All autobiography is suspect. Beware of the self-congratulation and phony self-deprecation, the ego-stroking rationalisation and reputation-guarding omission, the cod-philosophizing and disingenuous confessions. When someone is trying to “set the record straight” with “I did it my way” bombast, that’s a sure sign of hagiography. What really gets up my nose are the best-selling celebrity “memoirs” that are actually ghost-written biographies in disguise. The most absurd of these are about twenty-year-old athletes and Reality-TV nano-celebrities. This is all histrionics, a word which some people think refers to the subject matter of history. According to my dictionary, however, it means “exaggerated, dramatic behaviour designed to attract attention.”[1] Histrionics indeed.

Wait a minute. That definition may also apply aptly to best-selling business books. So where does that leave the state of the business autobiography? In the shadow of Jack Welsh, mostly. He’s the former CEO of General Electric. Welsh turned one of the most valuable blue-chip conglomerates into the most valuable blue-chip conglomerate by firing masses of people at Wall Street’s behest, among other cynical tactics. Now semi-retired, he writes about why autocratic executives who fire people for short-term gain are bad. No, that’s not a mia culpa. Welsh’s biography (Jack: Straight From the Gut, 2001) and reflections (Winning, 2005) are, in many ways, the template for the modern business autobiography: rationalise past escapades using today’s prevailing wisdom—check; tell stories of alpha-male power-brokering balanced with sagely disclaimers of humility—check; describe success in terms of the deft application of lofty principles rather than the cynical placation of investor biases—double check. Jack has a lot of self-serving revisionism in his gut, apparently.

I usually give business autobiographies a wide berth. Occasionally, but only occasionally, I come across a business autobiography that stands out from the drek. Yvon Chouinard’s Let My People Go Surfing (2006) is one such book.

Let My People Go Surfing: the Education of a Reluctant Businessman
by Yvon Chouinard (Penguin, 2006), pp. xi, 258.

Let My People Go Surfing is partly a warts’n’all memoir and partly a politico-business manifesto, all revolving around a plain-spoken description of the ups and downs of two companies—the mountain-climbing gear manufacturer Chouinard Equipment and the outdoor-sports clothing manufacturer Patagonia. Chouinard reflects on his experience of molding two businesses around a personal world view. That world view evolved as he learned about business, the nature of the workplace, and the degradation of the natural environment. In many respects, this is the contrarian business autobiography. Chouinard doesn’t like being a businessman. He does business part-time to pay for extreme-sports junkets and pet environmental causes. This is definitely business done California style despite the fact that Patagonia has become an international enterprise.

The phrase “let my people go surfing” is actually the name of Patagonia’s flextime policy. It gives employees the opportunity to get out into the natural world and engage in outdoor sports. The spin-off benefit is that employees better understand the business from the customer’s point of view. Patagonia goes out of its way to hire customers or encourage employees to become customers. This dovetails with Chouinard’s notion of “management by absence”, which refers to the need for managers to get out of the office and engage with the real world (hangout with customers, look at what competitors are doing, look at what people in other countries are up to, and so forth). Many of the company’s innovations come from this type of inquisitiveness and drawing of inspiration from other disciplines. Plus, if a workplace can’t function with the prolonged absence of a particular manager, then there is probably too much managerial meddling and second guessing going on. Managers are not expected to shoulder the burden for coming up with new ideas, however. Nor are managers sequestered in offices away from their staffs. There is a general mingling among the employees. And every employee has an opportunity to make suggestions. Indeed, the janitorial staff—a marginalized group in most companies—have proposed several changes that reduced company costs and reduced waste.

Patagonia understands customer relations as few companies do. The company was “crowd sourcing” long before that became a fashionable business concept. For example, customers are encouraged to send in photos of themselves using Patagonia products in the great outdoors so that the company can use them in its mail-order catalogue. This makes the company’s image more authentic. A select group of hardcore mountaineers, surfers, and endurance athletes are given products and asked to give feedback (or are enrolled in a preferential buyer program). These people then play the role of company evangelist. The company also takes the stance that unhappy, vocal customers are not a nuisance and source of losses. They are treated as valuable source of feedback given that such customers are usually the tip of the iceberg of discontent with a product. The company goes out of its way to turn them into satisfied customers because it realizes the importance of reputation and word-of-mouth referrals. Given Patagonia’s emphasis on quality as the first priority, it can actually offer guarantees of this sort.

The quality control process starts by having all of the main participants brought into the manufacturing process at the design stage: “As [Michael] Kami points out, only about 10 percent of a product’s costs are incurred during the design phase, but 90 percent of the costs are irrevocably committed.” (p. 119) There is a lot of experimenting and innovation going on. So Chouinard advocates extensive testing, catching problems early, and doing things right the first time (”measure twice, cut once”).

Chouinard encourages his people to be sceptics. When faced with problems, he insists that you can’t always rely on first, second, or even third impressions. Probative questioning is always required. As Chouinard puts it:

Uncurious people do not lead examined lives; they cannot see causes that lie deeper than the surface. They believe in blind faith, and the most frightening thing about blind faith is that it in turn leads to an inability, even an unwillingness, to accept facts. (p. 202)

Part of his company’s mission spells out the need for “a healthy skepticism towards authority.” The company’s workforce is diverse for that reason: “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.” (p. 170) These are all excellent points.

Before I go further, I should declare my views on environmentalism because it helps explain why I like Chouinard’s philosophy about design and integrated manufacturing.

I’m one of those people who thinks that do-it-yourself environmentalists—the obsessively recycling “think globally, act locally” busybodies on your block—are misguided (and occasionally vindictive). Michael Shellenberger & Ted Nordhaus are right in their book Break Through (2007) when they say that environmental activists lack imagination and are fixated on the politics of imposing limits. These activists are deluding themselves if they think that the general population will become self-sacrificing conservationists if they only come to appreciate the majesty of nature and the extent of environmental degradation. If that were true, the world would have been full of conservationists long ago. Indeed, Patagonia has conducted surveys of its customers and found that they are fairly apathetic about the environment. And these people are outdoor-sports freaks and wilderness explorers; people with one of the biggest stakes in environmental preservation. They’re mostly interested in the quality of products. If these people don’t embrace conservation as a first priority, then what hope is there for the rest of us?

So what can be done? I am a big fan of William McDonough & Michael Braungart’s views, as described in Cradle to Cradle (2002). Specifically, I endorse their view that complete recycling needs to be built into product designs, the design of the entire manufacturing system, and the design of the infrastructure that eventually processes products once they are discarded. Every element of the product needs to be recyclable or introduced back into the natural environment. McDonough & Braungart’s case studies are breathtaking in their ambition, genius, and demonstrable success. (McDonough describes several cases in this video.) In contrast, getting a few people to make voluntary sacrifices is fine so long as it doesn’t create as many environmental problems than it solves. However, systems premised on consumer goodwill often create more harm, either because they breed complacency among those who think they’ve already made a big difference or because they create more waste and pollution than they prevent (as timid recycling programmes tend to do). Begging, rallying, and cajoling volunteers only gets you so far. What we need are practical solutions that are socially astute, design savvy, infrastructural, and embraced by producers.

That’s where Chouinard’s book comes in. He started by educating customers and advocating eco-friendliness. Chouinard doesn’t eschew F.Y.I. environmentalism, although, even here, he endorses the more expansive “pay your penance” notion of off-setting the degradation you cause (which presumably includes things like paying carbon offsets). But he eventually realized that if he was going to make more than a small dent in the problem, he had to own up to his role in the system and build genuine environment-minded design into his products. He had to do this while achieving market-leading levels of quality. So this is not just a story of business success. It’s a story that shows that business and environmental success are not necessarily at odds thanks to enlightened thinking about the environment, thoughtful designs, and careful attention to how people relate to their workplace. There is much here that can be replicated elsewhere.

What is Chouinard’s approach? Over several decades, Patagonia has looked at the environmental problems caused by their business—from their suppliers through to the end of product use.

• First, Patagonia had to gain more control over its suppliers by seeking out the right ones and building long-term relationships. This was originally done to ensure quality and consistency. Later, Chouinard found ways to manufacture fabrics that didn’t contain toxic elements (such as dying or other fabric treatments). If a product feature (such as a particular colour) couldn’t be made without toxins, it was dropped. Some products were made of recycled materials, such as a jacket that was made from 25 recycled plastic bottles (thus diverting 86 million bottles from landfills in 10 years). This reduced oil consumption and reduced toxic emissions too. They use organic cotton that is environmentally friendly (not all organic cotton is) and which also meets high quality standards (not easy to do). They also scrutinized the environmental practices of suppliers and rewarded those who don’t pollute.
• At the design level, the focus on quality instead of fickle fashion meant that customers would wear their garments longer before they needed to be recycled. The products are simple and so are the product lines. One implication is that products are designed to be multi-functional; one garment has many uses. It also improves profitability.
• All company facilities in California were made more energy efficient and use wind power. Pategonia took control of its retail operations, creating stores to ensure that products were merchandised properly. This then allowed them to cut down on packaging, one of the biggest sources of waste in the industry. Interestingly, when an item such as boxer shorts was displayed on hangers instead of placed in packages, customers perceived them as more valuable and bought more. Sometimes packaging was reduced to the bare minimum, such as a reusable elastic band. More costs are saved.
• It’s mail-order catalogue was made from recycled materials, with most catalogue shopping eventually migrating to the Internet. Chouinard’s holds an “innocent until proven guilty” attitude towards new technology, contrary to the knee-jerk resort to the politics of limits.

All told, it comes very close to McDonough & Braungart’s cradle-to-cradle model. Chouinard admits that he hasn’t quite reached the goal of fully recycled products but the company continues to make incremental improvements.

If this overview strikes you as Chouinard patting himself on the back, then it’s because I haven’t mentioned any of the struggles that Chouinard has gone through. His story is one of making all of the classic business mistakes. At one point, his company was dependent on unsustainable growth. He had difficulties coping with recessions, conservative banks, product flaws, layoffs, lawsuits, a disruptive addiction to reorganization, and management turnover. He built organizational silos up before breaking them down. Chouinard owns up to a lot of mistakes. It’s a candor I don’t often see in business autobiography. All of that said, of course there’s a bit of back-patting; it isn’t an ego-less account.

The problematic parts of the book come from two topics.

The first problem is Chouinard’s discussion of activism. Grass-roots activism is quite different from corporate-funded activism. Strangely, Chouinard equates grass-roots activism with the activism financed by his company’s special political fund. He also uses mercenary tactics against grass-roots activists he doesn’t like. For example, the company supports Planned Parenthood, an organization that advocates abortion rights. That stance led to opposition from religious activists. When they threatened to picket stores, Chouinard donated a fixed amount of money to Planned Parenthood for every picketer that arrived. Clever. However, the many kind words Chouinard says about activists are about activism writ large, whereas the stories he tells suggest that he’s only referring to activists who agree with him.

The second topic is his incomplete take on consensus decision-making. Chouinard advocates consensus decision-making, not compromises that lead to mediocrity. Yet he doesn’t tell us much about how that works in practice. Most proprietorships vest a lot of decision-making power in the owner. Throughout Let My People Go Surfing, there is no question that Chouinard has a strong influence on the direction of his companies. So how does this consensus decision-making work exactly? How is this apparent contradiction resolved?

These quibbles notwithstanding, I strongly recommend Chouinard’s book. It’s one of the few first-hand accounts of how two companies evolved over half a century. Chouinard’s candor and detailed discussion of examples make the book a refreshing alternative to those business books that wallow in abstraction.

By Peter Stoyko

NOTES

[1] I’m devoted to the OED but this definition comes from the handy dictionary that came with my MacBook. I’m happy that the Compact OED is coming to the iPhone. (Update: no it isn’t; booo!)

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