Personally, I Would Rather Climb In The

I Purposely Try To Hire People Who Are Really Self-motivated And Good At What They Do, And Then I Just Leave Them Alone.

There's No Difference Between A Pessimist Who Says, "oh It's Hopeless, So Don't Bother Doing Anything." And An Optimist Who Says, "don't Bother Doing Anything, It's Going To Turn Out Fine Anyways. Either Way, Nothing Happens."

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.

Doing Risk Sports Had Taught Me Another Important Lesson: Never Exceed Your Limits. You Push The Envelope And You Live For Those Moments When You’re Right On The Edge, But You Don’t Go Over. You Have To Be True To Yourself; You Have To Know Your Strengths And Limitations And Live Within Your Means. The Same Is True For A Business. The Sooner A Company Tries To Be What It Is Not, The Sooner It Tries To ‘have It All,’ The Sooner It Will Die.