The April 2025 issue of National Geographic featured an awards show of sorts – 33 individuals around the world whose work (at least according to National Geographic) is improving the world in some way. Many of them, as you might imagine, are doing things related to the environment. Several, however, were businesspeople, and two in particular stood out to me – Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia; and Hamdi Ulukaya, the founder of Chobani.
In case you don’t know, Patagonia is famous not only for being a multi-billion dollar outdoor apparel company but also for its devotion to environmental causes – so much so, that Chouinard recently put 98% of the company’s shares into the Holdfast Collective, a nonprofit designed to advocate for environmental causes. “Earth is now our only shareholder,” he famously said of the decision. And Chobani’s founder, who was forced to flee his native Turkey due to his support for ethnic Kurds, is enormously devoted to helping immigrants and refugees. “Our pitch is that you’re not going to find more loyal, hardworking, and determined people to work for your company,” Ulukaya says of his hiring practices. “They’ll never forget that you opened the door for them.”
I’m highlighting these two people because I think they are excellent examples of what can happen when you adopt a both/and, rather than an either/or mentality. It’s common to believe that many goals are mutually exclusive – if our company is doing something “good” or “charitable,” for example, then it must be hurting our bottom line. Taken to its furthest extreme, “either/or” thinking demands that for every winner, there must be a loser.
But these two companies, and plenty of others as well, have managed to find considerable financial success (both of these men are billionaires) and stay true to their non-financial mission and lift others up along the way. They decided that pursuing one set of goals did not mean they had to sacrifice every other set of goals – and if they can do it, there’s no reason the rest of us can’t.
Here’s a small example of that – my kids like to play games with me and my wife, but they don’t like to lose. In fact, they don’t like losing so much that beating them can ruin what had been a pretty fun experience. Now in most games, the objective is to win, and in order to win then somebody has to lose. Very “either/or”. So my wife and I have spent some time talking to our kids about adding an additional goal to the game-playing: simply having fun. You can play to win, and you can play to have fun too. Losing the game doesn’t mean you can’t still have fun – and so while losing might mean that you failed to achieve one objective, it’s no longer the only objective. I don’t expect my kids to suddenly love losing – nobody does – but I’m hoping that they realize they can both lose and win at the same time.
By adopting a both/and mentality, we give ourselves the opportunity to multiply our chances of winning outcomes – to build businesses that appeal to people’s need for financial stability and their need to pursue meaningful work, or to create societies where the success of one group can lead to the success of others. That’s a goal I think all of us can get behind, and all it takes is a simple shift from either/or to both/and.
