58 pages • 1 hour read
Yvon ChouinardLet My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key Figures
Yvon Chouinard
Yvon Chouinard is the founder of the defunct company Chouinard Equipment and the main founder of Patagonia. Let My People Go Surfing is a history and philosophy of Patagonia and of Chouinard himself. While he never shows true interest in the business side of things, preferring to work with his hands in the early days of Chouinard Equipment on product development or at Patagonia field-testing gear, he is the visionary behind the Patagonia brand.
Chouinard sees his company as an extension of himself. More than that, as this book recounts, in Patagonia he creates the world he wants to live in, the sense of belonging he lost in childhood when his family moved to Burbank. He finds a new, if lonely, home in the outdoors as a child, and the experiences he has in nature from childhood into his teens shape his naturalist outlook and interest in risk sports that later define Patagonia. He and the company grow like romantic partners, expanding each other’s thinking and reflecting conflict.
Let My People Go Surfing serves equally as an autobiography, business guide, and advertisement. Because for Chouinard the personal informs the corporate and vice versa, it’s no surprise this trifecta mirrors the signature marriage of outdoor experience, education, and product promotion that Patagonia developed in its catalog. While Chouinard’s true home remains the outdoors, Patagonia becomes an arm to protect and remediate damage in that home. He develops this mindset in the early days of Chouinard Equipment: that the company is a means both to fund his outdoor lifestyle and to protect the nature he loves by selling less destructive products and educating people on their environmental and functional superiority.
The restrained tone Chouinard uses to reveal the self-defeating nature of the mindset that profit can only come at the expense of the environment conveys his pragmatic, equanimous commitment to environmental activism. Throughout the book he acts in equal parts as the raconteur, the activist, and the spiritual guide, ending the book with his recommendation for how to live responsibly and happily.
Malinda Pennoyer Chouinard
Yvon Chouinard’s wife, Malinda Pennoyer Chouinard, doesn’t feature prominently in the book, but she nonetheless has had a significant role in shaping the company. She prefers to remain unseen (literally, too: for a long time she refused to be photographed) as an invisible force at the top of the company, next to her husband. Chouinard characterizes her as tenaciously moral: When he meets her, she rips the license plate off the car of a litterer who refuses to pick up their trash so she can report them to park rangers.
While Yvon primarily focuses on product and environmental activism, Malinda has her own project improving employee benefits. This project complements Yvon’s commitment to building a better business because his focuses sometimes blind him to employees’ basic need for family benefits, such as onsite daycare centers and paid maternity and paternity leave. Malinda researches family care and contracts the help of a highly regarded child developmental specialist to guide her in writing company policy. This diligence, coupled with her insistence on implementing the suggested benefits—paid maternity and paternity leave, onsite daycare at market price, and flexible work hours—shows a deep commitment to the well-being of Patagonia’s employees.
Under Malinda Chouinard’s directive, Patagonia became the pioneer of progressive workplace benefits that it is known as. This addition to the do-good image the company established with its environmentalism cemented its reputation as a truly different kind of company.
Kris McDivitt
In the mid-1960s, McDivitt was Chouinard’s neighbor on a surfing beach in California. She started as an assistant packer at Chouinard Equipment, and in 1979 the Chouinards appointed her general manager of Patagonia and Chouinard Equipment.
Despite having no business experience, McDivitt turns the disorganized, struggling company around, proving to be both an effective manager and an adept translator of Chouinard’s grand vision. She effects this change with an attitude radically different from Chouinard’s: She asks for help. While Chouinard believes in self-reliance and doing things oneself, McDivitt isn’t afraid to admit she doesn’t know something and ask someone to teach her, so she solicits advice from the presidents of banks. This approach works, and she successfully manages Patagonia’s business and brand for 13 years. At that point, she realizes that the company has gotten too big and complex for her skill set, so she recommends the Chouinards hire a CEO with business experience and steps down to continue managing the company’s brand. This astute self-awareness and lack of ego that she displays throughout her tenure, coupled with her diligence to create effective management, provide a much-needed counterbalance to Chouinard’s frequent absences and attitude of self-reliance.
After McDivitt retired from Patagonia in the 1990s, she and her husband, Doug Tompkins, moved to South America and established 2.2 million acres of wilderness preserve in Chile and Argentina.
Michael Kami
Though he only appears once in the book, Michael Kami has an outsize influence on Chouinard and Patagonia. Kami headed IBM’s strategic planning during its period of rapid growth in the 1950s and Xerox’s during its boom in the 1960s. The Chouinards and Patagonia’s top managers consult him on solving Patagonia’s convoluted operations. Before he addresses that issue, he interrogates the story Chouinard has been telling himself about why he doesn’t sell Patagonia. By doing so Kami prompts Chouinard to realize later that his true reason for staying business is to be a larger force for good than he and his wife could be on their own. This clarification enables Chouinard to readjust and direct the company accordingly, making it the model of environmentally conscious business it’s known as.
Kami also provides a key insight into successful production: concurrent manufacturing. This is a type of manufacturing different from assembly-line production in that it convenes the production and design teams at the beginning of the product design phase to balance what is intended for the product and what can be feasibly produced. Under this concurrent model, design and production remain in communication throughout the design and production processes to minimize problems. Kami’s model allows Patagonia to make its commitment to quality financially viable. Without his advice and his model, the company would not have become what it is today.
