| Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose |  | Author: Tony Hsieh
Publisher: Business Plus
Category: Book
List Price: $23.99
Buy New: $9.50
as of 8/1/2010 03:30 CDT details
You Save: $14.49 (60%)
New (43) Used (19) from $7.94
Seller: WOODSIDEBOOKS_NY
Rating:  170 reviews
Sales Rank: 72
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 253
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.2 x 1.1
ISBN: 0446563048
Dewey Decimal Number: 658.409
EAN: 9780446563048
ASIN: 0446563048
Publication Date: June 7, 2010
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
| |
| Features:
| • | ISBN13: 9780446563048 | | • | Condition: New | | • | Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed |
|
| Similar Items:
| |
| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Review
The visionary CEO of Zappos explains how an emphasis on corporate culture can lead to unprecedented success. Pay new employees $2000 to quit. Make customer service the entire company, not just a department. Focus on company culture as the #1 priority. Apply research from the science of happiness to running a business. Help employees grow both personally and professionally. Seek to change the world. Oh, and make money too. Sound crazy? It's all standard operating procedure at Zappos.com, the online retailer that's doing over $1 billion in gross merchandise sales every year. In 1999, Tony Hsieh (pronounced Shay) sold LinkExchange, the company he co-founded, to Microsoft for $265 million. He then joined Zappos as an adviser and investor, and eventually became CEO. In 2009, Zappos was listed as one of Fortune magazine's top 25 companies to work for, and was acquired by Amazon later that year in a deal valued at over $1.2 billion on the day of closing. In his first book, Tony shares the different business lessons he learned in life, from a lemonade stand and pizza business through LinkExchange, Zappos, and more. Ultimately, he shows how using happiness as a framework can produce profits, passion, and purpose both in business and in life. (edited by author) Amazon Exclusive Author Q&A with Tony Hsieh, Author of Delivering Happiness
1. In the book you say, "I've been an entrepreneur for most of my life." Do you think people are born entrepreneurs or do they become them? I think usually by the time you're 12 years old, you either have the entrepreneurial spirit or you don't. I would describe the entrepeneurial spirit as a combination of creativity and optimisim. 2. Could you name one particular experience that inspired you to create a company devoted to customer happiness? For me, it's really been driven by daily examples of bad customer service in my everyday personal life. 3. Was the worm farm really the invaluable catalyst for forming your business and life philosophy? My parents tell me that as a kid I was always trying to come up with different business ideas. The idea of starting a worm farm is my earliest memory of a business idea. 4. You say that you have always been an avid book reader. What are your favorite books? Which non-business book helped you grow professionally? Business books: Good to Great, Peak, Tribal Leadership Made to Stick Non-business books: The Happiness Hypothesis Comedy Writing Secrets The Game 5. What is the ratio between rebelling against conventional wisdom and sticking to the good old truths in building a successful business? 1:10 6. You describe your way to happiness starting with profits, then going through passion and finally getting to purpose. Is that the only path to business happiness? No, that was just the path that I happened to take. Part of the purpose of the book is to help other entrepreneurs and business owners shortcut the process and encourage them to go straight to combining profits, passion, and purpose. 7. You seem to have taken risks with business ideas a lot while growing up. How do you recognize a risk that you shouldn't take? I think it just comes down to really breaking down what the worst case scenario actually is. For most of us, we're lucky to live in a time and in a society where we aren't actually ever in danger of dying from starvation or lack of shelter. Most of us have friends whose couches we can crash on in the worst case scenario, so any "risk" we take in starting a company isn't actually that big a risk.
Product Description
In his first audiobook, Tony Hsieh - the widely-admired CEO of on-line shoe retailer, Zappos, explains how he created a unique culture and commitment to service that aims to improve the lives of its employees, customers, vendors and backers. Using anecdotes and stories from his own experiences and from other companies, Hsieh provides concrete ways that companies can achieve unprecedented success. Even better, he shows how creating happiness and record results go hand-in-hand. He starts with the 'Why' in a section where he narrates his quest to understand the science of happiness. Then he runs through the ten Zappos 'Core Values' such as 'Deliver WOW through Service,' 'Create Fun and A Little Weirdness' and 'Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit' and explains how you and your colleagues should come up with your own. Hsieh then details many of the unique practices at Zappos that have made it the success it is today, such as the philosphy of allocating marketing money into the customer experience, thereby allowing repeat customers and word-of-mouth be their true form of marketing. He also explains why Zappos's main priority is company culture and his belief that once you get the culture right, everything else - great customer service, long-term branding - will happen on its own. Finally, Hsieh explains how Zappos employees actually apply the Core Values to improving their lives outside of work - and to making a difference in their communities and the world
|
| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 170
 A must-read for inspiration ... plus two other suggested titles for practical implementation June 4, 2010
D. Sanderson (Austin, TX)
47 out of 52 found this review helpful
There has been quite a crop of customer service related books recently, as well as the classics in the field. They each have their own angle, and I'm going to use this brief review as a chance to summarize where Delivering Happiness falls in this group as well as how to complement it with a couple of other books with different approaches that make for a very well-rounded outlook in tandem.
As far as [[Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose:]]
I was privileged to get a galley of this much-anticipated title. It's the story of an entrepreneur and the different paths he took (or twists in the one path, depending on how you look at it). A fascinating story, and not just because of the bezillion dollars he got selling the company to amazon. (And: how can you not like a guy who calls his warehouse WHISKY (WareHouse Inventory and Supply in Kentucky -- Page 118)? Heavy emphasis on his pursuit of happiness for himself and his staff -- very admirable and inspiring.
If you're looking to directly transform your customer service/customer experience, you may want to add to Tony's inspiring autobiography some directly actionable books to help you turn his ideas into techniques you can put into practice right away -- and that are highly consonant with Tony's pro-employee, pro-customer, outlook -- I suggest two books --one a classic, one that's new this Spring -- that can take care of this for you.
1. Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit: The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization
This, like Tony Hsieh's book, is a new title this Spring. Practical, useful insights from the insiders who created high-tech startups and The Ritz-Carlton. Contains specific prescriptions for how to handle many different customer situations like they're handled at the companies profiled inside (incl: Zappos, Ritz-Carlton, Netflix, Charlie Trotter's, Lexus,), appendices with scripts you can use right away, etc.
2. [[Customers For Life: How To Turn That One-Time Buyer Into a Lifetime Customer]]
This is an older title, and a classic: how a texas cadillac dealer, of all people, mastered great customer service. Extremely simple, but never simplistic. Has inspired many business leaders since it was written. Many pages have usable, actionable insights. If you don't have this in your library (and in your psyche) yet, why not? You can probably grab it used for next to nothing, and the wisdom is timeless enough that you hardly need the "latest revised edition" if you need to save a few dollars.
YOUR PATHWAY TO CUSTOMER HAPPINESS...which is your ultimate success June 10, 2010
Melissa King (Atlanta, GA)
64 out of 77 found this review helpful
I've read about and followed Tony Hsieh for a long time...I think he is brilliant. He helped a lot of people who worked along side of him in his business to learn how to solve problems and make people happy. Whether you were close to him or you observed from afar, you had to be touched by him in some way. And now that we have his book, he is definitely making a bigger impact...and I see that as a very good thing during a recession.
If you are wondering if you should get this book, let me say that it is a delightful book, easy to read and his stories will make you smile. However, I see a bigger reason, because if you want to succeed in business (or in life for that matter) you will need to know how to solve problems and make people happy. In fact, solving problems and delivering happiness is at the core of every successful business person.
Therefore, I would highly recommend getting this book along with another that I just finished reading called, Wild West 2.0: How to Protect and Restore Your Reputation on the Untamed Social Frontier. It is inevitable that you will get some bad reviews, or even worse, revengeful customers who will try to ruin your online reputation. This book tells you exactly where to look for the problems and then how to repair the problem. Internet Reputation Management should not be delegated to your webmaster...it is now a critical management and marketing issue that concerns everyone from the CEO on down.
I've also been so inspired by Serendipitously Rich: How to Get Delightfully, Delectably, Deliciously Rich (or Anything Else You Want) in 7 Ridiculously Easy Steps, which was written by Madeleine Kay, along with a foreword by Joe Vitale. This book gives you that same delightful feeling of power and success as it moves you positively on a path of change. It teaches you how to make decisions that serendipitously bring you success. It also gives you practical steps that deliver happiness into your own life, which will make your business a better place to work.
Fabulous, exciting reading March 31, 2010
Lynellen Perry (Dumfries, VA USA)
28 out of 37 found this review helpful
"Delivering Happiness" has become the trade phrase for Zappos. In this hard-to-put-down book, Tony Hseieh (CEO of Zappos) tells the story of how his life became entangled with the life of Zappos. Starting with his childhood, Tony tells how he has always had an entrepreneurial spirit: he tried to raise earthworms when he was 9, he held garage sales and sold lemonade, he had a newspaper route (and decided it was just a way for newspapers to avoid child labor laws:), he wrote a newsletter of jokes he tried to sell to friends, he sold Christmas cards, he made custom photo buttons. Then in high school he discovered computers and began learning. He got a job testing video games, then became a programmer. The little jobs continued throughout college, where he tried to find the easiest path through his classwork. When he graduated college, he took a job at Oracle just because they offered the most money. And he found a way to do as little work as possible there too. Because he was bored, Tony and his roommate created LinkExchange which they eventually sold to Microsoft for $265 million. Bored again, this is where Zappos enters his life.
Much of the rest of the book is a fascinating history of how Zappos evolved and grew from nothing to $1 billion in gross sales in less than 10 years. Along the way, Tony explains how he learned business lessons from a summer fling with playing poker in Vegas. One of those lessons was to figure out what he really wanted to get out of life. He dabbled in investing and day-trading but found them unfulfilling. He dabbled in angel funding (Zappos being one of the companies he funded). He realized he was passionate about building a company, and the beneficiary of his passion happened to be Zappos. He poured a lot of his own money into keeping Zappos alive and learned lessons about inventory, warehousing, and outsourcing.
About half way through the book is where I started highlighting and folding down page corners. Tony talks about company culture and how he lead Zappos to invest their time, money and resources into 3 areas: customer services, culture, and employee training. Tony lists a great "Top 10 ways to instill customer services into your company" and explains (in great detail) the 10 core values of Zappos culture. He gives examples of interview questions that they ask to see how the person will fit into the company culture. He lists some of the course titles that are offered to employees that choose to learn new skills in order to advance their title. He lists the "Top 10 questions to ask when looking for investors and board members." And then Tony tells the story of how Zappos became a "marriage partner" to Amazon.
The final section of the book is about applying the science of happiness. This was an outstanding section and the entire book is worth the price just for this section alone. Tony mentions several books (The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom and Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment) that formed the foundation of his research into happiness along with books that taught him about company culture (Good To Great: Why Some Companies Make The Leap...and Others Don't and Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization). Tony also recommends Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow (J-B US non-Franchise Leadership) to learn how Maslow's Hierarchy of needs can be applied to business, customers, employees and investors.
Overall a highly enjoyable book, very nicely written in an informal style, with a great story and good pointers to further resources. Highly recommended.
This review was written based on an Advance Reading Copy of uncorrected page proofs.
Excellent Read from Tony Hseieh April 15, 2010
Lee Mellott (Frederick, Maryland)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
In Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose Tony Hseieh shares much of his background and his rise to personal and financial success. A self made millionaire by his early twenties Tony's story is a fascinating read.
Ever the entrepreneur Tony had a number of businesses as a child including lemonade sales, worm farming and button making. Eventually he graduated from Harvard, built and sold Link Exchange for millions of dollars, ran Zappos which sold to Amazon in a deal valued at $1.2 billion and so much more.
The premise of the book underlies that Tony feels that the framework of happiness can result in both passion and profits.
Tony seems to make very good friends and keep them throughout his life as both business partners and friends.
Tony's energy and enthusiasm radiate throughout the book and it is good to see that someone who has achieved as much as he has at such a young age knows the value of the important things in life.
Interestingly when I mentioned to my pop singing daughter that I was reading the book she told me she had tweeted him a few times and he had very nicely tweeted her back. For someone with hundreds of thousands of friends on Twitter that shows a real people person.
Excellent read!
~ Lee Mellott
Delivering Happiness to Your Employees and Customers = Success June 8, 2010
Anthony Oravet
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I was lucky enough to receive advanced copies of Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose. The book was personally written by Tony Hsieh (CEO of Zappos) without the use of a ghostwriter.
Tony Hsieh is your everyday entrepreneur; start out small and work your way up. From worm farming as an adolescent, selling burgers and pizza for spending money in college, to the $1 billion dollar sale of Zappos to Amazon in 2009, all of those long hard days of work finally paid off for Tony.
In Delivering Happiness - A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose, Hsieh talks about his failed attempts at worm farming as a child and selling burgers and pizza in college. He chronicles the key moments while advising and investing in Zappos and how those decisions helped him become CEO of the $1 billion a year company.
This book is not intended to help improve your bottom line. The book outlines the successes a company can enjoy when they provide a great atmosphere for their employees and customers. It's common sense.
The company culture has to be one of the biggest keys to success for Zappos. Provide a great atmosphere to work in and those positive attitudes will trickle all the way down to those repeat customers. Employee and Customer loyalty will abound.
This is an easy read for anyone. You don't have to be an entrepreneur to appreciate the nuggets this book has to offer. This book provides great business and life lessons from a down to earth perspective.
It's about the people involved in the company, not the profits that makes Zappos successful.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 170
|
|
|
CERTAIN CONTENT THAT APPEARS ON THIS SITE COMES FROM AMAZON SERVICES LLC. THIS CONTENT IS PROVIDED ‘AS IS’ AND IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE OR REMOVAL AT ANY TIME. Powered by Associate-O-Matic
| |
