Delivering Happiness

Insights
As we started getting more and more speaking requests at Zappos, we
started sending other people from different departments to speak as well.
Just like in our culture book, different employees told their own personal
stories and gave their own presentations and perspective. To this day, we
don’t have a standard PowerPoint presentation that everyone gives.
All the speaking we’ve done has led to a lot of unexpected results that
we could not have possibly predicted. In addition to plenty of coverage in
blogs and in the media, we’ve gotten to know many, many different
conference organizers, which led to speaking engagements at Tony Robbins
events, TEDIndia (Technology, Entertainment, Design), SXSW (South by
Southwest), a conference where the Dalai Lama also spoke, and the Inc.
500 Conference. I’ve met many of the authors whose books we admire and
carry in the Zappos Library, including Jim Collins, Seth Godin, and Chip
Conley. We’ve had people from all levels of a lot of different companies
tour our headquarters as a result of our public speaking appearances. From
those, we’ve developed many great relationships and business opportunities
that would have otherwise never happened.
We apply our core values whenever we give these talks. Rather than use
our speaking opportunities to explicitly promote Zappos, we instead try to
share as much as possible about how we do things in order to help the

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audience Pursue Growth and Learning. And in line with our core value of
trying to Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication, we’re
happy to share numbers and other detailed information.
All of this led to the single biggest unexpected result of our public
speaking: realizing that we were actually changing other companies and
other people’s lives. It slowly started sinking in that we could be part of
something that was much bigger than Zappos. We realized that we could
change the world not just by doing things differently at Zappos, but by
helping change how other companies did things.
It’s been rewarding to hear from other people and companies about how
they’ve changed their lives or the way they run their companies by doing
things such as implementing core values, focusing more on customer
service, and focusing more on company culture and employee happiness,
and how doing so has actually improved their financial performance as
well.
We continue to hear from people every day that Zappos inspired them to
run their business differently, not necessarily because they wanted to be just
like Zappos, but because they saw a real-life example that it was actually
possible to run a values-based company that also focuses on everyone’s
happiness. They saw that it wasn’t just theory, that there was a way to
combine profits, passion, and purpose.
The feedback and stories we received led us to develop Zappos Insights,
an online video subscription service, and Zappos Insights Live, a two-day
immersion seminar. Both programs are designed to help entrepreneurs and
established businesses improve their companies. Many participants are
specifically interested in learning how to create stronger cultures and their
own set of core values.
As we rolled out these additional services, we slowly realized that we
were becoming part of a bigger movement. It was no longer just about
Zappos. We were helping change the world.