#297 Yvon Chouinard (Patagonia)

#297 Yvon Chouinard(巴塔哥尼亚)

Founders

商务

2023-04-04

59 分钟
PDF

单集简介 ...

What I learned from rereading Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman by Yvon Chouinard.

单集文稿 ...

  • 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.

  • And 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 that I saw on airline magazine ads.

  • If I had to be a businessman, I was going to do it on my own terms.

  • 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 go do my own thing.

  • Since I had never wanted to be a businessman, I needed a few good reasons to be one.

  • One thing I did not want to change.

  • Even if we got serious, 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 and even be barefoot.

  • We all needed to have flex time to surf the waves when they were good, or to ski the powder after a big snowstorm, or to stay home and take care of a sick child.

  • Breaking the rules and making my own system work are the creative parts of management that is particularly satisfying for me.

  • The original intent for writing let my people go surfing was for it to be a philosophical manual for the employees of Patagonia.

  • We have always considered Patagonia an experiment in doing business in unconventional ways.