Values viabilityIn just a few pages, this exploration of Zappos will come to a close. While that appears to be an ending, it truly represents a new beginning on your journey to fire up a service movement in partnership with your staff and customers. Before we examine ways for you to personalize the application of the unconventional wisdom of Zappos in your setting, let’s first look at the opportunities and challenges Zappos itself faces into the foreseeable future.
In the span of a decade, Zappos leadership has taken a fledgling idea and parlayed it into a billion-dollar business known for service, culture, and delivering happiness. While this rapid success is noteworthy, in the overall context of business longevity, the company is relatively youthful. When I think about the accomplishments of Zappos, the words of Winston Churchill come to mind, as he suggested that failure is not fatal or success final. The leaders at Zappos have managed small failures well, but many questions remain on how well they will manage their runaway success.
Tony Hsieh, Zappos CEO, notes, “We have been fortunate enough to make a number of sound choices on behalf of our staff, our customers, and our overall business, but we have a lot more to learn.” Much of the immediate “learning” at Zappos is likely to be from reciprocal opportunities that will occur as a result of its relationship with Amazon. While each company is likely to learn from the other, both Amazon and Zappos will also have to maintain their uniquely different, albeit aligned, cultures. In fact, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos notes, “The culture and the Zappos brand are such assets…. There is a lot of growth ahead of us with Zappos, and I am totally excited about what can be accomplished over time.”
Maybe the greatest challenge Zappos leaders face is the adjustment required when going from a charming business outlier to an expanding, mature business benchmark. While many people root for you in your start-up phase, some will become tired of hearing about your thought leadership, or they will become suspicious, critical, and envious as you gain size and prowess. Moreover, as leaders and staff members take pride in the very successes that lead to business growth, everyone can be lulled into a false sense of security.
In his book How the Mighty Fall, bestselling author and business consultant Jim Collins outlines his research on the stages of business meltdown. The first of Jim’s stages, “Hubris Born of Success,” focuses on corporate pride, which often emerges before a fall. Jim suggests that yesterday’s success, in many ways, can be one of the biggest hurdles for tomorrow’s accomplishments.
While Zappos is certainly not immune to failure, the company is well positioned to circumvent significant pitfalls simply by adhering to one of its most crucial and unusual values: “be humble.” Jennifer Van Orman, Zappos software engineer, reflects, “My favorite value is ‘be humble.’ I have never worked in a department with so many geniuses. Really smart people surround me, and none of them are divas. No one is ever too busy to help anyone else out. There are no egos around here. That’s refreshing.”
Unlike other successful businesses, where pomposity and vanity have been an Achilles heel, Zappos is likely to sustain its success as long as people like Tony Hsieh continue to demonstrate the curiosity, humility, and service described by a Zappos senior user experience architect: “I was working in Kansas City for another company, and I met Tony Hsieh following his presentation at a conference I was attending. The day after Tony spoke, the conference was coming to an end. As I looked out the window getting ready to leave the conference venue, I noticed that it was raining and resigned myself to getting wet. To my surprise, at the door of the conference center was Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, giving out ponchos. As he handed one to me, I thought, ‘Wow—they anticipated the weather and my need.’ That’s something I have never seen from senior leaders at any other business, and I wanted to work for and be a customer of Zappos.”
Since we constantly synthesize information as we acquire it, I suspect you have been thinking about how to bring the best of the Zappos Experience to your life or your business. But how do you translate that thinking into an action plan? In keeping with Confucius’s observation that “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,” how do you decide on the step that is best for you?
While I can’t hand you a poncho in anticipation of a rainstorm, I did anticipate that you and other leaders in your organization might benefit from a comprehensive assessment and action-planning tool to help you evaluate and drive change in areas such as
Values viability
Culture strength
Operational excellence in service
Brand elasticity
Work stress reduction/employee pleasure enhancement
Other areas related to lessons from The Zappos Experience
You will find your Action Assessment Toolkit titled How Zapponian Are You? at zappified.com/action or via the QR link given here.
Whether you elect to use the assessment and action-planning tool, decide to sign up for Zappos Insights (using the complimentary membership provided at the back of the book or joining directly by going to www.ZapposInsights.com), or dive directly into an area of obvious need, allow me to offer overall guidance about benefiting from the Zappos lessons.
1. Refine it to meet your need. Anything from Zappos that you might wish to incorporate into your business must be filtered through the lens of what will make it work for you. It is important that you conduct some level of self-assessment and do not simply mimic Zappos. For example, rather than adopting the Zappos 10 core values as your own, it would probably be better for you to emulate the process that Zappos used for uncovering and formalizing values that are already operating in your culture.
2. Think about the unconventional. While I certainly hope the preceding pages gave you ideas for ways to make incremental improvements in your business, I want to make sure that the underlying message of “big idea focus” is not missed. The Zappos Experience is a story of leaders who did not set out to follow a cookie-cutter template on how other online retailers were achieving short-term success. Instead, it is a lesson about leaders who passionately pursued goals that had a long-term timeline and resulted in a transformational legacy.
Zappos is no longer in the shoe business; it is in the happiness business! Its leaders became passionate about a goal that transcended products or processes. Those leaders shifted their attention from business success to transformative objectives and, in the end, elevated their significance and their legacy. Columnist and author Irving Kristol once suggested that leaders need to define that “one big thing and stick with it. Leaders who had one very big idea and one big commitment are the ones who leave a legacy.”
I am an advocate of taking the time to think of that “one big thing” that you want to accomplish as a leader and forging your own “leadership legacy statement.” Leadership guru John Maxwell suggests, “People will summarize your life in one sentence. Pick it now.”
When asked about a Zappos legacy statement, Tony Hsieh said, “I hope that Zappos can inspire other businesses to adopt happiness as a business model—letting happy customers and happy employees drive long-term profits and growth. Ultimately, it’s all about delivering happiness.”
So what’s your leadership legacy statement? Go ahead and write it down—but, more important, live it! If you do, you truly will understand the transformational power of The Zappos Experience.