Delivering Happiness, Tony Hsieh

"Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared" -BUDDHA

This past week I've decided to make me happy. Best book to do that is Delivering Hapiness, a.k.a a path to profits, passion, and purpose, wrote by Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com.
I've listened Tony during LeWeb conference in 2009 in Paris.

I'm not american and my english is bad. I know that. I apologize for that. The funny thing is Tony do the same at the beginning of his book: "I'm not a professional writer, and in many cases I purposely chose to do things that would probably make my high school English teachers cringe, such as ending a sentence with a preposition".

Let me introduce Tony.
In 1996, he co-founded LinkExchange which was sold to Microsoft in 1998 for $265 million.
In 1999, he got involved with Zappos as an adviser and investor, and eventually became CEO. He grew the company from almost no sales in 1999 to over $1 billion in gross merchandise sales, annually.
In 2009, Zappos was acquired by Amazon in a deal valued at over $1.2 billion.
Respect.

So, what is the book about?
First I have to say: I enjoyed it. Tony explains his life, his experiences and his way of life. He gave us all the elements to understand his path to a sustainable success.
I won't summarize the book, Amazon does it great. I just want to share with you some key sentences, and I hope they'll convince you to read the book.

"In business, one of the most important decisions for an entrepreneur or a CEO to make is what business to be in. It doesn't matter how flawlessly a business is executed if it's the wrong business or if it's in too small a market.
Imagine if you were the most efficient manufacturer of seven-fingered gloves. You offer the best selection, the best service, and the best prices for seven -fingered gloves - but if there isn't a big enough market for what you sell, you won't get very far".

"They were expensive lessons, but I guess what I ended up learning was that it's a bad idea to invest in industries you don't understand, in companies you don't have any control or influence over, or in people you don't know or trust."

"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, culture, and employee training and development."

"There's a lot of buzz these days about social media and integration marketing. As unsexy and low-tech as it may sound, our belief is that the telephone is one of the best branding devices out there [...] I can tell you that my mom has zero buzz, but when she says something, I listen."

"Top 10 Ways to Instill Customer Service into Your Company:
  1. Make customer service a priority for the whole company, not just a department. A customer service attitude needs to come from the top.
  2. Make WOW a verb that is part of your company's everyday vocabulary
  3. Empower and trust your customer service reps. Trust that they want to provide great service... because they actually do. Escalations to a supervisor should be rare.
  4. Realize that it's okay to fire customers who are insatiable or abuse your employees.
  5. Don't measure call times, don't force employees to upsell, and don't use scripts.
  6. Don't hide your 1-800 number. It's a message not just to your customers, but to your employees as well.
  7. View each call as an investment in building a customer service brand, not as an expense you're seeking to minimize.
  8. Have the entire company celebrate great service. Tell stories of WOW experiences to everyone in the company.
  9. Find and hire people who are already passionate about customer service.
  10. Give great service to everyone: customers, employees, and vendors."
Happiness Frameworks
At the end of the book, Tony gives 3 types of "Happiness Frameworks" which I recommend to read. I like this one:

Customers: Meets expectations -> Meets desires -> Meets unrecognized needs

Employees: Money -> Recognition -> Meaning

Investors: Transaction Alignment -> Relationship Alignment -> Legacy


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