On of the highlights for me from South by South West’s Interactive festival this year was the keynote from Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, a $1 billion dollar online business that sells shoes (and quite a few other things). According to Tony Hsieh, backbone of the Zappos success story is its commitment to customer service and to its culture and building a powerful context within which. This culture defines your decisions, those you recruit to fulfil the company vision and (in Zappos case) your customer relationships. At the end of his presentations (some highlights below) he offered to send the audience (yes, all thousands of us) a copy of Zappo’s culture manual. Being ever-conscious of not wanting to waste his money (the company turns over billions did I say?), I decided that since
- I was in Australia and
- both my partner PJ and I were attending
that we’d just put our names down to receive one copy. I wondered whether they’d actually mail it to Sydney. It arrived yesterday and here’s a couple of things.
- It’s a whopper It’s over 500 pages of insider information (including warts and all stories from employees) and covers Training, Merchandising, Business Development etc. – an insight into the culture and values of this powerful organisation. What inspires them to hand out this to thousands of people? Pretty amazing in my eyes.
- It’s compelling reading It’s sitting on our dining table so that we can enjoy bite-size pieces of it over the coming weeksI am a big believer in culture and ritual and identifying what it is that is true and important for you to have in your workplace. As a business owner I am challenged to define the culture and ensure we stay congruent to it. About Zappos Culture In his talk which you can watch if you go here, Tony talked about Culture being your “committable core values” and asked:
Are you willing to hire and fire according to these values?
Here are those that I managed to jot down: 10 Rules of Culture from Zappos
- Deliver Wow through service
- Embrace and drive change
- Create fun and a little weirdness
- Be adventurous, creative and open-minded
- Pursue growth and learning
- Build open and honest relationships with communication
- Build a positive team and family spirit
- Do more with less
- Be passionate and determined
- Be humble Watch the video for a better look at the Zappos organisation.
Oh, and here’s a really bad mug-shot of the two of us. I’d seen Tony the week previously on TV when he was guest on Donald Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice show and on TV he came across quite shy and humble. In real-life he also excuded a humble air which surprised me and which I found interesting, cause people do success so very differently, don’t they?
