Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose
Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose
The visionary CEO of Zappos explains how an emphasis on corporate culture can lead to unprecedented success.
Pay new employees $2000 to quit. Make customer service the entire company, not just a department. Focus on company culture as the #1 priority. Apply research from the science of happiness to running a business. Help employees grow both personally and professionally. Seek to change the world. Oh, and make money too.
Sound crazy? It’s all standard operating procedure at Zappos.com, the online retailer that’s doing over $1 billion in gross merchandise sales every year.
In 1999, Tony Hsieh (pronounced Shay) sold LinkExchange, the company he co-founded, to Microsoft for $265 million. He then joined Zappos as an adviser and investor, and eventually became CEO.
In 2009, Zappos was listed as one of Fortune magazine’s top 25 companies to work for, and was acquired by Amazon later that year in a deal valued at over $1.2 billion on the day of closing.
In his first book, Tony shares the different business lessons he learned in life, from a lemonade stand and pizza business through LinkExchange, Zappos, and more. Ultimately, he shows how using happiness as a framework can produce profits, passion, and purpose both in business and in life. (edited by author)
User Ratings and Reviews
4 Stars Zappos - Gone Big with Heart
For anyone interested how a business grows big, really big, then Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh is the book for you. It tells the poignant story of the birth, growth and sale of Zappos to Amazon. However, it is more than a just a biography of the company, it is rather a chronicle of how an ethical company can grow and mature in any business. Whether you are interested in order fulfillment processes, branding or building a unique corporate culture this book provides a good guideline. Full of insights and anecdotes, Hsieh delivers a thoughtful account of his career from student to CEO of Zappos. A particularly good read for business students or young entrepreneurs.
5 Stars Compelling, and I don’t have much to apply it to
Tony Hseih’s “Delivering Happiness” is a delightful book. I couldn’t put it down, and I’m not a high-powered CEO, or even a middle manager looking to come up with great business ideas. This book did make me want to move to Vegas and work for Zappos — but I’ve had those fantasies before, mostly every time I have cause to call Zappos customer service (or Customer Loyalty Team, as they’re called internally).
This book is mostly memoir, tracing Hseih’s entrepreneurial passion through his childhood, college, and then finally to Zappos, which he didn’t found, but found reason to believe in. I couldn’t relate much to Hseih’s childhood, but found the story fun, and his enthusiasm for his various projects is infectious. It’s later, as he starts realizing that despite his belief that he wants to make a lot of money, sometimes the path that yields the most money isn’t the one he wants to take, that it gets really interesting.
Ultimately, this is a book about the pursuit of happiness, and about spreading happiness. In Hseih’s telling, Zappos is doing a pretty good job of doing this, not because shoes are so wonderful — there are no assertions here that shoes are the key to happiness — but because the company is built on a solid culture of respect, trust, fun, and a little weirdness, and these values extend to employees, customers, vendors, and anyone else with a stake in the company.
I work for a tiny (five employee) non-profit school, which seems like a different world from the 700+ employees and $1 billion revenue Zappos boasts, but still, I found myself thinking about ways we could build our own culture, for and from our employees, students, families, and supporters. The Zappos story didn’t feel irrelevant at all.
And it’s fun. Hseih is engaging, down to earth, and committed. I recommend this book to just about anyone who’s ever interacted with other human beings, especially in a business environment. Especially if you don’t mind an off-beat and informal narrative.
5 Stars People Are Important: Make Them Happy
This is an awesome book because Zappos is an awesome book. Tony Hsieh (CEO of Zappos)is one clever guy. He is also smart to have figured out that making customers happy is how you make your business successful. That in and of itself is not that brilliant or new, but what he acutally put into place was to create a business culture that invests in three key areas: customer services, culture, and employee training. There is his brillance - he has figured out what the most value asset of the company is and strives to make it better. That asset would be his employees. Humans are important to Zappos.
The book has lots of great tips on building this culture. What questions to ask potential employees. It also gives some insight to the company training program which encourages employees to constrantly grow and develop. Funny how many companies worry that they will waste money training people that will just leave. This is true because they missed the happiness factor. Make your employees happy and they will be more productive and stay with you. Novel idea.
5 Stars Excellent Book - Great insight into building company culture
‘m a big fan of Zappos and the things that the company has been able to do. I love the idea of a culture driven company and Zappos has been the poster child for this idea for quite some time.
When I saw this book, I knew I had to read it.
The first section of the book covers a great deal of time (birth to Tony’s start as Zappos’ CEO).
Tony provides provides a pretty interesting, and at times funny, walk-through of his childhood, high school and college. While describing his life, its easy to see the entrepreneurial spirit alive and kicking throughout Tony’s life.
One of the really interesting parts of this section is the description of the building of Tony’s first company LinkExchange (LE) and the subsequent selling of that company to Microsoft. The building and sale of LinkExchange isn’t chronicled in detail but an interesting summary is provided the gives the reader a good feel for what happened.
In addition, Tony describes the years after the LE sale and his search for something to do. In this part of the book, Tony details the lessons he learned playing poker…and tries to equate them to strategies for business…and he does a pretty decent job of it too.
About half-way through the book (starting with Section II) Tony gets into the details of how Zappos became the company it is today. The trials & tribulations of an internet company trying to survive the bursting of the dot.com bubble, the economic troubles of the early 2000’s and other issues (9/11, etc).
This part of the book is pretty interesting as Tony gives the reader some insight into how Zappos was kept afloat during the initial few years. Basically, if it weren’t for Tony putting his own money into the company (and almost going broke doing so) Zappos might not have survived.
While describing how Zappos was built into a thriving business, Tony also provides some insight into his approach to building the Zappos culture that we’ve all become aware of. There are some great tidbits of knowledge in this section of the book.
While I found the first two sections of the book (described above) interesting, the final section of the book is where the real lessons can be learned about building a culture that fits an organization.
In the final section of the book, Tony describes the concept of Delivering Happiness. This section is very interesting and worth reading a few times (which I’m doing).
This book is a winner.
I like this book for a few reasons. First, its just an interesting read. Being able to hear about Tony’s life from Tony is interesting to me. Second….it provides some excellent insight into what its really like running a startup and the ups/downs that comes with the territory.
Will you like it? I think so…but here’s some advice for those of you who are on the fence about the book:
If you have any interest in building a business, read this book.
If you have any interest in a building a culture that `fits’ your organization, read this book.
If you like reading about success stories in business, read this book.
If you are a grammar nerd and hate it when people don’t write in perfect grammatical english, you may not like this book. But heck…if you’re reading my blog, you probably aren’t a grammar nerd
4 Stars Great Read, With Caveats
First the facts: Tony Hsieh is smarter than your average guy, and willing to work hard. He had an early dot com success, made some money, and squandered most of it partying. He gave Zappos its first funding, then later became the company’s CEO, and led Zappos to tremendous success before it was purchased by Amazon for over one billion dollars. This book chronicles those events.
If you know anything about Zappos, you know they have an almost insane commitment to customer satisfaction. You may not know that they have an intense corporate culture around the theme of “Delivering Happiness.” This book also explores both of these topics in some detail.
However, this is NOT an in-depth analysis of how to run an internet retailer. While IT, inventory, financing, drop shipping, vendor relationships, pricing, etc. are all discussed as the story unfolds, none are covered in any detail. This book is about Tony’s experiences and growth in building Zappos. He does not attempt to instruct you how to do the same.
I enjoyed the book, and learned a number of useful lessons. Tony’s analogies comparing poker and businesses were somewhat of an eye opener. What particularly shocked me was how little preparation or research went into some of their most important decisions. It seems that, at least in Zappo’s case, smart people with the ability to quickly change direction after recognizing a mistake can do as well or better than most companies who do deep analysis and diligence in advance.
Highly recommended insider tale of how Zappos succeeded. Just don’t expect any analysis, because there isn’t any.
Filed under: Personal Finance Book Reviews