Mindful Work by David Gelles

Author:David Gelles
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

7

Socially Responsible

ONE THRILLINGLY SUNNY DAY, I traveled down Highway 1, the Pacific Ocean shimmering on my right, to the headquarters of outdoor apparel maker Patagonia, just north of Los Angeles. While corporations like General Mills are teaching meditation in the office, and some, like Facebook, are weaving compassion into their products, I wanted to visit some of the executives who are committed to using their organizations as vehicles to put mindfulness into action.

Founded in the 1960s by a French mountain climber named Yvon Chouinard, Patagonia originally made pitons—the spikes climbers drive into the rock face to secure their lines—and other climbing gear for the pioneers navigating the steep rock faces of Yosemite’s Half Dome and El Capitan. Chouinard, however, was more than just another hippie living out of his van. The elfin Frenchman had a deep spiritual connection to the land and developed a quiet Zen practice that has informed his business choices for the last fifty years. His breakthrough came when, while climbing, he saw that the pitons were fracturing the rock and making it unstable. Chouinard developed a new class of pitons that didn’t harm the rock, and Patagonia was born.

For Chouinard, mindfulness has found its truest personal expression in physical activity. Besides climbing, he spends his time fly-fishing, white-water kayaking, and hiking trails around the globe. “I’ve learned a lot of lessons from doing these sports,” Chouinard told me when I visited the company. Though he is now chairman, having handed over CEO duties to a succession of execs, Chouinard is still a regular presence on campus, overseeing new product development and steering the company’s direction when he is not wading through a stream in search of rainbow trout. As we sat in an office overlooking an organic garden and the solar panels on adjacent buildings, Chouinard told me how he employs a sort of mindful intuition to excel in water sports, even at his advanced age. An accomplished kayaker, he learned early on how to roll his boat without a paddle. For him, that was easy enough. So one day, he decided to navigate an entire stretch of rapids on Wyoming’s Upper Gros Ventre without a paddle. The water was raging, the rapids were solid Class 4 all the way down, and the water fell one hundred feet each mile. Immersed in the moment, Chouinard made it down unscathed and without rolling over.

“What did that teach me?” he said. “Well, first of all, I had to do everything right. I could turn the boat, but I had to put it on its side and carve it. When a rock was coming up, with a paddle you can just go around it at the last minute. When you don’t have a paddle, you have to look way ahead and prepare. And when I went over a drop, I couldn’t sit back, I had to go into the drop. I never went over, and I had a perfect run. Perfect. I didn’t go from there to never using a paddle, but then that’s when I really learned to kayak.

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