... of how online behaviour can mimic - and make easier - the kinds of malevolent dirty tricks often played out in boardrooms and in the competitive arena of of business. 

Pseudonymity can have its advantages ... and as we all know it also can provide cover for some common forms of  human ugliness of spirit and intent.

If you take a look at the bottom part of the excerpt I quoted, the Whole Foods CEO offers one of the lamest excuses for trying to avoifd wankerdom I have seen in a while ... a form of "Gee, I didn't really mean it, I was just poking fun."

Sure ... I believe you, John Mackey, I really do.  I hope his hoped-for merger fails and that his business career is ruined.

Via The Guardian Online

.

Takeover at risk from Whole Food boss's web rants

Andrew Clark
July 13, 2007


On the cynical forums of Yahoo's finance website, a user called "rahodeb" stood out. Fiercely argumentative and passionately partisan, the shadowy tipster stuck rigidly to one topic - the strengths of the supermarket chain Whole Foods.


Whole Foods, according to hundreds of "rahodeb" posts between 1999 and 2006, was easily the US's top organic retailer. Its rival, Wild Oats, was overvalued, "floundering around" and lacking in any coherent strategy.

In a disclosure that has prompted stiff questions about corporate ethics, the Federal Trade Commission this week unmasked the person behind the pseudonym as John Mackey - who co-founded Whole Foods in 1980 and built it into a $5bn Fortune 500 company.

As Whole Foods' chief executive, Mr Mackey in February agreed a $565m takeover of Wild Oats - the very firm whose stock he had been urging lower on Yahoo, using as a pseudonym an anagram of his wife's name, Deborah.


In a lawsuit filed to stop the merger on anti-competitive grounds, the FTC has cited an observation by Mr Mackey that he planned on "systematically destroying" Wild Oats "market by market, city by city".

Mr Mackey's online ramblings often centred on share prices. In March 2006, he confidently predicted that the price would rise by a fifth over 12 months.

"Whole Foods remains in a long-term upward trend. The stock was at $49.98 a share one year ago today. Therefore the stock is 20% above where it was a year ago. I think it will be about 20% above where it is today one year from now."

He minced few words in bashing Perry Odak, his counterpart at Wild Oats, based in Boulder, Colorado. "OATS has been in business for 19 years now and its cumulative losses are $84 million over that time period - most of that in the last 5 years under Perry Odak's 'brilliant' leadership."

[ Snip ... ]

Experts in corporate governance suggested that Mr Mackey's antics could jeopardise Whole Foods' already controversial takeover of its rival. Buie Seawell, a business ethics professor at the University of Denver, told US reporters: "For the head of one company to be using an alias to criticise another in a fairly prominent posting site seems to me not worthy of someone at that level of trust. What is he up to?"

Robert Lande, a professor at the University of Baltimore's law school, said: "This merger is in real big trouble thanks to him shooting his mouth off."

Writing under his own name on Whole Foods' own website yesterday, Mr Mackey admitted that he was "rahodeb" but defended his conduct, saying he was merely playing "devil's advocate" in many instances and did not always really believe what he was writing.

"I posted on Yahoo! under a pseudonym because I had fun doing it," said Mr Mackey. "I never intended any of those postings to be identified with me."

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