The Mastermind of 'Delivering Happiness'

hello and thank you for calling zappos.com sales associates dressed as barmaid how's everyone doing are you being safe spider-man in the cafeteria Oh Racing toy cars in the middle of the office what's going on here welcome to the zoo what you are witnessing is a social experiment by Tony Hsieh the entrepreneur and mastermind behind zabbix the online shoe company his revolutionary way of running a business has made sappers into a 1.2 billion dollar powerhouse and he got there with the guiding principle great things will happen if you make employees it's like a playground I mean they're balloons there are whistles does that help business we think it's important for employees to have fun and that drives employee engagement at companies with strong cultures tend to outperform the ones that don't have strong cultures Shea's hugely successful company sells over a thousand brands of shoes and just about every style size and color ship 24-hours a day as many as you like and it's free shipping both ways at Zappos headquarters in Henderson Nevada outside of Las Vegas know our corporate cubicles here instead employees are cheerful and down like zany and no CEO corner office instead Tony Shea sits in the middle in his own cubicle next to his assistant you want your people you'll hire to be in your words a little weird what does that mean one of our core values is to create fun in a little weirdness we really recognize and celebrate each person's individuality and what their true personality is shine in the workplace Tony Shea has been a maverick from an early age the son of Taiwanese parents with high expectations my parents want me to get good grades and eventually become a lawyer or a doctor word but Tony launched his own little B billion before he had double digits your parents wanted you to learn musical instruments but you deceived them what did you do I really did not enjoy playing musical instruments so I would play recordings of me playing the piano while my parents were song bed so they thought I was practicing do you play any instruments today I can pretend to shave began to show an instinct for business at just 9 years old I had this idea of buying a lot of worms and then I would grow my own and then I could eventually sell well what happened maybe a week or two later all the worms had escaped so that was the end of my worm farm business good grades got him into all the top universities but he went with his parents choice of it you didn't go to any classes how come the store got A's reading the material on my own or getting notes from friends is it true that one of your courses was Mandarin Chinese but you already spoke Mandarin Chinese yes I was first year Mandarin Chinese I don't know whether we should be very proud of you or whether you're going to tell young people you have got a college and never go to school I actually encouraged them to take the money they would have spent on college to start businesses instead if your ultimate goal is to be an entrepreneur not one to let college get in the way of promise che made fast money selling fast food got on the subway when one stopped by frozen McDonald's burgers and took a taxi back and cook them and sold them to students how much money did you make five or ten thousand dollars after graduating che his first big move was launching an advertising website from his basement called link exchange it grew quickly but so did Tony's unhappiness as I got more successful that's when you didn't want to do it anymore why not wasn't a fun place to work at anymore so you sold it how much did you get when you sew link exchange 265 million he was set for life but then someone approached him with the idea of selling shoes online you said sounded like the poster child of bad internet ID you are not interested in shoes I'm actually still not interested in shoes it was the most exciting business from a growth perspective and I really like the people there Shay jumped on board a CEO and this time he would build his company differently I definitely do not want to repeat the same mistake I've made at my previous company where the company culture just went downhill if I was going to go into an office every day I might as well go into an office with people I would choose to be around not be around purely just for business reasons Shay is evangelical about making sure his employees are happy offering free food in the cafeteria covering all medical benefits and even supplying a life coach to help employees reach their goals I just was accepted to the brand marketing internship oh that is awesome great congratulations Fortune magazine named Zappos one of the top ten companies to work for there are some rowdy folks feel free to take pictures and video as we go around and the business world is taking notice don't mind the silly string folks it's superhero week employees and other companies often show up at Zappos headquarters taking tours and trying to understand what makes a perso successful often with disbelief I think they think we're nuts I think we're generally afraid to allow employees to be themselves because then they feel like the power is taken away it's really more than just a place to work it's it's a lifestyle most sapless employees when they leave the office leave to hang out with others Apple's employees not because we force them to but because they actually choose to after a decade Zappos dominated the online shoe industry and it's expanded into other products in 2009 Amazon bought the company for 1.2 billion dollars but a Shea to stay on as CEO he agreed for a salary of just $36,000 a year that's my way of making sure that I'm actually only there for my own happiness I'm not staying over the money che is not proprietary about how he runs his business in fact he put Zappos recipe for success in a book called delivering happiness and went on tour to spread the word Shea's next big project is to deliver happiness to downtown Las Vegas we are in the Fremont East District right now it's an area that most first don't know about is where the locals hang out and there's a real sense of neighborhood and community here his vision revitalized the distressed downtown area into a high-tech hub bringing in more jobs what does success mean to you the ultimate definition of success is you could lose everything that you have and truly be okay with it your happiness law isn't based on external factors could you lose everything and be happy I think that would actually be a fun challenge Oh

Channel: ABC News

Views: 83,957

Keywords: Barbara Walters, Zappos.com, Tony Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 20/20, business

Id: p4OBZFVwu1s

Length: 7min 27sec (447 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 03 2012