Lessons on Company Culture from Tony Hsieh, CEO Zappos.com

We all know Tony Hsieh(pronounced Shay) as the author of “Delivering Happiness” and the CEO of Zappos.Com, Inc. Within Zappos, he is credited to create such a strong company culture that helped him achieve unprecedented results. After Tony joined Zappos.com as an advisor and investor, and eventually became CEO, he helped the company grow from almost no sales to over $1 billion in gross merchandise sales annually, while simultaneously making Fortune magazines annual Best Companies to Work For list.  Numbers don’t lie and Zappos’s  tremendous growth in sales is a clear testimony of what a company’s culture will do to it’s bottom line.

We came across a really interesting talk given by Tony to Google folks, shortly after the release of his book “Delivering Happiness”.  Here’s our collection of best sentences from the 1 hour long presentation:

> The Philosophy is, let’s take most of the money we would spend on paid advertising and paid marketing, instead invest in customer experience and let customers do the marketing for us.

> With what a lot of e-commerce companies, what we’ve noticed is that most of their investment is around what happens in order to get the customer’s credit card, we focus on what happens after we get the credit card number from the customer.

> As Low Tech and Unsexy it might sound, Telephone is still one of the best branding device, because you will get undivided customer attention for 5-10 minutes. What we found is that if we get the customer interaction right, they will remember it for a very long time.

> It doesn’t matter what your core values are, as long as you “commit” to them

>Great Businesses are the ones that combine Profits, Passion and Purpose

Want to watch the entire talk?  Here you go!