Wednesday, June 9, 2010

The Happiness Culture

I saw this cool article called "The Happiness Culture: Zappos Isn't a Company -- It's a Mission" on fastcompany.com. It is a very interesting article about the business culture at an e-commerce company called Zappos and it discusses ideas of CEO, Tony Hsieh who have wrote book on the same topic.

According to the article, here are there main core values of the company.
1. Deliver Wow Through Service
2. Embrace and Drive Change
3. Create Fun and a Little Weirdness
4. Be Adventurous, Creative and Open-Minded
5. Pursue Growth and Learning
6. Build Open and Honest Relationships with Communication
7. Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit
8. Do More with Less
9. Be Passionate and Determined
10. Be Humble

What really made me intriguing is that it's seems a lot similar to Pixar's culture which I discussed in one of my last posts. Apart from the above points they even have a similar training program for all staffs irrespective of the position when they join the company.

Here are few interesting quotes on Hsieh which I found personally interesting

"I think we're just at the beginning where companies are becoming more and more transparent whether they like it or not. People are becoming...just because the information is everywhere and it's pretty hard to control now. So I think moving forward it's going to be only the authentic companies or people can win because everyone else will eventually be outed."

"In the end, the culture is about more than money. "It's not me saying to our employees, this is where our culture is. It's more about giving employees permission and encouraging them to just be themselves."


"There's three types of happiness and really happiness is about being able to combine pleasure, passion, and purpose in one's personal life. I think it's helpful and useful to actually think about all three in terms of how you can make customers happier, employees happier, and ultimately, investors happier."

Take a look at the interview which this article was based on.





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