Essay About Culture Piece And Work Today

Zappos Case
Zappos is known for its unique corporate
culture and focus on customer service,
can you give our readers a little background
on these two areas?
Sure. So let me start with a little bit of
history in terms of how we decided to
really focus on the culture piece, as well
as customer service, of course, and then
our core values in general. Our CEO, Tony
Hsieh graduated from Harvard and when
he hnished he started a company called
LinkExchange with a college roommate. It
did really well, and about a year into the
business they started getting offers from
other companies to purchase them. He
actually ended up selling to Microsoft for
just a small chunk of change.
Obviously there was a financial gain
there, but for him it was really less about
that and more about the change that
had occurred in his company. The initial
employees were friends of friends or
other people they had gone to school
with, all of whom tended to have the
same philosophy and values.
Ayear into it they had grown very
rapidly. They had gotten up to I think a
little over lOO people, and Tony realized
one morning, “God, I dont want to go
into work today” For him that was really
eye opening. If he didnt want to go
into work at a company he started, what
must the other employees be feeling?
And in hindsight looking back, trying to
figure out how this company that he created
– how it kind of went awry – he really
felt like the main problem was that
they hired folks purely based on who
could do a job and do it the best, which
is important, but didnt pay