Chouinard taught himself blacksmithing to make better pitons, sold them out of the trunk of his car in Yosemite, and then discovered his pitons were wrecking the cracks, so he stopped making the thing his company was built on and switched to chocks. That decision is the whole book in miniature. The rest is how Patagonia runs: The philosophies for product, production, distribution, and management, why they went to organic cotton after seeing what a conventional cotton field smells like, why the flex-time policy that gives the book its title exists, and why growth for its own sake is treated as a failure state.
Let My People Go Surfing