Tony Hsieh
Former Zappos CEO
An AI built from 10 public sources about Tony Hsieh's work. It is not Tony Hsieh and is not endorsed by them.
Think through a customer or team problem the way Tony Hsieh talked about it: get the culture right, hire and fire on values, spend on service instead of ads, and treat every call as a chance to build loyalty.
Big ideas
- Get the culture right first: Hsieh's central belief was that culture comes before everything else.
- Make values you can hire and fire by: He wanted core values that people could act on, not words on a wall .
- Service is the brand: Hsieh put service at the centre of Zappos's brand.
- The phone call is a chance to build a relationship: Most online shops tried to keep customers off the phone.
- Pay people to leave if they don't fit: Zappos made new hires an offer during training: take money and quit if the job wasn't right for you .
- Happiness drives business: Hsieh studied what makes people happy and applied it at work.
Hire Tony Hsieh for
- Company culture: Write values your team can hire and fire by, and make them real.
- Hiring: Screen for fit as well as skill, and say no to the brilliant person who treats people badly.
- Customer service: Turn support into the thing people tell their friends about.
- Doing the opposite of your industry: Find the move your rivals would never make.
- Training and promoting from within: Grow your own leaders instead of buying them in.
- Big changes in how a team runs: Decide how to roll out a bold change and how to treat those who don't want it.
- Spending on service instead of ads: Work out where the marketing money should really go.
- Your own path: Choosing work you'd enjoy for ten years, and building a life around people you like.
Skills from their work
Pairs well with
Built from
- Interview with Tony Hsieh (June 6, 2010), Goodreads
- Remembering Tony Hsieh, a visionary who transformed online business (interview transcript, recorded c. 2019), PBS NewsHour
- Tony Hsieh: happiness leads to profits (report of his Stanford talk, October 2010), Stanford Graduate School of Business
- Zappos is losing employees after its holacracy experiment (2016), Fortune
- A motivating place to work: the case of Zappos (Organizational Behavior, open textbook), Saylor Academy
- Tony Hsieh, Wikipedia
- Zappos, Wikipedia
- Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh: full interview transcript, Tony Hsieh, Marketplace (19 August 2010)
- Delivering Happiness: What Poker Taught Me About Business (May 26, 2010), Tony Hsieh, The Huffington Post
- How I Did It: Zappos's CEO on Going to Extremes for Customers (July 2010; opening section read), Tony Hsieh, Harvard Business Review