Delivering Happiness

Delivering Happiness is Tony Hsieh’s (pronounced Shay) story of how he and a few close friends founded Zappos.com, which they eventually sold to Amazon for $1.2B.

You can learn all about it and buy the book at Delivering Happiness, the website devoted to this philosophy.

Tony Hsieh is an entrepreneur in his soul. He started businesses when he was a kid and when he was in college. He has a great family and got a wonderful education but at the end of the day, its what he did with these great beginnings that sets him apart.

He took this notion of differentiating Zappos as an online retailer of shoes based solely on customer service and morphed it into the idea of delivering happiness.

How to summarize all that? Well how about looking at Zappos’ Core Values? Read them a few times. It will become apparent that they blend together what is important to business and what is important to human beings.

Further when you read the book, you will see that everyone from Tony to all the individual contributors at Zappos live these values. They are not just words. That’s what sets Tony and Zappos apart. That’s why no one can steal or copy their formula for success.

Zappos’ Core Values are:

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
I do have a concern in that Zappos has 10 core values (too many), some of which don’t look like they could fire someone for. What are your values? Do you live them? Do you hire, compensate, celebrate, reward and terminate based on those values?