Founders - #60 Yvon Chouinard: What We've Learned from Patagonia's First 40 Years

Episode Date: February 18, 2019

What I learned from reading The Responsible Company: What We've Learned From Patagonia's First 40 Years by Yvon Chouinard and Vincent Stanley.----When I die and go to hell, the devil is going to make me the marketing director for a cola company. I’ll be in charge of trying to sell a product that no one needs, is identical to its competition, and can’t be sold on its merits. (0:01)What Patagonia was meant to be (8:25)Everyone wants to feel useful (11:00)a short history of companies (14:30)the definition of meaningful work (26:00)more human, less corporate (40:30)Yvon's ancestors and their working conditions (46:00)the benefits of long term thinking (49:00)build something useful and don't bullshit (57:00)Don't do things that have no useful purpose / being bold can lead to new discoveries / we need more small businesses (1:04:00) ----Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here. ----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

When I die and go to hell, the devil's going to make me the marketing director for a cola company. I'll be in charge of trying to sell a product that no one needs, is identical to its competition, and can't be sold on its merits. I'd be competing head-on in the cola wars, on price, distribution, advertising, and promotion, which would indeed be hell for me. So that is a quote from the founder that we're going to talk about today. And that's Yvonne Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, and his book, The Responsible Company, what we've learned from Patagonia's first 40 years. So before I get into that, if this is your first time listening to Founders, welcome. The concept of this podcast is fairly straightforward. Every week I read a biography

or an autobiography or a book about a founder and then just pull out ideas that are useful for our lives. So after last week when we studied Howard Hughes, I pushed, so I've had the responsible company on my bookshelf for a few weeks now, and I knew I was eventually going to read it. And I decided after finishing that Howard Hughes podcast to push this one up to the top of the queue. And because the main reason I did that is because I felt that I learned basically all the things not to do from Howard Hughes. And according to my calculations, I've read 57 books, different books so far for this podcast. And in my top five easily out of all those 57 books is the book I covered on Founders 18,

which was Yvon Chouinard's book about the founding of Patagonia. It's called Let My People Go Surfing, The Education of a Reluctant Businessman. I'd recommend this to any entrepreneur, anybody making anything, to definitely read it because I just feel this guy is – he's basically the opposite of Howard Hughes, where I feel like we can learn everything not to do with Howard Hughes. I feel Yvon's teaching us everything to do. And he's just got a lot of old school knowledge from running a company for 46 years. And I think we can benefit from his experience. So if you haven't listened to that Founders episode, Founders number 18, I definitely would do so. And then I'd order the

book and read it because I think it's fantastic. And before I get into the Responsible Company book, I'm just going to read some quotes from Yvonne. And you'll see why. I mean, the quote I just opened the podcast with, I think you could tell why I love somebody like this, that talks that way and that thinks that way. So these are just some quotes I collected. Just want to read them to you. It says, the hardest thing in the world is to simplify your life. It is so easy to make it complex.

I'm in that same vein. Here's another quote I love. The more you know, the less you need. And I think this next quote is hugely important and it's part of the reason why I'm doing this podcast. And it says, the secret to happiness is to be working at your passion if you want to be miserable lead a desperate life like everybody else where they drag their asses to work every day because and because they hate their job um so this is another quote that i talked about in the first podcast i did your von which um stuck out to my mind yeah even to this day if you want to understand the entrepreneur,

study the juvenile delinquent. The delinquent is saying with his actions, this sucks, I'm going to go do my own thing. He's got some hiring advice, basically a way to access undiscovered talent for us. Hiring people with diverse backgrounds brings in a flexibility of thought and openness to new ways of doing things as opposed to hiring clones from business schools

who have been taught a codified way of doing business we'll actually talk more about this in the podcast because he essentially built a massively successful business from a talent pool of misfits which which I obviously love. Remember, I'm the kid who couldn't play competitive games, meaning sports. That's why he got into mountain climbing and surfing. I'd much rather design and sell products so good and unique that they have no competition. That kind of echoes something I talked about on the first podcast with him, that one of his fundamental distribution strategies is just quality,

quality of your product. this is something especially important uh nature doesn't like empires it doesn't like accumulation in one place it doesn't like monoculture it's always trying to make diverse species it wants to spread everything out and we're constantly trying to hold everything in i the reason i included that quote is because something I've talked about a lot is my advocacy for more small businesses, for more people that are employees to turn into entrepreneurs and less centralization. And this is not a unique or new idea by any means, but it's something extremely important to me. I mean, the reason I say it's not news because we've talked about it ad nauseum that edwin land had talked about this a long time ago about instead

of having one giant corporation of polaroid it would be much better if he had like a thousand separate companies um and you know the goal there is you find more diversity of thought you have a better basis for more unique thinking that leads to better products, products that wouldn't come are more likely to come about in like a monoculture. But the reason I bring it up is because in the United States, like every single metric for entrepreneurship, from new business formation and all the other like different data points is going in the opposite direction. It's like I was just listening to the founder of Shopify on a podcast talk about, because that's what he's trying to do. He's trying to make entrepreneurship easier by letting,

by making it easier for people to sell things. That's why Shopify exists. And he's talking about like most people don't even know that new business creation in the United States is the lowest it's ever been. So I, that quote, I think what Yvonne is saying there is like, you know, nature doesn't like empires. And you're not going to just see a consolidation into a few massive companies.

Like that's not actually good because we're seeing that now. More centralization leads to less new business creation. And then he's got another great quote here. It's the same with business. If you focus on the goal and not the process you inevitably compromise businessmen who focus on profits wind up in the hole for me profit is what happens when you do everything else right and like I don't think that many people know at least I didn't know before I started reading his books, like Patagonia is a privately held company.

It's been around for 40 plus years. It does close to a billion dollars in sales and it's owned by his family. It's made him incredibly wealthy, but he never optimized for that. He just optimized, as we're gonna also hear in the book, you know, he started out making climbing equipment and the equipment he found, the climbing equipment and the equipment he found the

climbing equipment uh the reason he didn't even want to make it he just was using other people's equipment to climb mountains and realized they were what he called like shit quality and in his case he realized the need like it's a life he had to make the best product possible because in he and he was one of the rare um product categories where if his product wasn't as best as it could be people could literally die and so then when he started making clothes he kind of just kept that high bar of quality and then um one other quote before we jump into the book once you educate yourself you're left with choices. Okay. So I'm going to jump right into the very beginning. They're going to tell us, so he's writing this book with Vincent Stanley, who's worked on and off

at Patagonia for a few decades. And he's also an author and a poet in his own right. But I think his title at Patagonia was like chief storyteller. Okay. So it says, this book is for anyone who works, not just business leaders and managers. It is also for business students and other young people who want to engage their best, deepest self in the working life that stretches ahead. Okay. So this is them just talking about like what Patagonia was meant to be and how they kind of stumbled upon this business of theirs. You should know that at its beginning, Patagonia was meant to be not a risk-taking,

environment-obsessed, naval-gazing company, but an easy-to-milk cash cow. Yvonne created Patagonia as an offshoot of the Chouinard Equipment Company, which made excellent mountain climbing gear recognized as the best in the world, but made very little money. Patagonia was intended to be a clean and easy company. Desk jockeys work. In contrast to the 10 hours a day sweat and toil of hammering out pitons with a coal-fired forge or drilling and cutting chocks from extruded aluminum. The clothing business required no expensive dyes to amortize and had a much broader customer

base than a few dirtbag climbers. At Chouinard Equipment we were used to life or death standard of product quality. You did not sell an ice axe without checking it closely for a hairline fracture or for 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. Okay, next page. Patagonia may seem different because its owners are committed to social and environmental change, and our company is privately held, not publicly traded, so we could take on greater risks. But our management requires the same set of skills, pursues the same opportunities, and faces the same competition and constraints as any other business. It turns out we were not unique in our desire to become a more responsible business. We may make clothes so you can get outdoors,

and you can climb mountains, you can hike, you can surf. So conserving the environment is especially important to us, as it should be anybody that wants clean air and water. But these principles also can be applied to any kind of business that you do. Okay. So he's just picking up on some just basic human nature here that everyone wants to feel useful. And he says, to earn employee commitment and trust begs more of a company than providing competitive pay and benefits and enacting humane environmental policies. Not everyone can satisfy his heart's desire working for your company, but everyone does want to feel useful at, or better yet, enlivened by what they do all day long. No one wants to be ashamed to name the company he works for.

No one wants to leave her values at home when she leaves for work in the morning. So he's going to hit on this idea over and over again throughout the book, that doing good is actually good business. People argue over what makes the world a better place to live and over what each of us would like to see more of and less of in the world. It is hard to imagine anyone rejoicing over the generally accepted landscape of only a decade ago. And he's describing what's taking place in his opinion,

a suburban monoculture of tilt-up malls cracker crumb housing pandemic obesity cheap distractions and expensive services all at the expense of nature it's as though we've handed satan a hard hat and asked him to refashion our earth according to his plan. So we always talk about the idea that the best businesses in the world, they have a point of view. And by reading this book and then Let My People Go Surfing, Yvonne is clear.

I mean, the reason for writing the book is he's telling you his point of view. He's looking at how we do things and, in many cases, how businesses do things. And he's like, this is just stupid. Why are we doing this? So I like this idea about things being stupid, brutal, and imprecise. And it says, globalization, a man-made but not humanly controlled process, is largely responsible for the current speed at which life turns to sand. Globalization moves with great speed to identify

then harvest resources for human needs but crawls slowly to repair the devastation that is left in its wake it is fast but stupid brutal and imprecise to cull a tree it takes out a forest um okay and then this is now, the authors are going to explicitly tell us what they want us to get from the book. The authors hope that those coming into their own now will, all their lives, pursue meaningful work and do the right thing, which is to say, be responsible to other people and to nature.

The authors hope they reject the official story told by governments and corporations that a healthy economy relies on the suppression of social, ecological, and individual health. And they're just going to talk a lot about that. Like, you know, there's tons of opportunity for, especially for a privately held company, to just continue to just enrich the family that owns the company.

But he's saying like for us to continue to do so at such drastic levels like that takes away from our employees. And that takes away like what if we can cut quality, maybe our customers won't like notice immediately. But long term, this is actually damaging. And it just goes back to the reason that he feels that Patagonia is successful is because they put his need they put the needs of the customer and the employees before their needs of their own and that's like a virtuous cycle that kind of feeds on itself and builds over 46 years to a billion dollars in sales okay so he's what I really liked about this is he's going to give us a short history of

companies as he sees it. So I want to read a bunch from this section because I find it interesting. How is a company responsible? Should it profit its shareholders, provide for the well-being of its employees, make excellent products, be a good force in the community, and protect nature? We think that a responsible company bears all of these obligations. It would help to better understand how a company's responsibilities differs today from 50 or 150 years ago. The responsible company of 1860 was one that paid a return to its shareholders, honored its commitments, and kept honest books.

A hundred years later, that picture had become far more complex. In 1860, only 5% of all work was done by machines. 95% was done by humans and animals. It's interesting. Just a side note, I finished reading that book, Unscaled, I've been talking about the last few podcasts. So right here, Yvonne's talking about the difference between 1860 and 1960. So you go from 5% of work done by a machine to 95% of work.

I wonder what the next 50 to 100 years is going to look like. What's the percentage of works done by computers specifically now compared to what it will be in the future? I'm recording that podcast. Probably by the time you hear this podcast, it's probably already been out, but I'll tell you more about how to access that at will be in the future. I'm recording that podcast. I probably, by the time you hear this podcast, it's already probably already been out, but I'll tell you more about how to access that at the end of the podcast. Okay. So it says 95% of work was done by humans and animals. By 1960, the figure reversed. 95% of all work was performed by machines.

It would take, if it were possible, the muscle power of 700,000 people to power the flight of a jet. Machines made us capable of doing far more work than we and our animals could have ever done on our own. The big responsible company of 1960 was rich and international and going global. It kept honest books, hated to bribe officials, and paid its people decently. It maintained substantial training and education programs and promoted from within. So this is a huge idea that he hits on constantly. There's like checklists at the back of the book, and I think you can download them for free online by just Googling the responsible company checklist. But he talks about like something is seriously wrong with

your company if you have to hire if you have to when there's new opportunities for promotions if you're constantly hiring externally um so that's just a little preview of what he'll talk about so it says uh it maintains substantial training and education programs are promoted from within operated programs to increase safety in the workplace and supported community hospitals schools and non-professional sports activities. The management philosophy in such a company derived from the West's earlier models for organizing large numbers of people

through command and control. So he's saying that they learned this from the military and the Roman Catholic Church, among other institutions. With new contributions from manufacturer Henry Ford and efficiency consultant Frederick Winslow Taylor. I got to Google him. I got to find out who that guy was. Maybe I know what his efficiency ideas were, but I don't recall his name right now or hearing it before, rather. The standard of living for less well-educated lower salaried and wage-earning employees was higher than now a big company was likely to be

industrial not financial so now he's going to tell us a little bit about what he sees as the wrong direction we went in as of this writing two-thirds of the U.S. economy relies on consumer spending. This is more, you know, gives you an idea of his personality. Poke your nose in any store in the mall and look around. Much of what we produce to sell to each other to earn our living is crap. Either ever more luxurious specialized goods like electronic temple massagers and personal oxygen bars are cheap, salty junk food and disposable clothing. Every piece of crap, because it was manufactured, and this is such an interesting point and I would have never thought of on my own. Every piece of crap, because it it was manufactured contains within it something of the priceless applied human intelligent intelligence so this idea of like where you have something

we're making something that's completely disposable and that we can make you know millions of which is this crappy products yeah where you were we're using up something that's priceless which is our applied human intelligence and on an individual level finite right it's an interesting thought so let me read the whole this whole sentence because i stopped myself there every piece of crap because it was manufactured contains within it something of the priceless applied human intelligence for one natural capital for another some natural capital for another. And natural capital is something taken from the forest or a river or soil that cannot be replaced faster than we deplete it. We're wasting our brains and our only world on the design, production,

and consumption of things we don't need and that aren't good for us. Something I found really admirable from Patagonia, when I was just researching before I started this podcast, before I recorded the podcast, rather, and they have this thing where, like, let's say you buy a Patagonia. First of all, they'll repair anything you buy forever, right? But let's say you bought a, I don't know, a jacket five years ago. You can go back in the store today and get a credit for a new item to replace it. And then they take your old

jacket, they refurbish it, and then they sell it online. I think they have an online store called Well Worn or something like this. And again, that's just, that costs the company money, but it's something that like the idea we have to hammer to every single person that we know that's building a product or service is like, you have got to put your customer first. That is better for the customer, not better for the company. And so this whole idea about how like these large, we always pick on these large companies that are usually not run by their founders anymore and how just silly they are. I had an experience recently,

I bought a pair of shoes, took them out of the store. The next day I came back because I was like, oh, they're like, I bought the size I normally buy, but for this brand, it hurts my feet. Can I just exchange them? I don't want my money back. I just want one size up because it's hurting my toe. And they're like, no, you wore them. And I was like, okay, well, like, are you sure? Like, I don't want money back. I just want the right size. No, as soon as you wear them, you can wear them for a minute, and we couldn't take it back. And so, like, compare and contrast that to Patagonia.

Like, this is how stupid these companies are because I'll never shop at that large company again. On an individual basis, that doesn't matter to to them but what are their customer acquisition costs like and what is the lifetime value of a happy customer that keeps coming back much more than a than a cheap pair of sneaker of running shoes it's just that they're so short-sighted as opposed to like a company like if the founder was still in charge of that company like there's zero not zero chance there's a lot less likely chance that they'd have such a silly um and you know self-detrimental uh policy um so i don't know i i just love uh examples of companies that actually say hey i'm

yeah i'm gonna take back this shirt that you had like this jacket that's been five years old and i'm gonna make sure it gets recycled and it can benefit somebody else and hopefully spark joy in somebody else's life. And what's going to happen? What's the outcome of that? The customer's like, wow, these people are amazing. I'm going to keep shopping here. And then not only that, I'm not going to tell you the company that,

because I don't want to trash them, even though I guess I should, but it doesn't matter. But the alternative is somebody that Patagonia made happy and they felt good in that transaction, there was a good response to that, is now going to tell their friends, hey, can you believe that Patagonia, I wore this jacket for years and they just gave me a new credit so I can get a new jacket. And what like that word of uh advertising is worth way more than a jacket and see doesn't that seem like an obvious idea yet when you when you get around these large you know companies they somehow they lose sight of this it's uh i don't know it it befuddles me okay so

he's talking about um some issues with he's still going into like uh what it means to be responsible company over time so this is in um it's broken down into like what it means to be responsible company over time so this is in it's broken down into a bunch of different things like how to think about your stockholders governments and but this section about employees I think is important there's been a 50-year trend towards automation moving jobs offshore and improvement in wages in developing countries and a flattening of wages in advanced countries. The next 50 years will be marked by pressure to restore the living wage. It was assumed as late as the 1960s that the annual pay of one wage earner

should support his family. The new, more modest goal has a worker paid one half of what it takes to support the family of four. So he's talking talking, I do think like there's an, there's an obvious issue. If you look at the data from the United States, if you adjust for inflation, like the average income of a wage earner is just flat. It's been flat, I think since the 1970s. So he's saying, hey, why don't we encourage companies to be more responsible to pay as much as they can to their employees, right? I am an advocate of that point of view, but I don't think that's the answer.

My answer here is more entrepreneurship because nobody is going to care about your wage as much as you will. and entrepreneurs are able to capture the economic value that maybe a job, like, you know, that the market, the job doesn't pay. So I don't know. I'd have to go back and look. Like, is there examples in history where, like, this trend, this, like, stagnation trend is reversed? So I don't know if that's even possible or if we've seen it before, but I do think that just making entrepreneurship more easy to do

allows people to capture more of the value they produce as opposed to selling your time to, you know, an employer. Like, I mean, I don't know if, like, I don't know if people think this, but I mean, it seems rather obvious that like rather obvious that if your employer is willing to pay you X amount, they're clearly making X plus Y. So why don't you just try to capture X plus Y yourself? And I think a lot of people don't do that because it seems to be some kind of mythical process or too complex process to do so. So I think if we can make, if we share information that kind of like opens the secrets, if you will, for lack of a better word, like I think that's a good use of our time. And then this is something he talks about a lot, which is quality is strategy. This

is just one sentence. The context here, he's talking about, you know, don't make a bad product. Don't waste your time making cigarettes or sugary junk or stuff like that. So he says to make a bad product is to do bad business. And he's talking about bad product, not only a product that's bad for you, but also like poorly made. Okay, so now we got to the chapter all about meaningful work. So let's go into what they define that as. 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 are all good at something, with words or numbers, or we work with our hands well, or we work best outside. One of the authors of this book, Yvonne, would rather spend his day picking apricots or hoeing his garden than sit at a desk and stare into a computer screen. Repetitive, rhythmic work need not be numbing, as anyone who has spent all day hammering pythons at the forge knows. It can

be enlightening or joyous as the scene in Anna Karina, I should know how to pronounce that book by now, Anna Karina, where the aristocrat Levin sighs wheat with his peasants. He can't keep up with them until he learns how to fall into a rhythm. The other author, Vincent, who once spent a muddy October picking grapes for his living, would rather spend his day at the keyboard than tending his garden. So I think what they're saying here is that we want to encourage a discussion about meaningful work, but no one can tell you what meaningful work is. It's something that you're going to have to find out. And in their opinion, you have to find out through trial and error. 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. Okay, so this is the part I was talking about earlier about Patagonia attracting misfits. and i think independently this this um this like this story is important this idea is important um because it just shows like there's not like a um like a set set of talent that you can build a really great company with like they're the the like um the configurations or the options are nearly limitless so it says in the early days

patagonia attracted the disaffected people who loved climbing and surfing or vagabonding and would come back to ventura to pick up work for a few months at a time or people who had a degree in physics or biology but for one reason or another usually the inability or unwillingness to fit into academic culture, changed course. They would find a home at Patagonia because they found the culture congenially filled with other outsiders, misfits. A guidance counselor at St. Paula High School told Christine Tompkins' mother not to waste her money sending her daughter to college. Christine, the unmotivated and indifferent student, would at age 30 become Patagonia's fast-learning CEO during its critical early days. That just tells you like intelligence does not always look the same. We do not bristle

with overachievers who would find reward in what we saw as the real world. Instead, we attracted bright, restless, unconventional people like Christine who hadn't felt the call toward a vocation, and others who had sought and then abandoned one or had pursued one that couldn't provide a living. Many Patagonia employees turned out to have a vocation working for a small, quirky company where no one knew what they couldn't do, so ended up doing things that they had no idea they could do in the company of others doing the same thing.

So he's obviously talking about his own company there. Doing something as silly as working in the clothing business turned out to engage the intelligence, imagination, and social needs for our unconventional anti-establishment employees. So in other words, talent that other people were overlooking, he just needed the right environment. They needed people that were like them.

This reminded me, for people that have subscribed to founders notes while they know this but uh in founders notes 23 i was taking um notes on this podcast with the founder of wordpress uh matt millenweg and he's just got a i read the book um i think it's called a year the year without pants which is uh this journalist went to work for wordpress for like two years and then wrote a book about his experience i might actually turn that into a founder's episode or or something in the future because i find it interesting but i like the way matt thinks a lot um and he's got a lot of just unconventional ideas that are not again he he just he he um

he he uncovers these ideas just by questioning like well are we sure this is like this is the way what work has been done for such a long time like are we sure that's the best way have we actually asked ourselves like is there a better way are we thinking from first principles and so that when i read that that those few paragraphs in the responsible company made me think of what he was saying that he uh wordpress has i don't even know like 500 i don't even know how many employees but they're all remote and his whole thing um is about like you know distributed companies is clearly the future working in collaboration with people all over the world through the mechanism of the internet is clearly better than than um than what we're doing

now i think he said something like uh let me see if I can find it. So there's two quotes I want to read to you. He says, we take so much about work for granted. We do things a certain way because that's how we did it in a previous job. How much could we impact the world if we just got better at some of these things? Most companies just keep doing things the same way. We are like buggy whip makers riding around on horses.

So he's saying like we barely even touch the, like we barely even scrape the surface for what, like how we can rethink work. He also says that, you know, it's not distributed workforce and remote work is not for everybody. But the reason I bring that up is because, you know, he gets a lot of, they're like, you know, you're not going to build WordPress

into a successful company doing this because we know how other successful companies in the past have done this. And so he questioned that assumption. He says, a common criticism of remote work is to look at great tech companies of the past, like Oracle and Microsoft, things like that. And then people say, what do you know that they don't? And he says, my answer is that distributed companies are being built with a different set of talent.

People went from Microsoft, then Google, and they did everything all over again. And then they went from Google to Facebook and did it all over again. They're repeating the same playbook. And you see this on resumes. So he gets a lot of people obviously apply to WordPress. And you see that's just the same group of people going from company to company. It's people bouncing from a small set of companies in the same few cities. Distributed companies are drawing from worldwide talent that hasn't worked at these companies before. And then he says, you can fish in the same small pond of the Bay Area or in the ocean

that is the rest of the world. Okay, so back to the book. It says, We have, more than we care to admit, several MBAs working in the company, some of whom really love business for itself, others who earn the degree to help them do well in life. We're not awash in entrepreneurs who, by definition, would rather be working for themselves. Patagonia also has bright locals who grew up in the area, feel at home here, don't want to leave, and find our company the most interesting place to work in town. It's the best place in town for women to work. Conversely, we have some top executives who don't want to live in Ventura because they don't like it or their families are settled elsewhere and they can afford to commute and do. And a number of people work for Patagonia and seek to come to Patagonia because they think the company's values coincide with their own.

So what he's telling you is like, listen, there's not a prototypical Patagonia employee. So it says they come to work at Patagonia because they like our values and they think they coincide with their own. That deep sympathy provides the extra motivation it takes to stay level-headed and alert when a workday gets difficult. It keeps people engaged when they have to figure out a new fabric source because the old one is found to have a toxic dye, or when they have to negotiate with a factory to invest in ventilation because someone from our sourcing department smelled something disturbing during a visit. Doing the right thing motivates us to work past a point where we might otherwise give up. Meaningful work, it turns out, is not only doing what we love but also giving back to the world. The two combined create the ground for a kind of ordinary human excellence

that any business can treasure. Every company has to encourage and cultivate this ordinary human excellence if it is to become more nimble, responsive, and responsible. Every time people in the company do something new that was formerly thought impossible, they contribute significantly to the company's culture and to the sense that much is possible in the future. So I'm going to skip ahead to this idea. Something you don't see very commonly is a company that creates a better product than

its existing best-selling product. I mean, it's so uncommon that they wrote an entire book on it called The Innovator's Dilemma. And it's something Yvonne did because he thought it was the right thing to do. That's probably easier because it was a small company at the time, but it's still something that he did and I think we can learn from. And here's the story. By 1972, Chouinard Equipment was still a small company, doing about $400,000 a year in sales. But it had become the largest supplier of climbing hardware in the

United States. With the increased popularity of climbing and its concentration on the same well-tried routes, our reusable hard steel pythons had become environmental villains. The same fragile cracks that had to endure repeated hammering of pythons during both replacement and removal were and we're disfiguring that okay let me read that again the same fragile cracks had to endure repeated hammering of pythons during both replacement and removal and the disfiguring was severe after an ascent on the degraded nose route on Capitan, which had been pristine a few summers earlier, Yvonne and his climbing partner Tom Frost decided to phase out the Python business. It was a huge risk.

Pythons 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 so they're gonna kill off their most profitable product and they do so at a great risk but the way they hedge that risk is to me like an understanding of human nature your customers are not morons if you just tell them hey here's the problem we realize by using our own equipment here's what we're doing

about it and here's why they usually respond um positively like this whole idea of, I can't even believe it's like something that large companies lose sight of. It's just like there's no such thing as a company. Like it's just a collection of people, and your customers are a collection of people. So if you're two collections of people, you should treat each other humanely and just realize that they're humans, and they most likely respond just like you do. So they write this long, it's a 14-page essay about why they're doing what they're doing, and they put it in their catalog, and here's the response. So the catalog opened with an editorial from the owners on the environmental hazards of pythons. A 14-page essay by Sierra climber Doug Robinson on how to use chalks began with a powerful paragraph.

So chalks is what they're replacing with. There is a word for it. Now I'm quoting from the first paragraph of this 14-page essay. 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 traces of his ascension. Clean as climbing the rock without changing it, a step closer to organic climbing for the natural man. So it says, this is the result. Within a few months of the catalog's mailing,

the Python business had atrophied. Chalk sold faster than they could be made. At Chouinard Equipment, we learned that we can inspire our customers to do less harm simply by making them aware of the problem and then offering a solution. We also learned that by addressing the problem, we had forced ourselves to make a better product. Chalks were lighter than pythons and more secure. We might not have risked the

obsolescence of our python business just to sell something new, but doing the right thing motivated us and it turned out to be good business. So there's his premise again. Okay, so a few pages later, I think this is a really good idea. And again, it's just more human and less corporate. And what's good for people is good for business so this is has to do with kids and keep in mind that what he's describing here maybe I don't even know if it's common now but it's more certainly more common than when he used to do and then he was doing it a few decades ago during the early 70s one of the co-owners of chenard equipment was Doreen Frost she used to bring her

daughter Marna to work and and no one minded. After the Chouinard's son Fletcher was born, Melinda, that's Yvonne's wife, brought him in as well. Then the other workers, as they had babies, brought them in as well, and so on. By the early 80s, you could find baby blankets draped over computer monitors and rattles and toy trains littered the floor. And of course, kids cried. The noise prompted a discussion about providing daycare, not as a progressive measure, but child care in the workplace in those days was so rare, we didn't even know it was progressive. The mothers who worked for us simply wanted to be near their babies to breastfeed or comfort them when they were needed. The men at the company, including the co-authors, and the women without kids, including the CEO, didn't agree that

Patagonia should devote its scarce cash or space to running a nursery school but backed by the moms melinda doggedly pursued her cause and eventually won out this is what i mean like yvonne is not shy about hiding his um like his mistakes or that like the the feeding into this myth that like there's such thing as a perfect person he's like no i don't want kids here like i don't want to spend time or money that could be otherwise used for the business taking care of kids but slowly but surely like he was he was persuaded that this was actually better for his employees and if it's better for his employees it's better for the customers that they're serving so and it helps that his his wife is doggedly as he said doggedly pursuing her cause the kids stayed and they have made a difference to the quality of our workday so now he's going to talk about like what does that mean

for the sight and sound of children playing in the yard makes the place feel more human and less corporate second the presence of children makes adult conscious of their responsibilities as mammals. Grownups first, employees second. Third, our children care, our child care, maternal and paternal leave, and flex time policies allow women to advance in the company. Moreover, Anita Furtaw, who has run the child care center for two decades, okay, they had this idea. It just kind of naturally evolved. Then it got out of hand. So we have this initial human instinct

we have to overcome to, oh, no, now we need a rule. Nope, can't have kids. Then we had to learn by talking to not only his wife but other women why this is important to them and for the dads too. I would love to spend all day with my daughter if I could. Then what happens, so then we're going to continue this. We're going to dedicate resources to this. Then we find out the benefits that you're going to have less retention.

He talks about how, actually, let me stop my thought and finish this sentence so I don't run over what I was about to read. We have a very low employee turnover rate especially among parents of school age children the presence of kids and the introduction of child care taught us that if there's some quality about the workplace you love and don't want to lose it don't it costs patagonia roughly fifty thousand dollars 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 so what i was about to to say was not only like like you see that uh like the the sequence i was just describing but then there's all these positive externalities that you couldn't have

predicted the fact that hey this is going to drop retention uh if the higher the retention goes the more money that the company is paying on to recruit, train, and to recruit and train new employees. But secondly, then you have like decades of experience, right? With this person that's running it, Anita Fertal, who's running this perk or whatever you want to call it for the company. And the benefit is she can then pass on a couple decades of helping raise kids to new parents. And then now you have your employees feeling like, not only am I getting benefit because I'm working on a place that I like, I like their products, I get paid well, but they actually care enough about me that they're helping me with a fundamental human experience, which is the raising of children. So I don't know.

I just think that, again, seems completely obvious to me, but when you interact with companies, it's like, why are you so corporate and not human? Like, your customers are not corporations. They're people. Even if you're selling to businesses, you're still selling to people. So, again, I just think that's a good idea that Yvonne is trying to share with us. Okay. Okay, so something really helpful when understanding why this guy thinks the way he does

is to just understand the background. So there's a couple paragraphs here that tell us the background of Yvonne's family and their working conditions that I think is extremely important to understand why this guy is so unique. It says, by the end of the 19th century, the factory labor base had shifted from farm girls to immigrant families. Our own family took part in this history. They sold their farm in Quebec to emigrate south to work the looms of the cotton and woolen mills along the Adros-Scoggin River. The system was efficient. In 1908, in the company of his parents and ten siblings,

Yvonne's nine-year-old father took the train to Lewiston, Maine. The Grand Trunk Railroad Depot stood opposite the Bates Manufacturing Company's hiring hall. Behind the hall lay a sprawl of four-decker wooden tenements known as petite canada a family could arrive at the station and secure jobs for everyone who could officially physically work from ages six on up so that means his nine-year-old dad at the time then walk half a block to rent their rooms the french canadians which is Yvonne's background, took work that all Yankees by then, including girls and women, regarded as beneath them. Was it meaningful work? Such a term wouldn't have occurred to our immigrant relatives. They were of the generation in transition from meaningful

but hardscrabble life bound to the land to an industrial life of low-paid work for long hours in uncomfortable, if not unsafe, conditions. They were no longer peasants. They had become essentially industrial soldiers with no independent control over most of their waking hours. Their new life met their basic needs for food and shelter, as well as their social needs. Their friends worked alongside them.

According to the view of psychologist Abraham Maslow, however, our family members had yet to meet the two highest, most complex requirements in the hierarchy of needs. That being a sense of worth and self-fulfillment. It was Maslow's view that needs must be met in the order of their importance for survival. Basics first, self-fulfillment last. We suspect that as our family members advanced their basic needs, they lost hefty measures of self-worth and self-fulfillment. When they left the farm for the mill, they gained a regular income, which made life easier. But as overworked laborers in a deafening workspace, they lost their autonomy, sense of purpose, and their connection to nature. Farm life had been harsh and in bad years dangerous, but not demeaning in this new way. A few pages later, there's an example of long-term thinking, which may seem counterintuitive,

but he's encouraging his own customers to buy less of their product. And you know that statement on its face like oh this is crazy and then he's going to talk about it's actually benefits them because actually helps attract more clients. More customers rather. Okay we ask customers to pledge not to buy what they don't need or what won't last, if it's poorly made or likely to be fashionably wearable for only a season. We promised in turn to redouble our efforts to make useful, long-lasting products. We asked customers to pledge to repair first before discarding or replacing what breaks. In turn, we upsized our repair department staff to get the work done and turn around more quickly. We ask customers to pledge to reuse or recirculate what they

no longer wore. We set up a program with eBay to make it easier for our customers to resell products and introduce used products for sale on our website. Would we lose business as a result? We wagered that if our customers were to buy more thoughtfully, and if we were to do our job well and make useful, high-quality products, they would continue to buy from us, and we'd gain new customers who shared our commitment. And now we're going to wrap up this chapter on meaningful work. And it says, meaningful work work what is it exactly regardless of our talent our education our preference our preference for working with words numbers our hands our ability

to cut pattern layout an ad or negotiate with a supplier we have meaningful work at patagonia because our company does its best to be responsible to people and nature. Our daily gestures, on one hand, mundane and often tedious, are, on the other hand, infused with the effort to give something useful and enjoyable to society without bringing undue harm to nature, the commons, or other workers. This is a really important part because nothing is really exciting if you think about running a company he says tedium is easier to take when it has meaning i read that sentence and made me think they have like these like i don't know what you would call them like hybrid reality shows about like entrepreneurship um like the planet of the apps there's one of them or shark tank or all these other these these just shows and they're like uh, I saw a quote on our

tweet on Twitter. They're just like, like there could never be a show about entrepreneurship because it'd be just, it'd be boring. Like entrepreneurship may seem exciting from the outside, but like, you know, a lot of the stuff you have to do is just mundane. Um, but I like the idea that tedium is easier to take when it has meaning. To take one step toward responsibility, learn something, take another step, and let self-examination build on itself has engaged everyone at Patagonia. Many of our suppliers and customers are equally invested in this process of improvement. What engages us most deeply enlivens us. Lively, gratified workers make good business possible and they

make it thrive. Now he's just got some, let's see, this is, okay, so this is, he kind of expounds on this idea he was just talking about. Like you take little small improvements over a long period of time is like how to make progress. And so how do you get started? He says address first what you suspect you know already. Tease it out. What nags at you most whenever you hear about it or see its consequences? What is it you think you can do something about that your company will be good at getting done?

Keep going. Here's what will happen. The company will get smarter and more people will start to care deeply about creating a better quality business through improving its own social and environmental performance. In doing so, your people will have to pay better attention to all the business fundamentals, and this boost in applied intelligence will result in a more fluid, less wasteful organization. You will spot money leaks you could not see before, and you will gain the confidence to recognize and go after opportunities that a company bound by traditional corporate see-no-evil politeness cannot begin to address.

Success motivates people, including your strays. Doing good creates better business. So this section I'm in is actually just like what's your responsibility to your workers? Like what's a responsible company supposed to do for workers? So he's continuing to give us just some ideas about how to organize and basically manage a company. To fully engage the minds and hearts of employees and minimize both the bulk and bulk associated with bureaucracy, larger companies have to figure out how to best organize productive working groups of different sizes for different ends. Twelve is a good number for a small group to bond and work in concert to achieve a specific task with minimum hierarchy.

Think of a jury, a tribal hunting party, or an army squad. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar cites 150 as the magic number for community cohesion based on the number of human relationships the human brain can handle. When it builds a new plant, the manufacturer W.L. Gore puts in 150 parking spaces. When the plant exceeds that capacity, the company builds a new one. Microsoft and Intel also limit the number of employees per building to 150, though they both run plants with multiple buildings. Along the same lines, a military company comprises between 80 and 225 people. Chouinard equipment, Patagonia's predecessor, was, as we mentioned, curiously pre-industrial

revolution. Our tin sheds held equipment, a drop hammer forge, an anvil, a coal forge, jigs for drilling aluminum chocks, but no time clocks or assembly lines. Everyone was poor and most live marginal if well-traveled lives. For a while, we paid a 10% bonus to anyone who had the initiative to work 40 hours a week, a practice that turned out to be illegal. We were busted and required to stop. That's interesting. I never knew that before. We partied heartily. The shed faced a courtyard where we celebrated almost any event with a barbecued lamb and a keg. When we became a clothing company and as sales increased, we had to become more professional, a process that at first consisted of throwing bright, inexperienced young people into new jobs to see if they could learn what we needed to know how to do. We paid fairly well considering the inexperience of our employees. Early on, we

provided health care, although we did not have to. We have told the story of how we introduced child care and parental leave. We never made anyone dress for work, though those coming into the company from the workday world had to relearn how to dress casually in order to fit in. People were free to take long break midday to go surf or run, with the understanding that they came in early or stayed late, or at any rate, they just got the work done. Our worst day as an employer came in 1991,

when we laid off 150 employees for two years now he's going to talk about his mistakes or a mistake rather for two years we had managed the company too careless carelessly bought too much inventory sold too little of it hired too many people and salted away too little money to pay for an expansion that our bank cheerfully financed until they got into troubles of their own and pulled the plug. Costs had to go down and fast. We should note the bracing fact that in 1991, after the layoffs, morale improved among the workers still with us. The hovering axe had fallen. Those of us left still had our necks. So now he's going to get into like what is your responsibility to your customers he's got some good advice here um the noise left myself i

would say is a six word summary of this entire section and it's build something useful and don't bullshit so it says how to it starts out with a question 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. Paul Hawken, when he was still running his Smith & Hawken gardening supplies company, told us that he didn't like to advertise

because he didn't want that kind of relationship with his customer. He was referring to the alternate reality environment of the magazine ad, wherein a business bullhorns its message in the same space as other unrelated voices, all barking their own individual messages. Like a bazaar, but without the smell of spices, or the dance of a charmed snake. Since the mid-1980s, when Hawken made his comment, commercial space has much expanded and grown ever more noisy. More products have become more disposable, more customers experience more frustration, I agree with that 100%, when a flimsy product fails and they have to deal with the

customer service person on the scratchy line from the offshore call center who has no authority to correct a problem and, instead, repeats the company's rules. If the chase for cheaper labor is playing out to its conclusion, so is the race to attract customers on price alone. This is an important idea he has here. So let me start from the beginning. If the chase for cheaper labor is playing out to its conclusion, so is the race to attract customers

on price alone when the product in question won't last and the service won't deliver. Any customer can go online and find the cheapest price for anything anywhere in the world. The strongest thing your company can do is something no one else will do or will do well. To turn for a moment to romance. Selling and marketing seek to incite desire, but a company has to love to sell something its customer loves to buy.

For both ethical and practical reasons, the selling story, to paraphrase Mark Twain, has to be mostly true. 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 the 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 quickly be dispersed by a competitor, activist, or regulator. If you are responsible for a company's advertising and marketing, be truthful. The anonymous talking head doesn't really represent your brand or product. Neither does Tiger Woods. Most people under 40 don't watch the ads placed on TV at such great expense. They fast forward through the boring bits when they watch the show after air time on a laptop. Before I continue his line of thought here,

that's something else that I just learned from taking notes on the podcast with Toby, I think it's Lukey. He's the founder of shopify and he's like why doesn't every single product have a video uh of the founder explaining why the product was made like why it needed to exist he's like because he spends a lot of time you know talking about the the founding myth of the founding story of shopify how he was just starting online trying to sell snowboards and he didn't like any of the tools, was a pain in the ass to sell snowboards. So that, what his point is, is like when customers, again, they're just people and we're by nature tool builders and storytellers. And so when a customer knows why you made the product,

like what problem you're trying to solve how you think about it that makes that product more valuable it's more they actually get an increased utility out of that product long term i love that idea um okay so continuing this says customers are expensive to find and to replace they will become more so you also see he's also right about this he wrote this book i think first publication i think was in 2012 and i think they updated in 2016 but um i just saw data online that customer acquisition costs are going are increasing to the point where a lot of direct-to-consumer brands are finding it actually cheaper to go the old school route of having physical stores where rent is your new customer acquisition cost as opposed to just continuing to dump money into like a digital advertising duopoly.

Okay, so customers are expensive to find and replace and it will become more so, 100%. The responsible company has to treat the customer as, if not a friend, a neighbor or colleague who shares a love for what the company offers. Say a particular kind of clothing, food, shelter, education, art, sport, or entertainment. The wooing of customers can be assigned a cost per thousand exposures, scaled, tested, subjected to strategy. But the relationship, once sealed, is intimate and cannot be abstracted or reduced to a transaction. It's kind of that kind of thinking when you hear a sentence like that from Yvonne.

It kind of makes sense why he's going to take something he sold you five years ago and replace it repair it for free or replace it for free as well because he does not looking at as an individual transaction yes and in that individual transaction yes the company's losing money over the long term they're definitely not okay someone will be happy to get your company's email or he may wince she will order from your catalog or use it as kindling. The responsible company has to continue to state its case, provide the best information it can on why its products or services meet a need, how those products are made, how long they'll last, and what the customer has to do to make them last longer. And finally, what to do with them when they reach the end of their useful life.

But you see why at the beginning I talked about, like, I'm completely biased to Yvonne. I just think that it's just straightforward, no BS, good ideas. And communicating, just like a really easy to understand. I appreciate like the simplicity of the way he thinks. And just again, like it's just good common sense. And common sense, I think backed up by, you know, 40 plus years of experience. Okay. So this last section is,

don't do things that have no useful purpose. Being bold can lead to new discovery, and we need more small businesses. And he's going to communicate a lot in a very few sentences. 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. We advocate a combination of steady improvements with the occasional, breathtakingly bold move to keep everyone awake and motivated, to show leadership that reflects well on everyone in the company. Bold moves that disrupt accepted practices are more likely to lead to the discovery of a new, more environmentally responsible product or service you can offer. The advanced industrial economies no longer create enough well-paying jobs. The job base no longer underpins with any stability the economy,

hence why I said we need more small businesses. We need a new economy built on smaller scale enterprise. I guess he says it too. That wasn't even my idea. I just took his idea and said it was my own. Sorry. There is much to be done and much we can do. Start where you get the least resistance and most cooperation and go from there.

All right. So that's where I'm going to leave this book. If you want to buy the book, I leave a link in the show notes and everyone. I also, if you want to see the book I'm going to do next, I still have that. Um, if you go to founderspodcast.com, you'll now see in the header, they have like a little a with a smiley face. That is, um, a collection of every single book. There's 57 of them so far. And by the time you hear this, I'll have 58 up there. So you know which one I'm working on that week. Um, and if you buy it from there, it obviously benefits the podcast because Amazon sells

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helping me out, uh, as I continue to add to this private podcast feed, which I plan on doing one to two a month, if not more, or, uh, let me not over promise one to two a month, if not more. Let me not overpromise. One to two a month because I do books. I do entire books. But anyways, what I'm saying is that feed will continue to update. You don't have to do anything else after you leave that review. So for two or three minutes of your time,

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me before I get there if you're listening to things on like overcast and breaker overcast is a really popular podcast app for for my listeners they have a thing where you can press like the star or the heart. So just press that. It changes color. Take a screenshot. And what you're doing is you're telling people in your network, hey, I like this episode. And so it'll show up to when other people are searching

like specific categories like business podcasts and such. Anyways, you can screenshot that to me. And same thing. I'll send you that link. It's the same thing. If you're on a podcast like pocket casts and other ones where they don't have any kind of heart recommendation review feature you can just post about this podcast on social media take a screenshot of that and send it to me um obviously i want to optimize first for reviews on podcasts

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