Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose
On that page, I came across the book - Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose by Tony Hsieh, the CEO of the online shoe and clothing shop Zappos.
Author: Tony Hsieh
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Table of Contents
How I discovered the book
Once upon a time, when I was too deep in WordPress I wanted to join Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Jetpack, etc. At that time, when I was looking at their ‘Work with Us‘ page, I was intrigued by their job description for Happiness Engineer. After reading through it carefully, I decided that I wanted to become one.
On that page, I came across the book – Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose by Tony Hsieh, the CEO of the online shoe and clothing shop Zappos.
Delivering Happiness Review
To be honest, it was one of the best books I’ve ever read on business, startups, and entrepreneurship. Tony Hsieh reiterates why it is very important for a successful company to be customer-centric and have a healthy company culture at all times.
The book is divided into three sections – Profits, Profits & Passion, and Profits, Passion & Purpose.
Profits
In the first section, Tony describes how his life started – born and raised in an Asian family where getting good marks, being talented, and getting into a good college were all that mattered the most. Also, it was at that time that he realized his interest in making money out of business.
Later as he graduated from Harvard University and got a job at Oracle, he understood that it was not for him and he quit. Then along with one of his friends (Sanjay Madan), he built LinkExchange – a popular internet advertising cooperative, similar in function to a web ring, originally known as Internet Link Exchange or ILE. Later it was acquired by Microsoft for US$265 million.
After selling the company to Microsoft, Tony co-founded Venture Frogs, an incubator and investment firm with his business partner, Alfred Lin. Then Nick Swinmurn brought up the idea of selling shoes online thus paving the way for Zappos. Though initially successful, they had to face a whole lot of hardships and a cash crunch.
Profits and Passion
In this section, the story revolves around how Tony, Nick, Alfred, and Fred turn around the situation at Zappos with the help of Wells Fargo, and later Sequoia Capital, and a few others.
Tony and his friends kept inspiring their employees, defined Zappos’s core values, and cultivated the culture book. Moreover, their customer service is what helped them to grow to become one of the most successful e-commerce stores at that time. What was different from Zappos and other similar companies is that they treated everyone like a family – customers, employees, buyers, and vendors alike.
Here are the ten core values at 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
Profits, Passion, and Purpose
Since Zappos continued doing what they had always done – improving their customer experience while strengthening their culture, they started getting more media coverage and once in a while a popular blogger would pick up something they were doing and the story would go viral making Zappos a household name.
Later, Tony sold Zappos to Amazon in an agreement in which all of the existing shareholders and investors of Zappos will be exchanging their Zappos stock for Amazon stock. But Tony wanted people to see this differently, like ‘Zappos and Amazon sitting in a tree…’ rather than traditional headlines such as ‘Amazon acquires Zappos’ or ‘Zappos sells to Amazon’.
Though Zappos was acquired, it still runs as an independent entity, that is, it is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amazon.
Final Words
For people facing customers each day, Delivering Happiness gives us an example of how relationships should be built with customers and how it will greatly help if employees were allowed to think outside the box rather than following traditional scripts to increase profits by upselling. Overall, it was a great read and I would recommend you read the same.