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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If you wait for the customer to tell you what to do, you’re too late. My customers didn’t want a model T, they wanted a faster horse — Henry Ford I especially enjoyed the new foreword by renowned author and activist Naomi Klein, asking, “What if we shopped to live, instead of lived to shop?” In creating new products, Patagonia doesn’t chase fashion or trends. They pay attention to their core customers and focus purely on solving theirproblems and making themsomething useful that will not just look good today, but will look good 10 years from now.

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. Inspiring news & a great example of what a few people can accomplish w/ dedication. https://t.co/ErHTKrTbjF cc: @RobertKennedyJr #Futaleufu

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Our own company had exceeded its resources and limitations; we had become dependent, like the world's economy, on growth we could not sustain. We were forced to rethink our priorities and institute new practices. First step: I took a dozen of my top managers to Argentina, to the windswept mountains of Patagonia, for a walkabout. In the course of roaming around those wildlands, we asked ourselves, once again, why we were in business and what kind of business we wanted to build. Klein sums up the book by saying: “This is the story of an attempt to do more than change a single corporation—it is an attempt to challenge the culture of consumption that is at the heart of the global ecological crisis.” My company, Patagonia, is an experiment. It exists to put into action those recommendations that all the doomsday books on the health of our home planet say we must do immediately to avoid the certain destruction of nature and collapse of our civilisation. Quality Control Like Yvon Chouinard, you might see where, in your life, or work, you can rewrite the rules to set yourself and others up to win. Through the exercise of thinking deeply and writing down your own thoughts and beliefs, you challenge yourself to clarify any gaps in logic, as well as see past any rosy hues you put on your thoughts while still in your head. It’s there on hard paper.

Evil doesn’t have to be an overt act, it can be merely the absence of good. If you have the ability, the resources, and the opportunity to do good and you do nothing, that can be evil.

Our Billionaire Age Still Going Strong

What our employees all share is a passion for something outside themselves, whether for surfing or opera, climbing or gardening, skiing or community activism. The original definition of consumer is "one who destroys or expends by use; devours, spends wastefully." It would take seven Earths to provide enough raw materials to allow the rest of the world to consume at the same rate Americans do. Ninety percent of what we buy in a mall ends up in the dump within 60 to 90 days. It's no wonder we're no longer called citizens but consumers. Our politicians and corporate leaders are fair reflections of who we've become.

When we first started looking for alternatives, organic cotton was available from a few family farmers in California and Texas. We experimented. At first we made only T-shirts with organic cotton. Then, after several trips to the San Joaquin Valley, where we could smell the selenium ponds and see the lunar landscape of cotton fields, we asked a critical questions: How could we continue to make products that laid waste to the Earth in this way? In the fall of 1994, we made the decision to take our cotton sportswear 100 percent organic by 1996.” A week later, as the new VP of HR, finances, and legal, he began to find his answer to the question. If Patagonia can continue to be successful operating under the constraints of our environmental philosophy, then perhaps we can convince other companies that green business is good business, and they can gain the confidence to take a few steps in the right direction. We are the last generation that can experience true wilderness. Already the world has shrunk dramatically. To a Frenchman, the Pyrenees are “wild.” To a kid living in a New York City ghetto, Central Park is “wilderness,” the way Griffith Park in Burbank was to me when I was a kid. Even travelers in Patagonia forget that its giant, wild-looking estancias are really just overgrazed sheep farms. New Zealand and Scotland were once forested and populated with long-forgotten animals. The place in the lower forty-eight states that is farthest away from a road or habitation is at the headwaters of the Snake River in Wyoming, and it’s still only twenty-five miles. So if you define wilderness as a place that is more than a day’s walk from civilization, there is no true wilderness left in North America, except in parts of Alaska and Canada. In a true Earth-radical group, concern for wilderness preservation must be the keystone. The idea of wilderness, after all, is the most radical in human thought—more radical than Paine, than Marx, than Mao. Wilderness says: Human beings are not paramount, Earth is not for Homo sapiens alone, human life is but one life form on the planet and has no right to take exclusive possession. Yes, wilderness for its own sake, without any need to justify it for human benefit. Wilderness for wilderness. For bears and whales and titmice and rattlesnakes and stink bugs. And…wilderness for human beings…. Because it is home. —Dave Foreman, Confessions of an Eco-Warrior We need to protect these areas of unaltered wildness and diversity to have a baseline, so we never forget what the real world is like—in perfect balance, the way nature intended the earth to be. This is the model we need to keep in mind on our way toward sustainability.”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.