Tony Hsieh died a few days ago, he was one of the founders and the chief executive of Zappos, the shoe company in the United States who changed the face of online retailing from 1999 onwards.
He was a fascinating guy, not just in how he constructed a business which was as much about the people who worked for the business as it was for the customers (and became the 23rd best business to work for in the world but a long way from the biggest) but he also did provide huge investment into his own neighbourhood through the money that he'd gained and the experience that he had acquired.
He also wrote a book called Delivering Happiness: A Path to profits, passion and purpose but the majority of the book is dedicated to the fact that if you don’t look after the people who work for you then you’ll never have a business worth worrying about.
In the end he sold Zappos to Amazon for 1.2 billion dollars and initially that made me think that he was a terrible guy for selling his business on to someone like Jeff Bezos but it seems he was able to dance with the devil and ensure the culture at Zappos remained and flourished under the parent company of Amazon. Perhaps it is the modern way, perhaps dancing with a devil like Amazon is what we have to learn.
If you listen to the start of Delivering Happiness on audiobook as read by Hsieh, he talks about how he didn’t have a ghost-writer and he just wrote the book the way he talks and apologized to his high school English teachers.
The future of communication might well lie in authenticity and authenticity comes from saying what you feel and probably not getting your semicolons in the right place.
Blog Post Number - 2573