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Delivering Happiness
Tony Hsieh
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What is Delivering Happiness about?
Pay new employees $2,000 not to quit. Make customer service the focus of the whole business, not just one department. Focus on workplace culture as your number one priority. Apply happiness research to running your business. Help your employees grow both personally and professionally. Strive to change the world! And make money while you're at it...
Key ideas of Delivering Happiness
Culture Is the Core Product
Hsieh built Zappos by treating company culture as the actual product, arguing that get the culture right and customer service and profits follow automatically.
Purpose Before Profit
After selling LinkExchange and feeling empty, Hsieh concluded that layering purpose and passion under profits produces more durable success than chasing money directly.
Happiness as Operational Science
Drawing on positive psychology research, Hsieh applied four concrete levers, perceived control, progress, connectedness, and vision, to motivate employees and design the company.
Read an excerpt from the summary
The Room in Vegas
Picture seven hundred people in a Las Vegas ballroom on a July afternoon in 2009. They are standing because the news has just been confirmed. Amazon has bought Zappos for what will eventually be valued at more than one point two billion dollars, and a few of them are crying. Beach balls bounce over their heads. Tony Hsieh, the CEO, watches from the stage, and he keeps thinking about a rave he attended a decade earlier, the one where the music seemed to move through the entire crowd as a single body. He sees the same energy here, in a corporate conference room. That is the strangest detail in the whole story. The man who built a billion-dollar shoe company on the back of a phone center is thinking about raves and worm farms.
He also thinks, while the cheering goes on, that this looks like history repeating itself. He sold his first company, LinkExchange, to Microsoft in 1998 for two hundred sixty-five million dollars after two and a half years. He sold Zappos to Amazon ten years later. Two roughly equivalent paydays, ten years apart. From the outside it was the same script. From the inside, the second one was a completely different movie, and the difference is what the rest of this book is trying to explain.
Hsieh's argument across three hundred pages is small enough to fit on a napkin. Profits are not the point. Profits, passion, and purpose stacked on top of each other are the point, and if you build a company around all three, the money shows up as a side effect. He spends the rest of the book showing how he learned that the hard way.
The Worm Farm and the Mail Order Empire
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Continue in the appWho is it for?
- Anyone who wants to understand how a startup can grow from near-bankruptcy to a billion-dollar acquisition without abandoning its values.
- Anyone who runs a team and wants a practical framework for building culture that outlasts any single hire or leader.
- Anyone who has chased a financial goal and found the reward hollow, and is looking for a more sustainable way to think about work.
- Anyone who works in e-commerce or customer service and wants to see what radically customer-first operations look like in practice.
About the author: Tony Hsieh
Tony Hsieh was an entrepreneur and business executive best known as the longtime CEO of Zappos, the online shoe and clothing retailer he led from a struggling startup to a company acquired by Amazon for over one billion dollars. Before Zappos, he co-founded LinkExchange, an early internet advertising network that Microsoft acquired in 1998.
He was widely recognized for his unconventional approach to management, his emphasis on workplace happiness, and his later urban revitalization project in downtown Las Vegas. Hsieh stepped down as Zappos CEO in 2020.
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