I’m a businessman, but I’m still going to do things on my own terms. I’m going to break a lot of rules, and we’re going to blur the distinction between work and play. So we have a policy here – it’s called “Let My People Go Surfing.” A policy which is, when the surf comes up, anybody can just go surfing. Any time of the day, you just take off and go surfing… That attitude changes your whole life. If your life is set up so that you can drop anything when the surf comes up, it changes the whole way you do your life. And it has changed this whole company here.
– Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia
Yvon explains the surf boards lined up in the entrance hallway of the companys headquarters in Ventura, California. Quoted in “Good Business” by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly.