The book narrates the Zappos story through the eyes of Tony Hsieh (pronounced as ‘Shay’), the Harvard-graduate entrepreneur who led the company from 1999 to 2020 after having sold his former company, LinkExchange, to Microsoft for $265 million when he was just 25 in 1998. Starting out as your run-of-the-mill online shoe retailer, the Las Vegas-based Zappos was acquired less than a decade later by Amazon in 2009 for more than $1 billion and it happens to be the subject of the book we review this month: Delivering Happiness. Some companies put so much value on culture that they go to extreme lengths to promote their corporate culture, just like Zappos did by publishing the Culture Book explaining what culture means to them. Despite being a rare sight, such companies are built around a few core values that define their raison d'être, rely on these core values to develop sustainable competitive advantage and try to beat their competition in the long game. However, this does not mean that there aren’t companies that live and die by their culture. What it refers to in the business context and what it does for a particular company rarely get more attention than a few sentences in a mission statement, though. Today it has turned into a buzzword without which you cannot prepare a press release or make an announcement. Culture must be one of the most overused but least understood terms in the business world.

Delivering happiness book