Under the tree this past Christmas was my very first piece of Patagonia clothing: a greyish quarter-zip, as I now know them to be called. Late to the party, I’ve only recently become aware of how special the Ventura, CA company is when it comes to charitable causes, treatment of its workforce, and manufacturing sustainability, so getting some sort of gear was tops on my Santa list. Included in the box was a copy of Let My People Go Surfing, company founder Yvon Chouinard’s recently updated business book. As durable as my new pullover is, the book’s lessons are even more so with loads of the author’s wisdom on his MBA (management by absence), intolerance for excuse making (tell him something is impossible at your own peril), and core values (the first of which is to do no environmental harm). Perhaps most remarkable are the included photographs taken over the company’s nearly 50-year history, all of which help communicate who their core customers are and the work hard/play hard vibe. Far before results only work environments (ROWE) came into fashion, Patagonia stressed that when you get the job done you’ve earned the right to grab your board and catch a wave, so let ’em boast about high employee productivity and tenure.
Chouinard, pushing 80 years of age, still doesn’t seem entirely comfortable calling himself a businessperson and always wanted to distance himself “from those pasty-faced corpses in suits” that he saw in airline magazines. (With a line like that, doubtless he’s a longtime fan of the late George Carlin.) As a self-described dirtbag – albeit one with an estimated personal net worth north of $1B – it’s important to him and his wife Malinda that employees want to come to work “on the balls of (their) feet and go up the stairs two steps at a time” and “to blur that distinction between work and play and family.” Show up barefoot if you like as long as you’re psyched to be there. Today the company can sift through an avalanche of applications for each job opening, but early on it was all about the immediate network of fellow climbers and kayakers, those who knew full well what gear worked and fit. As revenues rocketed skyward – largely under the stewardship of one-time GM-cum-CEO Kris McDivitt Tompkins – it became that much more crucial to nurture an innovative workplace known for open communication in a collaborative atmosphere. If ever there was an example of what good can result when a company hires carefully and correctly, surely this would be it.
Of course, a book about company culture built on the mission of environmental activism is political in nature, so the reader should expect threads of that sort of commentary throughout. But like its author, it doesn’t take itself too seriously either. Chouinard, all about loving one’s meaningful career, envisions hell as the place where he’d be required to market soda pop, “a product that no one needs, is identical to its competition, and can’t be sold on its merits.” And about those excuses: he’s not having them. Sounding every bit the cranky back-in-my-day/get-off-my-lawn type, he rails against those who blame management, technology, or a lack of time & resources as reasons things couldn’t or didn’t get done. The best one? When you say you can’t reach someone on the phone, you’ve likely only tried a few times. Check back with Chouinard when you’ve called the prospect twenty times, including at the poor slob’s home… at 5am. This is the sort of nerve it took to build a universally admired global enterprise and one imagines the same sort of nerve required to sleep in a hammock on the face of El Capitan two thousand feet off the ground (with a photo to prove it). Scaling mountains both real and figurative, he and the company have defied death time and again and we’d be wise to bet against neither.