Review: Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh (CEO, Zappos.com)
// June 7th, 2010 // No Comments » // web thoughts
Over 244 pages Tony Hsieh, CEO of the world famous Zappos.com brand provides a wonderful insight into what made him the ‘hip, iconoclastic’ and inspirational CEO that he is today. When was the last time a book left you with a inspirational thought or idea after every section you read? This book not only delivers happiness, it delivers inspiration.
Undoubtedly there will be reviews that are cynical over the way he progressed from selling button badges from his bedroom through to a multi-billion business in Zappos.com. Did he just get lucky? Was he in the right place at the right time? Quite possibly a little bit of both, but what comes through chapter after chapter is that he is an inspirational business leader that has a different way of approaching business.It also talks about the mistakes he and the business has made and what the lessons they learned were.
The book is a three-parter. Section one looks at Tony’s journey to create a profitable business = The end result being LinkExchange, which sold for a mere $265 million to Microsoft. Section two provides a fascinating insight into his approach to investing in start-ups and how one investment really grabbed his interest and became his baby! The last section is the coming together of the three key themes through out the book – ‘profits, passion and purpose’. It is divided into two sub-sections, the first part openly discusses the Amazon buy out of Zappos and the way that it was communicated to the business. While the second part, turns to focus on the reader and how through reader participation, the added benefit that the book may well deliver is personal happiness.
For me this is a brilliant book for anyone with a entrepreneurial streak in them or anyone who is looking for inspiration to improve the culture of the company that they work in. Highly recommended.
Find out more at the official website – Delivering Happiness Book or pre-order a copy today at Amazon
Sometimes you hear about a concept that sounds to good to be true and I thought that was the case with the Zappos.com Culture Book. Fortunately after a little bit of Googling I found a blog post from a guy that had managed to get hold of a copy. He sang fantastic praise about the book and left a simple instruction on getting a copy if your outside the US – why not e-mail the CEO (Tony Hsieh)? So I that’s what did, in all honesty I was expecting to get an auto-reply or not hear anything at all, after all how many CEO’s have the time or inclination to reply to a request like this? Then within a couple of hours a response came back requesting my postal address and additionally offering a tour around their HQ if I’m ever in Vegas. Now this to me exceeded my expectations by a mile and has become a story I tell to a lot of people.