This Humanizing Growth session from the Institute for Real Growth pairs the head of human resources at Patagonia with the marketing lead for the region. The subject is how activism is scaled inside a company and outside it, and how each reinforces the other.
The pivot point is a change of mission statement. The old one had several parts: build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis. The founder replaced it overnight, without warning, with a single line. Patagonia is in business to save our home planet.
Key findings
- The first effect of the new mission was that it removed the places people could stand behind. There was no longer anywhere to hide inside the mission, whatever function you worked in.
- The second effect was on ambition. It accelerated the boldness of initiatives inside the company, in the supply chain and in how the company speaks publicly. The best known campaigns of that period would not have happened under the old mission.
- Growth is discussed as a means rather than a goal. Responsible growth is defined as being able to take care of the company’s most important stakeholders, starting with employees and extending to the supply chain.
- Asked whether stakeholders are ranked, the answer given is planet first, with the internal community and the customer community treated as equally important after it.
What a leadership team does with an order it did not expect
The change arrived without consultation, and the instruction that came with it was minimal. The founder told the team they were smart people and to go figure it out. The account given here is that they are still figuring it out, and that the effect was to clarify a mission the company had already held for 40 years.
Hiring for a mission people cannot sit out
The recruitment consequence is deliberate slowness. The company hires slow, sees many people, and looks for mavericks who want a part in the call to action rather than candidates who simply bring a skill set to a workplace.
The harder problem is connecting every function to a mission stated in those terms. The example offered is the finance team, which found its route in through sustainable banking. The stated approach is to connect the voice each person already has to the mission.
Employee activism is supported with policy, not just encouragement. The company created a bail policy that covers employees arrested while marching for environmental causes, which the HR lead describes as a first in her career.
A program called Earth University was created about a year before the recording. It brings cross-sections of employees together in forests to learn, to confront what each of them will contribute, and to build storytelling capability so they can represent the mission internally and externally.
Where the line between work and life goes
The mission reaches into personal choices about flying, consumption, and clothing, and the company is careful about how far it pushes. The stated position is that Patagonia does not tell people what to do, and that it is not a cult. It hires for intellectual curiosity and relies on people to turn the question on themselves.
The marketing lead describes the same effect on his own function. Once you own your impact, the only available response is to mitigate it. He cites the carbon cost of moving points of sale around the region and the social impact of investing in platforms that propagate hate speech.
Marketing as a route to action
The commitments the customer work sits on include becoming carbon neutral by 2025. The company is a founding member of One Percent for the Planet, which routes one percent of gross revenue each year into a fund distributed by a grant committee. It currently grants to over a thousand groups globally.
Patagonia Action Works was built to connect customers to those groups directly, with the brand getting out of the way. The principle behind it is that a communication should always carry an action. Creating pathways to action is described as critical, as against simply preaching a value.
The upcoming campaign follows the same design. A feature-length film about renewable energy communities is paired with partnerships across the European federations that support the movement, so the interest it generates has somewhere to go. The description of the work is that the brand is a platform for accelerating solutions.
What it did to the business
Asked about the commercial effect, the marketing lead is careful. The more strident the company is about what it cares about, the more people want to engage with it, and both the community and the business have grown. He is explicit that the two have never been discussed as coupled, and that neither was designed to drive the other.
Scope and limitations
The growth described here is not offered as evidence that activism drives sales. The speaker states directly that the company has never discussed the two as linked.
This is an account from inside the company, given by the two executives responsible for the programs. The speakers say themselves that the company does not get everything right and has the everyday problems of any organization.
Source
This page summarises HGS #23: Evelyn Doyle & Alex Weller (Patagonia) share how Patagonia drives impact through engagement, by Marc de Swaan Arons.