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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By creating something that scratches your own itch, it may very well do the same for others. It’s rare that we are ever completely unique. 😉 In creating new products, Patagonia doesn’t chase fashion or trends. They pay attention to their core customers and focus purely on solving theirproblems and making themsomething useful that will not just look good today, but will look good 10 years from now.

Any book like Let My People Go Surfingthat I read, often leaves me with similar advice—reflect deeply on, and write down what it is you think and believe about the world. A familial company like ours runs on trust rather than authoritarian rule. Maybe a few people take advantage of our flextime and our "let my people go surfing" policy, but none of our best employees would want to work in a company that didn't have that trust. They understand that my M.B.A. style of management is as much a sign of my trust in them as my desire to be out of the office. 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 Zen master would say if you want to change government, you have to aim at changing corporations, and if you want to change corporations, you first have to change the consumers. Whoa, wait a minute! The consumer? That's me. You mean I'm the one who has to change? From highschool on, Chouinard found enjoyment outdoors. Yvon describes, “I found my games in the ocean, creeks, and hillsides surrounding Los Angeles.” Yvon’s formative experiences revolved around nature. His earliest days of entrepreneurship began from being 15 years old when he was a founding member of the Southern California Falconry Club, to his summers in Wyoming where he learned to climb and fish, to his time camping out in Yosemite with some of the best climbers of the day (including himself). Was countingon 40-50% revenue growth every year possible and sustainable for 100 years? Patagonia realized it wasn’t.

What our employees all share is a passion for something outside themselves, whether for surfing or opera, climbing or gardening, skiing or community activism. Yvon has a clear passion for “craft.” If something is going to be made at all, it better be useful, of the highest quality, and last as long as possible. In the late eighties, Chouinard Equipment became the target of several lawsuits. None involved faulty equipment or climbers. We were sued by a window washer, a plumber, a stagehand, and someone who broke his ankle in a tug-of-war contest using our climbing rope. The basis of each suit was improper warning—that we had failed to properly warn these customers about the dangers inherent in using our equipment for uses we could not predict. Then came a more serious suit, from the family of a lawyer who was killed when he incorrectly tied into one of our harnesses in a beginner climbing class.

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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.