Yvon Chouinard - A CEO Worth Respecting
This Fortune cover story is incredible. Fortune always has interesting CEO profiles, but why would anyone give a damn about those other guys after reading this? I will be ordering his book soon.
Despite his anti-business quotes he acts like a salty capitalist. His firm, Patagonia, was one of the first companies in America to provide, "onsite day care, both maternity and paternity leave, and flextime". Some of my favorite quotes:
To Chouinard, the average suit ranks somewhere between alcoholic and criminal on the respect scale, and American business, when powered by the endless consumption and discarding of stuff, is unimaginative at best and evil at worst...
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I wanted to distance myself as far as possible from those pasty-faced corpses in suits I saw in airline magazine ads...
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If you're not pissing off 50 percent of the people, you're not trying hard enough...
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When the surf was up or the powder wafted down, employees would be where they ought to be: outside. If an employee's child was sick, the parent would also be where he ought to be: at home. They would keep Patagonia privately held and say no to anything that compromised their values.
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Everybody tells me it's an undervalued company," he says, "that we could grow this business like crazy and then go public, make a killing." He shakes his head. "But that would be the end of everything I've wanted to do. It would destroy everything that I believe in."
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I don't want a Wall Street greaseball running my company.
1 Comments:
After reading the Fortune article that you linked, some thoughts come to mind:
* Patagonia sounds like a great place to work.
* Yvon Chouinard got really, really lucky. For every person that is successful by "focus[ing] on doing things right, and the profits [will] come", there are at least a hundred who focus on doing things "right", as they would like to see things done, and fail miserably.
* It's darkly humorous, as well as egotistical, that Yvon Chouinard thinks that "it's probably too late" for advanced civilizations, maybe for all of humanity, and that "there's a race between running out of water, topsoil, or petroleum."
He made his mark by being innovative and problem-solving, but he doesn't think that those who come after him will be capable of facing the future's challenges in the same mannner ?
Give me a break.
Also, the Twentieth century was the first time in human history that humanity wasn't threatened with running out of food or fuel, and certainly the first time that almost everyone in advanced nations had reliably clean water.
Given that we've survived up until now, I don't think that it's much of a stretch to guess that it won't be a lack of food, water, or oil that does us in.
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