Delivering Happiness-Book Review

Are you working toward maximizing your happiness each day?

What is the net effect of your existence on the total amount of happiness in the world each day?

What are you passionate about and your higher purpose?

What are your company’s values?

What is your company’s higher purpose?

At Picha Images we always try to learn and grow. One of our latest ventures in this direction is reading business and self-development related books and reviewing them. The second book we did pick up was Delivering Happiness, written by the CEO of Zappos, Tony Hsieh.

When it comes to customer service, there are few companies as renowned as Zappos. Their self-proclaimed aim is to wow their customers every time, and to achieve this, they have made some great innovations in their customer service department. We decided that this should be a book to be read, chiefly because;

• We  wanted to know how Zappos evolved its core customer-centered values
• We wanted to understand how putting their customers ahead of everything else worked in Zappos’ favor.

This book is a mixture of a memoir as well as a story about business development. It talks about his initial entrepreneurship ventures, ranging from a worm farm as a young child, to a pizza business as a college student. He also talks about how these experiences helped him with his future ideas and startups as well.

Before he got involved with Zappos, he quit his well-paying job at Oracle to begin his first company, LinkExchange, which he ended up selling for a supposed 265 million dollars to Microsoft. Towards the latter half, we learn more about Zappos itself, as well as the standards and values they care most about, as well as how these have shaped the company.

key takeaways from the book

1. Its important to discover the one thing you’re passionate about and conversely what you don’t want to do.

Try out many things and see what works using the concept of winning and losing in some areas or rather use of elimination method.

With passion, you will know your ultimate goal. To quote Tony, the change happened after he “decided to stop chasing money, and start chasing the passion”.

2. Take things slow!

 Never outsource your core competency. Zappos almost went bankrupt because they hired a delivery service which failed to do their job. The company decided to take the task up and do it themselves, a decision which saved them.

Be cautious and carefully consider each new hire and monitor the hiring process. Their code for hiring people- they picked people who were both talented as well as a fit for their culture. Be Humble is probably the core value they looked for the most.

3. Strive to be always learning and making it priority for your employees as well.

The way they nurture their employees- Zappos makes sure that their employees are both professionally and personally happy. For example, they established the Zappos library, which today, even offers classes to analyze the more popular books.

4. Build Engagement and Trust by treating right, don’t focus on building a buzz around your Brand.

Tony’s focus on building relationships- he says it’s better to “try to build up the number and depth of your friendships, where the friendship itself is its own reward” as opposed to merely focusing on the benefits you might gain from the relationship.

Every interaction with your customers is an opportunity to further your brand.

5. Find a Niche

This allows you to focus and specialize to become great at something than lust being adequate and good at several things. Never outsource the one thing you want your company to be best at.

Though initially, their focus may have been on selling shoes through the internet, several years after establishment, they managed to make their primary concern their customers’ happiness and greatly merged in that

6. Have a Higher Purpose Vision; something bigger worth selling.

Have goals beyond making profits and growing company rather let your ultimate outcome be Happiness to all.

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7. Lastly, it is important to have and embrace Core values or rather company’s code.

Here are some of the Zappos’ core that they used to hire and fire the team.

• Deliver wow through service.
• Embrace and drive change.
• Create fun and a little weirdness.
• Be adventurous, creative, and open-minded.
• Pursue growth and learning.
• Build open and honest relationships with communication.
• Build a positive team and family spirit.
• Do more with less.
• Be passionate and determined.
• Be humble.

To wrap up with at the end of the day, everyone’s fundamental goal is happiness and everything they do pursues this. This understanding has ended up shaping Zappos into what they are today, and is, in my opinion, the reason they succeed at what they do. This book was definitely worth the read for us.

Grab this book and discover more lessons within to nurture your company’s growth as well as your personal growth.

Building a company based on customer’s satisfaction, of creating a culture his or her employees believes in is Happiness both for employees and customers. Picha images aim to achieve this every day ,See our services here