Conquering the North Face

by Hap Klopp

  It doesn’t have to be that way. We as leaders can save America from this drudgery. What it will take is an infusion of passion—the pulsing grip of any great vision. We must give up the security of tradition for the surprise of passion. We are all driven by inner needs, and not just the survival-istic ones either. We are driven by a need to accomplish, to express ourselves, to succeed, and to contribute to society. Everyone, I don’t care who, wants to do something great with his or her life. Many never even acknowledge that want. It becomes hidden, a source of shame.

  But desire for greatness is not shameful. It is something to be celebrated—something to be nurtured. People in business, just like Crilly, are willing to endure great hardship if it will bring the fruits of life—success, recognition, and the heartbeat-by-heartbeat thrill of existence that comes from accomplishment.

  Dreams are wonderful. But dreams alone, as Walter Mitty showed us, are not enough. When nothing surfaces alongside the dream—when there is no passion—there is only the passing thought. There must be a real life boring in—an entrenchment of the soul, if you will, in the logistics of the dream to make it come true. It takes the dedication of Ned Gillette with the perseverence of Churchill. And it takes the ingenuity of both.

  Many aspiring leaders believe they must be dispassionate, but I’ll be damned if I know why. Passion is magnetic, it draws people to you, but some managers are so dispassionate they won’t even own a dog. One way to express passion is to cry, really cry, when you lose a sale, and rejoice when you close one. You have to care. Despite uncertainty, you have to let your heart lead you. It will usually be right, and it will certainly draw your co-workers in around you. Allowing passion into your life not only empowers you as a leader, it also allows you to have fun. Don’t just excite, incite.

  The level of dedication of a superb leader is almost infinite. If you have it, you exude passion. As a leader you must ask others to dig deep. The only way that will sell is if you, the leader, dig deeper. You have to show a willingness to sacrifice, a capacity for the audacious, and an instinct for brilliance.

  A leader cannot be detached or robotic. A leader must be involved, putting emotions up front where everyone can see that the task at hand is more than just a way to make money. A leader must inspire, but first a leader must be inspired.

  Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, was inspired. Back when Nike was a small company in Oregon, Knight knew he had a great product. But he couldn’t get anyone to finance his concept without stealing the company from him. He wanted to grow, and he knew a huge market existed for his athletic shoes if he could find the money—enough to feed explosive growth. He didn’t just believe, he knew there was a market for his shoes.

  Knight went to Nisho Iwaii, the Japanese trading company that had supplied him with some components. I believe it was laces and soles, but some people say it was even less than that.

  Knight said, “I’ve got this great idea. There’s only one little thing you’ve got to do for me—you’ve got to lend me the money so I can manufacture more shoes. Not only will you receive interest on the money you lend me, but also I could buy more from you. You could double or triple the interest with the profit you’d make on the things you sell me.”

  Nisho Iwaii understood the risk but saw the opportunity. They went forward and helped Knight create the new-booming sneaker industry. Knight paid off the trading company as soon as he had sold his shoes to retailers. But up to that point Nisho Iwaii financed Nike, helping Knight grow. As Knight proved, you can be pretty creative under pressure.

  Like Knight, I had the usual difficulty getting financing when I first came up with my plan for The North Face. Everyone I went to turned me down. It was one of the most frustrating periods of my life. I just knew I was right. Finally, when the last venture capital (by then I had renamed them all “vulture capital”) firm I talked with turned me down, I looked them right in the eye and said, “Fine. I understand your rejection, but do me a favor. Make me a bet. I’ll bet you $500 that in five years The North Face will be worth more than two-thirds of the companies in your portfolio are.” They never did bet me. They were, however, so intrigued that they reconsidered and financed The North Face. Five years later I would’ve easily won the bet.

  It was easy for me to be passionate and persevere, because my spark was a personal one. Always I strove for more.

  Although The North Face was founded on the principle of making the best-possible products, in 1970 I decided we needed to do even better—to improve the best. I didn’t want to just dominate the market, I wanted to revolutionize it. Through a friend I contacted Buckminster Fuller, the inventor of the geodesic dome. My idea was to get Bucky to help design a geodesic-dome tent. It didn’t exactly work out that way, but it did work out.

  Bucky wrote back full of enthusiasm. He was convinced he knew exactly what we needed but, unfortunately, was without time for the project. So without Bucky’s design, I waited. I waited more than five years. While I waited, I began bouncing the idea off some of my employees. I wanted, needed really, to find some people who shared my belief that a geodesic-dome tent was possible and would make all the tents on the market obsolete. I needed people who understood my premise—to evangelize this cause within the company. I found two people with just that vision.

  The first was Bruce Hamilton, a dope-smoking hippie, graduate of the University of Vanderbilt, and disciple of Karl Marx. He was not your typical corporate employee by any stretch. At times, when Karl Marx was particularly fresh in Bruce’s mind, we’d go around and around about the strengths and weaknesses of capitalism and communism. These were not mere discussions of theory, either. Often Bruce had a problem with the capitalistic way I ran The North Face. Through it all, though, we became friends.

  Bruce had a math degree and was somewhat of a Buckminster Fuller groupie. He, honest to God, spent a year on the road like a devoted Deadhead (as in The Grateful Dead), following Fuller from city to city to hear him speak.

  When I went to Bruce with my ideas for a geodesic-dome tent, he was more than enthralled. He was ecstatic. It was like asking a Deadhead to tune Jerry Garcia’s guitar.

  The second person was Mark Erickson, also an iconoclast—part hippie, part artist—who was dedicated to doing something special with his life. He was a graduate of Northwestern. In Berkeley the counter-culture types seemed to flock to us. We had established a reputation of being open to all types. Not only did we welcome them, but for many we were a last-ditch chance at a life of steady employment. At The North Face we loved this image.

  Mark applied for a job with The North Face 28 times. Yes, that’s right. No misprint—28 times. He saw himself as the epitome of a North Face employee. Finally we did too.

  He took the only job we had—as a janitor. Of course, in our company this didn’t limit him. We encouraged people to rise above their daily duties and do anything possible to help the company be the best. Mark responded. Boy, did he.

  Mark was in love with design and creation, and he immediately identified with the project. Employees naturally self-selected into projects that interested them, and this was a project he relished. Mark, who had long since risen from janitor into product design, was perfect for the geodesic-dome tent—he had an analytical mind, a creative disposition, and the flexibility necessary for the creative process. Hiring Mark was half luck and half brilliance—our luck, his brilliance. Whatever, he quickly rose in the company by displaying a great visual sense—the geodesic tent is a tribute to his aesthetic skills. Mark now owns a design firm.

  Mark and Bruce set out to design the tent that would revolutionize the world market for backpackable tents. Soon Bucky came along to offer his input. Mark and Bruce were in heaven. So was I. We combined Mark’s product design with Bruce’s mathematics, and into the mix jumped the legendary Buckminster Fuller, a hero to both Mark and Bruce. I knew the geodesic-dome tent would become what it became—the inspirational parent to at least the next ten generations of small backpackable tents.


  Mark and Bruce collected what can only be called a cult of followers, wedded to the project and to the belief in the vision of geodesics as articulated by Buckminster Fuller. One of these followers, Jim Shirley, eventually went on to work on the world’s weather and greenhouse-effect problems. This work was a direct result of the inspiration he received from working with Bucky. It was truly a magical time.

  Nevertheless, there were plenty of difficulties along the way. For one thing, the tent poles that went through the bends of the tent were experiencing stress-corrosion cracking—a technical way of saying they were breaking. At one point we recalled every pole we ever put in our product. Making good on our warranty was our normal way of doing business.

  I’ll never forget the day we finally unveiled the original tent, designed just for Bucky. It was October 7, 1977, our son’s ninth birthday. Bucky spoke at the ceremony, and then we had a well-practiced team assemble an oversized version of our geodesic-dome tent in ten minutes. Everyone who participated was a part of the team.

  Following the ceremony, a few of us—Bucky included—headed over to my house. Bucky immediately took to my grandmother, who was two years older than he. They started talking about time, their lives—the first car, the first airplane, and so on. The rest of us just sat back and listened. It was one of the most educational evenings of my life. Finally, before the evening was over, Bucky walked up to my son, Matt, put his arm around Matt’s shoulder, and wished him a happy birthday. And then he gave Matt a book he had authored. In it Buckminster Fuller wrote: “To Matt, on his ninth birthday—a member of the generation who is going to change mankind for the benefit of all humanity.” Reading that later, I thought, We’re all part of that generation.

  Buckminster Fuller was a utopian. He and those of us at The North Face were not just trying to design a new tent—we wanted to improve the world. The tent was the focal point, but we were also thinking about an eventual market of people using tents as permanent residences instead of houses. We thought of it as good capitalism. With good capitalism we could change the world—allow people to explore the wilderness, appreciate nature, and stop the destruction of the planet.

  We had created our dream and battled it out. When something didn’t work at first, we figured out a way to make it work. We believed in it. We had taken our first step. It was time to start planning our next. Financially we created a monumentally successful project. Yet no one thought only in terms of making money.

  We thought that by striving for our best—financially, physically, and spiritually—we would be our best. That tent was no mere product of fabric and metal—it was a physical representation of our lives for the past five years. Every hiker who purchased that tent was, in effect, joining us on our incredible journey. We weren’t just selling hikers tents. We were selling them five very special years of our lives. We were selling them our best friend, our pet gorilla.

  9

  IMPROVING PERFECTION:

  Only the Best Will Do

  Chicago. There was a wrath of January wind and a swirling, throbbing snowfall that moved like a bad headache. It was so cold my face burned. The sky was gone—in its place, a gray, infinite void. No moon, no stars; only cold.

  I had just left a sporting-goods show at McCormick Place on the frozen banks of Lake Michigan. I was with my vice president of retail, Tom Applegate. As soon as we walked outside we expected to flag down a taxi, but no such luck. What we flagged down was less a taxi than a mobile dumpster. It was grimy, with oil stains everywhere, and the floor was a puddle. But it was five below zero and we had already waited a half hour. It would have to do. The cab driver had the semi-crazed look endemic to big-city cab drivers, along with a two-day growth of beard and a shock of unruly hair.

  When we got in, there was a problem. One of the back doors was broken and wouldn’t stay shut. When we pointed this out to the driver, he told us he couldn’t take us because the broken door was too dangerous. But we wouldn’t leave. We had been outside so long that even my hair was cold.

  Tom and I examined the door and quickly figured that the rocker arm on the door latch was the problem and could be easily repaired by hand. However, it was covered with grease and grime. It didn’t make sense to work on it in our business clothes—we had another meeting to attend. The cabbie looked at us, confused. He wasn’t sure he understood our explanation. To test it he went to the other door and pushed down hard on the latch on that door, replicating the malfunction of the first door. Then he stopped, dumbfounded.

  With that push, the problem doubled—we now had two broken doors. I was anxious. I was cold. I had a meeting to attend, but the cabbie was now more insistent than ever that he couldn’t take us. My retort was that if he had to get back to the shop for repairs, he couldn’t get there without us. We could help.

  And we did. Sitting in the backseat, Tom and I each grabbed opposing door handles with our hands and linked our other arms together—structurally linking one side of the cab to the other. This kept the doors from flying open and us from falling out. Using this improvised latching technique, we helped the cabbie get to the shop. When we got there, we finally flagged a “real” cab to take us on to our meeting.

  It’s a simple thing, to expect a cab to have doors that close and a decor that doesn’t come from the junkyard. But so often we find that even our least expectations cannot be met. The problem is that so few people pay attention to quality. In an economic climate where quick money rules, quality has become a joke. But the joke’s on us.

  Almost every company has some sort of quality control program. Unfortunately most are just statistical tools designed to weed out defects, and not even all of them. Quality control programs don’t add to quality; they merely attempt to keep it from dropping to the unacceptably low level that no one will buy. That’s the problem—an American infatuation with meeting the lowest common denominator and the knee-jerk acceptance of the unfounded axiom that the consumer will always take price over performance.

  I remember reading an interview with one of the astronauts upon his return from a successful space mission. He was asked what he was thinking as he sat in the capsule ready to blast off. “I was thinking,” he said, “that all the parts of the spaceship went to the lowest bidder.”

  That says it all. The lowest bidder! Not the best; the lowest. The cheapest. Sure, he got home all right. But still—the lowest bidder. It’s become the American way to worry about price first and quality second.

  This is not to say that quality always has to be the most expensive. Often it is; many times it isn’t. Quality isn’t about money, it’s about caring. It’s about wanting to be the best because there is personal pride at stake—an individual declaration of identity with the product.

  There is always a market for the best, all over the globe. It’s an obvious and well-known fact that mountain climbers don’t like to buy discounted climbing ropes. And there’s the joke about the parachute offer for sale—cheap, slightly irregular, but used only once. When something is as important as life and death—and all business decisions should be—quality is irreplaceable.

  For everyone involved, it’s a lot more fun to pursue the top of the market than any other segment. It’s more challenging—it’s energizing.

  Making the best ensures that a company gets repeat customers while offering an umbrella of protection against excessive competition. Quite simply, few companies are willing to compete at the top end of the market.

  Great quality can differentiate you from all the others in your field. There is an aura about quality—a glow you feel when you are involved in the event of quality. There is a common bond of satisfaction shared by those involved with quality—a mutual energy perpetuated by being the best. Quality is not just a statement about products; it is the credo of a life style.

  In the United States there are 500,000 brand names registered and actively used. Every consumer sees more than 875,000 advertising impressions each year. According to one retail study, the
re are enough stores in the United States to serve 500 million people—more than twice the 240 million population. These staggering numbers show how difficult it is to stand out. Yet to be successful, you must stand out. The best way, quite simply, is with the highest quality.

  Quality will show up in the most unlikely places. Quality always stands out. Peter Glen, the critic and author, had a quality experience at, of all places, a coffee shop—in a Tokyo department store.

  The first thing he noticed was the impeccably groomed staff waiting to serve him. Why? he asked. Why would a mere coffee shop in a department store have such well-groomed help?

  The answer was pride, he was told. Pride of the manager, who personally inspected every employee and sent them home if they did not look immaculate. And pride of the employees. The manager went on to explain that all employees were required to speak two languages.

  Imagine such a requirement in the United States, where many employees can’t handle even one language. Americans would tell you it’s superfluous; Japanese would tell you it’s good business.

  After talking with the manager, Peter ordered coffee. He was quickly given a hot towel to freshen himself, and it was promptly followed by his coffee—no ordinary cup of coffee. There was a dollop of cream on top, shaped like a rosebud. Peter picked up his spoon to stir, but he was asked to wait and watch. He did, and the dollop slowly began to open, a rosebud opening into petals. It was service, it was unique, it was attention to detail, it was showmanship, and it was great.

  Next time you order coffee at your local greasy spoon or wait in line more than an hour to check into even a fancy hotel, compare your experience to Peter’s. And while you’re comparing, think about your customers, your employees, your boss; compare your work to someone else’s.