For Chouinard, the value of this is less about the present than the future.
WSJ: Patagonia's Founder is America's Most Unlikely Business Guru
But Chouinard argues this is merely a tithe he refers to it as an Earth tax.
WSJ: Patagonia's Founder is America's Most Unlikely Business Guru
At 73, Chouinard is a short, thick fireplug of a man who still looks barely 60.
WSJ: Patagonia's Founder is America's Most Unlikely Business Guru
As other outdoor clothing companies, such as Columbia Sportswear, have gone public, Chouinard has resisted the temptation.
Like many of the other business-school professors I spoke with about Patagonia, he seemed genuinely impressed by Chouinard.
WSJ: Patagonia's Founder is America's Most Unlikely Business Guru
Chouinard began to wonder whether he should stay in the game at all.
WSJ: Patagonia's Founder is America's Most Unlikely Business Guru
"He rules with an iron fist, " says Yvon Chouinard, founder of clothingmaker Patagonia, who spent a week there this summer.
Chouinard's new book, "The Responsible Company, " published this month, offers detailed checklists for making money without inflicting undue societal harm.
WSJ: Patagonia's Founder is America's Most Unlikely Business Guru
There's genuine shareholder value at the heart of many of Chouinard's ideals, which could carry over to all types of enterprise.
WSJ: Patagonia's Founder is America's Most Unlikely Business Guru
Though he left New England when he was only seven, Chouinard still retains the unimpressed, dismissive mien of a flinty Mainer.
WSJ: Patagonia's Founder is America's Most Unlikely Business Guru
The day before Chouinard had told me about his earliest childhood memory.
The idealism, ambition, self-assurance and total hubris at the heart of this salmon escapade are all hallmarks of the Chouinard executive style.
WSJ: Patagonia's Founder is America's Most Unlikely Business Guru
Make no mistake, Chouinard embraces the ideal of universal health care coverage.
Company founder, Yvon Chouinard, designed them for the slippery rocks found on the big steelhead streams in the western U.S. and Canada.
Credit was cut off Chouinard says his accountant at one point introduced him to a mafia guy who offered to lend at 28 percent interest.
WSJ: Patagonia's Founder is America's Most Unlikely Business Guru
Chouinard was born in Maine, in far less posh environs, to French-Canadian parents who transplanted the family to Burbank, California, when he was seven.
WSJ: Patagonia's Founder is America's Most Unlikely Business Guru
But when Chouinard counseled Walmart on sustainability, the retail behemoth found it actually saved money through environmental initiatives, like reducing its packaging and water consumption.
WSJ: Patagonia's Founder is America's Most Unlikely Business Guru
Similarly, Levi Strauss with more than 10 times the annual revenue of Patagonia has embraced Chouinard's efforts to set data-driven benchmarks for improving apparel makers' environmental practices.
WSJ: Patagonia's Founder is America's Most Unlikely Business Guru
"I worry we will have patients here who somehow do not fall into some category and somehow slip through the cracks, " is how Chouinard put it.
Under a veil of the early-morning fog Yvon Chouinard , the 63-year-old founder of Patagonia sportswear, and I cast colorful, hand-tied salmon flies into the tannin-stained water.
Chouinard marched into state offices on the morning of January 3, 2012, to make Patagonia the very first company to register as a benefit corporation in California.
WSJ: Patagonia's Founder is America's Most Unlikely Business Guru
At his weathered beachside home in a gated enclave a few miles north of Patagonia's headquarters, Chouinard puts out a plateful of his salmon, smoked and sliced.
WSJ: Patagonia's Founder is America's Most Unlikely Business Guru
In the 1950s young Chouinard, an army vet and former private dick for Howard Hughes, tired of suburban life in Burbank, Calif. and literally took to the hills.
Climbing also taught Chouinard another lesson: Don't exceed your resources.
It's not just the marketplace Chouinard is affecting it's the workplace.
WSJ: Patagonia's Founder is America's Most Unlikely Business Guru
This is how Yvon Chouinard became an accidental apparel mogul.
WSJ: Patagonia's Founder is America's Most Unlikely Business Guru
But, like Chouinard, they worry about falling through the cracks.
After years of fishing in tropical locales and sweating through his shirts, Chouinard came up with the idea for Patagonia's Puckerware fabric, introduced in 1998, which wicks moisture from the skin.
No longer just designing technical gear for his pals, and hoping to fund his own climbing expeditions, by the mid-1980s Chouinard found himself helming a red-hot, rapidly expanding, internationally known fashion brand.
WSJ: Patagonia's Founder is America's Most Unlikely Business Guru
Chouinard claims steady progress and credits a combination of growing trust in the community and aggressive clinic outreach using an electronic record database brought online with the help of federal grant money.
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