Responsbile Company What We've Learned from Patagonia's First 50 Years
Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
In 1973, Yvon Chouinard founded Patagonia, a purpose-driven company known for its quality clothing products and commitment to advancing solutions to the environmental crisis. The company was nearly 50 when Chouinard decided it was time for another improvement. In September 2022, Chouinard and his family made a historic announcement: They had adopted a purpose-driven ownership model, locking in the company’s values and dedicating the excess profits to protecting our home planet. Since 1957, Chouinard and his family have lived in California and Wyoming. Vincent Stanley has been with Patagonia on and off since its beginning in 1973, for many of those years in key roles as head of sales or marketing. More informally, he is Patagonia’s long-time chief storyteller. Vincent helped develop The Footprint Chronicles, the company’s interactive website that outlines the social and environmental impact of its products; Worn Wear; and Patagonia Books. He currently serves as company philosopher and is a resident fellow at the Yale Center for Business and Environment. He is also a poet whose work has appeared in Best American Poetry. He and his wife, the writer Nora Gallagher, live in Santa Barbara and Brooksville, Maine.Responsbile Company What We've Learned from Patagonia's First 50 Years
<p>“An instructive guide articulating the essential elements of business responsibility for these ecologically perilous times—and it is far more ambitious than a traditional business book… [The] authors challenge organizations to prioritize not only shareholders and customers, but also workers, the community, and—most critically of all—the Earth." —<b>SHELF AWARENESS</b><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>"A quick-but-effective recap of Patagonia’s greatest business challenges, victories, and missteps, combined with actionable steps that any company or entrepreneur can follow to be more responsible and deliberate–while still turning a healthy profit." <b>Ed Roberson of Mountain and Prairie podcast</b><br /></p><p><br /></p>"If you have any doubt at all that doing right by the natural world is good for the bottom line, please, stop right now, wherever you are, find a seat, put the smartphone on mute, and read this freaking book. Yvon and Vincent aren't here to bum you out about a planet turning to desert, or to shame you into anything. They affirm that the ingenuity and hard work required to clean up our offices and industries will be the most rewarding (and profitable) work we do."--<b>Brad Wieners, Executive Editor, </b><b><i>Bloomberg BusinessWeek </i>(about the first edition)</b>
Simple but powerful advice on how and why to rethink your business structure in a time when traditional capitalism is no longer working for people or the planet.
Patagonia over and over throughout the years has been recognized as much for its ground-breaking environmental, social practices as for the quality of its clothes. And then, in an unprecedented action, in 2022, the Chouinard family gave their company away, converting ownership to a simple structure of trusts and non-profits, so that all the profits from the company can be used to protect our home planet and work to reverse climate chaos. In this exceptionally frank account, Stanley with Chouinard recounts how the company and its culture gained the confidence, by step and misstep, to make its work progressively more responsible, and to ultimately challenge other companies, as big as Wal-Mart and as small as the corner bakery, to do the same.
In plain, compelling prose, the authors describe the current impact of manufacturing, commerce, and traditional capitalism on the planet’s natural systems and human communities, and how that impact is forcing business to change its ways. The Future of the Responsible Company shows companies how to reduce the harm they cause, improve the quality of their business, and provide the kind of meaningful work everyone seeks. It concludes with specific, practical steps every business can undertake, as well as advice on what to do, in what order.
This is the first book to show companies how to thread their way through economic sea change and slow the drift toward ecological bankruptcy. Its advice is simple but powerful: reduce your environmental footprint (and its skyrocketing cost), make legitimate products that last, reclaim deep knowledge of your business and its supply chain to make the most of opportunities in the years to come, and earn the trust you’ll need by treating your workers, customers, and communities with respect. It also describes the threats of traditional capitalism and why the owners of Patagonia chose to hack the system to ensure that the company will still exist and have impact in 100 years. An explanation of Patagonia's revolutionary new business organization, The Patagonia Purpose Trust and The Holdfast Collective, rounds out this captivating business book.
PREFACE TO THE 2023 EDITION
1: WHAT CRISIS?
2: MEANINGFUL WORK
3: THE ELEMENTS OF BUSINESS RESPONSIBILITY
4: WHAT TO DO
5: SHARING WHAT YOU LEARN
6: MAKING A LIVING IN THE ANTHROPOCENE
7: PATAGONIA: WHAT’S NEXT?
APPENDIX: THE CHECKLISTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
RECOMMENDED READING
NOTES
INDEX
- Two-thirds new material
- Full-color photographs throughout
- Includes Patagonia innovations and highlights from the last 10 years, including
- Patagonia's new mission statement: We are in business to save our home planet
- Patagonia's revolutionary new business model
- Advances in regenerative business
PREFACE TO THE 2023 EDITION
In the decade since we wrote The Responsible Company: What We’ve Learned From Patagonia’s First 40 Years, dramatic shifts have taken place in the world and at Patagonia. This new edition, which marks our 50th year in business, reflects these changes. The aim of the book, however, remains the same: to articulate the elements of business responsibility for our time—when everyone working at every level has to face the unintended consequences of a 250-year-old industrial model that can no longer be sustained ecologically, socially, or financially.
Yvon has said that Patagonia— any company for that matter—should behave as though it will be around in 100 years. You don’t pump up and hollow out a company meant to stay in business for a good long time. This once standard American business ethos was eclipsed in the 1960s by Milton Friedman’s doctrine of shareholder primacy, wherein the sole purpose of a business is to maximize profits. That objective helps keep a stock’s price high but doesn’t work in the long run for society, the planet, or even the health of a business. In the 1950s, the average corporation survived to celebrate 61; now it barely makes it to 20.
Business founders don’t live forever. And a 50-year-old company that wants to live responsibly for another fifty years needs a succession plan that involves far more than a change of who sits at the head of the table. In 2012, Patagonia became a California benefit corporation, which allowed us to enshrine into our business charter our core values and practices, including an annual gift of one percent of sales to grassroots environmental organizations. The company’s long-time purpose statement— “Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, and use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis” —could now legally outlast our original ownership. To dissuade anyone of different values from buying in, we now required a vote of 100 percent of the company shares to alter the charter.
Dismayed by the deepening of the crisis, and the ineffective response from businesses and governments, Yvon rewrote our statement in 2018 to reflect a sharper focus: “We’re in business to save our home planet.”
It had been nearly 30 years since Patagonia first committed to “inspire and implement solutions,” 30 years of effort to “reduce unnecessary harm.” We were proud of our work and the products that resulted, but whatever we did each day to roll the rock uphill, it came tumbling back down. Global economic activity trespassed ever more of the planet’s physical boundaries: greenhouse gases climbed, storms intensified, rivers dried at the mouth, soil turned to dust, and species continued to disappear at a thousand times their natural rate.
Our sharpened purpose meant more than a race against the doomsday clock. We’d learned something new and promising over the last decade from Patagonia Provisions, our venture into the food business. Regenerative organic practices to cultivate food and fiber could restore topsoil; slow the depletion of groundwater and pollution of rivers; draw carbon from the atmosphere deep into the soil; restore habitat; improve biodiversity; and along the way, help revive the health of rural communities.
In 2016, we introduced organic Long Root Ale made with Kernza, a perennial wheatgrass with roots that descend ten feet or more, where they create the proper conditions for microbes and fungi to generate topsoil. Two years later, we began working with smallholder farmers in India to grow organic cotton with regenerative practices, including companion planting of turmeric to discourage harmful insects and generate a second source of income.
Patagonia Provisions pointed our apparel business toward a new north star. We could do better than doing less harm or becoming carbon neutral. We could give back to Earth as much or more than we take. We could do positive good.
In 2022, the Chouinard family committed the entire value of the company—monetary and moral—to our new purpose. The family donated 100 percent of the company’s stock to two entities—an irrevocable Patagonia Purpose Trust and a 501 (c) (4) charitable organization, the Holdfast Collective, that commits Patagonia’s annual profits to groups working to save the life of our home planet. Earth is now our sole shareholder.
Vincent remembers being ushered, a few years back, into the office of a dean of a small liberal-arts college after giving a talk there. A man in his sixties in a gray suit and tie, the dean was responsible for helping graduates find their first real jobs. He had a real problem, he said, lowering his voice to an anguished whisper: “None of them will go to work for bad companies.”
That’s a good problem to have. If the elements of business responsibility have not changed much in the past decade, their cultural context certainly has. Young people now want to work for responsible companies; business students know there is no longer a convincing financial case to be made for being a bad company.
Drawing on our experience at Patagonia (the only company we know in any depth), we hope to write usefully for all people who see the need for deep change in business practices and who may work in companies quite unlike ours. Although we mainly address companies that make things, or, like us, design things made by others, this book is germane to all businesses, as well as civic organizations and nonprofits, that want to treat their people well, and improve the environmental performance of their operations. Although of particular interest to business leaders and managers, this book is for anyone who wants to engage their best, deepest self in the working life that stretches ahead.
<p>“An instructive guide articulating the essential elements of business responsibility for these ecologically perilous times—and it is far more ambitious than a traditional business book… [The] authors challenge organizations to prioritize not only shareholders and customers, but also workers, the community, and—most critically of all—the Earth." —<b>SHELF AWARENESS</b><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>"A quick-but-effective recap of Patagonia’s greatest business challenges, victories, and missteps, combined with actionable steps that any company or entrepreneur can follow to be more responsible and deliberate–while still turning a healthy profit." <b>Ed Roberson of Mountain and Prairie podcast</b><br /></p><p><br /></p>"If you have any doubt at all that doing right by the natural world is good for the bottom line, please, stop right now, wherever you are, find a seat, put the smartphone on mute, and read this freaking book. Yvon and Vincent aren't here to bum you out about a planet turning to desert, or to shame you into anything. They affirm that the ingenuity and hard work required to clean up our offices and industries will be the most rewarding (and profitable) work we do."--<b>Brad Wieners, Executive Editor, </b><b><i>Bloomberg BusinessWeek </i>(about the first edition)</b>
Simple but powerful advice on how and why to rethink your business structure in a time when traditional capitalism is no longer working for people or the planet.
Patagonia over and over throughout the years has been recognized as much for its ground-breaking environmental, social practices as for the quality of its clothes. And then, in an unprecedented action, in 2022, the Chouinard family gave their company away, converting ownership to a simple structure of trusts and non-profits, so that all the profits from the company can be used to protect our home planet and work to reverse climate chaos. In this exceptionally frank account, Stanley with Chouinard recounts how the company and its culture gained the confidence, by step and misstep, to make its work progressively more responsible, and to ultimately challenge other companies, as big as Wal-Mart and as small as the corner bakery, to do the same.
In plain, compelling prose, the authors describe the current impact of manufacturing, commerce, and traditional capitalism on the planet’s natural systems and human communities, and how that impact is forcing business to change its ways. The Future of the Responsible Company shows companies how to reduce the harm they cause, improve the quality of their business, and provide the kind of meaningful work everyone seeks. It concludes with specific, practical steps every business can undertake, as well as advice on what to do, in what order.
This is the first book to show companies how to thread their way through economic sea change and slow the drift toward ecological bankruptcy. Its advice is simple but powerful: reduce your environmental footprint (and its skyrocketing cost), make legitimate products that last, reclaim deep knowledge of your business and its supply chain to make the most of opportunities in the years to come, and earn the trust you’ll need by treating your workers, customers, and communities with respect. It also describes the threats of traditional capitalism and why the owners of Patagonia chose to hack the system to ensure that the company will still exist and have impact in 100 years. An explanation of Patagonia's revolutionary new business organization, The Patagonia Purpose Trust and The Holdfast Collective, rounds out this captivating business book.
PREFACE TO THE 2023 EDITION
1: WHAT CRISIS?
2: MEANINGFUL WORK
3: THE ELEMENTS OF BUSINESS RESPONSIBILITY
4: WHAT TO DO
5: SHARING WHAT YOU LEARN
6: MAKING A LIVING IN THE ANTHROPOCENE
7: PATAGONIA: WHAT’S NEXT?
APPENDIX: THE CHECKLISTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
RECOMMENDED READING
NOTES
INDEX
- Two-thirds new material
- Full-color photographs throughout
- Includes Patagonia innovations and highlights from the last 10 years, including
- Patagonia's new mission statement: We are in business to save our home planet
- Patagonia's revolutionary new business model
- Advances in regenerative business
PREFACE TO THE 2023 EDITION
In the decade since we wrote The Responsible Company: What We’ve Learned From Patagonia’s First 40 Years, dramatic shifts have taken place in the world and at Patagonia. This new edition, which marks our 50th year in business, reflects these changes. The aim of the book, however, remains the same: to articulate the elements of business responsibility for our time—when everyone working at every level has to face the unintended consequences of a 250-year-old industrial model that can no longer be sustained ecologically, socially, or financially.
Yvon has said that Patagonia— any company for that matter—should behave as though it will be around in 100 years. You don’t pump up and hollow out a company meant to stay in business for a good long time. This once standard American business ethos was eclipsed in the 1960s by Milton Friedman’s doctrine of shareholder primacy, wherein the sole purpose of a business is to maximize profits. That objective helps keep a stock’s price high but doesn’t work in the long run for society, the planet, or even the health of a business. In the 1950s, the average corporation survived to celebrate 61; now it barely makes it to 20.
Business founders don’t live forever. And a 50-year-old company that wants to live responsibly for another fifty years needs a succession plan that involves far more than a change of who sits at the head of the table. In 2012, Patagonia became a California benefit corporation, which allowed us to enshrine into our business charter our core values and practices, including an annual gift of one percent of sales to grassroots environmental organizations. The company’s long-time purpose statement— “Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, and use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis” —could now legally outlast our original ownership. To dissuade anyone of different values from buying in, we now required a vote of 100 percent of the company shares to alter the charter.
Dismayed by the deepening of the crisis, and the ineffective response from businesses and governments, Yvon rewrote our statement in 2018 to reflect a sharper focus: “We’re in business to save our home planet.”
It had been nearly 30 years since Patagonia first committed to “inspire and implement solutions,” 30 years of effort to “reduce unnecessary harm.” We were proud of our work and the products that resulted, but whatever we did each day to roll the rock uphill, it came tumbling back down. Global economic activity trespassed ever more of the planet’s physical boundaries: greenhouse gases climbed, storms intensified, rivers dried at the mouth, soil turned to dust, and species continued to disappear at a thousand times their natural rate.
Our sharpened purpose meant more than a race against the doomsday clock. We’d learned something new and promising over the last decade from Patagonia Provisions, our venture into the food business. Regenerative organic practices to cultivate food and fiber could restore topsoil; slow the depletion of groundwater and pollution of rivers; draw carbon from the atmosphere deep into the soil; restore habitat; improve biodiversity; and along the way, help revive the health of rural communities.
In 2016, we introduced organic Long Root Ale made with Kernza, a perennial wheatgrass with roots that descend ten feet or more, where they create the proper conditions for microbes and fungi to generate topsoil. Two years later, we began working with smallholder farmers in India to grow organic cotton with regenerative practices, including companion planting of turmeric to discourage harmful insects and generate a second source of income.
Patagonia Provisions pointed our apparel business toward a new north star. We could do better than doing less harm or becoming carbon neutral. We could give back to Earth as much or more than we take. We could do positive good.
In 2022, the Chouinard family committed the entire value of the company—monetary and moral—to our new purpose. The family donated 100 percent of the company’s stock to two entities—an irrevocable Patagonia Purpose Trust and a 501 (c) (4) charitable organization, the Holdfast Collective, that commits Patagonia’s annual profits to groups working to save the life of our home planet. Earth is now our sole shareholder.
Vincent remembers being ushered, a few years back, into the office of a dean of a small liberal-arts college after giving a talk there. A man in his sixties in a gray suit and tie, the dean was responsible for helping graduates find their first real jobs. He had a real problem, he said, lowering his voice to an anguished whisper: “None of them will go to work for bad companies.”
That’s a good problem to have. If the elements of business responsibility have not changed much in the past decade, their cultural context certainly has. Young people now want to work for responsible companies; business students know there is no longer a convincing financial case to be made for being a bad company.
Drawing on our experience at Patagonia (the only company we know in any depth), we hope to write usefully for all people who see the need for deep change in business practices and who may work in companies quite unlike ours. Although we mainly address companies that make things, or, like us, design things made by others, this book is germane to all businesses, as well as civic organizations and nonprofits, that want to treat their people well, and improve the environmental performance of their operations. Although of particular interest to business leaders and managers, this book is for anyone who wants to engage their best, deepest self in the working life that stretches ahead.