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Good read for those who dread going into work
Pros
*Genuine <br>*Insightful
Cons
*Can be slow <br>*Not a writing masterpiece
Recommended it?
Yes
The Bottom Line:
Most of us have had "those" jobs. Read this book to see what a good company can be if the leaders care.
I'm a business nerd so I love reading stories about how businesses rose or fell. This book is based around Tony Hsieh's rise from childhood entrepreneur trying to start a worm farm to the man who helped found Linkexchange and Zappos.com. The former sold for $265 million to Microsoft and the latter sold to Amazon for $1.2 billion.
It's not what most would probably consider well written but it's a good read. It's genuine because he didn't use a ghost writer. It goes through his successes and failures since childhood. He gives you negative and positive stories of him from extreme slacking off at his mind numbingly boring first job out of college to willing to take a huge personal financial loss to keep Zappos running.
It has genuine e-mails and stories from other employees littered throughout the book so you see a glimpse of what it's like from others perspective. The "Timmy" livechat story had me laughing like crazy. It's a good read that shows you that practicing what you preach, hiring right, treating your people right, and allowing people to express themselves creatively can create success. Company culture starts from the top down.
The overall theme stays true to the title. It's about happiness. Finding happiness by making others happy and wowing them. He walked away from tens of millions of dollars Microsoft would've given him if he continued to "vest in peace" virtually doing nothing but showing up for a year after the Linkexchange deal. He sold off his stocks because he saw it as pointless because he had more money than he'd ever need. He bought everything he wanted and still wasn't truly happy.
He talks a lot about studies done about happiness near the end that I've heard before so it kind of bogged down for me in the later stages of the book but it was truly something he cared about. I think that's why he's successful it's because he is indeed walking the walk and talking the talk. It seems to be contagious.
It's not what most would probably consider well written but it's a good read. It's genuine because he didn't use a ghost writer. It goes through his successes and failures since childhood. He gives you negative and positive stories of him from extreme slacking off at his mind numbingly boring first job out of college to willing to take a huge personal financial loss to keep Zappos running.
It has genuine e-mails and stories from other employees littered throughout the book so you see a glimpse of what it's like from others perspective. The "Timmy" livechat story had me laughing like crazy. It's a good read that shows you that practicing what you preach, hiring right, treating your people right, and allowing people to express themselves creatively can create success. Company culture starts from the top down.
The overall theme stays true to the title. It's about happiness. Finding happiness by making others happy and wowing them. He walked away from tens of millions of dollars Microsoft would've given him if he continued to "vest in peace" virtually doing nothing but showing up for a year after the Linkexchange deal. He sold off his stocks because he saw it as pointless because he had more money than he'd ever need. He bought everything he wanted and still wasn't truly happy.
He talks a lot about studies done about happiness near the end that I've heard before so it kind of bogged down for me in the later stages of the book but it was truly something he cared about. I think that's why he's successful it's because he is indeed walking the walk and talking the talk. It seems to be contagious.
