Ingredients for success

Home Ingredients for success

Tony Hsieh1. Happiness is about 4 things:

  • Perceived control: being able to decide if you want to learn and grow yourself

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  • Perceived progress: feeling like you move forward

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  • Connectedness: focus on company culture

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  • Vision / meaning: being part of something bigger rather than financial performance

2. Maslow’s hierarchy

Once the basic needs of an employee are met, money is lower down the list compared to professional growth opportunities or the quality of the relationship with the manager.

3. Three types of happiness: pleasure, passion and higher purpose 

  • Pleasure: always chasing the next thing 

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  • Passion: where peak performance meets peak engagement and time flies by

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  • Higher purpose: being part of something bigger

Some other ingredients for the success: 

  • Stop chasing the money, start chasing the passion (when Tony decided to leave LinkExchange earlier than agreed with MS and leaving a lot of money behind!)

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  • Don’t outsource your core business

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  • Don’t focus on buzz as marketer but focus on building engagement & trust

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  • Deliver a WOW-experience through service 

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  • Don’t put traditional KPI’s on your call centre such as number of calls they can handle because that leads to getting off the phone with the client as fast as possible.

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  • Have Core Values you can commit on as a company

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  • A strong culture and committable core values are important because they create alignment among employees

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  • Build good relations with vendors, don’t position yourself as a client but as a partner. Work together with them!

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  • In terms of social media (strategy): be real and use your best judgment

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  • When presenting be real, be passionate and use personal stories

I especially liked the idea of the Face Game. At LinkExchange Tony realized he did not know everyone’s name anymore as the company was getting so big… At Zappos you get a picture of a colleague after you login and you have to tell his/her name. This increases the changes of serendipitous employee interactions.

Personally I love the mentality of doing a random act of kindness (or WOWness) and I find myself already doing it. And I have to share the core values, just listing them, while in the book (or on the links) they are explained in detail:

  1. Deliver WOW Through Service

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  2. Embrace and Drive Change 

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  3. Create Fun and A Little Weirdness 

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  4. Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded 

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  5. Pursue Growth and Learning 

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  6. Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication

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  7. Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit

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  8. Do More With Less 

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  9. Be Passionate and Determined 

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  10. Be Humble

Overall conclusion? The book is fun and easy to read and I recommend it to everyone. It is not ground breaking or new, if you follow Tony and Zappos, but it gives you a good vibe, a good feeling and is teasing you to do things different in the future. If you haven’t seen or heard about Zappos before … it is a must read!