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Case Study: Yvon Chouinard

Better Essays

Morgane VERRIER
BS5 1A

On March 14th, 2015

US MANAGEMENT & LEADERSHIP
Yvon Chouinard

Final Assignment

Table

INTRODUCTION 3
The company – Patagonia 4
Management & Leadership style 6
Decision – Making process 9
Behavior style 12
Staff involvement 14
CONCLUSION 17
REFERENCES 18

INTRODUCTION

This report is about an US manager / leader from the private sector, with a high profile. Yvon Chouinard was born in 1938 in Lewiston, Maine (USA), is a climber, mountaineer and American entrepreneur founder of technical equipment companies, Patagonia and Black Diamond. He is a business leader who is always pushing Patagonia to find solutions to the global environmental crisis.

Patagonia is a company, based in California, that designes technical clothing (using only organic …show more content…

He takes all different product lines and gives way more responsibility than he had before to the manager of each division. Then, managers handle all the buying. Instead of having a general marketing department, each line will have its own marketing person who stays on top of that individual market.
When there are a lot of independent people working for a leader like Yvon Chouinard, leader cannot tell them what to do, or he will get a passive-aggressive response. Instead, Yvon Chouinard find a best solution, he has to build a consensus.

Yvon Chouinard’s obsession for the perfect product (technically, aesthetically and environmentally) remains. To respect his principles and prove he is right, he is ready to go very far. In the 1970’s, he ceases to manufacture steel pitons that make its success because they create small cracks and damage the rock wall. In 1984, Patagonia is the first US company to print its catalog on recycled paper. In the 1990’s, the company began using recycled bottles to make fleece jackets (25 bottles are needed to make a jacket). Between 1993 and 2003, 86 million bottles are recycled as

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