1 percent

I’d been wanting to post about Yvon Chouinard for a while, but the news item I kept looking for never appeared. Anyways, the founder of Patagonia has lead a 1 percent for the planet campaign for over 2 decades, as described in “How much difference can 1 percent make?” He donates 1% of Patagonia’s annual gross sales to environmental causes and encourages other companies to do so as well. You can find more about this pledge at http://www.onepercentfortheplanet.org
Btw — if you’re looking for a pledge for yourself, not your company, you can look at 10over100.org.

I’ve been hoping I’d run into an article about Chouinard’s new book
Let My People Go Surfing : The Education of a Reluctant Businessman, but I think I just need to get my amazon order ready. This Time article Reaching the Top by Doing the Right Thing has some funny insights and explains the title. He has a speech where he tells employees to “live in the moment, ‘as long as the work gets done,’ and if the surf is up, surf.”

Chouinard’s definitely an interesting guy. I visited the Patagonia offices for work a long time ago, and the woman working there says Chouinard would be there in the mornings for the company yoga classes wearing a t-shirt with holes and old jeans. But that’s small stuff compared to his other accomplishments, including switching Patagonia from conventionally grown cotton to organic cotton, building aluminum chockstones in the 70s, and his tendency to drink from every stream he can find.