Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh - audiobook of the week
📖Books
Recent buzz about the shoe company called “Zappos” got to me as well. After I heard one of Tony’s (Zappos CEO) speeches I decided to take up on his offer and downloaded a free audiobook Tribal Leadership, which I described in detail on this blog last year. When I heard of the new book by Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Delivering Happiness, I decided to buy it and listen to it myself.
Overall, it’s not as great as the Tribal Leadership, but it’s a good book as gave me great insights to several things:
1. The Story of Zappos
If you’re not familiar with their story, now you will be - it’s the integral part of this book and it’s great to get to know how they made this online footwear store work.
2. The Story of Tony
You get to know his passions, his ideas and his path to Zappos and beyond. Why he ended up there and how he made it all happen. Even how we founded Linkexchange and sold it to Microsoft which was a great feat anyway.
3. Customer Happiness
Yes, he’s showing you all the ways you can go to make your customer happy and believe me, it’s all about customer happiness in the end. I know, I’m running an online business myself and I know how crucial it is to make the customer happy. Tony gives great insights of how this can be accomplished and covers them with great examples.
And a bonus - he also explains how to make the employees happy and how to create a company culture that is natural and is motivating for the employees. Everyone must be happy - the external as well as internal customers - I know - I have a small team but we’re very happy and we love working together… and we’re having a nice company meeting next Tuesday! :-)
I’m all for happiness
As you know, I’m running what others would call a “Lifestyle business” and I love it. I’m happy, my team is happy and my customers seem to be happy, too.
Even Jeff Bezos was very happy with Zappos - so much that he decided to buy them and to make sure Zappos would approve not only $1.2B buyout, he wanted to convince Zappos employees by recording this video - worth 8 minutes of your time - enjoy: