CORE (corps) VALUES OF THE ORGANIZATION

Tony Hsieh is the CEO of Zappos.com, Inc. During the past 10 years, the company has grown from almost no sales to more than $1 billion in annual gross merchandise sales, driven primarily by repeat customers and word of mouth. Below is an excerpt from Tony's forthcoming book that describes the beginning of Zappos.

Even though our core values guide us in everything we do today, we didn't actually have any formal core values for the first six or seven years of the company's history. It's my fault that we didn't do it in the early years, because it was something I'd always thought of as a very "corporate" thing to do. I resisted doing it for as long as possible.

I'm just glad that an employee finally convinced me that it was necessary to come up with core values — essentially, a formalized definition of our culture — in order for us to continue to scale and grow.

I only wish we had done it sooner.

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The commitment part was the most challenging part. 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 one of orientation, but then the values just end up being part of a meaningless plaque on the wall of the corporate lobby.

We wanted to make sure that didn't happen with our core values. We wanted a list of committable core values that we were willing to hire and fire on. If we weren't willing to do that, then they weren't really "values."

We eventually came up with our final list of 10 core values, which we still use today:

Deliver WOW Through Service
Embrace and Drive Change
Create Fun and A Little Weirdness
Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded
Pursue Growth and Learning
Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication
Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit
Do More With Less
Be Passionate and Determined
Be Humble

Be Humble is probably the core value that ends up affecting our hiring decisions the most. There are a lot of experienced, smart, and talented people we interview that we know can make an immediate impact on our top or bottom line. But a lot of them are also really egotistical, so we end up not hiring them. At most companies, the hiring manager would probably argue that we should hire such a candidate because he or she will add a lot of value to the company, which is probably why most large corporations don't have great cultures.

Our philosophy at Zappos is that we're willing to make short-term sacrifices (including lost revenue or profits) if we believe that the long-term benefits are worth it. Protecting the company culture and sticking to core values is a long-term benefit.

Once we had our final list of our ten core values, I sent an e-mail to the entire company describing each of them in more detail. We still refer to the original e-mail today. In fact, when new employees join the company, they are required to sign a document stating that they have read the core values document and understand that living up to the core values is part of their job expectation.