I don’t know why I’m struck with a little bit of sadness upon hearing about Tony Hsieh’s untimely death. Maybe, it’s because he’s my age. I think it’s because I read his book, Delivering Happiness and still think about some of the things he wrote about as he built Zappos and successfully sold it to Amazon.
I took notes at the time I read it about this time of year, two years ago. My note taking system was a brain dump to a google doc. The notes I took seem irrelevant now except for two or three, as I take time to digest them fully. I’m thankful of what a gift to the world a book can be. Thank you, Tony!
Lessons Learned
He had a internet banner advertising business he could have sold for $1M but he didn’t sell at that point. There’s a lesson there. if you have a business that someone is willing to buy - chances are they see a much larger opportunity than the selling price is projecting. The hard part is figuring what the multiple should be. 5X, 20X, 200X? Tony ended up selling that business for $250M.
He earned $30M and almost lost it all building Zappos. This is another lesson here. No amount of capital can guarantee a businesses success. He was thinking about his business. He learned, he iterated. My notes say: He learned he could not outsource fulfillment and that he iterated the business model five times from drop-shipping to ultimately controlling inventory.
The Most Important Lesson
In the mean time, he also made his company a place where people wanted to work. The one idea that resonated deeply with me, even two years after reading Delivering Happiness, was the idea of career path at Zappos. I didn’t even take notes on it but still think about this idea often. If you worked at Zappos and wanted to get ahead, you had a roadmap for how to do that. Does every employee want such a thing? Not necessarily but it’s immensely valuable to those who do. Simplicity works, Do A, Get B. Do C, get D, etc.
He also paid people to quit if they were unhappy. Someone who endures a hated job will have a hard time delivering happiness. Today on Twitter, @jasonrapp shared an email from Tony Hsieh explaining why a delivery would be late. He encouraged his customers who weren’t experiencing undue hardship but who might be extremely annoyed, to call in and ask the customer service representative to do something weird or embarrassing like sing “I’m a little teacup” or do their best audio impression of a cute little kitten. You can read the Twitter thread here.
As you can see from the thread, not everyone loves this idea, but true to Tony Hsieh’s intention, this sort of thing done by his customer service team was able to deliver happiness. If your employees can have a little fun, your clients will benefit too.
In the end, making things simple was one of Tony Hsieh’s gifts. He thought about happiness and described it thus.
Happiness is really just about four things: perceived control, perceived progress, connectedness (number and depth of your relationships) and vision/meaning ( being part of something bigger than yourself.)”
Thanks to @garrytan for sharing this on Twitter.
Zappos was Tony Hsieh’s successful experiment that was able to test his happiness theory - some of the examples above illustrated how these principles were worked. The Zappos career path gave some control and a measurement of progress. He gave the control to self-select if the Zappos culture was for you or not. Some might attest that Zappos representatives connected deeply with their customers. The career roadmap to something bigger than just a job but a possible long-term role in an endeavor that was much greater than simply selling shoes.
Tony Hsieh, I didn’t know you but I thank you for your work and for sharing that work with the world. You will be missed.