Yvon Chouinard Quotes

I want it to be able to hold up in 30 years' time. So, I'm really thinking about everything.

Growth isn't central at all, because I'm trying to run this company as if it's going to be here a hundred years from now. And if you take where we are today and add 15% growth, like public companies need to have for their stock to stay up in value, I'd be a multi-trillion-dollar company in 40 years. Which is impossible, of course.

I live for the moment. I'm basically a Buddhist-type person. I'm just here right now, and I don't think about what's going to happen a hundred years from now. I try to concentrate on what's going on right now. But I'm really trying to run this company like it is going to be here a hundred years from now. That's what's important.

Business, more than any other occupation, is a continual dealing with the future; it is a continual calculation, an instinctive exercise in foresight.

One test of leaders is how they make sure that their ideas and programs will live on after they’re gone.

We're so used to thinking in the short term, and the minute you speak in more long-term language then you tend to get dismissed as utopian and so on. We have a real problem here in making long-term thinking respectable

You have to build businesses for longer term.

If you want to sustain excellence over a long time, you'd better come up with a system that works well. Anyone can sprint for a little while, but you can't sprint for forty years.

Ten years is a pretty good run for anything.

I look at every business and ask, How long can this last? How can I identify the status quo and change it?

But I think it's important that things endure.

My fastest time in high school was a 4:29 mile. I think cross-country has something to do with my longevity in my business. When you're in an eight-mile race, you never give up.

You just can't get too focused on worrying about what's going to happen in the next quarter. You have to worry about where the business is headed long-term.

My goal is to get another 30 years out of this business. So I need to figure out the fuel to do that. And so far, I think it's respect and quality and company, not celebrity or box office or stardom. It's not a sprinter's approach. It's more like a long-distance thing. You can stick around a lot longer if you kind of slow-play it.

Neither man nor nation can prosper unless, in dealing with the present, thought is steadily taken for the future.

Governments, however, must think not only of the present, but of the rights of future generations.

My job is to make sure that 10 and 15 years from now, people aren't going to say, 'Oh, do you remember Merck?'

The stuff that's good is the stuff that lives on.

The basic ability to not wipe oneself out, to endure, to use your technological interaction with the world in such a way that has the possibility of the likelihood of lasting and not being temporary - that seems like a pretty good definition of intelligence.

It is important that global business leaders understand that they need to think beyond their quarterly balance sheets and see what it is that they are creating.

I would like the Hunter Foundation to outlive everything.

An entrepreneur never thinks of quarter-on-quarter; he thinks for 25 years, 50 years.

I used to hope the things I did would work; now I hope they last.

I think you have to be when you own your own business. I'm looking at the new No Limit as being a legacy. It's incredible that we've been able to build this up and survive over ten years and we are doing the right thing by maintaining.

You read a book from beginning to end. You run a business the opposite way. You start with the end, and then you do everything you must to reach it.