Remember: If You Take Bivouac Equipment Along,

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.

...there's No Such Thing As Sustainability. There Are Just Levels Of It. It's A Process, Not A Real Goal. All You Can Do Is Work Toward It. There's No Such Thing As Any Sustainable Economy. The Only Thing I Know That's Even Close To Sustainable Economic Activity Would Be Organic Farming On A Very Small Scale Or Hunting And Gathering On A Very Small Scale. And Manufacturing, You End Up With Way More Waste Than You End Up With Finished Product. It's Totally Unsustainable. It's Just The Way It Is.

The Rules Of The Game Must Be Constantly Updated To Keep Up With The Expanding Technology. Otherwise We Overkill The Classic Climbs And Delude Ourselves Into Thinking We Are Better Climbers Than The Pioneers.

Hire Extremely Independent, Intelligent, And Passionate People, Not Necessarily "experts." Maybe Three Or Four Of My Employees Have Mbas, And Those Guys Aren't Necessarily At The Top Of The Food Chain.

Surfing And Climbing Are Both Useless Sports. You Get To Be Conquistadors Of The Useless. You Climb To The Summit And There Is Nothing There. And You Could Hike To The Top From Another Direction. How You Get There Is The Important Part. It's The Same With Surfing.