The Responsible Company: What We’ve Learned from Patagonia’s First 40 Years – by Yvon Chouinard and Vincent Stanley
Date read: 1/4/23. Recommendation: 8/10.

A quick read that operates like a handbook for how to build an enduring, responsible company. Chouinard and Stanley detail—across decades of experience—how doing the right thing and focusing on sustainable growth is actually what’s good for business. Every entrepreneur should read this. There are tremendous lessons in doing hard things, anchoring in truth, disrupting yourself, and investing in meaningful work.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Patagonia origins:
“Yvon created Patagonia as an offshoot of the Chouinard Equipment Company, which made excellent mountain-climbing gear recognized as the best in the world, but very little money. Patagonia was intended to be a clean and easy company.” 

“At Chouinard Equipment we were used to a life-or-death standard of product quality: you did not sell an ice axe without checking it closely for a hairline fracture or any other fault. Although we applied the same standard to rugby shirts (they had to be thick and tough to survive the skin-shredding sport of rock climbing), we knew that seam failure was unlikely to kill anyone. Patagonia was to be our irresponsible company, bringing in easy money, a softer life, and enough profits to keep Chouinard Equipment in the black.”

We are part of nature:
“As men and women we are part of nature. If we were to have no experience of wild nature, or no way to know of it, we would lose entirely our sense of human scale. We derive our sense of awe from our ability to feel nature’s force. We better know ourselves when we come face to face with the magnificence of the unknown. Emerson, Thoreau, and other transcendentalists learned and taught these lessons in New England in the 1830s through 1860s. They showed us that we can learn directly from nature about who we are and how to live.”

Not everything can be quantified: “We don’t think a speech from John Muir on the need for ecosystem services would have swayed Teddy Roosevelt to preserve Yosemite Park nearly as much as a night in the redwoods under the stars.”

Reducing environmental harm:
“Know your impacts, favor improvement, share what you learn.” Daniel Goleman

“Responsible behavior, as it becomes cumulative, also makes a company smarter, more nimble, and potentially more successful.”

Making it everyone’s job: “It is important to note that Patagonia’s dedicated environmental staff for products numbered all of two. The small size of the department was deliberate: we wanted the reduction of environmental harm to be part of everyone’s job. We did not want to create a separate bureaucracy that might clash unproductively with our product-quality or sourcing staff, or give that staff a reason to make environmental considerations secondary because someone else would handle them in their stead.”

Verify before trust: “Before placing an initial order with a factory, Patagonia has a member of its social/environmental responsibility team visit to verify conditions. This team member can break the deal. Our quality director has similar veto power over the sourcing department’s decision to take on a new factory.”

Win/win: “Companies that recognize the opportunity to use the intelligence and creative capacity of their people to do less harm, certainly less harm that serves no useful purpose, will benefit. The company that wreaks less environmental harm will at the same time reduce its sharply rising costs for energy, water, and waste disposal.”

Meaningful work:
“At its heart, to have meaningful work is to do something you love to do and are good at doing for a living. Most people don’t know, at first, what they love best. What they become best at develops by trial and error or by accident. We’re all good at something: with words or numbers, or we work with our hands, or we work best outside.”

“Meaningful work is doing things you love to do, often, though not always, with other people. No responsible company can function well without a lot of different people doing things they love to do in concert with others. Doing what you love to do makes work meaningful. Doing the right thing, with others, makes work meaningful.”

“We have made the choice to do better and not accept the status quo. This is how our work has become more meaningful: we’re not just making clothes, we’re making long-lasting clothes that do less damage.”

Disrupting yourself:
“In 1972, Chouinard Equipment was still a small company (about $400,000 a year in sales), but it had become the largest supplier of climbing hardware in the U.S. With the increased popularity of climbing, and its concentration on the same well-tried routes (in Yosemite Valley, El Dorado Canyon, the Shawangunks, etc.), our reusable hard-steel pitons had become environmental villains. The same fragile cracks had to endure repeated hammering of pitons during both placement and removal, and the disfiguring was severe. After an ascent of the degraded Nose route on El Capitan, which had been pristine a few summers earlier, Yvon and partner Tom Frost decided to phase out of the piton business. It was a huge risk: pitons were the mainstay of the business. But the change had to be made for reasons both moral and practical: the routes were beautiful and satisfying and shouldn’t be ruined; and to ruin them would put an end to, or greatly reduce, the possibilities for climbing in the most popular areas, and thus eventually hurt our business.”

“There was an alternative: aluminum chocks that could be wedged in and removed by hand without the use of a hammer. Hexentrics and stoppers made their first appearance in the Chouinard Equipment catalog in 1972.”

“That catalog opened with an editorial from the owners on the environmental hazards of pitons. A fourteen-page essay by Sierra climber Doug Robinson on how to use chocks began with a powerful paragraph: ‘There is a word for it, and the word is clean. Climbing with only nuts and runners for protection is clean climbing. Clean because the rock is left unaltered by the passing climber. Clean because nothing is hammered into the rock and then hammered back out, leaving the rock scarred and the next climber’s experience less natural. Clean because the climber’s protection leaves little trace of his ascension. Clean is climbing the rock without changing it; a step closer to organic climbing for the natural man.’”

“Within a few months of the catalog’s mailing, the piton business had atrophied; chocks sold faster than they could be made. In the tin sheds of Chouinard Equipment, the steady pounding rhythm of the drop hammer gave way to the high-pitched whine of the multiple-drill jig.”

“At Chouinard Equipment, we learned that we could inspire our customers to do less harm simply by making them aware of the problem and offering a solution. We also learned that by addressing the problem we had forced ourselves to make a better product: chocks were lighter than pitons and as or more secure. We might not have risked the obsolescence of our piton business just to sell something new. But doing the right thing motivated us—and turned out to be good business.”

Retention:
“It costs Patagonia roughly $50,000, on average, to recruit, train, and get up to speed a new employee; if we want to make any money, it’s a good idea to keep the ones we have happy and fully engaged.”

“How to gain a customer and keep one? First, make something or offer a service someone can use, for which satisfaction endures. Second, your company should romance, but not bullshit, the people whose business it solicits.”

Navigating downturns:
“Our emergency plan for a downturn of any magnitude now is to cut the fat, freeze hiring, reduce travel, and trim every type of expense except salaries and wages.”

Anchor in truth:
“A company needs to present itself well to the customer; it may even preen a little, the way a lover might take care to dress for a date. A life story, or product story, told just this side of myth-making is okay when it fairly represents the real. But beware of conjuring a false image of your company’s goods or services. Mystification will no longer work in a world where stage fog can be quickly dispersed by a competitor, activist, or regulator.”

“Transparency is the primary contemporary virtue for all responsible businesses.”

“For a company to set goals or assess progress toward meeting them it needs freely flowing, transparent information. No transparency: no accountability.”

Do the hard thing:
“Patagonia was not always an especially transparent company, nor were we eager to learn about problems that seemed beyond our control. We collectively groaned when we learned how harmful conventionally grown cotton was. We had no idea when we decided to switch to organic cotton how much work would be involved; we knew only that it was possible, and that we had no compelling reason to continue to use harmful, chemically dependent cotton.”

“Over time, your company will become healthier as a benefit of knowing your business more intimately—and more fully engaging your workforce and community.”