Justin Fox:

My column in this week’s Time is about John Mackey, the CEO and co-founder of Whole Foods Market, and Kip Tindell, the CEO and co-founder of the Container Store, and their shared belief that corporations perform a lot better over time if their executives focus more on employees and customers than on shareholders.
Mackey and Tindell go way back–they shared a house in Austin with three friends one year in the mid-1970s as they worked their way through the University of Texas on the eight-year plan. They’ve recently begun hanging out together a bit, and when I met Tindell at a National Retail Federation event in New York late last year, he invited me to come down to Texas to talk to the two of them. So I did. We met at Whole Foods’ headquarters in Austin, which is perched atop the chain’s flagship store, and we talked, and talked. Tindell is stereotypical laid-back, slow-talking Texan. Mackey is a not so stereotypical hyper, fast-talking Texan. But they seemed to get along pretty well. As for me, I mostly just stayed out of the way.
What follows is an edited transcript of the conversation. I cut some stuff out, moved a few passages around, and removed a lot of “uhs” and “you knows” (mine as well as theirs). Beyond that it’s a pretty faithful representation of what was said. It’s pretty long, too. But most educational.