spacer image
spacer image

Welcome! You're looking at an archived Snarkmarket entry. We've got a fresh look—and more new ideas every day—on the front page.

March 15, 2009

| Snark by Snarkwest: Another Games Panel >>

The Continuum from Google to Zappos

One interesting SXSW session from yesterday was Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh’s keynote on what makes his company tick. Among his most arresting lines was this (in paraphrase): Contrary to popular belief, the most important goal for us is not customer service. It’s culture. Hsieh proceeded to outline an exhaustive strategy for enforcing a fairly specific corporate culture, including the creation of an annual “Culture Book,” which features statements from Zappos employees characterizing the culture of the company.

Hsieh’s presentation was striking because it seemed to cut firmly against the grain of the current prevailing attitude towards corporate culture. We hear a lot nowadays that the best CEOs work hard to produce a sort of rigorous autonomy among their employees. Google, of course, famously permits its employees to spend a day a week merely following their own curiosity in the pursuit of work. The Obama campaign was praised for replicating the organizing structure of a good jazz group - a legion of micro-maestros, all empowered to excel at their own strategies in their many focused domains.

The Zappos of Hsieh’s description, on the other hand, is in some sense a very top-down, command-and-control environment. Prospective employees are carefully screened for conformance to a preordained culture, and anyone hired can be severed for failing to conform to that culture. One of Hsieh’s “10 commandments of Zappos” (how often do you hear “ten commandments” these days in companies?) - “build a positive team and family spirit” - is about eradicating the division between work and life, according to the company’s recruiting manager. “Employees work together, play together, break bread together and come to think of each other as members of an extended family,” she says. I.e., Zappos aims to encompass the entirety of its employees’ lives. This runs counter to, say, Best Buy’s much-praised embrace of allowing its employees unprecedented flexibility in scheduling and telecommuting.

Of course I’m simplifying. The “commandments” ostensibly allow room for plenty of employee autonomy. “Be adventurous, creative and open-minded” is on the list. Which reminds me of trying to come up with funny post-song banter for a cappella concerts in college. At some point, after even our lamest ideas had stopped trickling out, someone would croak out an exhausted, “Be funny!” And we’d all laugh. Because, of course, you can’t command humor into existence. Can you command creativity? And can you really make jazz when all your musicians were pre-screened for favoring the same improvisations and flourishes?

Also notable was the warm reaction Hsieh’s sessions got. Aside from some jokes about the cultish picture he was painting, and some grumbling about his sort of flat presentation style, the Twitterverse was surprisingly (I thought) aglow about what Hsieh was saying.

Is the dynamic changing? Is top-down the new bottom-up? What’s the right balance between Zappos’ approach and Google’s, or Best Buy’s?

Later, also: Robin got at some similar questions in his post about Apple, the iPhone, secrecy and transparency.

mthompson-sig.gif
Posted March 15, 2009 at 12:30 | Comments (2) | Permasnark
File under: Business

Comments

"Employees work together, play together, break bread together and come to think of each other as members of an extended family."

That's super interesting. You're right, it's totally against the zeitgeist. It feels like the old kind of corporate job, where you'd sign up to work at IBM... FOR LIFE. For all I know that model is still very alive in some places -- certainly in Japan, Korea, etc.

But then again, there's a bit of that all-consuming vibe to some of the Silicon Valley campuses, too. All the big technology companies have cafeterias... gyms... daycare... dentists! So there's some of that same 360-degree "this is your universe" approach there, too.

What do you think? All things being equal, would you want your imaginary mid-sized company of around 200 people, profitable, w/ a cool product, to be a) just the place you happily spent your days (but you gotta figure the rest of your life out on your own) or b) an all-encompassing corporate cocoon, w/ all the support & benefits that that implies?

Universities are pretty cocoon-like -- classrooms, offices, dorms, shops, restaurants, and sometimes hospitals all in one place. I imagine this is why for some of the just-out-of-college hot-shit coders at Google (or wherevs), campus life feels oddly familiar, and comforting -- a grown-up, better-paid extension of their first encounter with adulthood.

It's a dangerous thing, though, and probably best suited for places like academia (where, after all, many employees have a process that guarantees them a job for life). It's hard to lose your friends, house, dentist, etc., all at once if you lose or change your job. That's why the Pullman folks had such power over their employees, and why that strike basically broke that industrial model at the turn of the century.

spacer image
spacer image