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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It pains me to bear witness to the sixth great extinction, where we humans are directly responsible for the complete destruction of so many wonderful creatures and invaluable indigenous cultures. It saddens me especially to observe the plight of our own species; we appear to be incapable of solving our problems.”…“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 the processes that are essential to maintaining healthy life on Planet Earth … Thinking these dark thoughts doesn’t depress me; in fact, I’m a happy person. I’m a Buddhist about it all. I’ve accepted the fact that there is a beginning and an end to everything. Maybe the human species has run its course and it’s time for us to go away and leave room for other, one hopes, more intelligent and responsible, life forms.” Yvon has always been an outdoors person. He’s a surfer, climber, fly fisher and all his friends were too. He focused on “scratching his own (and his friend’s) itch.” Our own company had exceeded its resources and limitations; we had become dependent, like the world's economy, on growth we could not sustain. We were forced to rethink our priorities and institute new practices. First step: I took a dozen of my top managers to Argentina, to the windswept mountains of Patagonia, for a walkabout. In the course of roaming around those wildlands, we asked ourselves, once again, why we were in business and what kind of business we wanted to build. If you can create the game that you are playing, you are more likely to win. And, to a great degree, this is why Patagonia thrives and other brands are constantly attempting to keep up with them. They are always re-writing the rules in their favor.

People may be afraid of the term ‘activist’ because they associate it with ecosabotage and violent protests, but I’m talking about normal citizens who want the government to live up to its obligations to protect our air, water and all other natural resources. Activists have an infectious passion about the issues they support, whether they are mothers fighting to clean up toxic landfills that are killing their children or farmers trying to hold on to their fourth-generation family business threatened by urban sprawl. These are the people on the front lines, trying either to make the government obey its own laws or to recognize the need for a new law.” Despite the challenges involved, we've found that every time we've elected to do the right thing, even when it costs twice as much, it's turned out to be more profitable. This strengthens my confidence that we're headed in the right direction. Our Environmental Assessment Program educates us, and with education we have choices. When we act positively on solving problems instead of trying to find a way around them, we're farther along the path toward sustainability. Plus we're constantly discovering more things we can do, both internally and externally. If Patagonia can continue to be successful operating under the constraints of our environmental philosophy, then perhaps we can convince other companies that green business is good business, and they can gain the confidence to take a few steps in the right direction. 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.”

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Like Yvon Chouinard, you might see where, in your life, or work, you can rewrite the rules to set yourself and others up to win. Patagonia puts quality first, period. A more sales-driven company might sacrifice a degree of quality to achieve on-time delivery, and a mass marketer might sacrifice both quality and on-time delivery to maintain the lowest cost. Yvon Married in 1971, to Malinda Pennoyer, who has been intimately involved in Patagonia’s operations in partnership with Yvon.

Our efforts, and those of others who work toward similar goals, are making an impact. The organic-food industry is growing at a rate of more than 20 percent a year. Worldwide demand for organic cotton has tripled in the nine years since we changed over. As this drives costs down, large companies like Nike buy organic cotton to blend in with their industrial cotton as a way to support the cause but not price themselves out of the market. Some of the fiber mills we work with, at our prodding, are actively researching ways to eliminate toxic materials like antinomy and methyl bromide in polyester.Patagonia’s philosophy revolved heavily around doing what they were good at, and doing it extremely well. 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.” In the version of the book I read, the historic account ends in the mid 2000s, and transitions to a section titled, “Philosophies.” Awareness and attentiveness to who you are (in this case who your company is) are foundational to operating in a way that’s sustainable and successful.