Five Fifty: Try a little weird

Discover more Five Fifties

Take another Five

Share this edition

PBS NewsHour

Zappos is a weird company— and it’s happy that way

Interview - McKinsey Quarterly

Safe enough to try: An interview with Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh

Take a fifty-minute deeper dive

Now that you’ve read the Five …

Interview - McKinsey Quarterly

Safe enough to try: An interview with Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh

Dive deeper

Crowdsource

“Everyone is a human sensor capable of sensing … the gap between the way things are and what’s possible.”

Embrace markets

“A market is able to incorporate the intelligence of all the individual players and get feedback much faster.”

Structure purpose

“You can pick any role anywhere in [Zappos’s] purpose hierarchy, and there’s an entire set of purpose statements that all link ultimately back up to the company purpose.”

Hire and fire

“It doesn’t matter what your values are. What matters is that you have them and … you’re willing to hire and fire based on them.”

Learning from Zappos’s eccentric approach requires pondering some of Hsieh’s more provocative concepts.

Try some

Interview - McKinsey Quarterly

Safe enough to try: An interview with Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh

Dive deeper

Tony Hsieh, Zappos CEO

“

We went back and forth for about a year and came up with our ten [core values]. They’ve become part of our culture. They’re part of our employees’ everyday language. . . . And once they become part of the language, they become part of the mind-set.”

These core values weren’t imposed on Zappos’s employees—the employees themselves decided what they should be.

Crowdsourced

Interview - McKinsey Quarterly

Safe enough to try: An interview with Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh

Dive deeper

Create fun and a little weirdness

Be humble

Build open and honest relationships with communication

Be passionate and determined

Build a positive team and family spirit

Pursue growth and learning

Do more with less

Embrace and drive change

Be adventurous, creative, and open-minded

Deliver WOW through service

But Zappos has a deeper structure too, striving to be like a city where common values unite decentralized decision makers.

Self-organizing

PBS NewsHour

Zappos is a weird company— and it’s happy that way

Dive deeper

The snipped ties pinned to the wall by the dress-code enforcer are a visitor’s first clue about Zappos’s culture. (You can wear yours like Rambo if you don’t want it clipped.)

They call them wallflowers

A quick briefing in five— or a fifty-minute deeper dive