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In March 2003 in the elegant ballroom of the Fairmont hotel in Santa Monica, California, John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market, tried several times to cut off the animal-rights activist.

Lauren Ornelas, director of Viva! USA, a group devoted to improving the living conditions of farm animals, was doing a lot more than asking a question at Mackey's annual shareholder meeting. She had taken the floor to make a speech about ducks -- a speech about the treatment and lives of the ducks that end up trussed and chilled in the display cases of Mackey's stores, ready to cook and eat.

"She was disrupting our meeting," says Mackey. "She was trying to force her worldview on other people."

Ornelas, in fact, was lecturing a man who has done more to improve the quality, sustainability, healthfulness, and purity of the food Americans eat -- from farm field and barnyard to kitchen table -- than anyone else in the past 25 years.

Whole Foods, the company Mackey cofounded and heads, is the largest organic- and natural-foods grocer in the country, and the world. It is also Mackey's ongoing experiment in battling the industrialization of the food supply, in making apparently ordinary work engaging and rewarding, and in running a large public corporation in radically new ways. At a time when grocery chains treat food as just another SKU in the supply chain, to be bar-coded, shelved, and self-scanned, Whole Foods has succeeded with exactly the opposite strategy. In 157 stores in 28 states, the District of Columbia, Canada, and Great Britain, Whole Foods creates markets that are a celebration of food: bright, well-staffed, and seductive; a mouth-watering festival of colors, smells, and textures; an homage to the appetite.

Worried about the safety of the farm-raised salmon? Some of Mackey's stores recently displayed placards detailing test results for PCB contamination in the chain's farm-raised and wild salmon, along with FDA limits. Curious about the life of a chicken in the display case? It comes with a 16-page booklet and an invitation to visit the live chickens at the company's Pennsylvania farm.

And so Mackey's initial response to the duck lady was dismissive -- even classically corporate. "I actually said to Lauren, 'We have the best animal standards in the country -- go bother somebody else,' " he recalls. And then, as Ornelas talked on about the meager lives of farm ducks, Mackey stepped from the lectern and strode from the ballroom. He says he was just taking a bathroom break, but it looked as if the CEO was walking out in a huff -- so much so that he was followed by several of his senior executives and a handful of Whole Foods stockholders.

After he returned and the meeting wrapped up, Ornelas found Mackey in the crowd. They had a cordial chat, and the CEO gave the activist his email address. For several weeks, they traded arguments about how animals are raised. Mackey quickly found the exchange tedious -- rhetorical rather than persuasive -- and says he sent Ornelas a final email that basically said, "I'm done. We're not going to agree about this."

And then the CEO of what will this year be a $3.7 billion corporation did something very un-CEO-like -- something that shows why he is such an unusual leader and ultimately such an influential one. Instead of simply dismissing Ornelas from his busy brain, Mackey decided to try to make sense of her and her beliefs. "I didn't understand why these people were so passionate about this issue," he says. "I perceived them as our enemies. Now, the best way to argue with your opponents is to completely understand their point of view."