Delivering Happiness

Core Values
Back in San Francisco, Nick, Fred, and I tried to interview every
prospective employee to make sure they were a culture fit for Zappos.
When we moved the company to Vegas, we were hiring a lot of people very
quickly due to our rapid growth. It wasn’t scalable for us to be involved

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with every new hire decision, but the problem was that because we had so
many new employees, not everyone knew exactly what we were looking for
when we said we were looking for a culture fit.
Someone from our legal department suggested that we come up with a
list of core values to serve as a guide for managers to make hiring decisions,
so I started jotting down the things that we were looking for. I thought about
all the employees I wanted to clone because they represented the Zappos
culture well, and tried to figure out what values they personified. I also
thought about all the employees and ex-employees who were not culture
fits, and tried to figure out where there was a values disconnect.
As I started creating the list, I realized that I needed to get everyone’s
input on what our core values should be, just like we had done with the
Culture Book, when we asked every employee for their thoughts on what
the Zappos culture was.
The initial list had thirty-seven core values:
1. Culture Is Everything
2. WOW/Service
3. Trust and Faith
4. Idealism
5. Company Growth
6. Long Term
7. Personal Growth and Stretching
8. Achieving the Impossible
9. Team
10. Family/Relationships
11. Emotional Connections
12. Developing Your Gut
13. Empowerment
14. Ownership
15. Taking Initiative
16. Doing Whatever It Takes
17. Not Being Afraid to Make Mistakes
18. Unconventional
19. Bottom Up (Meets Top Down)

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20. Partnerships
21. Listening
22. Overcommunicate
23. Operational Excellence
24. Built for Change
25. Continuous Incremental Improvement
26. Doing More with Less
27. Innovation
28. Word of Mouth
29. Lucky
30. Passion and Positivity
31. Personality
32. Openness and Honesty
33. Fun
34. Inspirational
35. A Little Weird
36. Willing to Laugh at Ourselves
37. Quiet Confidence and Respect
It was a long list, so we started thinking about which values were the
most important and truly represented who we wanted to be. We also thought
about whether we could combine some of them into a single core value.
Over the course of a year, I e-mailed the entire company several times
and got a lot of suggestions and feedback on which core values were the
most important to our employees.
I was surprised the process took so long, but we wanted to make sure not
to rush through the process because whatever core values we eventually
came up with, we wanted to be ones that we could truly embrace.
The commitment part was the most challenging part. As I mentioned in
my “Your Culture Is Your Brand” blog post, a lot of corporations have
“core values” or “guiding principles,” but the problem is that they’re
usually very lofty sounding and they read like a press release that the
marketing department put out. A lot of times, an employee might learn
about them on day 1 of orientation, but then the values just end up being