Interview with Tony Hsieh by Chris Sacca at Wisdom 2 0

[Music] we'd like to present our next speaker tony shea who in 1999 at the age of 24 sold link exchange the company he co-founded to microsoft for 265 million he then joined zappos as an advisor and investor and eventually became ceo where he helped zappos grow from almost no sales to over 1 billion in gross merchandise sales annually while simultaneously making fortune magazine's annual list of best companies to work for in november 2009 zappos was acquired by amazon.com in a deal valued at 1.2 billion on the day of closing his first book delivering happiness a path to profits passion and purpose will be published on june 7th please note that tony shea's speech will actually now be taking the form of an interview with chris saka so please welcome tony shea and chris sacca [Applause] yeah i learned about this new format about three minutes before you did actually so uh so tony and i have been friends for a long time actually and quite intimate friends um but ninety percent of our friendship really isn't appropriate for a public setting i figure so this wasn't an exercise in like what to ask it was an exercise and what not to ask um but we're at this conference it's it's about zen it's about awareness it's about questions and so i want to start right off and ask you tony if a uh if a tree falls in the forest does it no seriously um you're the ceo of zappos a company that i i deeply admire i think from afar most of our interaction with that company is you know it's it's almost religious experience for those of us who buy stuff there because the customer service goes to a level unparalleled at any other company in the world and as i got to know the company i realized like that actually is not an accident that's a core part of the strategy and it goes through all uh every everything the employees do et cetera and um and so i'd love to just kind of understand what was the path to being ceo of zappos you know i know you're involved in other companies before you'd already made a bunch of money even how did you become ceo zappos why did you become ceos at bose yeah so um i i guess i entrepreneurial all my life i've run mail order businesses and pizza businesses and was doing the lemonade stand thing when i was a kid and in 1996 a college roommate and i uh actually who we were in college but in college i ran a pizza business with them together and uh and then after graduating from college went to work for oracle and found that that you know the corporate environment wasn't right for me so we started a company called link exchange which uh this was in 1996 during that first.com boom and we grew that to about 100 or so people and then ended up selling the company to microsoft in 1998 but what a lot of people don't know is actually the reason why we ended up selling the company it's because the company culture just went completely downhill i remember when it was just five or ten of us and it was a lot of fun it was kind of like your typical.com we were working around the clock sleeping under our desks but we didn't know any better to pay attention to company culture and so we ended up hiring people that had all the right skill sets and experiences but they weren't necessarily culture fits and by the time i we were at 100 people i myself dreaded getting out of bed in the morning and going to the office and that was kind of a weird feeling because this was a company that i co-founded in if i myself didn't feel like going to the office i wondered how all the other employees felt so after selling the company i quit shortly thereafter and um alfred was our cfo nco today who you know as well we formed an investment fund and invested in about 20 or so different internet companies and zappos just happened to be one of them but over the course of a year i realized that investing for me was pretty boring um wait you're an investor now right so so pretty boring for me but good for certain other people and um and so i i really miss being hands on actually part of building something so uh zappos at the time was the most interesting and most fun of all the companies we were involved with so i ended up joining full-time within a year this was 99 to 2000 and i've been with zappos ever since so you you take the helm of this company and um you hadn't really done retail since the pizza business type stuff but you're shipping shoes and you've got actual investors this is a company you know backed by investors like sequoia famous vcs who want to see returns on their investment that kind of stuff and yet for you one of the most primary motivations for doing this is to build a company culture that that eclipses the stuff that made you miserable at link exchange and so you know as i've visited i've been you know i've visited zappos i've been interacting with their culture for a while it's entirely unique and so one of the things you guys do is you hire different than any other company i've ever seen in the world so talk a little bit about that hiring that practice and how you actually relate that to anything tangible in terms of results in the company yes so we actually do two sets of interviews for everyone that's hired and it doesn't matter what position you can be an accountant or lawyer or software developer and so the first set is kind of the standard the hiring manager and his or her team will interview for technical ability uh relevant experience fit within the team but then our hr department does a separate set of interviews purely for culture fit and they have to pass both in order to be hired so we've actually passed on a lot of really smart talented people that we know can make an immediate impact on our top or bottom line but if they're not a culture fit then we won't hire them and so the way we've formalized the definition of our culture is we have 10 core values and we actually have interview questions for each and every one of those core values and and we actually didn't always have have the core values we didn't roll out our core values until maybe four or five years into it and it was something that most of us myself included kind of resisted because it seemed like one of those big corporate things to do and you know a lot of companies have they might call them core values or guiding principles or so on but the problem is usually they're very lofty sounding and they read kind of like a press release that the pr department put out and maybe you learn about it on day one of orientation but then it just becomes this meaningless plaque on the wall and so we wanted to come up with a set of core values that we could actually commit to and by committing meaning that we hire and fire we're willing to hire and fire people based on whether they're living up to those core values regardless of their job performance and our performance reviews are 50 based on whether they're living or inspiring the core values and others so coming up with the list of core values was actually a pretty tough thing when you think of it in that framework and it took us a year i basically emailed out to send an email to the entire company and said what should our core values be got a whole bunch of responses back and we went back and forth for a year and finally came up with our list of 10. so um probably the core value that trips us up the most in the hiring or interview process is uh core value number 10 which is be humble and um because there's a lot of really smart talent people out there that are also really egotistical and so at most companies probably what would happen would be oh you know this if you interviewed someone like that they see well you know this person might be annoying and rub you the wrong way a lot of times but he can add a lot of value so therefore we should hire that person whereas at zappos it's not even a question we just won't hire them and a lot of it comes from not just what happens in the office but we're located in las vegas and next time many of you are in las vegas we actually give tours to the public monday through thursdays and if you go to tours.zappos.com you can just sign up right there so we'll pick you up in a zappos shuttle and give you a tour and then drop you off off at your hotel or wherever you want to go in las vegas and so we do the same thing for candidates and a lot of them we end up relocating but what they don't realize is actually uh the the interview kind of begins when they get picked up by the shuttle driver and then afterwards um you know the recruiting team will go back and ask the shuttle driver how are you treated when the candidate thought you were he was off the off the clock yeah [Applause] and uh and so so for each and i'll uh give you an example of some of our interview questions um one of our questions is well one of our core values is about being creative adventurous and open-minded and we one of our interview questions is on a scale one to 10 how lucky are you in life one is i don't know why bad things always seem to happen to me 10 is i don't know why good things always seem to happen to me well what's the right answer well um don't worry we'll keep it we won't tell anyone the right answer is 8.63 so no but well we don't want to hire the ones because they're bad luck and we don't want to bring bad luck too but this was actually inspired by a research project i had read about several years ago that actually asked that same question and um to a random group of people so they got answers all over the board and uh someone's some tens and a bunch in between but then afterwards they had them do a task and the task was to go through a newspaper and count the number of photos that were in that newspaper and then tell the researcher the answer afterwards well what they didn't know was that it was actually a fake newspaper and sprinkled throughout the newspaper where these headlines that would say things like if you're reading this headline now you can stop the answers 37 plus you'll collect an extra 100 and what they found was that the people that consider themselves unlucky in life generally never noticed the headlines they just went through the task at hand and you know eventually came up with the right answer and the people that consider themselves lucky in life generally stopped early made an extra hundred dollars so the takeaway isn't so much that people are inherently lucky or unlucky but more that luck is about being open to opportunity beyond just how the task or situation presents itself so that's why we asked that question so you also asked another question which blew me away when i first heard it and i and it's fun too because when i you know when i've gotten close to your company it's always i always hear this from executives and not necessarily just folks you know throughout the culture but one of the executives the head of hr told me like one of your key questions is you ask people how weird they are and so they scale themselves on one to ten on how weird they are what do you learn from that well if you're one you're probably a little bit too straight-laced for the zappos culture uh if you're ten too psychotic maybe for us um but one of one of our core values is uh it create fun in a little weirdness and um our belief is that everyone's a little weird and really it's just a fun way of saying that we really recognize and celebrate each person's individuality and we want their true personalities to shine in the workplace whether it's with co-workers or with the way to interact with customers on the phone so if you're a customer and you call us you know we don't have we run our call center very differently from most call centers we don't have scripts we don't have we don't measure how long they've been on the phone there's no quota of calls or anything like that like senior call center blows my mind yeah most call centers have this concept of average handle time which is about basically how quickly can you get the customer off the phone because it's all about maximizing for the call center efficiency whereas we're trying to we really view the telephone as one of the best branding devices out there because we have the customers undivided attention for five or ten minutes and on average and if we get the interaction right then they remember that for a very long time and tell their friends and family about it so we've actually had phone calls lasting as long as six hours i'm not sure how the bathroom situation worked out for that one but um but yeah we'll stay on the phone as as long as possible and uh you know customers call for most calls actually aren't don't result in sales but we're not trying to maximize every transaction we're trying to build a lifelong relationship with our customers so customers might call because they need to uh it's their first time going through the return process and they're not sure exactly how to do that or they need they just wanted advice for a wedding they might go to this weekend and i think we have some customers call just because they're lonely and we'll talk to them tell us uh tell us a very touching story about um you empower your your customer service representatives i mean first of all you put your phone number on every single page your website so every other website you go on the internet hides the phone number right so you really i mean you're walking the walk you put it on every single page we're actually thinking of changing it to your cell phone number i am kind of lonely i appreciate that thanks for looking out uh no so a very touching story i heard about the extent to which a customer service representative once went to take care of a woman who is grieving do you remember the story i'm talking about yeah well i haven't heard you tell this in like three or four years so yeah probably well we actually have an a number of similar things but i think the one you're talking about was uh was probably the one that somehow wound up on a on a blog and then ended up on the consumerist website so that's how that happened but a woman uh so so we do this thing where which is not advertised but if you order a pair of shoes from us and it's let's say it's not the wrong size if you call us to ask for an exchange we'll actually send you out the replacement pair before we get the original one back and just trust you know the customer will will do the right thing we just say you know try to send it back within two weeks and um and we won't charge you anything in in addition and so a woman had done that and 14 days had passed and and she still hadn't returned the shoes so one of our reps called up and just to remind them that we were we're still waiting and want to know if she you know she needed help with anything and it turned out that she had her mom had just passed away during those two weeks and so obviously it just slipped her mind and so the rep took it upon herself to send the woman flowers and just to show our condolences as as a company and you know we don't have a process or procedure for that but we also don't have uh you know most companies you need supervisor approval or to do really anything whereas we empower all of our reps to just do whatever they feel is right and uh and and we trust their judgment so when the woman received them you know she was so touched that you know a company would actually care and um and so at the funeral a couple days later uh she told the 50 you know friends and family that were there and so now not only is that woman a customer for life but all her friends and family are as well and so it's that type of thing where you know our goal is to create personal emotional connections with each and every customer one interaction at a time and we get thousands and thousands of phone calls and emails every day and so that's just one story but the great thing in in the way we think of building our brand is really just create these stories uh one phone call at a time one email at a time thousands and thousands of times every single day yeah i mean so you guys have actually been a big influence on our culture at twitter uh i think you first came and visited the company when we were about 15 or 16 people and really started coaching us and it's always weird when you're taking advice from people who are kind of your peers and stuff but you learn so much and i think you know evan williams gets a lot of credit for realizing from day one that culture really is the driving force of these things and if the first 50 people you hire are going to set the path for the rest of the people you hire and if you don't get that right and if you don't get the right attitude towards your customers dialed in right away it's going to be tough you know so so your weirdness in the in the twitter culture became uh best expressed by biz the co-founder who said that we hire for humor and for us biz put it that that we hire for humor because humor is a delivery vehicle for the truth and that that's what makes things funny and that's why fox news doesn't have a daily show but what's what's amazing is that beyond kind of the fuzziness of this stuff and that you know the touchy-feely like happiness type stuff like you and and your counterpart alfred who's a really good friend of mine is the ceo and cfo and kind of responsible for making the trains run on time both illustrated that this is actually really good business and that even as a die-hard capitalist treating customers this way is good business so one of the illustrations i remember from the first time you showed it to me was the return policy so basically you guys cover free shipping both ways anyone can return stuff but how can you afford something like that and still make money in a business yeah a lot of the things that i mean people ask us that about for example the call center stuff we were just talking about or uh we run our warehouse 24 7 even though that's not actually the most efficient way to run a warehouse the most efficient way is to let the orders pile up so the picker doesn't have to walk as far and then things like the free shipping both ways or we do surprise upgrades to overnight shipping for most of our loyal repeat customers and you know all of that added up is very expensive but our whole philosophy is let's take most of the money that we would have spent on paid advertising or paid marketing and instead invested into the customer experience invested into our culture [Applause] and then let the customers do the marketing for us through word of mouth and so we grew from no sales in 1999 to we're now doing over a billion in gross merchandise sales every year and the number one driver of that growth has been through repeat customers and word of mouth on any given day about 75 of our orders are from repeat customers so so can you quantify people who return stuff do they come back and buy more next time yeah and so we've actually studied the return rates because because uh sometimes uh when sequoyah was an investor they would ask you know what can you do to get the return rate down and we said that's actually not our goal what uh we want actually it's it's less about getting the return rate down and it's more about actually getting customers to stop thinking of returns as a bad thing but the shipping back and forth is the service and so kind of like netflix where that's what you do the is just the back and forth shipping and so when we've studied the re the you know different classes of customers in terms of their return rate we actually found that the customers that return more often percentage-wise are actually our best customers they end up spending more dollars total on on a net basis per year than the customers that don't return as often so being good is good business uh being good is great business nice all right so we're not going to plug from stage but hypothetically speaking if you had a new book coming out on june 7th available in bookstores everywhere and on amazon.com and things like that and we're called delivering happiness um well first first what what should people in this room do if they want to get a copy of this book actually hypothetical this is a legend well hypothetically if uh if we were to try to do something commercial here they would go to bookstores to buy it on june 7th but um because we're not trying to do something commercial here we've actually arranged for everyone here to get a free copy free advanced so wait so they get a free copy on june 7th uh but no there's more if they act within the next 30 minutes then um no we actually have a bunch of advanced copies that is normally reserved for the media uh outside so after we're done talking you guys can all take all right so you gave me this book when not this particular one but a copy of this book when we were down at the ted conference and the ted conference you already stay up late and you kind of you're stuck talking with people and i think i got back to my room around 1 30 in the morning and i probably had a couple drinks in me and i open this thing up and i read it and i get to bed finally around 5 30 in the morning the more you drink the better i mean it was a very it was a legitimately good read and i spoke to jen who helped you write it and co-edit and you know just kind of push the process along and stuff like that and i was just blown away by um by the book but one of the questions i have is so assuming everyone here is going to read this book you and i both come from this electronic world we're tweeting we blog you you've got some amazing blog posts you've wrote one that i want to talk about in a second that really touched a lot of us on twitter but you had to kind of commit this to dead trees a while ago so you had to send in a manuscript months ago and it's kind of been locked and ink for a while what have you learned in the process of talking to people about this book has anything in here changed or are you realizing now you left anything out um no nothing i mean nothing in there has really changed but i guess what i have realized so basically we finished uh working on it and and the way the book's a combination of uh it's probably i don't know maybe three quarters stuff that i wrote and then and then there's 10 or 12 uh contributions from third parties mostly zappos employees so jen helped look through all the different contributions we we had and then edit them and put it together into the book and um and so just we finished it last year and um and then just over the past i know it's i guess it's been four or five months now uh just it's more about oh yeah there was that other story that we forgot to tell or oh you know and oh this would have been really good to include in and so what we're actually doing is we have a website for the book deliveringhappinessbook.com where uh the plan is as we hear these additional stories um not just old stories but the really cool thing is the the book is about really that you can combine happiness with you know it used to be that maybe 50 years ago you had to choose between profits and happiness of whether of employees or customers and the book is really about there's another way actually where you can make employees happy make customers happy and make investors happy and and so what's been really cool is some people that have read the advanced copy of the book have emailed me and told me that because of that they've gone and changed their culture at their company or focused more on customer service at their company but not only have they done that but then they come back a couple months later and say uh and you know now sales are are increasing and growing faster than before profits are going faster than before and everyone's just happier so it's so those types of stories we want to put on the website uh especially after the the book is officially out just because a common reaction we get a lot of times is okay zappos you're an internet company you guys have special you know rules all dot coms are kind of weird and and so on and uh but then i get stories like the atlanta refrigeration company where uh they they're based in atlanta and they go they have people out in the field doing refrigerator repairs so almost you can't think of a more different company than zappos and yet they've been able to [Music] implement some of the things that are in the book and it's just really exciting to uh to hear stories like that and ultimately the book is about trying to start a movement where it's not just about my happiness or the happiness of zappos employees or customers but really just spreading this idea of happiness as a guiding principle for how to run companies and still make money to uh to other companies how did you end up on happiness why isn't it clarity or quality or peace or something like that how did it become happiness um i think originally it was just a couple years ago i personally just got interested in reading articles and books about this field called positive psychology about the science of happiness and originally was just a hobby but then realized that it's actually what we were doing at zappos we were trying to make customers happy we're trying to make employees happy and we apply that same philosophy to vendors as well so basically the vision of zappos changed from about being focusing on customer service to uh after that it was oh let's focus on culture as our number one priority and then the customer service will be a natural byproduct of that and then now it's really just about uh happiness and you know and and that's the uh and hence the coincidentally the title of the book that may or may not be coming out on june 7 bookstores everywhere so so and by the way i'm going to take a couple questions from the audience in a minute but uh you you wrote a blog post that i mean a lot of people don't read blogs anymore now the tweets are out there or they use tweets to filter blog posts but you wrote one that i think was one of the most meaningful blog posts i'd read for me maybe it's two years ago now but it was i'm going to paraphrase the title is basically why twittering makes me a better and happier person and and you do you still require all your employees to be on twitter uh we don't require them but we teach twitter as part of the new hire orientation that everyone goes through and then it's up to them whether they want to use it or not but so tell tell us about that blog post i mean because it really deeply resonated with me and as i explained to people why twitter meant something to me and the energy i got from it i found myself pointing to your blog post a lot but so i guess you know in a way you know it started out with um we're just thinking about okay when i tweet something out like it has to be some so my twitter username is zappos and so whenever i tweet something out it needs to be something that is representative of the zappos brand and uh and and so it's kind of evolved a little bit since the blog post but basically i try to send out uh at least one tweet a day and the goal of each of the tweets i send out is to fall into one of four categories which uh i use the acronym ic icee and basically the goal is for each tweet to either inspire connect uh educate or entertain and you know ideally some of the tweets will do more than just just one of those things and so um [Music] you know when i guess we approach twitter very differently from most companies that are on twitter we don't use think of it as a marketing channel we think of it as a relationship building channel and it's a great way for employees to connect with each other and you know in terms of how custom customers or whoever is following me on twitter the goal is more just to over time form a formal picture of who i am and who we are at zappos and and so a lot of uh you know people that aren't on twitter don't really see the value of of twitter because they ask well what can you know in 140 characters how how meaningful can we be and the way i kind of think about it is any one tweet isn't gonna be that meaningful but if you think of tweets as say dots on a piece of paper uh putting enough dots dots there over time it'll eventually form a picture or an outline of of who you are it's amazing yeah so your cat tweets follow the same principles um my cat is uh it's weird um uh it's it's sometimes tweets but it tends to be more darker than did we just move you on the weird scale from like a five to a six or like a five to an eight uh my cat yeah so so um we talked earlier on in our earlier panel a lot about productivity how do we how do we handle all this information flow et cetera i mean you have taken a very unique approach to twitter and that you follow back most of the people who who follow you so you're following tens of thousands of people and you've made it possible for all of them to connect to you directly you also very publicly give away your email address and so you're like intensely reachable by folks how do you manage all that um it's uh well for twitter actually it's changed a little bit because originally the reason why i followed everyone back was because if i didn't follow them back then they had no way of direct messaging me but uh you know through through the folks at twitter they actually set my account to a special status so anyone can direct message me now without me following them back so i actually don't follow everyone that follows me back but what i do do is anyone that mentions zappos uh in their tweet i i basically every day several times a day will do a search a twitter search for zappos and i'll read every single single one of those so anyone that wants to get a hold of me can either mention zappos or um or direct message me and you got how many followers right now uh i don't know well you have the laptop 1.6 million huh but it's not a i don't know i i guess that's not really a real number um because a lot of that was from when twitter had the whole suggested uh follower or users thing um but uh in terms of emails yeah i if you call our call center or ask ask anyone everyone's instructed to give out my email address um and so the way i've managed that because it's definitely you know hard to scale is i will i will re read every single email but i won't necessarily personally respond to every email but we make sure someone does respond and so we actually have a small team that we call the ceo team so that if someone emails me then if if it's a question that's been asked before because ninety percent of the emails are similar questions then uh and a great example is we get interview requests all the time and so we just ask them email us the questions whether it's from media a lot of them are college students taking a business class or something and so we want to make sure we answer all of them so the way we've scaled that is when they email into questions the co team will go through and see if that question's been asked before and if it's been asked before we have a database of the answers i've given in the past and then they copy and paste that so it's still my words and it's not someone pretending to be me and they and they reply with you know part of the co team and uh and you know here are tot below are tony's responses to your questions and then when there's a question that hasn't been asked before then they'll forward it to me and i'll personally type a response and then that gets added to the database so slowly over time just building up a database of answers that i've actually answered so you have this very unique culture inside everyone sits in cubicles you sit in a cubicle there are no private offices every team as you go on the zappos tour every single team has a theme uh as you walk by their cubes they will perform for you um not kidding um the the i.t manager puts on a sombrero and a poncho and plays a guitar i mean there's one team of people who scream they need more cowbell and they start doing a whole performance for you it's a very unique culture but one of the things that blew my mind is tell me about as we think about productivity as we think about how not to steal people's attention etc tell me about emails in which somebody replies all uh yeah so i think this is a problem at every company probably where you know someone replies at all and you know one way to address that is just don't allow people to email company-wide mailing lists and we didn't want to we didn't want to do that so what we've done instead is if someone accidentally replies all we have this thing called a reply to all hat which is like kind of a dunce and then we'll actually there's this big ceremony where uh we actually have like you know 10 or 15 people whoever happens to be around grab the dunce cap and then go over and like force the person to lead a parade of reply to all um and then we actually catch all that on camera and then and then we post it on our blogs so um people only make that mistake once do you guys sell the reply all hats because i think you've got to probably actually um we actually do and they sold out and so we're actually reordering them they may i don't know if they're replenished you can search that or reply down so we're out of time but i do have one more question because you talked about being a movement and this is something that the first couple times i heard you say it kind of went one ear and out the other and it's something we've really tried to take to heart and twitter and a lot of the other companies i work with but you have a book called tribal leadership it's not your book but you have a book called tribal leadership that you basically send to all of your friends i might have two copies from you but that's because we're very close friends yeah but but so this book though just talk about the basic hierarchy of why we work and how we work because that that was really deep once i finally got my hands on that in terms of how well why do people work you mean the five levels that they described so so interestingly enough the author of tribal leadership is actually uh gonna be here in half an hour uh because we're downstairs we're doing this live stream thing from uh i think seven seven to eight pm tonight you do a virtual happy hour to celebrate delivering happiness every friday wherever you are in the world you stream out a happy hour over the internet and thousands of people join and they toast you over the internet and you talk yep and uh and then we have different guests and so dave logan who's one of the authors of tribal leadership is one of our guests today and um and so he describes people and organizations as having five they put classified themselves in one of five levels and level one uh kind of the language they use is uh life just sucks in gen in general for everyone and you kind of see that type of culture and thinking in uh say prison populations or uh inner city for example and and then level two the class the language represented there is my life sucks but there's recognition that there are other people's lives out there that are that do not suck and then level three which is what you find in most of corporate america uh the language you hear is i'm great but because you're not and so there's a lot of you know behavior wise those types of people are the ones that really think of information as power and and don't like to share and try to build a lot of uh uh they're kind of like your typical networker they try to build a lot of one-on-one relationships whether it's with the people they work with or uh anyone that might help them out in business so if uh for example if this were all a cocktail party uh i would and i was level three person then i would go out and basically try to exchange business cards with everyone and hoping that i'll meet someone who can benefit me and you know maybe i can pay back somehow and so it'll be a really relationship but then the level four uh leaders and companies and cultures the uh language there is we're great and so there's this concept of uh we're in this together and the behavior that you see at whether it's organizationally or at um let's say this word cocktail party would be if i meet you and then i meet you and find out that you two have something in common or can help each other out what i would do is introduce you to the to each other and then move on to the next person and so they actually describe the level three behaviors really uh they create a lot of they call it dyad's one-on-one relationships whereas the level four behavior they create triads and so it's a three-person relationship and so the goal and the other interesting thing about triads is the role of each person in a three-person relationship is to make sure that the relationship between the other two people is strong that's the third person's responsibility and then that applies to each person and so kind of the example that they like to give is uh when two parents are fighting you know the little kid comes along and says mommy daddy stop fighting and so the kid is just instinctually playing his role in a triatic relationship so there's actually a lot of um uh things where we uh we're actually implementing a lot of that stuff in zappos in terms of trying to see how we can create more triadic relationships cross-apartmentally across level and just in general within the company and then level five the language is life's great and so for level four it's uh from the company's perspective it's uh we as a company are great and we're going to crush the competition whereas for level five they're the example they give is uh amgen whenever they study damgen if you ask them at the time who's your competition the answer was not you know this other biotech company the answer is oh our competition is cancer for example and so level five is really about trying to uh it's not it's not about us versus them it's about kind of this higher purpose uh thing and what the research has shown you know both from tribal leadership and good to great is another uh book that we have our employees read what they found is that what separated the great companies from the good ones in terms of long-term financial performance were two things one was having very strong cultures and what they found is it actually doesn't matter what the culture is what matters is that they have strong cultures that they have core values and they commit to them so that was one thing and the other thing was that they found that the great companies all had a higher vision or purpose beyond just money or profits or being number one in the market and so it's kind of ironic where it's um if you actually if money is not your primary motivation in the long run you actually end up making more money and i guess the way i i kind of uh think of an analogy was uh like kind of like when we were in middle school or or high school and like the like chasing after a girl like if you if you're too nicer than uh going directly after the girl then um then you won't get the girl whereas if you're is that what i is that what i messed up but if you you know poetry the chocolates the but the guy who actually ends up attracting all the girls in you know middle school or high school is the one who actually you know at least gave the image of not karen not being as into the girl and then that somehow attracts all the girls so well i i mean zappos it took me a while to kind of get my head around it but zappos really is a mission it's a mission-driven company and and the people who work there feel like they're part of a movement that they're changing the envelope of customer service and i think you know you i can't understate the impact you guys have had on on me on on twitter on the way we think of you know i think you directly influenced our mission statement of be a force for good and uh and so it's always been a pleasure to know you and work with you and so and thanks for coming here and thanks for sharing with everyone you

Channel: Wisdom 2.0

Views: 2,504

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Id: f42iiZLHC3w

Length: 44min 2sec (2642 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 03 2020