Outdoor market: can the eco-friendly approach that has made Patagonia, Inc. big profits be a model for all other companies? Nope.

• Author: Koerner, Brendan I.
• Position: Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman - Book Review

Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman

By Yvon Chouinard Penguin Press HC; $26.95

When deciding whether a movie deserved a lukewarm recommendation or a flat-out pan, the late Chicago Tribune critic Gene Siskel would ask himself: "Is this film more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?" After applying the test to 1993's True Romance, for example, Siskel slammed the movie, concluding that he would rather watch a video of Dennis Hopper and Christian Slater conversing over meatball sandwiches.

A useful corollary to Siskel's rule as applied to autobiographies of business titans might be. "After reading this book, would I want to have lunch with the author?"

The highest compliment I can thus pay Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman is that I'd love to break bread with Yvon Chouinard. A master outdoorsman and eco-activist extraordinaire, Chouinard is also the founder of Patagonia, a company that grosses $230 million per year selling some of the coolest adventure gear on Earth. Patagonia is distinguished not only by the quality of merchandise, but also by its dedication to ethically and environmentally sound corporate policies; it is a Sierra Club member's dream of a multimillion dollar company.

Yet, Chouinard's book has its problems. It shows no signs of having been ghostwritten, which in this case is not a compliment; Chouinard is obviously not familiar with Mr. T: The Man With the Gold, another memoir in which the subject failed to hand off the literary duties to a more competent wordsmith.

But the bigger problem with the book lies with the lessons he proposes to present from his life and his company's success. Chouinard tends to spout holier-than-thou rhetoric in lieu of concrete ideas. Let My People Go Surfing is billed as a manifesto rather than a memoir, and for good reason--Chouinard spends much of the book exhorting readers to learn from Patagonia's philosophy of corporate responsibility. In doing so, he makes Patagonia seem a little like Sweden: earnest and effective, admirable, even enviable, but a bit too smug about its superiority and oblivious to the fact its system can't be applied everywhere.

There is no doubt that Chouinard has led a life worth envying, starting with an adolescence spent scaling the "Tetons and camping in Baja California. To make ends meet, he worked for a detective agency that counted Howard Hughes among its clients; the young...