Yvon Chouinard’s “Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman” – Surfs up!

Yvon Chouinard’s Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman (2005) is an interesting mix of personal biography and advice on how to run a business as well as a declaration of philosophical intent.

Chouinard’s company Patagonia isn’t just another clothing company. They sell clothes, sure, that’s what they manufacture, but with this book I’ve gained a greater insight into what lies beneath the cloth, so to speak.

Personally, I’m not big on reading the self-aggrandising, bloated prose of successful businessmen who pride themselves on their predatory attitude towards how they earn their lucre. It brings to mind the bad comb over, tacky suits and hysterical attitude of the Donald Trumps of the world and, frankly, that’s always made me uncomfortable.

Yvon Chouinard is, in every sense, the opposite of that image. Let My People Go Surfing shows that you needn’t be a rapacious bastard to be successful. From the story Chouinard tells you get that he never intended to wind up a businessman, but rather just wanted to climb mountains, go fishing and surfing and happily dabble in falconry and other adventure sports. It’s telling that the first thing he made and sold was rock climbing equipment that he and his friends used themselves, and he only started doing that because he wasn’t satisfied with the stuff that was already out there. One thing lead to another and suddenly there was a little business growing that employed friends and family. This then led to other ventures and then into making clothes and then into becoming a real grownup company… it’s one of those slow slide into avalanche type things.

One of the reasons why this book is so interesting is that it depicts a company where the customers are actually the people who work there. It’s a very different kind of scenario from what I would suspect is the more common one, where you work to earn enough to be able to sustain yourself and your lifestyle while smiling politely at the company propaganda and never really drinking the Kool-Aid, no matter which flavour it is. That’s certainly been my experience.

The evolution of Patagonia as a true force in environmental concerns, both as a company and on a grassroots level, the internal structure of the company and the drive to create a brand that ensures quality hasn’t been uncomplicated. Chouinard writes frankly about the growing pains and the mistakes made and the near misses without ever losing any of the values that he wanted to represent. It’s not common, this kind of perseverance. I’m a horrible pair of old cynicy-boots and I always expect any institution, person or company that gains power and momentum to slide inexorably towards corruption. It seems to me that Chouinard’s Patagonia has managed to avoid that by staying true to some very decent and deliberately defined core values.

He writes at length about what can be succinctly boiled down to “leading and examined life”. The company takes responsibility for the product from the cradle to the grave, which means they have been an influence when it comes to things like ecologically grown cotton and recycling plastic fibres to make polyester. Not only that, but little things like workplace equality, child care provided by the employer, taking an afternoon off to go surfing and a variety of other commitments mean that Patagonia is consistently featured as one of the top 100 companies to work for.

Chouinard’s book shows that you can put your money where your mouth is in a very real sense. You can take responsibility and weather the losses, be they in the form of failed product lines or staff quitting because they don’t agree with the central tenets of the company and still be a responsible member of the larger community, not living blinkered by the strange and strangling desire to simply earn more for the sole reason of earning more. As proof of this he is the founding member of One percent For The Planet (http://onepercentfortheplanet.org). The mission statement of this organisation is “to build, support and activate an alliance of businesses financially committed to creating a healthy planet”.

Thinking in terms of what you want your legacy to be, as a business, an organisation, or an individual, that seems to me to be a much healthier goal to set yourself than merely making more money.

I highly recommend this book for the simple reason that we all have to work and we all have to live and it is good to be reminded that there are more ways of achieving that than are dreamt of in consumer philosophy.

Mule