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

Product Information

Though more than 40 percent of the republished book contains new material, I relished the parts that were from the original edition, remembering how his words have impacted my business decisions over the years. However, the new parts of the book are inspiring as well. “The purpose of the revised edition,” as Chouinard tells us in the preface, “is to share what we have done in the last decade and what we plan to do in the decades ahead to achieve our goals.” My company, Ventura, California–based Patagonia Inc., maker of technical outdoor apparel and gear, is an ongoing experiment. Founded in 1973, it exists to challenge conventional wisdom and present a new style of responsible enterprise. We believe the accepted model of capitalism, which necessitates endless growth and deserves the blame for the destruction of nature, must be displaced. Patagonia and its thousand employees have the means and the will to prove to the rest of the corporate world that doing the right thing makes for good, financially sound business. We are a product-driven company. That means that product comes first and the company exists to create and support our products.

Everything we personally own that’s made, sold, shipped, stored, cleaned, and ultimately thrown away does some environmental harm every step of the way, harm that we’re either directly responsible for or is done on our behalf. -Yvon Chouinard Wonderful . . . a moving autobiography, the story of a unique business, and a detailed blueprint for hope." —Jared Diamond, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel Branding is telling people who we are. Promotion is selling people on our product. Our promotional efforts begin with the product.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. I’ve been called an idealist before. It’s ok. I’m cool with it. So when an idealist is also a gear junkie, what does he buy? Patagonia. As my old gear gets worn out, it inevitably gets replaced with its Patagucci equivalent. This process has been going on for the better part of ten years and is in large part due to the durability of the gear and my trust in the company’s business practices. I'm always wary of the stories of successful people who make it seem like they fell into their success. At the same time, because Patagonia is, for a for-profit business, very environmentally responsible and family-oriented, I really wanted to like this book. Unfortunately, I didn't. This book is an example of exactly that, it’s a complete reflection and distillation of his philosophies on life and business. Flipping through the book’s glossy pictures and inspiring history, it’s hard not to appreciate what Chouinard has built. His deep passion for outdoor adventure, environmental sustainability, and Zen Buddhism come through in his witty prose and hard-earned wisdom. An admitted pessimist, Chouinard finds solace in activism funding countless projects to protect wild areas around the world and to improve the well-being of oppressed peoples.

Patagonia Founder Yvon Chouinard didn’t set out to be a businessperson. As he mentions in this very book, Let My People Go Surfing, he grew up wanting to be a fur trapper. In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness. Think about sustainability. It’s about the long-game, not the short game. It’s not only about what you are producing, but how you are producing it. The recruiters and hiring managers at the company want to understand how candidates put Patagonia gear to the test, what their connection to food, clean water, and healthy dirt is, and what work and homework they’re already doing to save wildlife and wild spaces.As soon as you title your employee handbook “Let My People Go Surfing,” you’re deeply committed to flexibility. Patagonia understands that when the waves are up at nearby C Street or Rincon — or the powder is down in the faraway Sierra — that employees will set aside their work, grab their boards or skis, and head out. “We hire people who love being outside, people who love the outdoors,” Dean said. “So when the surf’s up, they’re going to be surfing anyway. If we didn’t have a Let My People Go Surfing policy, we’d have a lot of performance action plans.”

At Patagonia, making a profit is not the goal because the Zen master would say profits happen 'when you do everything else right'.”Doing risk sport had taught me another important lesson: never exceed your limits. You push the envelope and you live for those moments when you’re right on the edge, but you don’t go over. You have to be true to yourself; you have to know your strengths and limitations and live within your means.” Do you have to prioritize the bottom line above all else? If you work in an office, do you work 9-5 with an hour for lunch? Is it, in fact, critical to determine for you and your employees when and from where work is done? 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.

Everything we personally own that’s made, sold, shipped, stored, cleaned, and ultimately thrown away does some environmental harm every step of the way, harm that we’re either directly responsible for or is done on our behalf.” Patagonia will never be completely socially responsible. It will never make a totally sustainable, nondamaging product. But it is committed to trying. We simply don't have any other choice. As the late environmentalist David Brower once put it, "There's no business to be done on a dead planet." 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). 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. 😉He recognized there wasn’t one way to do anything (well, most anything). If ultimately he learned that there was just one way to something, and that was a way he didn’t enjoy, then he wasn’t going to do it.