Delivering Happiness

book: Delivering Happiness A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose
author: Tony Hsieh

general overview

the book explains how Zappos built great company culture and transformed the customer experience and to go and sell the company to Amazon in 2009 for $1.2B. the theme of the book is that thinking long term and following your passions first can lead to a happy life for you, your employees and your customers.

some takeaways include:

• company culture is more important than customer service
  • employees happiness and ability to be themselves and have fun is what dictates how well the company does with customer service.
• to choose one thing you want to be the best at and then focus on that.
  • Zappos sets out with 1 goal. the 1 goal is to “WOW” customers.
  • they didn’t try to be the cheapest or to have the biggest selection or the rarest shoes. rather, they are trying to WOW their customers.
  • the CEO, Tony, says to never outsource the one thing you’re trying to be great at. you can outsource anything, but not everything.
• invest $0 in marketing and every dollar into your product.
  • Tony says you should re-invest everything you gain into your number 1 skill instead of investing in marketing and sales.
  • they focused on improving their core service so that the press came to them, organically.