Seven years ago, writing a book was one of those things I wanted to check off my list of things to do at some point in my life, like running a marathon. So I decided to run a marathon instead, since that seemed like a lot less work. I was motivated to write a book, but wasn’t inspired.
Then we started offering tours of Zapposheadquarters in Las Vegas. Originally, our tours were offered only to our vendors (we work with over 1,000 vendors today), but then word started to spread. Today, we offer tours to the public, because we found that they were a great way to connect on a more personal level with people and have them experience our culture firsthand.
Sometimes, after a tour was over, visitors would ask to learn more about the secret of how we build our culture. The secret is that there are no secrets—we’ve always been very open in sharing how we do things. If, for example, people wanted to learn what our interview questions were and how we evaluated the answers from job candidates, we would ask the head of recruiting to answer their questions.
Over time, as we started to share more and more through tours, speeches, and our Zappos Insights program (www.zapposinsights.com), we started hearing stories back from other companies about how they were inspired to focus more on customer service and company culture even though they were in completely different industries, such as refrigeration repair or bar operations. They reported that despite the challenging economy, revenues and profits were up as a result.
I think 50 years ago, many companies had to choose between maximizing profits and making their customers and employees happy. Today, we live in a hyperconnected world where information travels exponentially faster. I’ve always believed that a company’s brand is just a lagging indicator of its culture—the lag today is just much shorter than it was 50 years ago.
In my book Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose (Grand Central/Business Plus), I discuss how books such as Good to Great and Tribal Leadership researched what separated the great companies (in terms of long-term financial performance) from just the good ones. One important ingredient the great companies had was a higher purpose beyond just revenues, profits, or being #1 in a market (which, it turned out, enabled them to achieve all three of those things).
I also summarize some of the research that’s been done on the science of happiness. One of the findings is that having a higher purpose in life brings more personal happiness and is longer lasting than other types of happiness (such as pleasure and flow).Ultimately, I wanted to write in order to inspire people to focus more on making their customers happier (through better customer service), making their employees happier (by focusing more on company culture), and making themselves happier (by learning more about the science of happiness).
In doing so, I found the higher purpose for both Zappos and myself, and hence the title of the book: Delivering Happiness.
In 1999, at the age of 24, Tony Hsieh (pronounced Shay) sold LinkExchange, the company he cofounded, to Microsoft for $265 million. He then joined Zappos as an adviser and investor, and eventually became CEO, as he helped Zappos grow from almost no sales to over $1 billion in gross merchandise sales annually, while simultaneously making Fortune magazine’s annual “Best Companies to Work For” list. He currently lives in Las Vegas and sort of has a cat.
