Hsieh talks about his childhood, education, and lifelong interest in both making money and avoiding things he doesn't like, whether it's working with people who don't get the company culture or practicing the violin. Arguably, that is a model for success: play to your strengths, avoid your weaknesses. (See Daniel Pink's graphic novel, Johnny Bunko.)
Hsieh also talks about his lifelong interest in having fun, whether it's playing a practical joke on his boss or organizing a really great party.
At times, I wondered if the culture of Zappos, with its emphasis on practical jokes, fun and weird stunts (bald and blue, for instance) and its organizing of social fun and personal growth for its employees, was a conscious or unconscious effort to recreate the tribal feeling of college.
This book contains encouragement, it says, for folks who want to revolutionize the culture of their companies. (When it comes to customer service, I certainly agree that there is a need for a revolution.) I also think that writing this book was another inexpensive way to promote the company and I went on the Zappos website after reading the book.
The book is organized into three sections. "Profits" talks about his childhood button-making business, college, and the creation and sale of LinkExchange (when Hsieh was 24), and the beginning of Zappos.
"Profits and Passion" talks about the struggles to grow Zappos to the point where it was profitable, and the mistakes Hsieh and his co-workers made and the lessons they learned. In the aftermath of the dot com implosion and 9/11, Hsieh slashed his marketing budget and to grow his business, began to emphasize selling more to existing customers rather than trying to attract new customers. This led to the decision to open their own warehouse and to emphasize customer service to win loyalty from customers.
"Profits, Passion and Purpose" talks about the sale of Zappos to Amazon and incidentally discusses the importance of having a board and investors who are "on board" with the company culture and its goals and objectives. Hsieh undertook speaking engagements at conferences to help promote the Zappos brand and discovered along the way that there were folks who passionately interested in applying some of Hsieh's management techniques in their own practices, at their own companies. In his description of the announcement of the sale to Amazon to his employees he said:
"It wasn't just about the Kindle or the bonus. Those were just .. bonuses .. The moment signified far more than that. The unified energy and emotion of everyone in the room was not just about my own personal happiness, and not just about the happiness of Zappos employees. We were about much more than just profits and passion. Collectively, this marked the beginning of the next leg of our journey to help change the world."
And, I think that if Zappos continues to grow, Hsieh's model does have the potential will change the world -- to persuade managers that company culture matters -- if Zappos can prove that its success will outlast that of say, Borders.
You should read this book if:
1. You enjoy reading memoirs by successful businesspeople.
2. You enjoy reading leadership books because you hope to learn something that will help you in your own career.
3. You are interested in justifying your existing concern for excellent customer service.
4. You are interested in justifying your existing concern for treating employees well.
5. You are interested in motivation.
6. You are a big fan of Zappos and/or Tony Hsieh.
One of the things that struck me after reading the book was that although Hsieh talked frequently about giving excellent customer service and empowering Zappos' staff to provide it, he didn't talk in much detail about how to do it. He does talk about the fact that you could order an item with rush delivery by midnight and find the item on your doorstep by 8 am the following morning. I can't argue with the excellence of that; he explains that the warehouse is run in such a way that when the order comes in, the picker goes to get it immediately, rather than waiting for orders to collect (which would be more efficient, and cheaper, but would cause customers to wait longer for their items).
This question interests me because I used Zappos twice. I ordered a pair of shoes and when they arrived they were the wrong pair of shoes. I called customer service; they offered to pay for the return of the wrong shoes and invited me to order again. When the new shoes came, they were exactly like the first pair of shoes -- and not the shoes I had ordered. Then I was done. Financially, I was whole. I hadn't paid for shipping. But I'd spent time packing up the shoes and returning them and I'd spent time on the phone with the customer service rep who had not solved my problem. I actually see that as an important function of customer service representatives.
It came up in another context in my reading, recently. In Tom Peters' recent book, The Little Big Things: 163 ways to pursue excellence, he tells a story of an American equipment manufacturer who sold factory equipment to a company in China when trade with China had just opened up. The client reported that the equipment didn't work. Staff members from the American company got on a plane and went to China to fix the problem. They went to great lengths to fix the problem; they apologized for the problem; and they maintained their relationship with their client.
Perhaps these two authors are defining what "customer service" is differently; I'm more comfortable with Tom Peters' ideas.
If you wanted to learn how to teach your own staff to give excellent customer service, you wouldn't get that information by reading this book.
On page 152, Hsieh mentions again that Zappos' customer service orientation was developed as a way to build buzz -- word of mouth -- to compensate for the advertising and marketing they just couldn't afford:
What's the best way to build brand for the long term?
In a word: culture.
At Zappos, our belief is that if you get the culture right, most of the other stuff -- like great customer service, or building a great long-term brand, or passionate employees and customers -- will happen naturally on its own.
Hsieh does provide a revealing email exchange between a customer service representative and a customer that suggests that part of providing excellent customer service is actually acting like a salesman: flattering the customer's ego, being responsive to the customer's concerns, and even mirroring their behavior.
Hsieh touts the ability of his employees to offer free shipping as a perk to win and keep customer loyalty. He said that offering free shipping was expensive but it was, in his view, a marketing investment. I believe that that's true, actually, but think that simply providing folks with the shoes that they want and need is also central and he doesn't explicitly talk about that.
This book was published in 2009 and I'd love to read an update of the company's history to date. I've read that Hsieh "bought" the company back from Amazon. (Amazon's purchase was something between a merger and a sale; Zappos' investors were paid with Amazon stock.)
Hsieh talks about his company's culture, which includes treating customers, vendors, and employees well, as a key ingredient to its success. He presents part of the book as a call to arms, encouraging others to learn from his example and use these lessons in their own businesses, existing or yet to be born. I think that another real purpose of this book is to continue to promote the Zappos brand. Now it's not so much about the product but about the company's culture.
To me, that's not bad. A lot of people, including myself, are excited about behaving in ethical and transparent manner and still having success in the form of profits. Company culture is often neglected - rarely discussed and instead intuited by employees, and not always in a way that serves management and stockholders well. And I strongly agree with Hsieh on his exhortation to recognize your employees early and often, by saying things like "Thank you" and "you did a great job" publicly.
Here's a list of the Zappos core values, taken from their website:
Zappos Family Core Values
As we grow as a company, it has become more and more important to explicitly define the core values from which we develop our culture, our brand, and our business strategies. These are the ten core values that we live by:
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
My comment is that it's pretty hard to argue with these values; they seem self-evidently good. I find myself thinking that some of these "core values" help to "incentivize" (sorry!) employees with fun and acceptance rather than money, and I see that if you can succeed in doing that you can create greater stability for your company and avoid always using money to motivate your employees. If you're a fan of Daniel Pink's work Drive, you'll probably agree with him that money is not the only motivator. I continue to puzzle over the value of "weirdness," and I wonder if its virtue is that it fosters acceptance.
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