They say the company Zappos is harder to get into than Harvard. The company may sell shoes, but its mission is to deliver WOW, through a fun-focused, values driven company culture, making it one of the most coveted places to work in America. At the centre is CEO Tony Hsieh, obsessed with the hunt for happiness and driven by increasingly bold – and strange – ideas about how to find it.
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Further reading
Tony Hsieh’s life story is told in Wonder Boy: Tony Hsieh, Zappos and the Myth of Happiness in Silicon Valley, by Angel Au-Yeung and David Jeans; Happy at Any Cost: The Revolutionary Vision and Fatal Quest of Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, by Kirsten Grind and Katherine Sayre; and Tony’s own autobiographical business book, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose.
This script also drew on Aimee Groth’s book The Kingdom of Happiness: Inside Tony Hsieh’s Zapponian Utopia, and reporting in the New Yorker, New Republic, Fortune, The Atlantic, HBR, 8 News Now, Medium, and an interview with Tyler Williams on Burner Podcast.
John Kay’s book is Obliquity: Why our goals are best achieved indirectly.
