It is Pivotal to Maintain Both Passion & Inspiration in your Company | Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh

If you're an entrepreneur, think about what would you be so passionate about doing that you'd be happy doing it for 10 years, even if you never made any money from it? And then for, you know, eventually for people that have employees, think about what's the larger vision in their work beyond just money or profits or being number one in the market? Because there's so many HR consultants and people that giving advice about how to motivate employees, and you can motivate employees through incentives, like if, if you do X, then I'll give you Y, or you can motivate employees through recognition, or a lot of corporate America motivates employees through some sort of fear. But what we discovered over the years at Zappos is that there's a huge, huge difference between motivation and inspiration. And if you can inspire your employees through a vision that has a higher purpose beyond just money or profits or being number one in the market, or if you can inspire your employees through values, and not just kind of the values that you write down and put on a website, but actually practice values that match their own personal values, then you can accomplish so much more, and you don't really need to worry about the motivation part of it. It just kind of takes care of itself. So this is the evolution of our brand at Zappos. We started out with just saying, oh, let's just be the market leader in shoes, and then it wasn't until 2003, 4 years into it, that we all kind of sat around one day and asked ourselves, What do we want to be when we grow up? Do we want to be about shoes, or do we want to be about something more meaningful? And that's when we all decided, okay, actually, let's build the Zappos brand to be about the very best customer service and customer experience. And a funny thing happened when we finally decided on that and communicated to everyone in the company, and suddenly we found that employees were a lot more passionate and excited about the company. And when customers called, they could sense that the person on the other end of the phone wasn't there just for a paycheck, but truly wanted to deliver a great service. And then when our vendor partners came and visited, not only would they come more frequently, but they would stay longer for each of their, their visits. So all these things had this multiplicative snowball effect that really drove a lot of our growth over the years. 2005 was when we really decided to make culture not just something that was important, 'cause it was important from the beginning, 'cause I definitely didn't want to repeat the same mistake I had made at my previous company, but to actually make it a business strategy with the belief that if we make culture the number one priority, that the brand stuff, the word-of-mouth stuff, the customer service stuff, all of that would just be a natural byproduct of that. And part of that came from the realization that a company's culture and a company's brand are just two sides of the same coin. The brand is just a lagging indicator of the culture. And that might seem a little weird because typically back in the old days, you'd think, okay, this is our brand, and we're going to buy a lot of advertising on that brand, and then eventually the brand's going to be known, and it's going to be whatever we want it to be. But what's been happening with the world becoming more and more transparent, whether we like it or not, everyone's hyperconnected, information travels so quickly, is that this kind of brand and culture end up actually being very similar. If you look at the, say, the airline industry as a whole, for example, not any specific airline, and you ask a random person off the street what they think of the airline industry, you'll probably get back comments about bad customer service or apathetic employees and so on. And like it or not, that is the brand of the industry, even though no specific airline set out for that to be the brand. So we definitely see this huge, huge tie between culture whole culture and brand. And then just through the years realized, okay, customer service is about making customers happy, and, and company culture is about making employees happy. So let's just simplify the concept and just have our vision and brand be about delivering happiness in general.