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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I read Chouinard’s original book nearly a decade ago and was fortunate to get him to sign my treasured copy in 2013 when he was in Cleveland, Ohio, to receive the Inamori Ethics Prize, which honored his integrity as a business leader and lifetime commitment to corporate social responsibility. Yvon developed a clear definition for what “best” looked like for any new product they considered designing. Some of those characteristics included: Quality control was always foremost in our minds, because if a tool failed, it could kill someone, and since we were our own best customers, there was a chance it would be us! Simplification 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. 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. The current CEO of Patagonia (as of 2020), is Rose Marcario. Along with Let My People Go Surfing, Yvon has authored or co-authored three additional social entrepreneur books: another on lessons from Patagonia, one on ice climbing (his first book), and one on fly fishing (his most recent). Yvon Chouinard with current CEO of Patagonia, Rose Marcario Key Quotes

Getting Beyond the ‘Buffett Rule’

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.

Still other issues loomed. The general interest in outdoor sports and adventure was exploding in the U.S. and overseas, and we were riding the growth. We expanded internationally, opening retail stores in Chamonix and Tokyo. At the beginning of the nineties, we added another 100 employees, and projected continued annual growth of 40 percent, a rate we'd been experiencing for the past several years. But we made some classic mistakes. We failed to provide the proper training for the new company leaders, and the strain of managing a company with eight autonomous product divisions and three channels of distribution exceeded management's skills. We never developed the mechanisms to encourage them to work together in ways that kept the overall business objectives in sight.

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. Of course, we also want—and need—to make money, but we believe that's best accomplished by remaining nimble and efficient. One of our goals has been to have no debt. A company with little debt, or with "cash in the kitty," can take advantage of opportunities as they come up or invest in a startup without having to go further in debt or find outside investors. One of our most recent examples is a Japanese fabric mill we're working with to help us switch all of our polyester items, like our Capilene underwear, to 100 percent recycled material—something we probably couldn't have done if we carried a lot of debt. Managing our finances this way helps the company remain in yarak, a falconry term derived from Persian and meaning "superalert, hungry but not weak, and ready to hunt."