Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman--Including 10 More Years of Business Unusual: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman - Including 10 More Years of Business as Usual

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Often, business people enter into business opportunities purely for the sake of business. They’ll enter into markets and industries they themselves aren’t a part of as customers, and then patch together the needs and interests of the people in that space. And Patagonia learned that you cannot have both precision and perfection in your products and maintain 40-50% growth. It was this desire to manifest the entire potential of the company all at once that led to them hitting that wall in 1990.

Through the exercise of thinking deeply and writing down your own thoughts and beliefs, you challenge yourself to clarify any gaps in logic, as well as see past any rosy hues you put on your thoughts while still in your head. It’s there on hard paper. This moment was an inflection point for both Yvon and Patagonia as a company. Yvon committed to never again exceed their limits and resources as a business. He planned to prioritize sustainable and comfortable growth and to think long-term. None of this is necessary. No cotton was grown this way before World War II, when many of the chemicals now used in agriculture were first developed as nerve gases for warfare. I especially enjoyed the new foreword by renowned author and activist Naomi Klein, asking, “What if we shopped to live, instead of lived to shop?” From a series of Patagonia ads in 2004: “Who are businesses really responsible to? Their customers? Shareholders? Employees? We would argue that it’s none of the above. Fundamentally, businesses are responsible to their resource base. Without a healthy environment there are no shareholders, no employees, no customers and no business.”

Getting Beyond the ‘Buffett Rule’

When you get away from the idea that a company is disposable, all future decisions in the company are affected. The owners and the officers see that, since the company will outlive them, they have responsibilities beyond the bottom line. Perhaps they will even see themselves as stewards of the earth. A week later, as the new VP of HR, finances, and legal, he began to find his answer to the question. Can you imagine yourself doing what you are doing in the way you are doing it 5 years from now? 10?

Klein sums up the book by saying: “This is the story of an attempt to do more than change a single corporation—it is an attempt to challenge the culture of consumption that is at the heart of the global ecological crisis.” Though I highly recommend reading the entire book, I wanted to share the passages I found especially profound. Is working employees tirelessly, in a chaotic environment sustainable for 100 years? Of course not. Employee turnover would be constant and company cohesiveness would be routinely interrupted.

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Patagonia’s philosophy revolved heavily around doing what they were good at, and doing it extremely well.

When it comes to the environment, it's probably no secret that I'm a total pessimist about the fate of the natural world. In my lifetime I've seen nothing but a constant deterioration of all of the processes that are essential to maintaining healthy life on Planet Earth. Most of the scientists and deep thinkers in the environmental field who I know personally are also pessimistic, and they believe that we are experiencing an extremely accelerated extinction of species—including, possibly, much of the human race. We are a product-driven company. That means that product comes first and the company exists to create and support our products.

In the early 1970s, as an offshoot of Chouinard Equipment, came a clothing line. It’s this line that ultimately became what we now know to be Patagonia. Patagonia’s first official store opened in 1973, in Ventura, CA. having the philosophies in writing, and the shared cultural experiences of our classes, played a critical role in the company's turnaround, at the end of 1991. Within a few years we had eliminated several layers of management, consolidated inventories, and brought our sales channels under control—meaning that for the next decade and a half we would refocus on living up to our mission statement: "Make the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, and use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis." Even the businessperson or entrepreneur with the most conviction reaches a crossroad where they feel they must compromise on their own “non-negotiables.” Several planning efforts had to be aborted; no one could solve the Rubik's Cube of matching market-specific product development with such a complex distribution mix. Organization charts looked like the Sunday crossword puzzle and were issued almost as frequently. The company was restructured five times in five years; no plan worked better than the last one. I personally love change, but I was driving everyone crazy by constantly trying new ideas without a clear direction for where we were trying to go.

The power of the film [ DamNation] to motivate and embolden citizen action against dams around the world has been its greatest achievement. By doing something “right” the first time, we don’t have to worry about expending more effort and energy down the line, for ourselves or the planet. There became a point when Yvon accepted both his reality and his fate—he was a “businessperson,” and he’d most likely be one for a long time. He shifted focus towards actions that would ensure Patagonia would be in existence 100 years from now, not just tomorrow.Even with substantial sales volume, the climbing hardware business was never wildly successful. And ultimately, in the midst of a legal crisis in the late 1980s, where Chouinard Equipment was the target of lawsuits involving improper use of their climbing gear, they had to file for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy.