Giving It All Away

If you want to understand the entrepreneur, study the juvenile delinquent.

“If you want to understand the entrepreneur, study the juvenile delinquent. The delinquent is saying with his actions, "This sucks. I'm going to do my own thing.”

- Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing

Last night, during our kid’s bathtime, I saw a news story come across my phone: Yvon Chouinard gave away his $3B company. I immediately started laughing and said “Ah, the crazy old bastard really did do it!” And then I remembered that was a word the kids aren’t supposed to know yet. Sigh.

I stumbled upon the Patagonia brand when I was in high school. Their catalogs, well designed and full of photos, captured my imagination. They began producing short films grounding the brand in adventure-filled stories. I had no understanding that it was a type of marketing attracting me — I just knew that someday I wanted to do that kind of creative stuff. I credit the Patagonia brand as an early guiding light towards my future work.

Yvon has always inspired me as a business leader. I wrote about his management style in seminary — both confused and inspired by his witty “Management By Absence” (MBA) style of leadership. He always assumed the people he hired were better at doing their work than he could ever micromanage — and he’d rather be fishing, or climbing, or surfing instead of having meetings about meetings. Somehow, embodying the ethos of the company in an authentic way and pursuing his vision for excellence accidentally built him a multi-billion dollar company. And I say him, because Yvon owned the whole thing — personally. Until this week.

“A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.” - Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing

Bob Moore, founder of Bob’s Red Mill, gave his company away to his employees on his 81st birthday. Bob went to seminary here in Oregon for a year before he fell in love with making flours. I had the honor of meeting him and hearing his story at his mill nearly a decade ago. The wisdom he shared was to keep money in your hand, but not in your heart. At the heart of both Bob and Yvon’s management style is a deep care for their people: treating them like human beings with lives to honor rather than pawns to leverage.

Putting people over profit.

The prophet Amos, writing in the 8th Century BCE, warns of taking advantage of people:

Listen to me, you who walk on helpless people,
    you who are trying to destroy the poor people of this country, saying,

“When will the New Moon festival be over
    so we can sell grain?
When will the Sabbath be over
    so we can bring out wheat to sell?
We can charge them more
    and give them less,
    and we can change the scales to cheat the people.

We will buy poor people for silver,
    and needy people for the price of a pair of sandals.
    We will even sell the wheat that was swept up from the floor.”

The Lord has sworn by his name, the Pride of Jacob, “I will never forget everything that these people did.

There is a story in the Gospel of Matthew about Jesus being tempted by the devil himself in the desert. Henri Nouwen summarizes Christ’s three temptations as something any Christian leader faces these days: the temptation to be relevant, the temptation to be spectacular, and the temptation to be powerful. For the last one, the devil takes Jesus to the top of a high mountain and shows Him all of the kingdoms of the world and delivers the line, “All of this can be yours, but first...”  Jesus, hungry and tired, rejects the offer and ultimately gives his life away. Before then, he asked the question of his followers, “What will it profit a man if he gains the entire world, but loses his own soul?”

That’s the remarkable difference between folks like Yvon and Bob and the rest of us - It’s easy for money to creep into our hearts and crowd out the good, the true, and the beautiful. The corners become easier and easier to cut. Yet, when someone does it right — and they make it through the temptation to the other side and give it all away at incredible cost to themselves personally — you can’t help but smile, shake your head, and say to yourself Ah, the crazy old bastard really did do it.