One Thing I Did Not Want To

Remember: If You Take Bivouac Equipment Along, You Will Bivouac.

Hire Extremely Independent, Intelligent, And Passionate People, Not Necessarily "experts." Maybe Three Or Four Of My Employees Have Mbas, And Those Guys Aren't Necessarily At The Top Of The Food Chain.

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. Remember, I’m The Kid Who Couldn’t Play Competitive Games. I’d Much Rather Design And Sell Products So Good And Unique That They Have No Competition.

Who Are Businesses Really Responsible To? Their Customers? Shareholders? Employees? We Would Argue That It’s None Of The Above. Fundamentally, Businesses Are Responsible To Their Resource Base. Without A Healthy Environment There Are No Shareholders, No Employees, No Customers And No Business.

I Took A Dozen Of Our Top Managers To Argentina, To The Windswept Mountains Of The Real Patagonia, For A Walkabout. In The Course Of Roaming Around Those Wild Lands, We Asked Ourselves Why We Were In Business And What Kind Of Business We Wanted Patagonia To Be. A Billion-dollar Company? Okay, But Not If It Meant We Had To Make Products We Couldn't Be Proud Of. And We Discussed What We Could Do To Help Stem The Environmental Harm We Caused As A Company. We Talked About The Values We Had In Common, And The Shared Culture That Had Brought Everyone To Patagonia, Inc., And Not Another Company.