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Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman
by: Yvon Chouinard

Used Price: $4.95
Third Party New Price: $9.53

Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 658.4083
Format: Bargain Price
Label: Penguin Press HC, The
Manufacturer: Penguin Press HC, The
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 272
Publication Date: October 06, 2005
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
Sales Rank: 336344
Studio: Penguin Press HC, The

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Book Description:
The memoir/manifesto of legendary climber, businessman, and environmentalist Yvon Chouinard, founder and owner of one of the world's most inspiring companies, Patagonia, Inc.

Abridged CDs - 5 CDs, 6 hours

Amazon.com:
Like the carefully engineered dies which created his company's first products--steel pitons and carabiners which climbing enthusiasts would recognize as primitive forerunners of today's sleeker gear--Yvon Chouinard is if nothing else an original. How many other 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 other heads of multi-million dollar enterprises open their memoirs by stating bluntly, 'The Lee Iacoccas, Donald Trumps, and Jack Welches of the business world are heroes to no one except other 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 love of the outdoors. He recounts a mostly happy childhood spent in a still-unspoiled southern California, climbing, diving, fishing, and surfing. The narrative soon moves into Chouinard's early entrepreneurial efforts, which were less focused on market-share domination than on earning a basic living to finance his own sporting habits. As his company's first catalog noted, delivery 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 story 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 hiccup in its adolescence. This make-or-break juncture of a business's development often contains the most interesting 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 ahead. From this crisis emerged Patagonia's first-ever layoffs, affecting a hefty 20% of the workforce, and a serious re-examination of the business's core principles and methods.

The historical 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 working details, as can those who support or want to build businesses with self-consciously cultivated soulfulness. Readers who enjoyed Gary Erickson's story about Clif Bar, for example, should definitely find this a welcome addition to their bookshelves. --Peter Han

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- The Ultimate Company to work for
Yvon Chouinard began his foray into business as a way to create a product for himself and his climbing colleagues. His desire to life an unconventional lifestyle, along with his mother's philanthropic influence, led him to create what Patagonia is today: a socially responsible business that makes high quality products while tending to the environment and its employees. Chouinard believes in his people and they in turn trust him.

Author, "Trust is Everything: Become the leader others will follow"

Rating:

- best business book in years
this is the best business book i've read in a long time, hands down. and, that's a bit strange, in many ways. because it's not a pure business book -- let's call it a business memoir. chuoinard tells his own life story, including a detailed telling of the creation of chouinard equipment, and then patagonia. he's sometimes-arrogant, he often unfairly generalizes, he occasionally overstates his case. he's overly proud of this "i did it my way" path.

but... it works. and there are nuggets in here that are so wonderfullly different than what one would read in other business books. in a sense, this is a "life book" -- it's about leading a company who is voraciosly and unflinchingly committed to its mission and values, even when those are contrary to profit. it's about a company or an organization being about something other, something more, than revenue and profit. and, really, it's about being the kind of ... Read More

Rating:

- Why can't we all......
I found the book to be very enjoyable and definitely thought provoking. Even though I don't run a company, it got me thinking about ways I could have a similar affect on our world in my own job and personal life. If the book did that alone, I would consider it a success.

Rating:

- Decent case study diminished by pontification
The tone of arrogance and condescension really diminish what would otherwise be a good autobiographical case study of growing a hobby/skill into a successful brand. Critical self assessment is sometimes subordinated to over emotive passages and screeds about Chouinard's take social and economic trends. Some of the more interesting aspects of forming company goals and culture were lost amid a general tone of contempt for what Chouinard considers `the business world'. The good stuff is there, you just have to get past the maverick chest thumping and "I am a reluctant businessman and I run my business better without old and tired business practices and paradigms. . . like profit".

Two things were rather galling. First, the first sentence "No young kid growing up ever dreams of becoming a businessman." Well, sorry, a lot of kids actually do, they dream of following a parent or relation in a particular line ... Read More

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