I just finished reading Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose by Tony Hseih, who is CEO of Zappos. I have been wanting to read this for a while and just found out my library finally got their copy in.
I was actually a little disappointed in the book. While the history of the company was interesting, I was hoping to have him explain more why they do what they do, how it works, etc. Instead it seemed more fluff, like the type of stuff I used to get from the companies I worked for about how great it was to work there and how important their "culture" statements were. Of course for those companies it was just a bunch of hot air and never actually matched the reality that the company proclaimed.
Reportedly Zappos is very different and they actually mean what they say, but that didn't get communicated very well in the book, and his extensive use of emails that he has sent out did nothing to assist in that either.
But, what I did find most interesting from the book was how they chose UPS as their shipper. As they were starting up to carry their own stock, rather than drop shipping everything, they were looking for a vendor to assist them and so they called UPS, FedEx and DHL. They ended up going with UPS for the very simple reason that UPS was the only company that returned their call!
Sometimes the most important part of being chosen, of being the one people rely on, of being the one that people trust, is really the easiest part, and that is simply responding to the request. How often we forget that.
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