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You are here: Home / Archives for philanthropy

Patagonia’s Rock Climber

February 19, 2023 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Some food for thought (if you find that you’re hungry for it today) from Yvon Chouinard.
 
(He pronounces his name yuh-vaan shwee-naard if you’re wondering.)
 
Throughout, I’ll just call him Yvon, because he seems to invite that kind of familiarity with his plain-speaking forth-rightness. 
 
I’m going to be excerpting some quotes from a recent interview for you to chew on, while adding a few of the associations I made from his storytelling, although I encourage you to listen to what he has to say because you’ll know what I mean about “his plain-speaking and forthrightness” the moment you hear the sound of his voice.
 
When you see Yvon’s name you might expect French Academy, but when you hear him introducing himself it’s pure Lewiston Maine, which is where he was born from stock that likely wandered down from somewhere around Quebec. That’s why, maybe confounding our expectations, he comes across as a salt-of-the-earth American.
 
So if you haven’t heard of him or recognize him from his picture, who is this guy anyway?
 
Yvon’s interview, called “Giving It All Away,” was recorded just before Thanksgiving and I heard it just before I edited and sent out last Sunday’s post. The interview title speaks to the fact that he gave away the entirety of his billion-dollar company earlier this year in an unprecedented act of philanthropy. But perhaps even better, Yvon has been “giving it all away” for most of his life, spending himself in ways that I can only imagine.
 
So I guess if there’s nutrition to be found in his words, it comes from the arc of his remarkably fertile life and thinking about how we’ve lived and continue to live while he tells us about who he is and what he’s been doing.
 
Yvon Chouinard is the founder of outdoor clothing and sporting goods company Patagonia. In many people’s minds, the company is almost synonymous with sustainable manufacturing practices and products, protecting wild places (most notably in Patagonia itself, which comprises the southernmost tip of Argentina and Chile), and creating a kind of “hive mind” brand of enlightenment in the company’s workspaces. 
 
Moreover, while striving “to do good,” Patagonia has also consistently ticked off that other big box when it comes to American success stories, namely profitability. Yvon’s company (until recently, solely owned by him, his wife and two kids) will bring in an estimated $1.5 billion in revenues in 2022.
 
So what does he have to say for himself?

Some outdoorsmen and women that Patagonia corralled into wearing clothing from its “shell” line of sportswear in a recent mail-order catalog.  On top of everything else, it’s about looking good and having fun while pushing one’s mental and physical limits.

The interview begins with Yvon’s “changed my life” story. This 81-year-old tells us that he was a “serial climber” early-on, which his poor parents interpreted as something that was pretty grounded until they were watching a local news program in California, where they lived at the time, and the news clip shows (in his words): 

a helicopter coming by the North American wall of El Capitan [in Yosemite National Park]. And then it zooms in on these guys hanging from hammocks underneath this big overhang 2000 feet up. And one of ’em is their son. They always thought when I said I was going climbing that I was [just] going hiking.

So boy were they surprised, but he’d already been “a serial climber” for years (which shows, among other things, how little parents know about what their kids are doing) explaining: “I’d spent two years just climbing cracks. I’d spent five years just climbing big walls, like in Yosemite. I’d spent years and years learning ice climbing.” And eventually all that verticality and danger took him to the Himalayas, to a fateful climb that ended in an avalanche, to him somehow surviving while others in his company did not, and to how he felt about the bookends of his existence from that point forward. 

[I]t kind of changed my life. I’ve had a lot of close calls, near death experiences, but always afterwards you go around sniffing the flowers and being really happy to be alive and everything…but after that climb, all of us were deeply depressed for several months afterwards, and I’ve read stories about people that have kind of died and come back and you resist coming back. And in fact, it’s taught me that there’s nothing to fear about death itself. It’s a pretty pleasant feeling [when you find yourself face to face with it].

I heard it as a kind of relief, a comfort, once you glimpse that just as much as living, an ending “without fear “also belongs to you. 
 
For the sake of his parents and his own growing family, Yvon cut back on extreme climbs after that, but the experience allowed him to settle into his life in a whole different way. “[Y]ou know, when my time comes, I’m gonna go out pretty peacefully.”

At first, I wondered how he could be so sure about that.
 
I’d already been reading a new book by Susan Cain, who is most famous for her TED talk and a previous book about introverts. She calls this new one “Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole.” It reminded me of the lengths our culture goes to minimize or hide sorrow, suffering and death even though all of them are universal experiences. So I could understand that when he was taken to a cliff edge by an avalanche at the top of the world, Yvon came to a kind of acceptance that his end was now as much a part of his journey as his moving-on from there, that there was a kind of peace that was waiting for him beyond the physical experience, and that there was a tremendous sense of relief in that deep-seated knowledge.
 
At this point in the interview, I wondered where I’d found that kind of confidence in the limits of my playing field.

I also marveled at how Yvon described finding his career path. It’s been a preoccupation of mine in several posts (for example, Why We Gravitate Towards the Work That We Do) as well as a theme in my book writing.

I never wanted to be a businessman. I was a craftsman and I was a climber. And I just, every time I’d go into the mountains, I’d have ideas on how to make the gear better. The gear was pretty crude in those days. It was all made in Europe. So I just got myself a forge and an anvil and a book on blacksmithing, and I taught myself how to blacksmith. And that led to making these pitons and eventually ice axes. And crampons and all the gear for mountain climbing and never did it thinking that it was a business. It was at first it was just making the stuff for myself and friends and then friends of friends. And pretty soon I’m making two of these pitons an hour and selling ’em for a dollar and a half each. Well, not too, not too profitable, right? I kind of backdoored becoming a businessman.

I’m sure this sounds more home-spun than it actually was, but meeting his own needs and the needs of his outdoorsy friends was clearly the initial spark. It prompted me to replay my own journey from Perry Mason to courtroom, grade-school Show & Tells to writing in public. (For all of these reasons, if you have a few moments to spare after you finish here, I’d love to hear about the sparks that brought you to the work that you ended up doing too.)
 
When Patagonia (the company) got to the deliberation phase of its business, it had already begun to lose its way. Demand was growing faster than the company’s capacity to meet it, so Yvon had an extended conversation with his key collaborators about what was most important to them in moving the company to the next level. Those priorities grounded a kind of business philosophy that became Yvon’s 2005 memoir, “Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman.”

I mean the name of my book is ‘Let My People Go Surfing’ cuz we have a policy. If your child is sick, go home, take care of ’em, uh, no matter what. I don’t care when you work, as long as the job gets done and if the surf comes up, drop everything, go surfing. None of us liked authority. We really disliked authority and none of us wanted to tell other people what to do. So our management system is kind of like an ant colony. You know, an ant colony doesn’t have any bosses. The queen just lays there and lays eggs. There’s no boss in an ant colony but every single ant knows what his job is and gets it done. And they communicate by touching feelers, and that’s about it.

I’d call what he describes here the hive-mind of an enterprise. Unfortunately, I’ve only experienced it once, and never in “the regular course” of any business that I’ve been involved with. The notable exception was a school. 
 
Several years ago I was a teacher in a school for autistic kids, some with significant challenges and all with unbelievable amounts of energy. Only in the inspired chaos of this place, with a teacher-to-kid ratio that approached 1-to-1, did I experience anything like Yvon’s collective working spirit, manifested in the “touching feelers” of my co-workers.  
 
The immediacy and aliveness of every working minute at Benhaven School in New Haven reminded me (years later) of how Rebecca Solnit’s described lower Manhattan’s citizen rescuers coming together after 9/11 and NOLA’s citzen rescuers after Hurricane Katrina, exploits that she chronicles in “Paradise Built in Hell: the Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster.” As I conjured hive-minds like these, and apparently at Patagonia too, I couldn’t help thinking about all of the other places where I’ve worked over the years and how far they’d fallen short of the workers-paradise (at least to me) that Yvon and some remarkable others have helped to create. 
 
Sustainability is another ground-breaking concept for him. It’s about how you make something, but also (his company believes) what you do as a business once one of your products begin to wear out or your customers just get tired of having them around any longer. 
 
For instance, you show your customers how to repair the zipper on, say, your “Reversible Shelled Microdini jacket” or replace the buttons when they‘ve fallen off your “Organic Cotton Mid-Weight Fjord Flannel Shirt.” And when a Patagonia product’s useful life has ended for you, Patagonia even takes it back to try and refurbish it so somebody else can get a second life out of it too, or recycle it into something else if that’s not possible. Because if you pay a lot for quality from a company like this—instead of for one- or two-season throw-away clothes—shouldn’t that item have serial lives too? 
 
Here’s Yvon again, about the lifecycles that Patagonia is enabling for its products: 

[Some years ago] we did an ad in the New York Times on Black Friday that said, Don’t buy this jacket, and there’s this photo of this jacket and it said, Don’t buy this jacket without thinking twice. Do you really need it? Are you just bored? Uh, and if so, you know, don’t…[So] If they [our customers], if they made a commitment to think twice about purchasing, we were gonna back it up with our own commitment, which was guaranteeing that jacket for life, repairing it when it needed repair. Helping people find another owner for that jacket. And finally, when it’s absolutely shredded and can’t be used at all, we’ll recycle it into more clothing. And so to do that, we had to build the largest garment repair facility in North America. And we have a van going around to colleges and stuff, showing people how to repair clothes and repairing people’s clothing. We produced a bunch of videos on how to sew a button on so people can repair their own stuff. Cause that’s the best thing you can do is to buy the very best thing you can and try to keep it going as long as possible. And so we’re helping people do that.

When I heard him tell this story I was sorry that I’d recently given my first Patagonia, a full-length rain and wind jacket in a beautiful kind of orange (it had been a really big purchase for me at the time) to a church clothing drive instead of returning it to the company for renewal and transition. Because a circular economy like this is a kind of mind-set, a discipline that can be applied to almost everything if it becomes more engrained in our lives “as consumers”–but I’d never even considered what he’s offering here.
 
Yvon talks about many other things in this interview (and in his other interviews and writings and speeches over the years) and you might find it edifying to dive into more of his wit & wisdom as a result. But I want to leave you with one of my favorites from last Sunday’s gabfest, where he somehow manages to combine his first career with his current one—which involves lots of interactions with companies that see things differently and governments that almost always do. 
 
How do you convince these people to change the unsustainable and unhealthy ways that they’re doing things when you’re a powerful company like Patagonia or a powerful individual like its founder? 

I’ll tell you a little story about mountain guiding. There’s two types of mountain guiding. One is democratic where you, you’re guiding somebody up the Grand Teton, which is a pretty safe mountain. And the client starts freaking out. So you pull out your harmonica and you play your harmonica a little bit. You calm ’em down and you kind of, you know, take your time and, and you get up it, a very effective way to guide on a non-difficult mountain. Let’s say you’re guiding on the Matterhorn and you know, you’re 60 years old, and the guide and you got a family. And you know, you remember the client is always out to kill you. A mountain like that, it’s rotten rock. It’s thunderstorms every afternoon. And the client freaks out. The guide screams at him, pounds on ’em, calls them names, tugs the rope and gets ’em to the top. So what happens is the client is more afraid of the guide than the mountain. And that’s basically how we have to treat our government [and many of our corporations].

I don’t know about you, but I’m a sucker for truth-telling when it’s wrapped up in a musical story like this. 
 
So I hope you’ve enjoyed reading some of his words, that you’ll have a chance to listen to Yvon Chouinard saying them too (because the atmospherics he weaves around them simply can’t be duplicated on the page), and that he’s given you some food for thought to take into the days ahead.

Yvon Chouinard is 81 today, which puts him in his mid-70s when this picture was taken in March 2016, “on a classic local route somewhere out West during a new hire orientation.”

Thanks for reading. Have good week. Signing off today as day-vid gr-icing (since I’m told that some people also find my name unpronounceable). 


This post was adapted from my December 4, 2022 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any of them) by leaving your email address in the column to the right

Filed Under: *All Posts, Being Part of Something Bigger than Yourself, Being Proud of Your Work, Building Your Values into Your Work, Continuous Learning, Entrepreneurship, Heroes & Other Role Models Tagged With: an ending without fear, good work, Let My People Go Surfing, Patagonia, philanthropy, product life cycle, storytelling, Susan Cain Bittersweet, work commitments, Yvon Chouinard

When Is Generosity Something Else Again?

February 24, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

The Sacklers are best known as patrons of the arts, including the Sackler Wing of the Metropolitan Museum in New York with its Temple of Dendur, and the Sackler Gallery, the national museum of Asian art at the Smithsonian. Over the years, the family’s generosity has been noteworthy in areas like education and medicine as well.

More recently, the family has become almost as well known as the principle shareholders of Purdue Pharma LP, the manufacturer of OxyContin. Their business endeavors have made them the subject of multiple legal actions claiming that the company’s aggressive marketing has helped to produce the nation’s opioid epidemic. Purdue Pharma has helped the family to build the fortune it’s been using in its philanthropy. In 2016, Forbes estimated the family’s wealth at $13 billion. Since it was introduced to the pubic in 1995, OxyContin has reportedly generated more than $35 billion in revenues for the company.

A spokesman for the Sachler family responded to the OxyContin-dirty money allegations that were made in a Massachusetts lawsuit as follows:

For more than half a century, several generations of Sacklers have supported respected institutions that play crucial roles in health, research, education, the arts and the humanities.  It has s been a privilege to support the vital work of these organizations and we remain dedicated to doing so.  While plaintiffs’ court filings have created an erroneous picture and resulted in unwarranted criticism, we remain committed to playing a substantive role in addressing this complex public health crisis. Our hearts go out to those affected by drug abuse or addiction.

In their statement, the family places the allegations of predatory business behavior in the context of their longstanding generosity—asking us to give them the benefit of the doubt given all the good they have done. An article in Esquire at the time was far less forgiving:

the family’s leaders have pulled off three of the great marketing triumphs of the modern era: The first is selling Oxycontin; the second is promoting the Sackler name; and the third is ensuring that, as far as the public is aware, the first and second have nothing to do with one another.

Given the high emotions around the “deaths of despair” that are associated with opioid addiction–and the overuse of OxyContin in particular–it is easy to join activists and many in the press who have condemned the Sacklers before they’ve had their day in court. After all, no one forced doctors to prescribe these painkillers or anyone down the line to take them. But this story does raise some broader questions, including: 
 
– How often is philanthropy (and the moral afterglow of generosity) a cover for wealth that wasn’t earned in nearly as moral a way?
 
– What might the givers and the receivers in this situation have done differently?
 
– Since “generosity born of success” always seems to come with the suspicion that you’re “dressing-up the road that got you here,” how can gifts like the Sacklers ever hope to match their best intentions?
 
– And beyond philanthropy, what responsibilities should all receivers and givers—including you and me—have in supposedly “generous exchanges”?

1.         The Toxic Givers

The Sackler Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Temple of Denhur

Nothing about these questions is easy.

For example, some members of the Sackler family have no financial interest in Perdue Pharma, the opioid manufacturer, although it has been argued that marketing strategies pioneered by the family patriarch utlimately drove OxyContin’s success. Some of the Perdue profits that did go to Sacklers were attributable to other products or were produced before the opioid painkiller entered the market. Linking particular individuals to toxic profits that then went into specific gift giving is a complicated question of attribution. In fact, it is a problem for all philanthropy that may have toxic origins. How do you know that the donated Picasso was purchased with a philanthropist’s dirty money?

In the case of the Sacklers, it seems clear from an Inside Philanthropy piece last year that at least some of their OxyContin profits likely became gifts to organizations as diverse as Tufts University’s School of Biomedical Sciences, New York Presbyterian Hospital, the Central Park Conservancy, the Guggenheim and Victoria & Albert museums, and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (which the U.S. Food and Drug Administration relies upon for independent scientific advice on issues like opioid addiction). 

While the Sackler Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City was funded long before OxyContin came to market, it continues to bear the family name and has been at the epicenter of protests against the family’s toxic giving.

A Recent Protest in New York

It’s a thorny path from here for the givers as well as the receivers.

For givers like the Sacklers, a couple of avenues are clear to me at least, but neither seems to have been taken by individual family members to date. The first is new philanthropy aimed at opioid addiction treatment, a need that remains woefully underfunded nationwide. Maybe in a strange twist of public relations and legal advice, family members are waiting for a court to tell them what to do instead of making up their own minds.

The second road-not-taken is any suggestion that Purdue Pharma is curtailing its global roll-out of OxyContin. According to a 2017 New Yorker article that helped to trigger the current outrage: “the Sackler family has only increased its efforts abroad, and is now pushing the drug, through a Purdue-related company called Mundipharma, into Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.” Again, the better part of valor would suggest that the company should be reducing, instead of expanding its marketing outreach for this painkiller—even if its marketers and lawyers are advising that to do so could be construed as a kind of admission of liability.

For receivers like the supposedly independent government bodies that play a role in regulating opioids, the answer also seems clear. They should disclose how OxyContin-related donations were used by them in the past, modify standards that permitted receipt of donations by interested parties in the first place, and refuse to take any additional donations from them.

For other receivers of Purdue Pharma related largesse, the issue is complicated by two additional factors: how desperate many (most?) non-profits are to reach their fund-raising goals each year, and how nearly all significant gifts and naming rights are bound up in legal agreements.  

Even if the public or moral pressure were enough to make reluctant institutions consider returning toxic funds, in most situations the donors would need to voluntarily agree to take their money back or to removal of their names from programs or buildings. Whenever the givers demur or outright refuse, the receivers need to convince a court that they have the right to unwind the gift agreement unilaterally. In addition to the preoccupation and expense of a legal proceeding like this, the non-profit might also have to prove that the donors were personally responsible in some way for their gift’s toxicity (the attribution issue again). According to Marcus Owens, former director of the IRS’ tax exempt organization’s division:

For the institutions, it’s a real balancing act where there hasn’t been an actual conviction of a crime and it’s more that the donors have done something that is optically troubling to the recipient.

While there has been litigation involving Perdue Pharma and OxyContin, no court to date has tied its toxic marketing to any individual member of the Sackler family, despite the fact that several are in senior management or board members. 

Given all of the brouhaha, I assume that institutions that stand to gain from future Sackler donations are considering the risks of acceptance before they do so. But even here, the path regarding toxic gifts that have already been given or may be given in the future is far from clear. Some insist the amount of good that tainted money can do when invested in a school or museum offsets whether it was made in a deplorable fashion or was given by a deplorable individual. Even if you buy the argument that the ends justify the means, the 24-7 social-media environment makes every receivers’ reputation a key factor in the calculation of ultimate ends .

While the opioid crisis has thrown Sackler family philanthropy into bold relief, the moral debate today is hardly confined to individuals who are trying to launder their unclean profits by giving money to prominent institutions. 

On this page, I’ve briefly considered whether living artists (like Chuck Close who was accused of victimizing his female models) should have existing art they have given to museums taken down and new art they are creating boycotted by collectors. I’ve discussed Anand Giridharadas contention in Winners Take All: the Elite Charade of Changing the World (2018) that Silicon Valley tech companies like Facebook are using their philanthropy as a rationale for “us liking them” however much they are also causing us harm. As Giridharadas said at the time:

What I started to realize was that giving had become the wingman of taking. Generosity had become the wingman of injustice. ‘Changing the world’ had become the wingman of rigging the system…[L]ook at Andrew Carnegie’s essay ‘Wealth.’ We’re now living in a world created by the intellectual framework he laid out: extreme taking, followed by and justified by extreme giving.

It sounds a lot like what the Sacklers are being accused of today.

There is also the complicated moral dynamic between individual givers and institutional receivers when it comes to sources of information and the reporting of that information by the press. Media outlets eager to capture audiences with breaking news usually have little time to consider either the truth of the story their source has brought them or the bias and other hidden motivations that could undermine it after publication. When lapses in this kind of giving-and-receiving occur, the implications are wide-ranging because they tend to erode the press’s general reputation for truth telling. 

Consider too the prominent individuals who may have been too quick to believe the story that Jessie Smolett gave to the media about a racist and homophobic attack in Chicago—and if it turns out to be false—how the breakdown in that exchange could call into question the veracity of everyone who claims they were victimized by a hate crime going forward.

Giving nearly anything that has value to an institution today (be it a donation, a work of art, or even an interesting story) can easily become a morally fraught transaction.

2.         Giving and Taking One-on-One

I started this post with a picture of a sculpture from prehistory that conveys—to me, at least—the openness of giving. The bad news is that generosity is rarely this simple, pure or beautiful.
 
Generosity towards others is the key corrective for acting on our own behalf. Whenever we act, we try to be mindful of how that act impacts us as well as others. In autonomous exchanges, we strive to realize the best we have to offer while having the generosity to respect the same kind of striving in others.  The aim is reciprocity in how we treat ourselves and others and how we hope that others will treat us in return.
 
Of course, problems arise in life and work when any part of this exchange become unbalanced, but it seems to me that far more attention is spent on the imbalances caused by selfishness than on those that are caused by generosity.
 
Not unlike a wealthy family bearing much-needed gifts for a non-profit or a source dangling a juicy story before a ravenous press, giving can foist significant burdens on the receiver or mask a giver’s less than noble motivations. These pitfalls seems equally likely in our exchanges with one another.
 
For example, it’s easy to be ravished by someone’s seemingly spontaneous generosity, until you’ve been singed by it.  A stranger offering you a trinket when he’s looking for a hand-out makes you reluctant to take anything that’s being handed to you when you’re walking down the street. But what if they are items with real value, graciously offered, and part of you wants to accept them? This happened to me while I was traveling recently and unfamiliar with the local customs. It was only later that I discovered what was expected of me in return and could safely provide it…but not before I felt the burden of indebtedness born of generosity.
 
To return to the Sacklers for a minute, there may have been several motivations behind their gift-giving, but at least where philanthropy and random acts of kindness are concerned, such motivations become irrelevant whenever the giver gives anonymously. Unfortunately, among lovers, friends, neighbors, co-workers, bosses, employees and (when in Rome) strangers on the street, anonymity is simply impossible. 
 
In our personal relationships, we’d prefer not to focus on the ledger balances between us most of the time. Rough reciprocity in what we give to and take from one another will usually suffice. But losing sight of these balances altogether can weaken and even jeopardize those same relationships.  Overly generous givers can feel depleted and exploited by others’ needs. Givers who use their generosity to gain others’ approval can be oblivious to the burdens their giving places on receivers to reciprocate. The needs and motivations at play are as relevant when we give to one another as they are in the seemly less personal world of philanthropy. 
 
There simply aren’t many rules of thumb here, but maybe Khalil Gibran (that Siddhartha for hippies) came closest to providing one:

“Generosity is not giving me that which I need more than you do, but it is giving me that which you need more than I do.”    

This post was adapted from my February 24, 2019 newsletter.


Filed Under: *All Posts, Building Your Values into Your Work Tagged With: ethics, generosity, givers and receivers, giving and taking, motivations for giving, opioid addiction, OxyContin, philanthropy, the Sackler family, toxic generosity

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