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Vincent Stanley, Patagonia's director of philosophy, along with Yvon Chouinard, founder and former owner of Patagonia, draw on 50 years of experience at Patagonia to challenge all business owners and leaders to rethink their businesses in a time of cultural and climate chaos.
Patagonia has been recognized as much for its ground-breaking environmental, social practices as for the quality of its clothes. In 2022, the Chouinard family gave their company away, converting ownership to a simple structure of trusts and nonprofits, so that all the profits from the company can be used to protect our home planet and work to reverse climate chaos. Stanley and Chouinard recount how the company and its culture gained confidence, especially through missteps, to make its work progressively more responsible, and to ultimately challenge other companies, as big as Wal-Mart and as small as the corner store, to do the same.
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 and in what order.
The book shows companies how to thread their way through economic sea change and slow the drift toward ecological bankruptcy: 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 made the decisions they did to ensure that the company will still exist and have impact in 100 years. An explanation of Patagonia's new business organization, The Patagonia Purpose Trust and The Holdfast Collective, rounds out this business book.
About the Authors
Vincent Stanley has been with Patagonia on and off since its beginning in 1973, for many of those years in key roles as head of sales or marketing. More informally, he is Patagonia’s longtime chief storyteller. Vincent helped develop The Footprint Chronicles (now Footprint), the company’s interactive website that outlined the social and environmental impact of its products; Worn Wear; and Patagonia Books. He currently serves as company philosopher and is a resident fellow at the Yale Center for Business and Environment. He is also a poet whose work has appeared in Best American Poetry. He and his wife, the writer Nora Gallagher, live in Santa Barbara, California, and Brooksville, Maine.
In 1973, Yvon Chouinard founded Patagonia, a purpose-driven company known for its quality clothing products and commitment to advancing solutions to the environmental crisis. The company was nearly 50 when Chouinard decided it was time for another improvement. In September 2022, Chouinard and his family made a historic announcement: They had adopted a purpose-driven ownership model, locking in the company’s values and dedicating the excess profits to protecting our home planet. Since 1957, Chouinard and his family have lived in California and Wyoming.
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