Yvon Chouinard is the Owner and Founder of Patagonia, Inc. He was born in Lisbon, Maine, where a large French Canadian community resided. I read every book on business, searching for a philosophy that would work for us. I was especially interested in books on Japanese or Scandinavian styles of management because I knew the American way of doing business offered only one of many possible routes.” Part 1: “History” takes us all the way from Yvon’s upbringing in a French Canadian family that moved cross-country from Maine to Burbank, California, to Yvon’s more formative teens and 20s, where he found his earliest passions for life outdoors—surfing, climbing, fishing, and everything in between. I realize now that what I was trying to do was to instill in my company, at a critical time, lessons that I had already learned as an individual and as a climber, surfer kayaker, and fly fisherman. I had always tried to live my own life fairly simply, and by 1991, knowing what I knew about the state of the environment, I had begun to eat lower on the food chain and reduce my consumption of material goods. Doing risk sports 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. The same is true for a business. The sooner a company tries to be what it is not, the sooner it tries to ‘have it all,’ the sooner it will die.” Is working employees tirelessly, in a chaotic environment sustainable for 100 years? Of course not. Employee turnover would be constant and company cohesiveness would be routinely interrupted.

When Malinda and I made the decision to stay in business, we faced a personal challenge: Could we run a company that does much good and very little harm? Could we turn the company into a model, capable of effecting reform that we as individuals would be unable to accomplish? Could we actually change the way others treat the natural world?When you get away from the idea that a company is disposable, all future decisions in the company are affected. The owners and the officers see that, since the company will outlive them, they have responsibilities beyond the bottom line. Perhaps they will even see themselves as stewards of the earth.

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? There's no difference between a pessimist who says, 'It's all over, don't bother trying to do anything, forget about voting, it won't make a difference,' and an optimist who says, 'Relax, everything is going to turn out fine.' Either way the results are the same. Nothing gets done.” Breaking the rules and making my own system work is the creative part of management that's particularly satisfying for me. But I don't jump into things without doing my homework. In the late seventies, when Patagonia was really starting to grow some legs, I read every business book I could find, searching for a philosophy that would work for us. I was especially interested in books on Japanese and Scandinavian styles of management, because I wanted to find a role model for the company; the American way of doing business offered only one of many possible routes. I was still wondering why I was really in business when, in 1991, after all those years of 30 to 50 percent compound annual growth, Patagonia hit the wall. The country had entered a recession, and the growth we had always planned on, and bought inventory for, stopped.

Our Billionaire Age Still Going Strong

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. At Patagonia, making a profit is not the goal because the Zen master would say profits happen 'when you do everything else right'.” 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. Yvon Married in 1971, to Malinda Pennoyer, who has been intimately involved in Patagonia’s operations in partnership with Yvon.

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. If you find yourself feeling like you need to make those compromises on your non-negotiables, maybe that’s a call for a firmer allegiance to your values and greater creativity in problem-solving.This section covers Yvon’s philosophies which translate into the policies of Patagonia, encompassing: You will always be able to reason yourself into undermining the values that might go against the grain. If you set your own rules and standards but don’t strive to exceed the bar you set, then what’s the point? 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. 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