This book for sure is the best management book I read in the last year!
The book starts with Tony's early life as a kid in school, his first job and how a curious kid he was, all written in a funny way. I also appreciate the fact that Tony is very honest about the mistakes he made with his companies and what he learned out of them (for example what outsourcing a very crucial part of their business costed the company).
But the heart of this book is the 'Zappos' story. Zappos is an online shoe company based in Las Vegas, founded in 1999. It became famous when it was acquired by Amazon a few years ago for a billion dollars.You will read about how Zappos was grown considering the fact that e-commerce was not a familiar concept at that time, the struggles he and his friends went through for funding, how Tony spent every bit of his personal savings for Zappos because deep in his heart he knew that they were going to succeed, how the company culture is the key that got them where they are now ('Being weird' is one of their important core values!!), the letters he shared with his employees that show how important it is for an organisation to have an open communication.
12 bits of Tony's advice in his own words:
1. Your best negotiating position is where you don't care what your outcome is and you are not afraid to walk away!
2. I knew in my heart that even if we failed, going after the right opportunity was the right thing to do.
3. We were young we could afford to be bold.
4. The short story is that we simply didn't know we should have paid more attention to our company culture.
5. Large amounts of money have a strange way of getting people's true colors to come out.
6. I made a list of happiest periods in my life and realized that none of them involved money!
7. "I went to the office, sent my good-bye e-mail to the company and walked out the door. I didn't know exactly what I was going to do but I knew what I wasn't going to do. I wasn't going to sit around letting my life and world pass by. People thought I was crazy for giving up all that money. And yes, making that decision was scary, but in a good way".
8. Without conscious and deliberate effort, inertia always wins.
9. We believe that openness and honesty make for the best relationships because it leads to trust and faith.
10. We believe that no matter what happens we should be respectful of everyone.
11. "If you focus on making sure that your product or service continually 'wows' people, eventually the press will find out".
12. The key lesson we learned is you should never outsource your core competency.
There is a dialogue I remember from one of the episodes in Game of thrones, "But you have something more than that, you have a 'gentle heart', you will not only be respected and feared, you would be loved. Someone who can and should rule.Centuries come and go without a person like that coming into this world".
I guess it is everybody's dream to be lead by a leader like this and work in a group that has a 'greater or higher purpose'!
There are situations where we get torn between following guts versus reasons or following your passion versus logic. I guess there is no golden rule that says what to do when. Even though they say 'Good judgments come from experience and practice', reading these kind of books can also influence your decisions and help you figure it out!
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