Case: Whole Foods: Balancing Social Mission and Growth
Student Name: Wenjun Dong
Student ID: 108808399
Statement:
From hard time of initially founding Safer Way to today’s success of Whole Foods, Whole Food’s organizational strategies, processes and procedures to achieve its business and social goals indeed worth us to learn. Most important two of these experiences are: firstly, Whole Foods has specific organizational culture: its “five core values”. Secondly, the whole team can stick to this fundamental assumption and appear visible, physical manifestation of organizational culture, this is because no matter old or new employees of Whole Foods, they are all helped to learn the company’s system s and philosophy, in which organizational culture instilling is well done and strong culture can be generated. However, corporation’s growth is always accompanied by problems.
I believe Wholes Foods faces problems as follow:
Firstly and the most important, many stakeholders think Whole Foods doesn’t do a good job in balancing immense growth and its motto, “Whole Foods, Whole people, Whole Planet.”
Secondly, some people wonder some products exist in Whole Food’s expanded list are not wholesome.
Thirdly, intense competition from different sources, mainly include lower cost alternative market such as Trader Joe’s and conventional supermarkets such as Walmart.
Fourthly, “gainsharing” problem.
Last but not least, profits drop resulted from high acquisition cost.
Analysis of problem:
First problem: Balancing motto and immense growth.
Cause: the Contradiction between motto and immense growth: Whole Foods also use industrial organic farms and long-distance domestic and international shipping, not only solely use local suppliers, (Marquis, Besharov, & Thomason, 2011) which is criticized doesn’t match the image of a small local farm that many shoppers thought they were supporting when buying organic produce. (Marquis, Besharov, & Thomason, 2011)...