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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Our mission is to foster a universal passion for reading by partnering with authors to help create stories and communicate ideas that inform, entertain, and inspire. My lifelong adventure in business took root in Southern California. My family had moved from Lisbon, Maine, to Burbank, California, in 1946, when I was eight, because my mother, the real adventurer among us, thought the drier climate would help my father's asthma. My father was a tough French Canadian who worked as a journeyman plasterer, carpenter, electrician, and plumber, and I had an older brother and two older sisters. Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessmanis part biography, part compilation of Chouinard’s philosophies that underlie what has become one of the most successful and well-regarded outdoor apparel brands in existence: Patagonia. I had long practiced my M.B.A. theory of management—management by absence—while I wear-tested our clothing and equipment in the most extreme conditions of the Himalayas and South America. It fueled new and exciting ideas for products, new markets, or new materials, but it also fueled my growing awareness of the environmental and social devastation going on around the world. Rather than bailing out in disgust, I saw an opportunity to create an entirely new kind of company. I wanted to make sure every employee at Patagonia understood our business and environmental ethics, so I began to lead multi-day employee seminars in the philosophies, going by bus to Yosemite or the Marin Headlands, north of San Francisco, where we'd camp out and gather under the trees to talk. 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.

Is draining the planet of its natural resources at the cost of short-term profits sustainable for 100 years? Of course not! The very materials many companies need to produce their products would be gone.He blogs, podcasts, and publishes video on all things leaving the world a better, more just, equitable, and habitable place for all.

He described his father as a “tough French Canadian” from Quebec. And his mother, as “adventurous.” She was the one who moved the whole family out to Burbank, California in 1946. Cotton fields contribute millions of metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions every year. A conventional cotton field stinks; its chemicals burn the eyes and nauseate the stomach. Before harvesting in non-frost regions like California, cotton has to be sprayed by a crop duster with the defoliant Paraquat, about half of which hits the target. The rest settles over the neighbors’ fields and into our streams. He shifted focus towards actions that would ensure Patagonia would be in existence 100 years from now, not just tomorrow. We improve and get better at what we are doing by doing it constantly, for a long time. What do you feel like you would be happy doing most days for the next 5, 10, 15 years? Even if he or she isn’t aware of it, every individual spends an entire lifetime creating and evolving a personal image that others perceive.”One of the hardest things for a business to do is to investigate the environmental effects of its most successful product and, if it's bad, change it or pull it off the shelves. We confronted this when we were looking into switching over to organic cotton, in the mid-nineties. Though we successfully made the transition, we still haven't completely solved the problem. Even when cotton is grown without toxic chemicals, it still uses an inordinate amount of water and cannot be grown year after year without permanently depleting the soil. When a cotton garment is worn out, it is usually thrown away. We have to dig deeper and try to make products that close the loop—clothing that can be recycled infinitely into similar or equal products, which is something we continue to strive for. Reusing something instead of immediately discarding it, when done for the right reasons, can be an act of love which expresses our own dignity. —” In growing our young company, however, we still used many traditional practices—increasing the number of products, opening new dealers and new stores of our own, developing new foreign markets—and soon we were in serious danger of outgrowing our breeches. By the late eighties we were expanding at a rate that, if sustained, would have made us a billion-dollar company in another decade. To reach that theoretical mark, we would have to begin selling to mass merchants or department stores. This challenged the fundamental design principles we had established for ourselves as the makers of the best products, compromised our commitment to the environment, and began to raise serious questions about the future. Can a company that wants to make the best outdoor clothing in the world be the size of Nike? Can we meet the bottom line without giving up our goals of good stewardship and long-term sustainability? Can we have it all?