Customer Reviews

Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose

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There has been quite a crop of customer service related books recently, as well as the classics in the field. They each have their own angle, and I'm going to use this brief review as a chance to summarize where Delivering Happiness falls in this group as well as how to complement it with a couple of other books with different approaches that make for a very well-rounded outlook in tandem.

As far as [[Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose:]]
I was privileged to get a galley of this much-anticipated title. It's the story of an entrepreneur and the different paths he took (or twists in the one path, depending on how you look at it). A fascinating story, and not just because of the bezillion dollars he got selling the company to amazon. (And: how can you not like a guy who calls his warehouse WHISKY (WareHouse Inventory and Supply in Kentucky -- Page 118)? Heavy emphasis on his pursuit of happiness for himself and his staff -- very admirable and inspiring.

If you're looking to directly transform your customer service/customer experience, you may want to add to Tony's inspiring autobiography some directly actionable books to help you turn his ideas into techniques you can put into practice right away -- and that are highly consonant with Tony's pro-employee, pro-customer, outlook -- I suggest two books --one a classic, one that's new this Spring -- that can take care of this for you.

1. Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit: The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization
This, like Tony Hsieh's book, is a new title this Spring. Practical, useful insights from the insiders who created high-tech startups and The Ritz-Carlton. Contains specific prescriptions for how to handle many different customer situations like they're handled at the companies profiled inside (incl: Zappos, Ritz-Carlton, Netflix, Charlie Trotter's, Lexus,), appendices with scripts you can use right away, etc.

2. [[Customers For Life: How To Turn That One-Time Buyer Into a Lifetime Customer]]
This is an older title, and a classic: how a texas cadillac dealer, of all people, mastered great customer service. Extremely simple, but never simplistic. Has inspired many business leaders since it was written. Many pages have usable, actionable insights. If you don't have this in your library (and in your psyche) yet, why not? You can probably grab it used for next to nothing, and the wisdom is timeless enough that you hardly need the "latest revised edition" if you need to save a few dollars.

This book traces Tony Hsieh's rapid progress in the business world, from callow party dweeb with a high IQ to his selling of Zappos to Amazon for north of a billion dollars. Along the way, we get some ups and downs in business startups, the hunt for money, the hunt for the secret to corporate long-term success, and some input from partners and employees along the way. Zappos' leadership eventually decided to emphasise sterling customer service as the key to their own corporate culture, and the last third of the book - the part worth reading - covers what this means to the customer, to the employees tasked with turning it into a reality, and to the bottom line. The idea was to infuse ten larger values (with numerous sub-meanings and applications) into every aspect of every department of the company. Since Hsieh is now a billionaire or very close to it, one can say that, certainly in this case, it worked.

In general the book is a very light read. It is destined to be given out to employees for free, and to serve as a sort of corporate diary and the documentation of the corporate mythology. That's not necessarily bad, just what it is. The last few pages are a little more thoughtful, where the author tries to relate his business experience to a philosophical discussion of life, the universe and everything. This stuff might be a bit of a stretch, but it is the kind of expansive view of things one can expect from a businessman in his position and there are few business books by hugely successful authors that can resist this kind of thing.

I can not believe it but after 12 years of buying my books on Amazon, I am compelled to write a review. I found this book extremely creepy.

First, I was disappointed in the flip tone of this book. The preface includes a blurb about not bothering to have the book edited by a professional editor because the author did not find it necessary and wanted to continue to poke at his past English teachers because obviously he "showed them" by being a best-selling author and not bothering to be a conscientious writer. I can not imagine having an ax to grind with a teacher I haven't seen in 20 years who may have corrected my work during my "formative years".

Second, I want to personally apologize to every [...] employee. How does one work for a fellow who prides himself on not hiring "talented people"? I am dead serious. Tony clearly states that bringing in talented people into the organization as it grew would cause the culture to change so would not be part of his strategy to build the company.

Third, I also fail to understand how drinking with your co-workers and spending nearly every waking moment with them brings profit, passion and purpose. Yes, team cohesion is obviously important. The military wouldn't function without it. Spending a happy hour with co-workers and eating lunch together for instance, makes sense. Failing to keep your job because Bob in accounting doesn't like socializing with you after work, doesn't make any sense. Failing to be promoted because you don't drink and (horror) actually go home to your kids at night, doesn't make sense.

To summarize, I would re-title this book "A Formula for Running a Successful Cult" by Tony Hsieh aka The Big Pumbah because he has mastered the most important features of a well run cult.

A sampling:
1. Alienation (Done! Replace real family with new family - aka other Zappos employees! Eat all meals together, work long hours, socialize with employees only.)
2. Us/Them Syndrome (Done! Emphasize the collective over the individual. Executed brilliantly by administering a culture test and immediately firing anyone who questions the company as arrogant and not a fit.)
3. Charismatic Leader (Done Well! Name another Zappos leader? Thinking, thinking. . .Can't? No because the cult(ure) is the cult(ure) of Tony! Let's go shave our head and paint it blue!)
4. Exclusivity (Done! Private company. Private goings on. No nasty prying by Wall Street and no grown-ups (remember the missing talented types that were going to destroy them?) to correct us. It's a Zappos' Thing, You Wouldn't Understand!)

Delivering Happiness is a bold promise to make in any book, let alone a business book. But Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh makes it. The autobiographical story of Tony's childhood and career at times seems self indulgent and veers into frat boy territory, Harvard style. Hsieh is open about the fact that the writing is all his and that it's not literary genius. However, he's clearly an innovative man with a ton of brain power. It is a fun and entertaining read, especially for the genre. The book's stand-out quote:

"Without conscious and deliberate effort, inertia always wins"

I am not sure the book delivers happiness. But here's what it does do, and does very well. It provides an insight into the success of one of America's trendiest and high performing companies as well as the brain of the man behind it. From my work life lens, it also shows an interesting approach to corporate culture that so far is working well for Zappos.

I put my hand up to review the book Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose because I'd read so much about Zappos' unique corporate environment. Innovative organizational psyches are right up my alley. Hsieh has a light and enticing story-teller's voice as he shares his youthful business adventures, Harvard stories (mostly about how little work he did and how well he performed doing that), mistakes and spiritual experiences in the rave/party years and climbing Kilimanjaro. Ultimately though, it's a book about relationships, and about how to create an environment where your best friends show up to work with you. You work hard and you play hard and you do it all together.

For all it's talk of a bold new paradigm of institutional culture, much of it revolves around getting drunk together, partying and playing golf. It is the way business has always been done. It might be really fun to work at Zappos. And clearly there must be more to it than that or it would not consistently generate the buzz about being such a great place to work that it does.

I'd love to know more about how career breaks, care-giving needs and flexible work options to handle work life issues are really handled. There is one beautiful story shared of a woman losing her husband and being given time off and much loving support from her team members. But the story stuck out as unusual compared to other employee experiences. For example, there were no insights into how parenting or elder care needs are handled either informally or through policy.

Rather, there were stories of walking away from your entire life with two hours notice and not getting home again for three months. It was, as always, the absolute dedication to the company kind of stories that came through loudest. There was a great deal of discussion about creating a family, creating a group of people who you want to be with every day. This is a wonderful thing in a work environment up to a point, but homogeneity, even the weird and wacky kind, can be stifling over the longer term.

As I read stories of bar room and golf course decisions, I did wonder if that self-selects the real Zappos stars as being single and childless, or with a partner at home full time who raises the children or at least has a much less demanding career? Certainly the book makes it evident that a non-drinker like myself would not be progressing very far! Zappos - can you help me understand more?

Things that most impressed me about Hsieh's story and the Zappos culture. The Pipeline - how most recruiting is done at entry level with incredible on-going training and continual internal promotion opportunities. He is very clear about the kind of person he wants to work with every day, knows how to find them and wants to make sure they have a trajectory. I also thoroughly enjoyed his cheekiness and regular rule breaking, his loving poke at Asian parental pressure stereotypes and his deep hunger for a community. Hsieh and his team have certainly created something unusual in corporate America. I take my hat off to what this daring 36 year old has built so far and will watch with interest as to what comes next.

My heretical closing thought. As his people get tired of partying and look for their higher purpose outside of the Zappos family, I do wonder how sustainable the culture will be over the longer term. I too have created a family of people I want to be with every day and it's called my husband and children. He talks a lot about work being a calling, not a job. I'm not sure free pizza and shaving your head days are gonna cut it in 20 years time. Then again, they might not need to.

This book has been widely acclaimed as the latest "Great Ideas in Business" books. Delivering Happiness is part brief autobiography, part "here are my brilliant ideas for how to conceive, start, and run a business". Tony has some interesting and different ideas on how to run a business. He is more strongly oriented towards creating a corporate culture than any other business guru. However, I've got a problem with Tony and the book. It's the same I have with most of the gurus - proof and replication. Tony was at the right place at the right time once and pretty much by accident made millions in the process. Out of boredom he joined what was to become Zappos. 10 years later he has made Zappos the largest online store specializing in footwear, with sales over 1 billion dollars per year. But Zappos is always on the verge of failure and is completely dependent on an ongoing 100 million dollar line of credit with their banks (at least this was the case prior to their purchase by Amazon). This tells me that they have less than 100 million in profit. Not a rosy situation for any business. For all of the hype about how brilliant Tony is, he hasn't proved that culture is the key to business success. He has not demonstrated anything except that he was successful at making money by accident one time in his life, and his Zappos isn't it. More disappointing is he discusses the dozens of other companies he helped start, most of which failed, none of which had impressive success. So like most of the other business gurus, he provides no proof of his ideas, and has not been able to replicate his one success. Not someone I would consider a viable role model, leader, or even teacher.
Marc Mintz ACSP, ACHDS, ACTC
President
The MacXperts

About four years ago I bought a pair of boots from Zappos.com. It was a very pleasant experience and the customer service was outstanding. So when I saw an advertisement for this book I hurried to take it out of the library. I was greatly disappointed. Mr. Hsieh is obviously a talented and intelligent person. Unfortunately his talent doesn't extend to the written word. It was a struggle to finish reading it because of the pedestrian language and the numerous repetitions some times one or two sentences apart. Big mistake not to get a ghost writer and a good editor Tony.

This man hasn't grown up yet. All the drinking and other shenanigans by him and his "family" were very offputting. The idea that anyone working for Zappos has to spend all their time at work and after work together I found slightly creepy. Also, although he kept saying he was looking for diversity and different points of view that didn't seem true to me after reading the book. Zappos seemed more like clone city than anything else.

Now I come to my biggest problems with the ethos of the company as depicted in the book. There is no mention anywhere when writing about the culture of the organization about encouraging his people to do community service or support a charity. I know this is supposed to be a bussiness book but if he can write about his Red Bull and Taco Bell "adicitions" then he could have made room for this as well if it does indeed exist at Zappos.

Finally it seems I am not getting something. In my opinion getting great customer service and upgraded shipping only leads to very temporary happiness. I guess one would have to do a lot of shopping at Zappos to keep the buzz going. But may be that's the idea. Repeat customers would certainly make Mr. Hsieh and his bottom line happy.

I had high hopes for this book as a big fan of Zappos and Tony. Unfortunately I was some what disappointed. Some of the business related stories are interesting and I appreciated his perspective on customer service, finding your core competency and creating core values. However, I wasn't impressed by the childish stories of going to raves and buying a loft (and giving it a dorky name) for all of your buddies to party in. Sure, if I was 21 it might sound 'cool' to sell a company for millions and then buy a party loft, but I'm not 21 anymore. I was also bummed that the last chunk of the book was simply the 10 core values of Zappos and some internal email text that explains them. Sure, some of it was interesting but hardly the makings of a best seller.

Again, there is some great stuff in this book...just not the whole thing. Its a quick read so go for it, just keep your expectations low.

Just finished reading this book, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose and was mildy entertained. It is a very light read, and written very plainly so that a large audience might gain some value from it. Honestly, I am still on the fence on whether Tony wrote this book in order to bring more publicity to Zappos.

However, this book is filled with the trials and tribulations that a driven entrapenauer (Tony) encounters in his many attempts at building companies and economic ventures. At center page, is Tony's morphing someone else's company (Zappos) into the billion dollar shoe empire that it is today.

Some of the stories are funny and crazy, especially all the raves Tony claims to have gone to, and his struggles can be interpreted as inspirational. However, about two-thirds of the way through the book, it morphs into a collection of excepts from the Zappos employee handbook, which is about as dry as sand. Terrible decision.

Also, for the last 40 pages or so, Tony starts babbling about the psychology of happiness and starts trying to take the reader down some road that I'm not even sure he fully understands. Let's be honest, Tony is driven, and the methods he used worked, but I think there was a lot more luck involved in his success than he let's off. It was an ok book, nothing that blew my mind away, but not too bad either. I guess I would say it was just "meh".

First the facts: Tony Hsieh is smarter than your average guy, and willing to work hard. He had an early dot com success, made some money, and squandered most of it partying. He gave Zappos its first funding, then later became the company's CEO, and led Zappos to tremendous success before it was purchased by Amazon for over one billion dollars. This book chronicles those events.

If you know anything about Zappos, you know they have an almost insane commitment to customer satisfaction. You may not know that they have an intense corporate culture around the theme of "Delivering Happiness." This book also explores both of these topics in some detail.

However, this is NOT an in-depth analysis of how to run an internet retailer. While IT, inventory, financing, drop shipping, vendor relationships, pricing, etc. are all discussed as the story unfolds, none are covered in any detail. This book is about Tony's experiences and growth in building Zappos. He does not attempt to instruct you how to do the same.

I enjoyed the book, and learned a number of useful lessons. Tony's analogies comparing poker and businesses were somewhat of an eye opener. What particularly shocked me was how little preparation or research went into some of their most important decisions. It seems that, at least in Zappo's case, smart people with the ability to quickly change direction after recognizing a mistake can do as well or better than most companies who do deep analysis and diligence in advance.

Highly recommended insider tale of how Zappos succeeded. Just don't expect any analysis, because there isn't any.

This was a great book. I enjoyed reading it from cover to cover, but I feel that a lot of things were left out..... like the long days people put in to get the company up and running. The theme of the book is if you work hard, play fair, great things will happen. While I feel that is partially true, I think that a lot of the hard work that was put in was left out of the book.