Patagonia CEO Addresses Wharton West Leadership Conference San Francisco Session Highlights “Leading With Creativity and Conviction”
What kind of leadership will businesses need to succeed in the future?
On February 2, Wharton West, home of the Wharton School’s Executive MBA program in California, hosted a wide-ranging one-day leadership conference designed to help attendees answer this critical question.
The intensive session, titled “Leading With Creativity and Conviction,” emphasized strategies for current leaders to identify and nurture the right kind of talent in their organizations – those qualities that will help rising managers successfully tackle the challenges of the future. A June 9 conference at Wharton's Philadelphia home will also consider the same topic.
Conference speakers included leaders from large corporations, such as MCI, Clorox, Hewlett-Packard, and Kaiser Permanente, as well as from less traditional venues, such as Business for Social Responsibility, the Poetry Foundation, and the Palo Alto Research Center. Presenters also included professors Michael Useem, director of Wharton’s Center for Leadership and Change Management, and Peter Cappelli, director of Wharton’s Center for Human Resources, both of whom helped organize and sponsor the annual event.
Patagonia CEO Michael Crooke Gives Keynote Address
Michael Crooke, President and CEO of outdoor clothing retailer Patagonia since 1999, gave a keynote address that focused on three topics:
The pitfalls of focusing solely on the bottom line
Patagonia’s approach to the business environment as an ecosystem
The use of “flow” to optimize performance in individuals and organizations
In an interview with Michael Useem, Crooke emphasized the need for change and new ideas in an evolving organization.
“When I came to Patagonia,” he recalls, “I brought in seven new people. That was a lot of change and newness for the organization. Melding the new with the old and creating the next wave of the next thirty years at Patagonia — that’s been a real challenge.”
Crooke also emphasized that profitability and social awareness can go hand-in-hand. “We look at our strategic plans, and we look at what we invest in terms of the social side of our business, as well as the environmental side or the product side,” he explains, but adds:
“It doesn’t matter if you are eco-groovy and socially responsible. If you don’t have a great product or service that’s sustainable, then it’s a short-term phenomenon, and it’s going down.”
Wharton Leadership Programs
This year’s theme follows such highly successful and well-attended topics of previous years as: Leading in an Era of Change and Uncertainty, Leading With Integrity, and Leading With Speed. This is the eighth year that Wharton has held a Leadership Conference, and the second year that it has included a San Francisco session at Wharton West.
In addition to its annual conferences, Wharton’s Center for Leadership and Change Management sponsors a wide range of programs to promote the theory and practice of effective business leadership. Its initiatives include:
Leadership Research: Research projects on such topics as national variations in governing board structures, the performance consequences of executive succession, and the leadership required in outsourcing relationships.
Leadership Ventures: Experiential learning opportunities for Wharton students and graduates, as well as managers who have completed a Wharton Executive Education program. Ventures have included Patagonia, Antarctica, the Himalayas, the Civil War battlefield at Gettysburg, and work with the U.S. Marine Corps.
Leadership Outreach: Presentations on leadership to corporate, public, and non-profit organizations, as well as seminars on leadership to university students, alumni, and administrators, and consultations with print and electronic journalists on issues of leadership and change.
