Yvon Chouinard Quotes

I never wanted to be a businessman; I was a craftsman and good at working with my hands. At some point, I decided that this company is my best resource. Patagonia now exists to put into practice all the things that smart people are saying we have to do not only to save the planet but to save the economy.

Fifteen years ago, if you said business will help save the environment people would have laughed at you. Today, I believe that is a serious proposition.

Commercial organisations that operate responsibly have benefitted by increased revenues of 682% compared to 166% for those that don't

I took a dozen of our top managers to Argentina, to the windswept mountains of the real Patagonia, for a walkabout. In the course of roaming around those wild lands, we asked ourselves why we were in business and what kind of business we wanted Patagonia to be. A billion-dollar company? Okay, but not if it meant we had to make products we couldn't be proud of. And we discussed what we could do to help stem the environmental harm we caused as a company. We talked about the values we had in common, and the shared culture that had brought everyone to Patagonia, Inc., and not another company.

We believe responsible business can be profitable business

I believe our philosophy of conscious capitalism will eventually be widely adopted primarily because it is a better way to do business, and it creates more total value in the world for all of its stakeholders.

I am still looking for the modern equivalent of those Quakers who ran successful businesses, made money because they offered honest products and treated their people decently... This business creed, sadly, seems long forgotten.

I pretty much believe, as everyone in the B Team does, that business must succeed beyond the bottom line. More important than profits is how you get to them. Measuring financial earnings and losses only is definitely not enough and has led us astray from creating a better world for all.

I think I was the first executive to ever speak at a Greenpeace business conference, in London in 2001. That didn't play well here at Ford, but I thought it was an important signal to send internally, that these were the kind of issues we needed to be grappling with.

So much business is based on the belief that we should do whatever we can within legal limits to make as much money as we can. Ben & Jerry's was based on values, and we try to operate a business that not just sells ice cream but partners with all our stakeholders - whether that's suppliers or customers - to bring about a more sustainable world.

Can you imagine what a different world we will live in when businesses do what's right for the communities and the environment in everything they do?

I think CSR, corporate social responsibility, is something that is becoming front and center.

The business of business should not be about money. It should be about responsibility. It should be about public good, not private greed

American business needs a lifting purpose greater than the struggle of materialism.

I have always believed that business should be a force for good.

Doing business and doing good are not mutually exclusive, and it is our responsibility to prove this every day anew.

It's not just about checking the box on corporate social responsibility. It's about hitting our bottom line.

At Patagonia, making a profit is not the goal because the Zen master would say profits happen 'when you do everything else right'.

We're starting with our own carbon footprint. Not nothing. But much of what we're doing is already, or soon will be, little more than the standard way of doing business. We can do something that's unique, different from just any other company. We can set an example, and we can reach our audiences. Our audience's carbon footprint is 10,000 times bigger than ours... That's the carbon footprint we want to conquer.

What we are trying to do is to create a new business paradigm, simply showing that business can have a human face and a social conscience.

Someone needs to explain to me why wanting clean drinking water makes you an activist, and why proposing to destroy water with chemical warfare doesnt make a corporation a terrorist.

There will be no good business unless the majority comes to agree that we should demand more from business than large quarterly returns.

I don't want our success to be measured only by financial yardsticks, or by our distribution or number of shops. What I want to be celebrated for - and it's going to be tough in a business environment - is how good we are to our employees and how we benefit our community. It's a different bottom line.

Every business tries to turn this year's success into next year's greater success. It's hard for me to see why Microsoft is sinful to do this. If it's a sin, then I hope all of Berkshire Hathaway's subsidiaries are sinners. Someone whose salary is paid by U.S.taxpayers is happy to dramatically weaken the one place where we're winning big?!

The success of the Starbucks has been based on this balance between profitability and a social conscience. Everywhere we're doing business, were trying to manage the business through the lens of humanity.