Rose Marcario, president and CEO of Patagonia, has dramatically expanded the company’s commitment to environmental and social activism during her decade of leadership. Charting a new path in corporate sustainability, Marcario has made Patagonia’s production and sourcing processes more green, launched an in-house venture fund to seed environmentally conscious startups, and overseen the creation of Patagonia Provisions, an organic regenerative food company. With Marcario at the helm, the company introduced Patagonia Worn Wear, a place to repair, reuse, recycle, and resell Patagonia gear, and helped create the Regenerative Organic Certification for agriculture.
Marcario’s efforts in ethical leadership were recognized when she received the Botwinick Prize in Business Ethics, awarded by The Bernstein Center for Leadership and Ethics at Columbia Business School. “I think it's really a false choice to say you can either make money or do good,” Marcario said. “You can do good and make money, and the company has been proof positive of that.”
Sustainable supply chains and environmental focus
Patagonia’s environmental focus did not begin with Marcario. The company’s founder, Yvon Chouinard, started out in the early 1970s making “clean” rock climbing equipment that eschewed traditional methods of pounding steel pitons into the rocks. Still ahead of the pack on environmental issues, Patagonia is now working to decarbonize its supply chain and become carbon neutral by 2025 despite the significant cost involved. And, rather than guard the company’s intellectual property around sustainable supply chains, Patagonia intends to share its IP on apparel production, with Marcario “setting her sights” on persuading larger companies such as Nike to adopt more sustainable production practices.
“To the extent that we influence those brands and competitors to adapt and adopt more environmental fabrics and processes, I think that's a really good thing,” Marcario said. More companies are getting on board Patagonia’s do-good bandwagon. In 2018, BlackRock CEO Laurence Fink announced that his $6 trillion investment firm wanted to support companies that benefit the “communities in which they operate.” “To prosper over time, every company must not only deliver financial performance, but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society,” Fink wrote in his annual letter to S&P 500 CEOs. While Marcario said she supported Fink’s sentiment, she was still waiting to see action. “Larry Fink coming out and making those statements is a step,” she said. “I don't know if it's a big enough step, but it's a step.”
Catalyzing change and political activism
Marcario’s leadership legacy will also be noted for her political activism on environmental issues. Most notably, in 2017, after the Trump administration reduced the size of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments in Utah by nearly 2 million acres combined, Patagonia sued the federal government for allegedly violating the Antiquities Act. “There were a lot of people saying that we're going to lose a bunch of customers by suing the administration,” Marcario said. “And that was just the exact opposite. We got more customers and we got more revenue.”
Now, the CEO is making a concerted effort to become more involved with policy and renewable energy efforts at the state, local, and regional levels. Marcario wants to use Patagonia “as an activist and a catalyst for change in a deeper way than we were doing before by just funding NGOs.”
The benefits of Patagonia’s mission-fueled work culture are underscored by the academic research of Professor Burbano, who moderated the conversation with Marcario. Burbano’s studies have found that workers are willing to earn less for companies with a clear social mission and that worker misconduct declines when employees are aware of their company’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives and ethics code. “We have a much bigger mission than just the product that we're making,” Marcario said. “I think when you do that you have a much more inspired workforce. You have people that show up to work today, every day, wanting to fight the good fight … And I think that's a big part of what makes the company successful.”
Family-friendly work practices and inspiring mission
Patagonia is also known for its family-friendly work practices, including having an on-site child development center at its California headquarters, which Marcario credited as a reason why Patagonia has an equal split of men and women in management. The company’s mission is also why Patagonia received more than 9,000 applications for 16 summer internship positions last year.
“When you have a mission that really inspires people, then you will get thousands of applicants for jobs,” Marcario said. “You will get the best people who really care about solving these issues because they're focused on working for those companies that they think are doing real good in the world.”
Inspired by the vision of Yvon Chouinard, Marcario herself left the world of private equity and joined Patagonia because it was an opportunity for her to realign her values—something she sees the current MBA population also seeking to do. “They want their life to have more meaning than just making a quarterly profit,” she said. “If you could harness that in a productive way, then I think we could solve most of the big intractable problems that we're looking at today.”
