Vision: Companies Must End Short-Term Thinking

What if businesses got creative to unleash funding, political influence, and cultural clout to address our environmental challenges?

What if corporations were driven not by maximizing quarterly earnings and shareholder profits, but by being good citizens of planet Earth?

There are some companies truly trying to get it right. I happen to be on the board of one of them – the outdoor company Patagonia. I joined the board of directors in 2021, as Patagonia was going through a major transition that resulted in the world having one less billionaire, the founder Yvon Chouinard, and a plan to give away basically all the company’s profits to environmental causes in perpetuity.

I thought you might like a peak behind the curtain of all this, so I sat down with the CEO, Ryan Gellert, to dig into the values and practices that have shaped not just Patagonia, but set a high bar across sectors for everything from materials and manufacturing, to worker’s rights and activism, to philanthropy. Now, it’s not a perfect company, certainly, environmentally or otherwise, but it’s a model worth considering.

Links/resources for the topics we covered, are all in the newsletter: ayanaelizabeth.substack.com