important? which do you rely on has ago to attribute that has made you so successful? >> the first chapter is put purpose first so i better put it first. >> the purpose part is important because you seem to address, address to our

listeners why you think for profit firms out to make money and develop profits and pay shareholders are the most successful when they see a higher purpose. >> this is the single biggest misunderstanding about business in capitalism. until we get this corrected capitalism will always be disdained and criticized and attacked because its motivations are seen as impure and of course business has to make money. business doesn't make money will fail but that doesn't mean it's purpose is to make money. a metaphor, good way to explain it is my body has to produce red blood spilled. if i don't produce red blood cells i will die. just because i have to make red blood cells does not mean the

purpose of my life is to produce red blood cells. it is a necessary condition but doesn't define who i am. similarly business has to make money or it will fail but business is about creating value for other people. that is why it exists, it does a good job creating good value and products and services that its customers want then the business will flourish and make money for its investors but because business gets put in this box it is all about money, so if you think about it because if you ask what the purpose of the doctors, doctors make a lot of money in our society but they would not say i'm a doctor to make as much money as possible. even if that is true that is not the ethics that stand behind medicine. the ethics behind medicine is to heal people, architects

design buildings, it refers to some type of value creation. business is created by farm but the value creation. the tangential effects, for all those reasons they are benefiting, the larger communities. and do a service for trying to explain, making as much money as possible.

>> a great forward purpose to bring better quality to people so they could purchase them. that the great purpose and you accomplished that. you feel you led to more people leaving better, more healthy or wholesome food. >> absolutely. our stated purpose today. let me explain a couple things. when i started a business with my girlfriend i was 24 and she was 20, we were just a couple kids really and we didn't have a stated higher purpose, we were passionate about natural and organic foods. if you asked me with a higher purpose was in 1978 i would have said the higher purpose, sure.

we just want to sell healthy food to people and earn a living and have some fun doing it. those things all still exist in whole foods. the fun part let itself go into thousand 20 with covid but in general that is who we are but our purpose is deepened in the last 42 years. our stated official stated purpose now is to nourish people on the planet and that has a lot of different depth, how you define nourish and how you define people and how you define planet. they have different layers to them. i think every business you admire the most has a higher purpose. i've known hundreds of entrepreneurs in my life, very few started business to get rich. they wanted money and would like to get rich. mostly they are passionate about something. read the biographies of people like steve jobs, bill gates,

elon musk, jeff bezos, they were passionate about something something they wanted to create, so excited they decided to get going on it, they made a lot of money because it created a lot of value for other people. >> you are telling the story of purpose and getting the message of the purpose of the company or institution or organization down through every member, something i had never heard of, a story about the kennedy administration was when president kennedy was touring the space center he ran into a custodian mopping the floor and cleaning up the place and he said what are you doing, and he said i'm helping to get a man on the moon. i want to ask you, i struggled with this. how do you get everyone in the building to be united behind one purpose? how do you make that, you refer

to your people -- how do you do that? >> good question and it is not easy. the first is the leadership has to embody the purpose. if -- people pay so much more attention to what you do and how you show up in the world and what you say. we have a well attuned an antenna for hypocrisy, witness the governor's faux pas in california or nancy pelosi's faux pas, when we see hypocrisy, people are always looking to call me a hypocrite, always looking so it is important that i personally and other leaders embody the higher purpose of whole foods, you have to walk the talk or it is just talk. that being said, in a company like whole foods we have 100,000 people who work for the company. we are getting turnover and

continued growth, 10 to 20,000 new team members every year. how do you keep the purpose -- how do you institutionalize it? you have to talk -- it has to be part of the orientation, has to be part of something you talk about all the time, it is important for leaders reference what they are doing back to what the higher purpose of the organization is, show it all the time, you talk about all the time because you have new people coming in all the time you can never take it for granted. when you have a very resilient powerful culture, the culture does a lot of the work for you because other people who internalized the purpose of the organization will spread. they act like an immune system for the organization particularly one that has been around a long time. they had a culture based on values and purpose and if it is a good strong culture you can expect people, the organization to do its work in getting

people converted over. you don't have a good culture, shows a lot of hypocrisy and people don't think you are holding up to it won't be very effective so the purpose of something. and analogy right now. i have no doubt in my mind the united states has a higher purpose, it is there in the declaration of independence and the bill of rights, and yet it is being forgotten. a lot of the country no longer resonates the founding purpose of america so we've done a very poor job continuing to communicate the higher purpose of the united states. >> i completely agree with that. a great scholar wrote a book called learning patriotism. you have to teach those values and talk about them all the time. people recognize the force of our success in the country and it is in our founding

documents, a whole unit focused on that and we want that on college campuses at younger students so communicate communicate communicate, exactly right from my perspective but it is a problem. >> i love aei and i contribute because of that. >> i want to ask about your book, you have a way in which you encourage a positive collaboration and positive feedback from one worker to another. at meetings you conclude by saying tell us about that. >> love is often times not associated with corporations

which are genuinely seen as heartless money grabbers, part of their image problem they have in the world and it is to to metaphors we have about business as being hypercompetitors. we use war metaphors, darwinian metaphors to expand business, lots of sports metaphors to explain business and when you are at war there's not much -- we have thanksgiving, christmas time but check it at the door when you come to work because we are at war. we've got to win and that is very unfortunate because love is not week, what many people associate it with, not just a feminine virtue, it is a masculine virtue. love is the glue that holds an organization together. if you get two things to people they will of your organization and stay with it decade after decade. very low turnover, one of the first things i noticed, a lot

of people worked here 20 years, amazon. the reason why is if you give people purpose and give people a sense that they are loved then that is what people want, they want purpose and love. if you can meet those desires and needs you will have a great organization. appreciation is one way you can release love in an organization and so this is something that you get nothing out of my talk today remember this one thing. if you just injure meanings with appreciations you will release love in your organization. every time you have a meeting we wrap it up by doing voluntary appreciations. they are not mandatory, nobody has to do it but what happens, you do an authentic appreciation of someone else you can't do an authentic appreciation without opening your pocket and people know the difference when somebody is

just saying something and they are actually feeling that and expressing it from their heart. when you do authentic appreciation you open your heart and others will pick up on it. in addition it is very hard to this day in judgment of someone who has just given authentic appreciation to you. if tom is kind of a jerk and tom is saying how much he appreciates the things i do it is doing it in an authentic way, not just sucking up to me, then i am probably going to rethink who tom is. i will look at him with fresh eyes. i will tell some stories at whole foods. appreciation becomes a big deal at whole foods, with my leadership group, a couple years ago we were spending so much time doing appreciations at the end of meetings that we had to limit the number of appreciations, you can't

appreciate everybody, we're going to limit you to three appreciations and that still takes too long so then you get one appreciation, make it count. if you have other appreciations good. but do them outside of this meeting so we could get our appreciations with one down to 30 minutes which -- very powerful, other organizations and ceos and everything changed after that. >> you mentioned already the fact that the sites merged with amazon and it is remarkable coming together to iconic american companies and i want you to tell us about that and whether there has been tension and you have another story

about how jeff bezos -- i didn't notice either. he always has an empty chair for the customer, the customer is always represented do i have that right? tell us about the amazon whole foods market. >> the empty chair is part of the amazon story, whether they still actively do that or not i am not sure but it is part of the amazon mythology based on stuff that happens. a merger between large companies, it was a fortune 200 company when amazon bought us. it is like a marriage. i say that because you are coming together voluntarily for mutual gain and benefits and because you admire the other person. i use the metaphor of a

whirlwind romance, love at first sight, i told that story, but when you get married, if you're going to get married you are going to change. that is inevitable because the other person will influence you and you will gradually become -- move over against the sun in my face. you will gradually change and amazon has had an impact on all foods but on the other hand we have a very resilient culture. and healthy marriage there is me, there is you and there's us so all three have to be healthy so whole foods, we have to stave whole foods, follow a higher purpose, settle our core values, have unique special

culture and amazon has respected that. our culture is evolving but not because amazon is cramming things down our throat but because we are adopting certain processes. one example, whole foods tends to make -- previously, i would say even more intuitive in our decision-making. amazon is very data-driven in their decisionmaking process so a lot of times talking to amazon we would be giving our opinions and theories and they say show us the data, we are not going to make this decision, show the data and they have a practice in the right call the 6 page or that submits your arguments with data supporting it. if you do a good job at that you will get the decision that you want and if you don't do a good job you will be sent back to the drawing board or told no so hopefully began to think more data-driven in our decisionmaking, a positive

thing for us, still our intuition and entrepreneurial take on things but we are more data-driven. headed back to the merger it is going pretty well because whole foods is evolving, amazon thinks long-term. we been able to make 3 and are working on on our fourth price reduction that our company badly needed to do. premerger amazon had a lot of cool technology and in the book i talk about how it has been a win for every one of our stakeholders and customers through lower prices and team members, amazon soon after merger increased selling data, $15 an hour which, you have to increase everybody else's pay, level everybody up, that was very expensive. we counted the cost amazon, it would cost $250 million, you sure you want to do that and they did it and that was great

for morale, we had 90,000 people, 85,000 of them got a raise in pay and they were pretty excited about that. a win for our team members, when for our suppliers. they were not selling to amazon before so that is a good thing for them. a win for our investors from the time we began talking to amazon, got a $4 billion increase in valuation so that was a win for them. and a win for the community aspects of it as well like philanthropy and things we are doing in our communities, amazon supported that and did not try to cram that at all with an added additional donation so win win win win. >> do you worry not only about your situation but generally about the potential negative impact of large size, make it harder to lead the way you want to be?

>> the biggest challenge as a result of this merger has been amazon is probably one or 2 or 3 of companies in the world that gets scrutinized, everything they do is under a microscope so whole foods, we were big but now everything we do is under the microscope and that is pretty bizarre, we've got to think about anything we say or do we don't want that to negatively impact amazon. amazon doesn't want -- what is interesting is i think -- i was talking to the guy who reported to amazon one time, using my metaphor of marriage, when you married into this family you got a bunch of analogs now and some of them, some people don't like the in-laws and you have to live with it because you are part of the family now and i

thought that was a very clever way of putting it, that when people are matted amazon their matter whole foods and vice versa so that is different, being under the microscope so closely all the time. i have to be guarded in what i say in an interview like this because somebody will hear it somewhere and the media could do it, i don't want any headlines showing up here. >> speak freely with us. i understand. you have an appendix about cultural intelligence, now we will shift a little bit to your company and come back to leadership of companies in a minute but i want to ask in an effort to get your view of where we are as a country and you talk about three kind of cultural intelligence,

traditional, modern and progressive and sort of the old rules-based faith and church, liberals and liberal america, open society that believes in science and change it a step further, the mild authoritarian bend and then something in post-progressive culture, tell us a little bit what that is because it looks to be a little bit like something that gets us past the division plaguing america or maybe i'm wrong. >> this is a good framework of those who are interested, we have an appendix at the end of the book that goes into detail about this. chances are the authors might like this. >> looked like you were laying the seeds for something bigger later. >> we have a book we are talking about about conscious

america. to understand the united states, in terms of worldviews there are 3 dominant worldviews in america. the first is a more traditional worldview based on faith, family of the country and it has traditional values about religion, family, it harkens back to the constitution and the declaration of independence. >> were very comfortable in my world. >> the kind of heroes you might get like ronald reagan and winston churchill and william buckley, people like that so the modernist worldview, traditional worldview would

have more belief in truth being revealed through revelation. the modernist is more scientific, the enlightenment of progress through science, reason, capitalism, and if you think about 30% of the population of the united states is traditional that is where they are anchored and 50% is anchored in modernism. some example of the modernist would be thomas jefferson, benjamin franklin, madison, john f. kennedy, einstein, edison, milton friedman in some ways. guys like bill gates, another strong modernist. the progressives which make up 20% of the population, each of

these comes out as the worldview he falls they partly reject the worldview that came before them. modernism rejected faith. it rejected religion largely. many modernists are atheists. they believe in reason. they believe in science. they don't believe in scriptural revelation and things like that. there is a rejection of what comes before. but until progressivism arose you had this alignment between traditionalist ethics and modernist science that drove america for many decades and the new view comes about because flaws or failures in the previous worldviews so modernism did not completely

realize the limitations of modernity and so the environmental movement has come out of that because modernism, producing economic progress, there are externalities coming out of that that can negatively impact the environment so people that are progressive tend to have strong environmental views. we know we have this year, the last few years antiracism movement which is very progressive, the whole woke ideology is a progressive mindset and basically arguing america is inconsistent with its founding values of equality of all, that we've not done a good enough job in overcoming racism, having inclusivity and diversity. that has been in the media a lot.

i see that we've made a lot of progress in america, but we still have some problems. that helps motivate it. i say the progress of view is pretty globalist in the sense that it is concerned about inequality, suffering by any place in the world so there's a strong and high modernist streak to progressivism as well. a distressed of science except when it serves their ideology, mistrust of progress because -- >> they don't like capitalism. >> it is a rejection of capitalism so there's an element of socialism. and anti-modernist streak to it. those of the three. we've got 30% traditionalist, 50% modernist, 20% progressive

because they dominate academia, hollywood and the media way above their weight class in terms of members but that is the culture war, worldviews that are struggling with each other. how do we move past this, the authors argue we have to go post-progressive and the essence is to recognize all three of these worldviews have dignities and disasters, there are good things and bad things about it and what we have to do is honor the good things in each of these worldviews. for example we have to recognize some of the progressive insights are important, and shouldn't go away but we can't throw out capitalism and replace it with socialism, it would be a disaster. socialism has been tried 42 times in the last 100 years and 42 failures, it doesn't work. we have to keep capitalism.

i would argue we need -- causes readership, capitalism, but done in a more conscious way, taking into account higher purpose, stakeholders, human flourishing and done in a conscious way. we need to take the best of all these worldviews, make sure the very bad things that we can recognize bad things. bad things that might be disasters in a traditional worldview are racism, bigotry, sexism, homophobia. sometimes of traditional values. modernists we can recognize that sometimes can be captured by special interests, the can be indifferent, it can be elitist, it can be uncaring so to speak about -- >> overly materialistic.

>> the disasters and progressivism, anti-modernism, reverse patriotism so we are no longer patriotic about america, the worst country that ever existed. >> very authoritarian. >> it can be self-righteous and criticizing and canceling people out of different views. we see a lot of the disasters for progressivism right now because they are on display. but the beauties of progressivism that we need to integrate to go forward in a healthy way. of america gets to the next place we have to integrate the best of each of these worldviews and minimize the worst of these worldviews and we would call that post progressivism or the intra-goal worldview. >> i'm encouraged to keep that going because we see that divide all the time and i wanted to ask about where you

see it. if you look at the map of america with regard to the last election, the rural and urban divide and elites versus non-elites and you have stores in both kinds of america and workers and customers in both kinds of america and from your perspective after all these years of being in the middle of that, is that divide is pronounced and difficult as it looks or do we exaggerated because of the media attention it gets? >> there is a pretty big divide. 2020 has been a terrible year because of covid and everybody being locked up, people getting lonely and angry, frustrated, people losing their jobs, businesses failing. people on edge, we saw our riots, and a number of stores

that have been damaged, just a couple nights ago in portland, a couple of our stores were damaged, that has happened 15 or 20 of our stores that suffered damage during the peaceful protests and we have our team members, a big controversy this summer about dress code, all foods is always had, we don't -- we want you to -- we don't want you to promote whatever your political causes are whether it is black lives matter or make america great again or whatever it is check it at the door, we want you to be serving our customers and not bringing politics in and that has been controversial. we had a big blowup last week because we didn't want our canadian team members to be wearing poppies and we actually had the congress or the

legislature of canada condemn whole foods market, just wanting them to wear official company dress. whole foods when you get the government threatening to shut you down you will change your dress code and i wonder if that would have happened if amazon wasn't a donor whole foods. not sure what have. everything is magnified because of the amazon connection. >> that is so unfortunate. news about disturbances at your stores seems to me - are you eager to be more active in portland and get portland -- i am from new york and we know protestant disturbances and we don't under the time i worked there we believed in a certain order and respect for property. is that lost?

in that community? >> it is being challenged to put it that way. here's the thing. we are grocers, we want to sell. to do that our team members have to be safe. we've had stores broken into. we have quick instructions, chicago, in new york, in seattle coming in portland and several other cities, we have protocols to protect our team members. they are more important than property, they run out the back door, some people break into stores with baseball bats and start banking at cash registers, going into the wine department, hitting wine bottles and just being destructive. we need peace, commerce is

based on peace and rule of law. rule of law challenged a little bit, is being challenged. we are in a rocky place in america right now with defunding the police and a lot of communities. it is harder to do business. we have to hire a lot more security guards now. >> i want to ask about innovation and startup, a question we are getting from the audience. do you think you could do what you did all those years ago as easily or is the restrictions on our ability to start a business, grow a business, be free to establish a successful enterprise do you feel that is lost? >> good question. i don't really know because

i've been doing this for 42 years, pretty easy to start a business in 1978. i opened the door for business one day and the government bureaucrats came around and said where's your health department certificate, i said do we need one? where is your building permit, they came around but didn't shut us down, just that you got to get that, we had to pay a fee. >> you always focus on your purpose, you said a lot of stories about businesspeople who kept focusing on what they wanted to achieve and when they ran into roadblocks they kept their eye on the bigger goal and this got through. >> businesspeople have to constantly innovate around bureaucracy and stupid rules and figure out ways to stay in business. that is reality. businesses in the whole history of business in one way is

dealing with you need rules, you need regulations so that our stores are not broken into and looted all the time, you need police. on the other hand you can regulate business so it is hard to do business, then the whole society becomes less wealthy and less prosperous. >> i do like the book, great lessons for leaders but one of the things i love about it is you don't always tell it through your story but 100 other business people who lead with these values and i tended to ask your sense, isn't your sense that these leadership values are on the rise or more prevalent than you realize or are you fighting uphill against a culture that needs to be changed dramatically? >> it is evolving.

it needs to evolve or the socialists are going to take over. that is a path to poverty. they talk about trickle-down wealth that socialism is trickle up poverty. it impoverishes everything. that's my fear, that the marxists, academic community is hostile to business. it always has been. this is not. you will see in dietrich mccloskey's work that all the minority groups that are business people, persecuted, the jews in the west and the chinese in the east are the best examples. the aristocrats, the intellectuals, the clergy have always despised business, what tradesmen do, they are making a

profit, they are terrible people, they are not gentlemen. if you study european history if you're good brief business person you'd be college you even if you are not jewish. that was an attack on business culture in a way. now for universities, you go through there and they are so progressive and so anti-capitalists. when i speak at universities sometimes i get hecklers and they disinvited me but more often i watch the students in business school, they love the message you can do well and you can be prosperous and fulfill a higher purpose. that is music to their ears but the professors are very skeptical, their arms are crossed and they want to argue

with me. one of the interesting things to me about business school, if you think about it, who teaches in medical school? who are the teachers? >> doctors. >> who teaches in law school? >> former lawyers. >> who teaches in business school? >> businessman. >> not businesspeople, intellectuals. ..o've never actually been in business at all. it's interesting and they don't understand business don't understand entrepreneurship and can oftentimes be hostile towards the very think they are teaching. that's a particular challenge. >> yet many people -- >> about 100,000. those are livelihoods. those of the well-being, pathways up. that's a greater contribution to

human floor sheeting then universities in some ways. it's tremendous. i am a former welfare administrator as i mentioned earlier so i limped off people provided jobs. that's what i counted on. when the economy was strong and retail and grocery and people of all kinds of industries hired those workers were hiring, that's the best thing we could have. >> let me be clear about it. capitalism or actually prefer mccloskey is word for it, innovation is him the greatest thing humanity has ever created. if you go back 200 years ago when it was beginning to pick up speed, 94% of everybody alive on the planet, on earth lived on less than two dollars a day. only 6% making more than two dollars a day. that's in today's dollars. today that under 10% picked the average lifespan georges ago was

30. now with 72.6. now withn 72.6. in this countries it closer to 80. illiteracy rates to rogers agoa across the planet were 88%. now they're 12%. if you read in light but now you will see documentation after documentation at the documentation about how much the world has progressed. it has been science and technology combined withno innovationism as the entrepreneurs took the scientific discoveries and operationalized them to make our lives better. it is the greatest thing humanity has ever done. this is people are not the villains of the story. they are the heroes of the story. the entrepreneurs are the ones that createro great progress, ad they are universally vilified for the most park. people don't trust and said business, because the motivations off all, business is greedy and selfish and g export data. all he cares about is making

money. it can't be trusted. it corrupts the political culture. it's fundamentally bad thing. that's why we're t saying this move towards so socialism. capitalism is a gritty sink amenity is ever done. we told about narrative and would let the enemies of capitalism put out a narrative about us that's wrong, it's inaccurate and it's doing tremendous damage to the minds of young people. we have to counter that. it. >> i think you are right and i think we are a victim of our success. when things go bad socialist parties take over in the market goes down to where it bent in the past and all of a sudden people realize the benefits of a growing prosperous economy, i think. >> they may not realize it. the reality is what we've done

the last 200 years has never happened before. for the most part, it has slow progress because business people will basically self regulated, the genie never got out of the bottle until enlightenment so for a brief period of time intellectuals at least when it's neutral on business so maybe there is good in this. then we exploited and they are trying to stop the genie back in the bottle and if they do, we will stagnate and began to regress. i'm not think the technological civilization will collapse but it will not progress and it will begin to stagnate decline gradually. if we put in some of these green new deal policy, you will see us go backward. >> you are looking at longer-term, you're not caught

up in this election for this price but you mentioned cobit a couple of times and i wanted to get your sense of where we are in the communities you serve in your sense of large employer and businesses in america. and your observation of the pharmaceutical on a suitable industry and others that moved so quickly to develop a vaccine. are you feeling we're getting the light at the end of the tunnel here? are things going to get better? i hate to ask you monday business questions but i thought some people in the grocery business there were some optics during covered, did that not happen in your presence? >> hours were way up. the media reports strong for two reasons. the first is that our

transaction stores are down, traffic counts are down but they are down because there's a lot of business, office workers coming to lunch and offices closed down during covered, we didn't get the trap. second, i might businesses tripled, three 100% so actual sales are way up. inaccurately reported so business has done well during covered and i think restaurants, people have made a transition temporarily, i believe to not eating out as much, eating a lot more at home that has been good for supermarkets, all of. kroger, walmart, all of them. >> you have been able to adjust to whatever covered restrictions in place and interventions?

>> whole foods has the duty and responsibly to keep team members safe so i am proud of the fact that our company was in front of lot this and partly because amazon is out in front on it and we ended up, we've been recognized in a couple of different publications is the safest supermarkets in america during covid so most people have copied a lot of all food doing masks to disinfecting to cleaning to temperature testing and things like that so i think we have been successful in terms of infections and the number of people who have died. it's a relatively small. pretty low. make no mistake, it's been a difficult year even with sales up.

everybody wearing a mask, everybody is social distancing, whole foods is a huggy culture, nobody is hugging. you do elbows were kick feet with each other and that's not the same. people aren't socializing as much so i say whole foods made cultural deposits for a number of years. 2020 has been making withdrawals on the deposits. >> tumor questions, in your book you say you like to hire within and promote but you like to overdo it. there is a percentage you like, i think 80% or 75% because he felt bringing people from outside invigorate a culture so tell us about your hiring and choosing of team members. >> it is a balance between, if you only hire from within, if you only promote from within and

that enhances the culture in the sense that people know if they work hard, they can rise up and get ahead because whole foods has been growing, is a great place of opportunity for people since the pounding of the company. it doesn't require a education to make a lot of money because you can rise through the ranks. on the other hand if you only promote from within thing you stagnate because you're not getting enough new ideas, enough innovation from outside that sort of helps firmament, innovation and creativity. on the other hand if you promote too many people from the outside and people began to think you can't get ahead in the company. the way to get ahead is to work somewhere else with aramark appreciated so approximately are

leadership about 25% get promoted from outside the company and 75% are promoted from within. that's the way it's worked out for whole foods in the right number but back in barry and other companies. >> i wanted to ask a thanksgiving question related to the underlying business and your passion for healthy and wholesome foods. we are going to have things and we may have gatherings smaller than usual but still have gatherings with family. what is the product or food that is the main stay at your table and you would recommend to those of us -- >> i may be a bad person to ask, i am plant -based, vegan. >> i know that, i wasn't thinking you are going to say turkey but that, we all eat vegetables. what is your go to dish?

>> my go to dish generally is a been stew with a ton of vegetables in it, that's my favorite. >> that will be on the table at thanksgiving with your family. >> absolutely. a lot of beans but a ton of vegetables. sweet potatoes and broccoli, cauliflower to opera, whatever veggies are in season. >> all right. i hope you have a great thanksgiving and thank you for all that you've done thank you for your book and guidance in your leadership and for participating in this conversation. do you have any final words or anything we've missed? i like to give people the chance to say they feel there's a message they want to convey. >> i'll convey a message of hope

that america has gone through a difficult time and we are not merely through it, we are not going to get through it anytime soon. i'm a student of american history and we have faced bigger challenges and this one. we stumbled our way through but we have gone through it i think we will get through this, too. maybe it's going to take a few years, maybe longer but i do think america has a great capacity to renew itself and sometimes we are best when our backs are against the wall and forced to make changes. forced to make reformations and there's a great u there's a great underlying love of the country by americans. i think we seen it in this election cycle, and yeah, i'm very hopeful about the future even if i'm not particularly helpful about the short-term future even though i think we will get past covid. i think you're from now will be

passed it and a lot of our normal behaviors will be returning which is going to be a good thing. we will stop being so scared. that's a good thing. >> got to live, got to go forward and we are going to get through covid. thanks very much for doing this. we really appreciate it. >> thanks for all he you do. aei is a great institution. >> thanks very much. >> here's some of our live coverage for today. on c-span at 10:15 10:15 n the senate homeland security committee holds a hearing with terrorism experts to examine the threat of domestic terrorism and extremism here at 1 p.m. a conversation on health care workforce development posted by u.s. news and world report. on c-span2 at 10:30 a.m. the senate continues consideration of the bipartisan infrastructure agreement with debate and vote on amendments.

>> now on booktv's "after words" program, former xerox ceo ursula burns, the first black female ceo of a fortune 500 company, shares her insights into american business and the corporate world. she's interviewed by amazon senior vice president alicia boler davis. >> host: i am so excited to have this opportunity and to talk to did it about "where you are is not who you are." while we have never met i have followed you for many, many years and i've been incredibly inspired by your journey so i'm just was excited to talk to you trejo i am t happy to be here ad happy to help. >> host: okay. let's go ahead and get started. in the process you say it was truly remarkable -- [inaudible] which suggests you are a reluctant author. what convinced you to write your story?