I didn’t come up with that wonderful title myself; it is the name of the newly released book by Tony Hseih, CEO of Zappos. I was one of the bloggers chosen to review his book and received a copy several weeks ago.
As I was reading, I kept thinking: should I write about this theme, or talk about this story and how it would resonate with my readers. Should I just do a summary review or pick one chapter and talk about why I liked its message. I kept a list of the pages that had a phrase or paragraph that I thought was important to remember. So here goes: page 85,98,119,137,143,150,173,177,179,187 and 197. I’ll pick a few and let you look up the rest when you get a chance to read this book ( you can order it from Amazon).
One of the first things that I noticed while reading the book was how simple Tony’s writing style is. It was not full of multi-syllable business speak, or lots of technical terms. It sounds like you are talking to your next door neighbor over the fence- very easy to follow. Even though Zappos is technically a large company, the book has many lessons for small business owners. The early days at Zappos had huge cash flow issues, problems with their warehouse and unforseen problems that came at the worse possible times. Tony said at one point they were in a race against time – trying to make their limited money last until sales picked up. Sound familiar?
One of the lessons I took away from reading Delivering Happiness is for a business to decide what their core competencies are. One of the goals at Zappos was to sell $1 billion in gross merchandise sales by 2010- a goal they actually achieved in 2008.
Tony says ” Looking back, a big reason we hit our goal early was that we decided to invest our time, money and resources into three key areas: Customer service (which would build our brand and drive word of mouth), culture (which would lead to the formation of our core values), and employee training and development(which would eventually lead to the creation of our Pipeline Team). Even today, our belief is that our Brand, our Culture, and our Pipeline (which we refer to internally as “BCP”) are the only competitive advantages that we will have in the long run. Everything else can and will eventually be copied.”
I will save the discussion on their theory that spending more money on customer service and its 24/7 call center is smarter than spending money on advertising for another blog post. Also, their theory that the role of a manager is to remove obstacles and enable his/her direct reports to succeed. Simple but brilliant. Check out the website for the book –Delivering Happiness . Hope you enjoy it as much as I did!
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