We live in a world propelled by shareholder capitalism. Not to be too dramatic about it, but it’s a system that is directly in opposition to our chances of survival on this planet. The question of how we continue navigating through the for-profit system we live in, while also doing genuine good, or at the very least, some damage limitation, is one of the trickiest conundrums of our times.
One man’s answer to this question was a radical reinvention of his business succession model. In 2022, Yvon Chouinard, founder of outdoor gear company Patagonia, donated all his shares, splitting ownership between two entities: the Patagonia Purpose Trust, which retains voting control to protect the company’s values, and the Holdfast Collective, a non-profit that receives all excess profits to fund environmental efforts.
The company famously announced: “As of now, Earth is our only shareholder. All profits, in perpetuity, will go to our mission to ‘save our home planet’.”
The process, hailed as a blueprint for ethical capitalism, was orchestrated under the watchful eye and strategic vision of Patagonia chair Charles Conn, who will be speaking at a new conference, Reinvention Summit, in Dublin this month.
The conference is the brainchild of rugby player-turned-podcaster and motivational speaker Aidan McCullen (himself no stranger to reinvention after injury cut his sports career short). His successful podcast The Innovation Show has brought him into contact with some of the most visionary businesspeople and academics of our times, and the two-day event promises to be an inspiring melting pot for business leaders operating in a hyper-disruptive world and an ever-accelerating pace of change.
Reinvention is a concept that greatly occupies the thoughtful mind of values-driven investor, author, conservationist and businessman Conn – not just reinvention for its own sake, but reinvention of systems that no longer serve business, people or the planet.
From his early career as a partner at McKinsey, to a tech entrepreneurial stint co-founding Ticketmaster-Citysearch, to Monograph Capital, the life-sciences venture firm he cofounded, Conn has a broad perspective across many sectors and industries, and a firm belief that the old rules no longer apply, whether it’s on the ground or at the C-suite level in business.
For example, he draws unexpected parallels from his experience of biotechnology firms and the way product development teams work in Patagonia: “The time frames are longer than developing outdoor gear, but it’s the same idea, which is prototyping quickly, seeing problems, trying something, testing, getting back in the lab so you’re optimising faster.”
At a higher level, Patagonia has reinvented the way it looks at business strategy.
“We’re living in this world which is changing faster and faster and faster. I think the way companies and other institutions and society organise themselves strategically, the way they serve their customers, the way they think about their relationship to their teams, their staff and the rest of the world, needs to change.”
Writing a strategy that sits in a filing cabinet gathering dust for five years until it’s time to update it is irrelevant in today’s rapidly changing world, says Conn.
“Patagonia does things very differently and always has done things differently. What my keynote is going to talk about is, in a world like this, how should we think about what strategy is and even what capitalism is?”
Patagonia’s experimentalist approach, which involves rapid prototyping and continuous improvement, permeates every level of the company, from technical details in product development to how it approaches strategy.
“Instead of standing back looking down your nose and developing strategy, you’re developing strategy by being in it,” says Conn. His latest book, The Imperfectionists, deals with this topic. “It’s basically about accepting that you don’t always know how the world is unfolding, and if you can develop an approach to the world which is more experimentalist, you can move faster and meet the needs of customers more quickly,” he explains.
This is somewhat in contrast to the more measured, step-by-step process outlined in his debut outing, 2019’s Bulletproof Problem Solving, which advised a more time-intensive approach to breaking down problems into constituent pieces and prioritising what to work on first. “I always think of it as cod liver oil – you know it’s good for you, but it’s some work,” he says.
The idea of strategy-less strategy within Patagonia is very much tied up with a flat organisational structure and open communication, that allows every worker’s voice to be heard: “The more hierarchical you are, the more likely it is everyone looks up at the person who’s making decisions, instead of looking at each other.”
It turns the conventional way of doing things on its head with “strategies done by the frontline people [while] the rest of the organisation supports them in this experimentalist approach to meeting the needs of an evolving market”.
While Conn is the first to admit that this is a big mindset change, it can be a breath of fresh air for management. Instead of everyone looking to them for answers about what to do, Conn sums up this inverted approach with the proverb: “Let a thousand flowers bloom.”
In practice, this means: “Let’s take the best ideas that are coming out of wherever, whatever part of the business, and let’s celebrate those. I love the idea of working in a company where everybody feels empowered to make the place better, and nobody feels this so-called mushroom management – kept in the dark and fed s**t. Nobody wants to live in a world like that.”
It’s a concept that could be galvanising for companies trying to figure out how to win the war for talent.
“Whenever you have full employment, you have to stop and ask yourself, what are the kind of companies that the smart, most talented people want to come to work for?” he says. Ultimately, it’s down to fulfilment and agency: “Nobody wants to be a means to someone else’s end. Everybody wants to feel like they’re engaged.”
Rather than criticising things that don’t work, Conn is a big proponent of the benefits of regular postmortems to continuously improve and adapt strategies, backcasting to see which decisions worked and made sense. “Instead of doing that as a once-a-year strategy cycle, we do that as a regular, weekly or monthly cycle.”
Referring to McCullen, the founder of the Reinvention Summit, he says, “Aidan, what he would tell you is, you need permanent revinention, permanent revolution … you need to reinvent yourself before your competitors do it for you.”
He points to the disruption theory developed by his late friend, the Harvard Business School professor Clay Christensen: “If you can disrupt yourself by imagining what the future conditions for success are, then you are unlikely to be disrupted by a competitor.”
Conn is a believer in personal, as well as corporate, reinvention. “Maybe when you get older, reinvention feels scarier. I’m in my 60s now. I’ve had a long career. I’ve been working with Patagonia for a very long time, but my day job has changed every five to seven years,” he says. Keeping a sense of curiosity is at the foundation of this perpetual personal evolution.
“The way to keep growing and learning is to be curious,” he says. “If you can be curious about the world at any age and hopefully teach your kids to be curious about the world, they’ll be always asking the question ‘Why?’ and they’ll never accept the easy answer.”
This belief in reinvention as a path to personal growth fuels his optimism for the future of the human race: “There really is progress where humankind is looking for more universalistic values, and is caring about people more broadly, and about things outside their own personal consumption, for us to save the planet and people.”
To illustrate how this shift in mindset can happen, he references philosopher Michael Walzer’s Spheres of Justice, which explores how our compassion is strongest for those closest to us – family, neighbours, our immediate community. But as the distance increases, to strangers and people further away from us, our level of immediate concern often fades. Conn argues that if we want a future that works for our children, we must continually expand these circles of care, extending that same concern to broader issues such as environmental sustainability.
In an effort to re-embed the vision and values behind Patagonia, Conn recently reread company founder Chouinard’s memoir, Let My People Go Surfing. “It gave me such a revised appreciation for how bold the idea behind Patagonia is – to believe your vision that much in the face of other people telling you it’ll never work.”
However, he worries that many people who read it think life at Patagonia is “all unicorns and rainbows”. They would be wise to remember that there is discomfort in disruption too, he warns. Constant experimentalism means never settling.
“When you’re in a mode of constant experimentalism, constant improvement, constant reinvention and revolution, every time you make something, you say, that’s good, we can make it better. There’s never complacency. In Patagonia, high praise is ‘That’s good; we can do it better’.”
Charles Conn is a keynote speaker at The Reinvention Summit Dublin, Ireland’s flagship event for transformation and strategy, bringing together world-class thinkers and business leaders. It runs from April 29th-30th at The Royal Dublin Convention Centre, Golden Lane.
