My highlights from Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman
1. I learned at an early age that it’s better to invent your own game; then you can always be a winner.
2. In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness. Studying Zen has taught me to simplify; to simplify yields a richer result.
3. Where other designers would work to improve a tool’s performance by adding on, Tom Frost and I would achieve the same ends by taking away—reducing weight and bulk without sacrificing strength or the level of protection.
4. I began to see clothing as a way to help support the marginally profitable hardware business. At the time we had about 75 percent of the climbing hardware market, but we still weren’t making much of a profit.
5. I had always avoided thinking of myself as a businessman. I was a climber, a surfer, a kayaker, a skier, and a blacksmith. We simply enjoyed making good tools and functional clothes that we, and our friends, wanted.
6. One day it dawned on me that I was a businessman and would probably be one for a long time. It was also clear that in order to survive at this game, we had to get serious. I also knew that I would never be happy playing by the normal rules of business; I wanted to distance myself as far as possible from those pasty-faced corpses in suits I saw in airline magazine ads. If I had to be a businessman, I was going to do it on my own terms.
7. One of my favorite sayings about entrepreneurship is: If you want to understand the entrepreneur, study the juvenile delinquent. The delinquent is saying with his actions, “This sucks. I’m going to do my own thing.”
8. Work had to be enjoyable on a daily basis. We all had to come to work on the balls of our feet and go up the stairs two steps at a time. We needed to be surrounded by friends who could dress whatever way they wanted, even be barefoot. We all needed to have flextime to surf the waves when they were good, or ski the powder after a big snowstorm, or stay home and take care of a sick child.
9. I’ve always thought of myself as an 80 percenter. I like to throw myself passionately into a sport or activity until I reach about an 80 percent proficiency level. To go beyond that requires an obsession and degree of specialization that doesn’t appeal to me. Once I reach that 80 percent level I like to go off and do something totally different.
10. What was your single toughest climb? Probably when my friends, including [Patagonia founder] Yvon Chouinard, and I did the Kautz Glacier on Mount Rainier. I had never really done ice climbing before, and they gave me a 30-second lesson in crampons and ice-ax use. At one point, we were going across a very steep patch of black ice, and if you slipped, you would’ve gone about 1,000 feet. I said to Yvon, “We should rope up here,” and he said, “No way—if you go, then I go, and I don’t want to do that. This is like catching a taxi in New York on a rainy day: It’s every man for himself.” It’s been helpful to me to be [Yvon’s] friend. . . . He makes me think about things in new ways.
11. Can a company that wants to make the best-quality outdoor clothing in the world be the size of Nike? Can a ten-table, three-star French restaurant retain its third star when it adds fifty tables? Can you have it all? The question haunted me throughout the 1980s as Patagonia evolved.
12. I considered myself a craftsman who had just happened to grow a successful business.
13. The first part of our mission statement, “Make the best product,” is the raison d’être of Patagonia and the cornerstone of our business philosophy. Striving to make the best quality product is the reason we got into business in the first place.
14. “Make the best” is a difficult goal. It doesn’t mean “among the best” or the “best at a particular price point.” It means “make the best,” period.
15. The functionally driven design is usually minimalist. Or as Dieter Rams, head of design at Braun, maintains, “Good design is as little design as possible.”
16. Complexity is often a sure sign that the functional needs have not been solved. Take the difference between the Ferrari and the Cadillac of the 1960s. The Ferrari’s clean lines suited its high-performance aims. The Cadillac really didn’t have functional aims. It didn’t have the steering, suspension, torque, aerodynamics, or brakes appropriate to its immense horsepower. But then nothing about its design really had to work. All it had to do was convey the idea of power, creature comfort, of a living room floating down the highway to the golf course. So, to a basically ugly shape were added all manner of useless chrome gingerbread: fins at the back, breasts at the front. Once you lose the discipline of functionality as a design guidepost, the imagination runs amok. Once you design a monster, it tends to look like one too.
17. 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. I’d be competing head-on in the cola wars, on price, distribution, advertising, and promotion, which would indeed be hell for me.
18. I’d much rather design and sell products so good and unique that they have no competition.
19. Successful inventing requires a tremendous amount of energy, time, and money. The big inventions are so rare that even the most brilliant geniuses think up only a few marketable inventions in their lifetimes. It may take thirty years to come up with an invention, but within a few years or months there can be a thousand innovations spawned from that original idea.
20. Like creative cooks, we view “originals” as recipes for inspiration, and then we close the book to do our own thing. The resulting designs are like the fusion recipes of the best chefs.
21. To stay ahead of the competition, our ideas have to come from as close to the source as possible. With technical products, our “source” is the dirtbag core customer. He or she is the one using the products and finding out what works, what doesn’t, and what is needed.
22. People in focus groups are usually not visionaries.
23. The entrepreneurial way is to immediately take a forward step and if that feels good, take another, if not, step back. Learn by doing, it is a faster process.
24. Again, like the Zen approach to archery or anything else, you identify the goal and then forget about it and concentrate on the process.
25. Our branding efforts are simple: tell people who we are. We don’t have to create a fictional character like the Marlboro Man or a fake responsible caring campaign like Chevron’s “we agree” advertising. Writing fiction is so much more difficult than nonfiction. Fiction requires creativity and imagination. Nonfiction deals with simple truths.
26. Patagonia’s image arises directly from the values, outdoor pursuits, and passions of its founders and employees. While it has practical and nameable aspects, it can’t be made into a formula. In fact, because so much of the image relies on authenticity, a formula would destroy it. Ironically, part of Patagonia’s authenticity lies in not being concerned about having an image in the first place. Without a formula, the only way to sustain an image is to live up to it. Our image is a direct reflection of who we are and what we believe.
27. Quality, not price, has the highest correlation with business success.
28. Whenever we are faced with a serious business decision, the answer almost always is to increase quality.
29. We are a privately owned company, and we have no desire to sell the company or to sell stock to outside investors, and we don’t want to be financially leveraged. In addition, we have no desire to expand Patagonia beyond the specialty outdoor market.
30. We never wanted to be a big company. We want to be the best company, and it’s easier to try to be the best small company than the best big company.
31. Systems in nature appear to us to be chaotic but in reality are very structured, just not in a top-down centralized way.
32. Leaders take risks, have long-term vision, create the strategic plans, and instigate change.
33. The best leadership is by example.
34. They understand that my so-called MBA (management by absence) style of management is as much a sign of my trust in them as my desire to be out of the office.
35. The lesson to be learned is that evolution (change) doesn’t happen without stress, and it can happen quickly.
36. Climbing mountains is another process that serves as an example for both business and life. Many people don’t understand that how you climb a mountain is more important than reaching the top. You can solo climb Everest without using oxygen, or you can pay guides and Sherpas to carry your loads, put ladders across crevasses, lay in six thousand feet of fixed ropes, and have one Sherpa pulling and one pushing you. You just dial in “10,000 Feet” on your oxygen bottle, and up you go. Typical high-powered, rich plastic surgeons and CEOs who attempt to climb Everest this way are so fixated on the target, the summit, that they compromise on the process. The goal of climbing big, dangerous mountains should be to attain some sort of spiritual and personal growth, but this won’t happen if you compromise away the entire process.
37. I believe the way toward mastery of any endeavor is to work toward simplicity; replace complex technology with knowledge. The more you know, the less you need.
38. From my feeble attempts at simplifying my own life I’ve learned enough to know that should we have to, or choose to, live more simply, it won’t be an impoverished life but one richer in all the ways that really matter.