Remember Whole Foods, and how the strange man who serves as its CEO secretly criticized an acquisition target? Well, Whole Foods’s board of directors seems to feel it would be best if John Mackey – and all other executives – kept their mouths shut and fingers still.
In the event your memory isn’t so good, I’ll refer you to our own David Utter, who detailed how Mackey used a pseudonym in online forums while taking potshots at Wild Oats. An important detail: that story broke about four months ago.
So the board of directors at Whole Foods isn’t exactly quick on its feet, but at least it reached a reasonable conclusion. According to David Kesmodel, “The new code bars top executives and directors from posting messages about Whole Foods, its competitors or vendors on Internet forums that aren’t sponsored by the natural-foods chain.”
One can’t help but wonder if other companies will enact similar policies; the embarrassing situation created by Mackey is something that no one will want to repeat. And this development seems to fit with a report indicating that roughly half of businesses with a certain type of filtering software block MySpace or Facebook.
Oh, well. In vaguely related news, Brownstoner reports that Whole Foods apparently got around to fixing a fence after it “was in disrepair for several weeks, leading Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum to say the open-access brownfield was potentially harmful to neighborhood kids.”
