Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, created a corporate culture a world away from most of the companies you could look at. But Zappos was not the first entrepreneurial effort Hsieh created, by a long shot. Instead, it was the result of an entrepreneurial career that he has chronicled in Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose. There were some failures along the way — a worm farm when Hsieh was young resulted in not much more but a box of dirt — but in, whole, Hsieh seems to have figured out the mechanics of running a business early on.
Beyond the Mechanics
In Delivering Happiness, it’s not hard to see that Hsieh’s grasp of business made Zappos (and whatever may yet be in store for the young CEO) possible. Hsieh, along with co-founder Sanjay Madan, created LinkExchange and solid it to Microsoft for $265 million. Much of Hsieh’s portion of the proceeds of the LinkExchange wound up invested in Zappos: the book chronicles not only Hsieh’s personal history before Zappos but also shows how close Zappos came to not succeeding.
The company was founded in 1999 by Nick Swinmurn, who pitched Hsieh and the investment fund he had created with other members of LinkExchange’s team after the sale. But pretty soon, Hsieh was adding to that investment from his personal savings, selling off property to raise money for the company and generally throwing his own financial future behind the success of Zappos. He also joined the company as CEO, adding the benefit of his business savvy. It wasn’t until 2003 that the company was able to get outside funding. By the way, Zappos did $60 million in business that year. Suffice it to say that the company relied heavily on Hsieh’s involvement to reach that point.
Hsieh has applied lessons learned in the other businesses he’s founded and worked with at Zappos: the company’s culture is a priority, landing it time and again on lists of the best workplaces in America. In Delivering Happiness, Hsieh explores how he and his team developed that culture and how they continue to maintain it (even after selling Zappos to Amazon in a deal valued at about $1.2 billion).
A Worthwhile Read
While Delivering Happiness is a good read for any small business owner, it isn’t the typical business book you might expect. The feel of the book is ‘here, this is how we did it.’ There’s no guarantee that if you follow the same approaches Hsieh used that you’ll get the same results. But Hsieh is able to show what his employees’ responses were to specific changes made in Zappos’ approach, pulling in emails written at the time as well as including passages written by different members of the company.
All of this adds up to a book that gives a clear picture of why Hsieh has succeeded and plenty of ideas on how you can mimic that success. If nothing else, it will shift your view on what corporate culture has to mean.
Image — Delivering Happiness
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Tags: corporate culture, delivering happiness, tony hsieh, zappos
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