Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman
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Product Description
Whether you care about adventure sports, the fate of the natural world, or pure brand maintenance and business success, Patagonia, Inc. is one of the planet’s most appealing and inspiring companies. For nearly forty years, its reputation for unsurpassed high quality, maverick innovation, and long-term environmental responsibility has place it in a class by itself. And everything flows from Patagonia’s founder, Yvon Chouinard.
Chouinard’s creation myth is now an American business legend. As a child, he stirred with his father, a French Canadian blacksmith, and the rest of his family tree to Southern California in the 1950s with small English and less money. He escaped into mountain climbing as a teenager and by his early twenties was among the best climbers in America, building legendary first ascents of a number of notorious faces. When he chose he could make better climbing tools himself for less money and when his fellow climbers agreed and clamored for more, a way of life became a business. Some forty years later, Yvon Chouinard still summits peaks around the world (though he now spends more time surfing). Patagonia still makes exceptionally high-quality things, only it now earns more than $250 million a year from worldwide sales, and Chouinard is able to leverage his concern for the natural settings he’s spent a lifetime enjoying. His resolve to minimize Patagonia’s impact on the environment has led the company to make its legendary fleeces out of recycled soda bottles and to donate at least 1 percent of its revenue each year to environmental causes, among many additional things.
In Let My People Go Surfing, Yvon Chouinard relates his and his company’s tale and the core philosophies that have sustained Patagonia, Inc. year in and year out. This is not another tale of a successful businessman who manages on the side to do fantastic excellent and have grand adventures; it’s the tale of a man who brought doing excellent and having grand adventures into the heart of his business model–and who loved even more business success as a result. Let My People Go Surfing gives ample evidence as to why there have been few more influential companies in American business in the last forty years than Patagonia, Inc.
The long-awaited memoir/manifesto from legendary climber, businessman, and environmentalist Yvon Chouinard, founder and owner of one of the world’s most inspiring companies, Patagonia, Inc.Amazon.com Review
Like the carefully engineered dies which made his company’s first products–steel pitons and carabiners which climbing enthusiasts would admit as primitive forerunners of today’s sleeker gear–Yvon Chouinard is if nothing else an original. How many additional shy French-Canadian boys become surf-and-climbing bums, then blacksmiths forging their own play tools, and eventually founders of world-renowned sports equipment and apparel companies like Patagonia? How many additional heads of multi-million dollar enterprises open their life tale by stating bluntly, “The Lee Iacoccas, Donald Trumps, and Jack Welches of the business world are heroes to no one except additional businessmen with similar values. I wanted to be a fur trapper when I grew up.” The proverbial mold from which Chouinard was cast got broken.
In Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman, readers get a fascinating look inside the history and philosophy of both Patagonia and its irascible, opinionated founder. From its beginning, the book shares a sense of Chouinard’s strong-willed personality and his like of the outdoors. He recounts a mostly pleased childhood spent in a still-pure southern California, climbing, diving, fishing, and surfing. The narrative soon moves into Chouinard’s early capitalist efforts, which were less all ears on market-share domination than on earning a basic living to finance his own sporting habits. As his company’s first catalog noted, manner of language could be slow in the summer months, when Chouinard typically left the “office”–a dilapidated shack converted into an ironworks–for climbing adventures across the American West.
Eventually, though, the tale settles into a pattern familiar to business audiences: Patagonia grows rapidly, takes on more employees and product lines to sustain hungry demand from customers, but overreaches with over-ambitious expansion plans and suffers a hitch in its adolescence. This make-or-break juncture of a business’s development regularly contains the most appealing material, and here Chouinard and his beloved company are no exception. He describes a series of wrenching decisions through which he and Patagonia management team navigated in 1991, as sales growth stalled while capital and operational expenses sprinted yet to be. From this crisis emerged Patagonia’s first-ever layoffs, distressing a beefy 20% of the workforce, and a serious re-examination of the business’s core principles and methods.
The past part of Chouinard’s book largely ends at this point, and gives way to an exposition of philosophies which emerged at Patagonia during its dark moments in the early 1990s. The rest of the book serves as a kind of primer to business, the Patagonia way: one chapter each on product design philosophy, production philosophy, distribution philosophy, image philosophy, financial philosophy, human resource philosophy, and so on. Fans of Patagonia can revel in the company’s effective details, as can persons who support or want to erect businesses with self-consciously cultivated soulfulness. Readers who loved Gary Erickson’s tale about Clif Bar, for example, should certainly find this a welcome addition to their bookshelves. –Peter Han
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Although I sorry to say have not yet had the chance to read this book, I was deeply inspired by Yvon Chouinard’s recent talk (part of his book tour) at Lewis & Clark College. It was incredible to hear his tale, and from what I hear most of the additional people in attendance also loved his talk.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
If a name was to investigate the claims made in this book, there would be conflict. Patagonia is a corporation, like any additional. Their main purpose is profit. Do they offer loads of color variations on their underwear for the environment, or because Yvon is a “reluctant businessman”? I doubt it.
They do contribute money to the environment. This is right. But where do you reflect this money comes from? Their employees are paid at the bottom of the scale, and their prices are at a premium. So shouldn’t their employees be getting credit for these contributions as a replacement for of Yvon?
At best, this book is a manifesto of what a company could do, not what any company is currently. From what I’ve heard, The Management section in this book is nonsense. If anyone was to investigate the claims made in this book in detail, and make the authors prove what they aver, Patagonia would be caught with their $125 pants down, revealing their $35 underwear.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
I like Patagonia and admire the company’s philosophies, but this book felt like one huge, long self-aggrandizing advertisement for the company. The title of the book really says it all if you’re looking for excellent business management practices. No need to read any further. But the history of the company is reasonably appealing, and their efforts to be environmentally reliable are inspiring.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
The founder of Patagonia discusses how the company ongoing and how it has developed a new way of business. Fantastic book for anyone.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
From my Blog:
I read an appealing book called, “Let my people go surfing – the education of a reluctant businessman” by Yvon Chouinard who is the founder and owner of Patagonia. The surfing in the book refers to real surfing (in waves) unlike the surfing that most of readers coming to this blog are doing. The book is an appealing and farily simple read. Because his original start was a like of outdoor adventure and what they primarily sell is outdoor wear, his employees and his culture centre around the outdoors and the cool factor around outdoor adventuring.
He has made a perception that Patagonia is a “excellent for the world” company and much of the book centres around the excellent works that Patagonia does.
I am permanently inspired to read success and trials and tribulations of additional business people and that is why I loved the book.
This all ties back to my thoughts on branding. Patagonia has made a brand. The book is even part of it. The brand is the culture. Appealing.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5