Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman
✒️ Author: Yvon Chouinard | 📖 Published: 2005 (Republished in 2016) | 🗓 Read: December 11, 2020 | 📄 Pages: 270
Summary
In his long-awaited memoir, Yvon Chouinard-legendary climber, businessman, environmentalist, and founder of Patagonia, Inc.-shares the persistence and courage that have gone into being head of one of the most respected and environmentally responsible companies on earth. From his youth as the son of a French Canadian blacksmith to the thrilling, ambitious climbing expeditions that inspired his innovative designs for the sport's equipment, Let My People Go Surfing is the story of a man who brought doing good and having grand adventures into the heart of his business life-a book that will deeply affect entrepreneurs and outdoor enthusiasts alike.
Why You Should Read It
Yvon Chouinard built the company out of a desire to sustain his active, adventurous lifestyle. While many companies are focused on profit, losses, and growth, Patagonia is highly focused on serving their customer by building the highest quality product and saving the planet. It's exciting to see how his contrarian thinking has evolved over the years to produce such a successful company. You'll learn about values, culture, growth, and sustainability. If you're inspired by origin stories and thinking outside the box, this book is for you.
Notable Highlights
In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.
---
Studying Zen has taught me to simplify; to simplify yields a richer result. The rock climber becomes a master when he can leave his big wall gear at the base, when he so perfects his skill that he can climb the wall free, relying only on his skill and the features of the rock.
---
Where other designers would work to improve a tool’s performance by adding on, Tom Frost and I would achieve the same ends by taking away—reducing weight and bulk without sacrificing strength or the level of protection.
---
I had no business experience so I started asking people for free advice. I just called up presidents of banks and said, “I’ve been given these companies to run and I’ve no idea what I’m doing. I think someone should help me.” And they did. If you just ask people for help—if you just admit that you don’t know something—they will fall all over themselves trying to help. So, from there I began building the company. I was really the translator for Yvon’s vision and aims for the company.
---
I’ve always thought of myself as an 80 percenter. I like to throw myself passionately into a sport or activity until I reach about an 80 percent proficiency level. To go beyond that requires an obsession and degree of specialization that doesn’t appeal to me. Once I reach that 80 percent level I like to go off and do something totally different; that probably explains the diversity of the Patagonia product line—and why our versatile, multifaceted clothes are the most successful.
---
Sometimes good ideas spring from having a sense of where you want to go, of having a vision of the next level of products.
---
Yet you can’t wait until you have all the answers before you act. It’s often a greater risk to phase in products because you lose the advantage of being first with a new idea.
---
I was the outside guy, responsible for bringing back new ideas. A company needs someone to go out and get the temperature of the world, so for years I would come home excited about ideas for products, new markets, or new materials. Then I began to see rapid changes in the world, and more and more I came home with stories of environmental and social devastation.
---
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. It was time to apply a bit of Zen philosophy to our business.
---
“Make the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, and use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.”
---
The first precept of industrial design is that the function of an object should determine its design and materials.
---
To get all the components of a Patagonia product to be roughly equal in durability, we test continually in both the lab and the field. We test until something fails, strengthen that part, then see what fails next, strengthen that, and so on until we’re confident that the product is durable as a whole.
---
These conditions create a society of product consumers, not owners. And there’s a difference. Owners are empowered to take responsibility for their purchases—from proper cleaning to repairing, reusing, and sharing. Consumers take, make, dispose, and repeat—a pattern that is driving us toward ecological bankruptcy.
---
When we’re doing our job right, each style of ski pant has a distinct purpose. We make each in a good range of sizes (including women’s) and offer just enough colors.
---
If a proliferation of colors and patterns drains profit, think what a mushrooming of styles can do. We’ve worked out an interesting formula. Each product Patagonia adds to the line (without dropping an old one) requires the hiring of two and one-half new people.
---
The best-performing firms make a narrow range of products very well. The best firms’ products also use up to 50 percent fewer parts than those made by their less successful rivals. Fewer parts means a faster, simpler (and usually cheaper) manufacturing process. Fewer parts means less to go wrong; quality comes built in. And although the best companies need fewer workers to look after quality control, they also have fewer defects and generate less waste.
---
Remember, I’m the kid who couldn’t play competitive games. I’d much rather design and sell products so good and unique that they have no competition.
---
Successful inventing requires a tremendous amount of energy, time, and money. The big inventions are so rare that even the most brilliant geniuses think up only a few marketable inventions in their lifetimes. It may take thirty years to come up with an invention, but within a few years or months there can be a thousand innovations spawned from that original idea. Innovation can be achieved much more quickly because you already start with an existing product idea or design.
---
Like creative cooks, we view “originals” as recipes for inspiration, and then we close the book to do our own thing. The resulting designs are like the fusion recipes of the best chefs.
---
But I would not yet define Patagonia as a global company until we learn to think, design, and produce beyond our present limits. When we become a global company, not just a business operating internationally, we’ll adapt our designs toward local preferences, toward their functional need and sizing and color. We’ll produce more locally and less centrally. Most important, thinking and acting more globally will open our minds to an endless possibility of new ideas, some of which we can adapt to use in our domestic market.
---
A Patagonia product should be identifiable even from a distance by the quality of workmanship and attention to detail. The Zen master would say a true Patagonia product doesn’t need any label.
---
In fact, fashion is always passé because it is a response to an event in the past. It may recycle someday, but it will certainly be dead tomorrow.
---
If we are going to take responsibility for our products from birth to rebirth, and if we encourage our customers to send in their pants for repair, and if at the end of their lives we promise to recycle them into other valuable products, then the smartest thing we can do is make those pants last as long as possible because you really don’t want to see all those pants come back very soon.
---
Being first offers tremendous marketing advantages, not the least of which is you have no competition. Coming in second, even with a superior product at a better price, is often no substitute for just plain being first. This doesn’t mean we should be “chasing” trends or products. It applies more to “discovering” a new fabric or a new process. Again, the key word is discovering instead of inventing. There’s simply no time for inventing.
---
What the person really means is that the job didn’t get done because it had the lowest priority, and in fact he may never return your call because he really doesn’t want to. People do what they want to do.
Notes: 1) Key to business: learn how to make things people's priority.
---
There are different ways to address a new idea or project. If you take the conservative scientific route, you study the problem in your head or on paper until you are sure there is no chance of failure. However, you have taken so long that the competition has already beaten you to market. The entrepreneurial way is to immediately take a forward step and if that feels good, take another, if not, step back. Learn by doing, it is a faster process.
---
Consequently, we do as much business as we can with as few suppliers and contractors as possible. The downside is the risk of becoming highly dependent on another company’s performance. But that’s exactly the position we want to be in because those companies are also dependent on us. Our potential success is linked. We become like friends, family, mutually selfish business partners; what’s good for them is good for us.
---
I think of Patagonia as an ecosystem, with its vendors and customers as an integral part of that system. A problem anywhere in the system eventually affects the whole, and this gives everyone an overriding responsibility to the health of the whole organism. It also means that anyone, low on the totem pole or high, inside the company or out, can contribute significantly to the health of the company and to the integrity and value of our products.
---
Testing is an integral part of the Patagonia industrial design process, and it needs to be included in every part of this process. It involves testing competitors’ products; “quick and dirty” testing of new ideas to see if they are worth pursuing; fabric testing; “living” with a new product to judge how hot the sales may be; testing production samples for function and durability, and so on; and test marketing a product to see if people will buy it.
---
Again, like the Zen approach to archery or anything else, you identify the goal and then forget about it and concentrate on the process.
---
Because the world is changing, we can never assume that the way we have done things in the past is adequate for the future. We constantly evaluate the ideas of the moment for improving business processes—from MRP (materials resources planning), to just-in-time inventory, to quick response, to self-managed teams, if we think these approaches may result in a better product delivered on time and at a reasonable cost.
---
The drive for quality in production in any organization has to go beyond the products themselves. It extends to how we organize ourselves to get a body of work done, how we beg, borrow, and steal good ideas from other companies and cultures, and how we approach the question of the way things are and how they should be. That begins with an attitude of embracing change rather than resisting it—not just changing without reflection and weighing the relative merits of the new ideas, but nonetheless assuming that if we only look hard enough, there may be a better way to do things.
---
My first principle of mail order argues that “selling” ourselves and our philosophy is equally important to selling product. Telling the Patagonia story and educating the Patagonia customer on layering systems, on environmental issues, and on the business itself are as much the catalog’s mission as is selling the products.
---
Mail order’s mandate (and retail’s, for that matter) should be to achieve a 100 percent customer satisfaction rate. That is, give the customer what he wants 100 percent of the time. If a product is out of stock in mail order, the customer service rep takes advantage of the fact that we are a diversified company and pursues other channels to get the product to the customer.
---
What’s at the heart of the Patagonia image? How are we perceived by the public? Foremost, certainly, is our origin as a blacksmith shop that made the best climbing hardware in the world. The beliefs, attitudes, and values of those freethinking, independent climbers and surfers who worked there became the basis for Patagonia’s culture, and from that culture evolved an image: authentic, hard-core, quality products made by the same people who used them.
---
At the heart is their commitment to wildness, both in the natural world and in the sports they serve. They continue to hold to certain values and beliefs that were inherent in the fledgling company of the 1950s but have brought with them another: a willingness to take strong stands on environmental issues.
---
Patagonia’s image is a human voice. It expresses the joy of people who love the world, who are passionate about their beliefs, and who want to influence the future. It is not processed; it won’t compromise its humanity. This means that it will offend, and it will inspire.
---
The first goal of the catalog is to share and encourage a particular philosophy of life, of what undergirds the image. The basic tenets of that philosophy are a deep appreciation for the environment and a strong motivation to help solve the environmental crisis; a passionate love for the natural world; a healthy skepticism toward authority; a love for difficult, human-powered sports that require practice and mastery; a disdain for motorized sports like snowmobiling or Jet Skiing; a bias for whacko, often self-deprecating humor; a respect and taste for real adventure (defined best as a journey from which you may not come back alive—and certainly not as the same person); and a belief that less is more (in design and in consumption).
---
As for style, we write as though we were the customers. In fact, since we are still some of our own best customers, this is not too difficult. We don’t speak to what is perceived as the lowest common denominator. We speak to each customer as we want to be treated, as an engaged, intelligent, trusted individual.
---
A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.
---
Leaders take risks, have long-term vision, create the strategic plans, and instigate change.
---
The lesson to be learned is that evolution (change) doesn’t happen without stress, and it can happen quickly.
---
When there is no crisis, the wise leader or CEO will invent one. Not by crying wolf but by challenging the employees with change.
---
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.
---
I believe the way toward mastery of any endeavor is to work toward simplicity; replace complex technology with knowledge. The more you know, the less you need.
---