Over the past 6 months or so I have become increasingly fascinated with Zappos.com.  First, it was how fast the shipping was.  Order something, go ahead.  See when it comes in and you’ll be amazed too.  Next it was that they have over 400+ employees on Twitter.  Don’t believe me? They have a subdomain set-up dedicated solely to Twitter – twitter.zappos.com.  Once I found out about the Twitter piece, I began to dig more.  The more I continued to learn, the more of a fan I became.

I didn’t start begin becoming a fan because I thought they sold cool products at good prices (which they do!) but because of the importance they placed on culture, both internally with their teams, and externally with their customers.  While in Las Vegas for CES I was given a copy of the Zappos 2008 Culture Book.  No, this is not a management book where Tony Hsieh, CEO, talks about all the great things he’s done or his team has done to grow the company to more than $1 billion dollars in sales in just 9 years.  This is a book that starts by asking a simple question on the first page: “What is culture, anyway?”  To answer this question, Tony sent a company wide email stating:

Our culture is the combination of all of our employees’ ideas about the culture, so we would like to include everyone’s thoughts in this book.  Please email me a few sentences about what the Zappos culture means to you…We will compile everyone’s contributions into the book.

What follows at the end of that email is over 460 pages of employees who responded to Tony’s email with what the culture of Zappos.com and what working for the company means to them.  If you had never read about the 10 core values that the Zappos.com culture is based on, you would quickly learn what they are after reading the first dozen or so responses.  Oh yeah, and the reason why you would know what those core values are is because the employees truly believe in them.  It wasn’t a PR, marketing or branding move.  It’s what these employees live, eat and breath by.  Want to know what they are?

Zappos Core Values

1. Deliver WOW through service
2. Embrace and drive change
3. Create fun and a little weirdness
4. Be adventurous, creative, and open-minded
5. Pursue growth and learning
6. Build open and honest relationships with communication
7. Build a positive team and family spirit
8. Do more with less
9. Be passionate and determined
10. Be humble

So, how do they go about embodying these core values?  Instead of boring you with example after example of what I’ve read through previous interviews, presentations, or through the book, check out these 2 videos.  The first is a piece done by Nightline which goes inside Zappos.com offices in Las Vegas.  The second video is an interview Tony recently did with Seesmic founder, Loic Le Meur.  I highly recommend watching both videos in their entirety.

Do you actually live by your core values, personal or professional?  What can you learn from what Zappos.com is doing and adapt or create within your organization?  Let’s chat about it in the comments below.

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