Delivering Happiness

Be Humble
While we have grown quickly in the past, we recognize that there are
always challenges ahead to tackle. We believe that no matter what happens,
we should always be respectful of everyone.
While we celebrate our individual and team successes, we are not
arrogant nor do we treat others differently from how we would want to be
treated. Instead, we carry ourselves with a quiet confidence, because we
believe that in the long run our character will speak for itself.
Ask yourself: Are you humble when talking about your
accomplishments? Are you humble when talking about the company’s
accomplishments? Do you treat both large and small vendors with the same
amount of respect that they treat you?
It’s more fun to talk with someone who doesn’t use long difficult
words but rather short easy words like “What about lunch?”
—Winnie-the-Pooh
O
ne of our other goals when we came up with our ten core values was to
create a list that was unique to Zappos and didn’t sound like every other
company. No two company cultures are exactly alike, yet the core values
for a lot of corporations sound very similar. In most cases, you wouldn’t be
able to identify the company just by looking at their list of core values.

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Doing a Google search for each of your company’s core values can
serve as a good test for whether your company’s core values are unique. If
you Google any of our core values, you’ll find that Zappos always shows
up somewhere, and in most cases we are the number one search result.
Ultimately, though, it’s not the Google search results that matter. What
matters is that each of the core values becomes a natural part of employees’
everyday language and way of thinking. Committable core values that are
truly integrated into a company’s operations can align an entire organization
and serve as a guide for employees to make their own decisions.
I’m not suggesting that other companies should adopt our core values at
Zappos. In most cases, that would be a huge mistake. Our core values are
simply the core values that make sense for us.
In the books Good to Great and Tribal Leadership, the authors looked at
what characteristics separated the great companies from the good ones. One
of the most important ingredients they found was a strong company culture.
Core values are essentially a formalized definition of a company’s culture.
As it turns out, it doesn’t actually matter what your company’s core
values are. What matters is that you have them and that you commit to
them. What’s important is the alignment that you get from them when they
become the default way of thinking for the entire organization.
Your personal core values define who you are, and a company’s core
values ultimately define the company’s character and brand.
For individuals, character is destiny.
For organizations, culture is destiny.
To learn more about how you can create committable core values for
your organization, take a look at the links in the Appendix of this book.