Review: Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh

 The visionary CEO of Zappos explains how an emphasis on corporate culture can lead to unprecedented success.

Pay new employees $2000 to quit. Make customer service the entire company, not just a department. Focus on company culture as the #1 priority. Apply research from the science of happiness to running a business. Help employees grow both personally and professionally. Seek to change the world. Oh, and make money too.

Sound crazy? It's all standard operating procedure at Zappos.com, the online retailer that's doing over $1 billion in gross merchandise sales every year.

In 1999, Tony Hsieh (pronounced Shay) sold LinkExchange, the company he co-founded, to Microsoft for $265 million. He then joined Zappos as an adviser and investor, and eventually became CEO.

In 2009, Zappos was listed as one of Fortune magazine's top 25 companies to work for, and was acquired by Amazon later that year in a deal valued at over $1.2 billion on the day of closing.

In his first book, Tony shares the different business lessons he learned in life, from a lemonade stand and pizza business through LinkExchange, Zappos, and more. Ultimately, he shows how using happiness as a framework can produce profits, passion, and purpose both in business and in life. description taken from here.







I received the audio book of Delivering Happiness to review.  Tony Hsieh is the author, the editor, and the voice of this audio book.  He is also the CEO of Zappos.com, Inc.  You might have heard of Zappos.com before, an online web store where people can purchase brand name products (shoes, purses, accessories, etc.) at a discounted price.

The book isn't overly serious.  Meaning, that Hsiesh doesn't try to sell you a message by shoving facts and bias at you.  He seems easy going through his book, in the sense that he cares and is a hard worker, yet knows when to calm down and live.  Still, Hsiesh gets his message across to readers. 

For anyone in the business industry, this would be a book to consider reading, or listening to. 

Audio book length: 9 hours
You can purchase the book for $29.98 if you live in the US, or $35.98 for you awesome Canadians : )


**I did not get paid for this post.  I received a free audio book from Hachette in order to procure a real and honest review.  All opinions are my own unless otherwise stated.**