The Future of the Responsible Company
What We've Learned from Patagonia's First 50 Years
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5.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Simple but powerful advice on how and why to rethink your business structure in a time when traditional capitalism is no longer working for people or the planet.
Vincent Stanley, Patagonia's Director of Philosophy, with Yvon Chouinard, founder and former owner of Patagonia, draws on 50 years' experience at Patagonia to challenge all business owners and leaders to rethink their businesses in a time of cultural and climate chaos.
Patagonia over and over throughout the years has been recognized as much for its ground-breaking environmental, social practices as for the quality of its clothes. And then, in an unprecedented action, in 2022, the Chouinard family gave their company away, converting ownership to a simple structure of trusts and non-profits, so that all the profits from the company can be used to protect our home planet and work to reverse climate chaos. In this exceptionally frank account, Stanley with Chouinard recounts how the company and its culture gained the confidence, by step and misstep, to make its work progressively more responsible, and to ultimately challenge other companies, as big as Wal-Mart and as small as the corner bakery, to do the same.
In plain, compelling prose, the authors describe the current impact of manufacturing, commerce, and traditional capitalism on the planet’s natural systems and human communities, and how that impact is forcing business to change its ways. The Future of the Responsible Company shows companies how to reduce the harm they cause, improve the quality of their business, and provide the kind of meaningful work everyone seeks. It concludes with specific, practical steps every business can undertake, as well as advice on what to do, in what order.
This is the first book to show companies how to thread their way through economic sea change and slow the drift toward ecological bankruptcy. Its advice is simple but powerful: reduce your environmental footprint (and its skyrocketing cost), make legitimate products that last, reclaim deep knowledge of your business and its supply chain to make the most of opportunities in the years to come, and earn the trust you’ll need by treating your workers, customers, and communities with respect. It also describes the threats of traditional capitalism and why the owners of Patagonia chose to hack the system to ensure that the company will still exist and have impact in 100 years. An explanation of Patagonia's revolutionary new business organization, The Patagonia Purpose Trust and The Holdfast Collective, rounds out this captivating business book.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Patagonia founder Chouinard and executive Stanley follow up 2012's The Responsible Company, which chronicled Patagonia's first 40 years, with a tepid, self-serving update disguised as a business program. They purport to provide advice on how to run an environmentally responsible company, but the presentation is little more than a glossy sales pitch for Patagonia, tracing its early days as an offshoot of Chouinard Equipment for Alpinists, a mountain-climbing gear company; lamenting Patagonia's occasional missteps, such as the 1991 discovery that their cotton suppliers used insecticides that likely leeched into the ecosystems around the cotton fields; and highlighting its recent philanthropic activities, which include the 2022 decision to donate all of the company's stock to a trust and a charitable organization. The scant guidance offered is heavy on bromides ("Doing the right thing usually gives people courage to do more of the right thing"), and an appendix enumerating how CEOs can make their businesses more environmentally and socially responsible includes a few useful suggestions ("Supplement air-conditioning systems with evaporative coolers on condensers") alongside no-brainers ("Pay a living wage"). This will leave readers cold. Photos.
