By Verne Harnish “Growth Guy”
No company better exemplifies the power of a strong corporate culture than Zappos, the online shoe and clothing retailer acquired by Amazon last November for $1.2 billion. Just over a decade old, its corporate culture is the critical glue that helps this rapidly growing company deliver on its promise of providing exceptional customer service – and delivering happiness!
To witness this culture firsthand, I organized a private tour of Zappos corporate headquarters in Henderson, NV for 120 CEOs and executives of growth companies. We also invited their well known CEO, Tony Hsieh, to share his personal insights into corporate culture with a broader audience of growth company executives the following day.
FAILED CULTURE
Hsieh’s obsession with corporate culture dates back to his first company, LinkExchange, which he sold to Microsoft for $265 million when he was 24 years old. He decided to sell the company the morning he found himself hitting the snooze button on his alarm clock multiple times, dreading the thought of having to go into work. And he wondered how many other employees felt the same way.
He vowed if he launched another company he would focus on maintaining a strong corporate culture rather than one that haphazardly drifted and shifted as new employees were added to the firm.
CULTURE DRIFT
This cultural drift begins around 70 employees – when the senior executives no longer know everyone’s name in the company. This drift accelerates when the company moves to a second floor in a building or opens a second location. The physical separation makes it that much harder to keep the corporate culture tight and aligned.
The key to maintaining a cohesive culture is discovering a set of core values that accurately reflect the nuances of the organization’s personality. Hsieh led this discovery exercise during Zappos’ fifth year in business. This is about the right timing. Like a child, the corporate culture or personality isn’t fully revealed until the company is five years old, being shaped through early experiences and the collective values of the people involved.
DISCOVERY PROCESS
I’ve seen firms spend tens of thousands of dollars and months going through a laborious process that often generates a generic list of core values. And this generic list often fails to represent the uniqueness and power of the existing culture. Alternatively, there is a way to get at your core values that’s fun and amazingly fast. It’s an approach outlined in Jim Collins’s and Jerry Porras’s article “Building Your Company’s Vision.” You can download the article from www.hbr.com for $6 or Collins has some
