King (or Queen) of the Mountain

I’ve written before about CRI as a way to understand how a company carries itself in culture—how it absorbs pressure, how it holds alignment, whether it can actually move when things shift. But something different happens when you line up two companies in the same sector and put them through the same diagnostic. Not one-off observations, but a structural comparison. You don’t just see who’s doing better. You see what the terrain itself demands—and what kind of architecture is built to hold under those conditions.

Some friends of mine, Victoria Carrington Chávez✨, Nora DiNuzzo, and Chelsea Burns, M.S., brought up the idea of running Patagonia and REI. Two legacy brands in outdoor retail. Both with deep loyalty, climate signaling, cooperative roots. Both operating in a market shaped by activism, access, gear, and generational trust.

So I ran it. Side by side. No hedging, no narrative tilt. Just CRI as it’s meant to be used: pressure-tested, weighted, and scored.

Patagonia came in at 91.4. Stable. Structurally aligned. Low decay. REI landed at 74.6. Warning Zone. Holding. But softening over time.

But here’s the thing. The scores are not the insight. The insight is how those scores got built—and what they reveal about how resilience actually behaves inside an organization.

Let’s start with what’s obvious: Patagonia dominates narrative control. They don’t just “own their story”—they control how the story even gets told. The “Don’t Buy This Jacket” ad, the climate trust handover, even the way they publicly addressed labor issues in their supply chain—they don’t flinch from scrutiny because scrutiny is part of the plan. They metabolize it. That narrative discipline buys them not just reputational protection but narrative leadership. You can’t cancel a company that already said it out loud.

REI, by contrast, used to lead with cultural narrative. #OptOutside was a defining moment—not just for them, but for how brands think about holidays, commerce, and value signaling. But in recent years, the narrative has slipped. Internal unionization tensions, DEI gaps, workforce discontent—all of it emerged through external pressure, not internal initiation. They responded, but often a step late. In CRI terms, that’s what a 78 looks like in narrative control: still capable, but no longer dictating the terms.

Where Patagonia loses ground is actually where REI holds more weight. The polarization index. Patagonia’s boldness is a double-edged sword—it’s mission-first, but it’s also politically legible in ways that open them to backlash. Some of that is strategic: they want to pick fights. But when your consumer base polarizes as fast as the national discourse does, even principled stances carry cost. Patagonia’s cultural trust is high, but their operating room shrinks in hostile political cycles. That’s where some of their points fall.

REI, interestingly, absorbs less direct polarization. Even during the Vista Outdoor gun backlash, their stance—though reactive—was seen as cautious and principled. Internally, however, the polarization shows up in a different place: between corporate and worker trust. Union pressure isn’t inherently destabilizing. But when workforce perception diverges from leadership narrative, it creates a wobble. And that wobble slows agility. You can feel it in REI’s delayed tech infrastructure upgrades, or their slow response to generational workforce shifts.

That brings us to one of the most telling gaps: generational alignment.

Patagonia has invested—heavily—in staying aligned with the future. Their leadership team is increasingly gender-balanced. Their hiring practices have shifted to widen access. Their climate and anti-consumption stances resonate with younger buyers and employees. CRI doesn’t just measure diversity optics—it measures whether the people building the company reflect the people buying from it and entering the workforce. Patagonia scores in the 90s for a reason.

REI, on the other hand, is doing the work—but hasn’t yet closed the loop. Their workforce still doesn’t reflect the diversity of the communities they serve. Employee sentiment has become a leading indicator of misalignment: long-time staff voicing instability, younger hires calling out gaps. Their executive team has taken steps (bringing in Laughton as CEO, pushing sustainability harder), but the demographic transition hasn’t yet materialized across the structure. And the market can feel that.

So what do we actually learn from this?

Cultural resilience isn’t just about values. It’s about how those values show up in structure.

Both REI and Patagonia care about equity, environment, and integrity. But only one has made those values operational at scale. Only one has restructured ownership to guarantee long-term mission alignment. Only one has shown agility in both governance and go-to-market. The other—while still principled, still beloved—is adapting under pressure instead of preempting it.

And that’s the heart of CRI: anticipation beats reaction. Structure beats story.

Patagonia isn’t perfect. They lose points where principle limits maneuverability. But they are positioned to dictate the future of their category. REI still has the love. Still has the community. But unless they can turn internal shifts into structural coherence, they’ll keep losing cultural ground—not because they’re weak, but because the terrain is moving faster than their feet.

So as you’re thinking about cultural resilience in your own organization, zoom out. Look at the structural failure beneath the score. What systems couldn’t hold? What signals got ignored? And what would it take to shift—not just strategy, but architecture?

And while you’re thinking, here’s a question I’ll throw back to you: What two companies would you like to see compared next?

Drop them in. We’ll run the numbers.