Delivering Happiness

Party music filled the room as employees streamed in looking for empty
seats. I could feel the buzz and excitement in the air. Some employees
brought beach balls and started throwing them around into the crowd. It felt
like we were at a rock concert and a rave, combined.
We announced that we were going to start the meeting, and everyone
cheered and started clapping. The energy in the room was amazing.
We spent about an hour covering everything that was in the e-mail I had
sent out two days earlier and answered additional questions our employees
had. Amazon also answered some of the questions to give their perspective
on everything.
“I get asked by a lot by people what we would do differently if we had
to do Zappos all over again,” I said to the crowd. “There’s actually not
much that I wish we would have done differently. We’ve made a lot of
mistakes along the way, but learning from those mistakes has made us that
much stronger. But I do wish that we could have done things faster.”
And then I summed everything up in one sentence: “Getting married to
Amazon will allow us to fulfill our vision of delivering happiness to the
world that much faster.”
As a surprise to our employees, Alfred and I announced that we were
personally paying for and giving every employee a Kindle, Amazon’s
electronic book reader. And then, as a final surprise, we also announced that
Amazon was paying for a big bonus to all of our existing employees to
thank everyone for their hard work.
Without any prompting, everyone in the entire room spontaneously
jumped from their seats, standing up cheering and clapping. A lot of them
even had tears of happiness streaming down their faces. Just like we
surprise many of our loyal repeat customers with unexpected upgrades to
overnight shipping, we had just made our already happy employees even
happier with the surprise bonus.
To me, that one moment represented success far beyond what I could
have possibly imagined would be achievable ten years ago. It wasn’t just
about the Kindle or the bonus. Those were just… bonuses.

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The moment signified far more than that. The unified energy and
emotion of everyone in the room was not just about my own personal
happiness, and not just about the happiness of Zappos employees. We were
about much more than just profits and passion. Collectively, this marked the
beginning of the next leg of our journey to help change the world.
Half intentionally and half by luck, we had found our path to profits,
passion, and purpose.
We had found our path to delivering happiness.