Tony Hsieh Quotes

A bigger business is like a cruise ship: There are lots of amenities and you can go a lot further, but it's harder to turn quickly.

Every employee can affect your company's brand, not just the front-line employees that are paid to talk to your customers.

I thought about how easily we are all brainwashed by our society and culture to stop thinking and just assume by default that more money equals more success and more happiness, when ultimately happiness is really just about enjoying life.

Having a higher purpose is more than just about profits. You actually end up making more profits in the long run because employees really are a lot more engaged and customers see the higher purpose in the company.

Rather than focus on trying to get a lot of customers to market yourself, really focus more on the actual product or service itself and existing users to, like, what would make them happier, what would make them come back more and more times or in our case buy more often.

You've gotta love the game. To become really good, you need to live it and sleep it.

Just figure out what your personal values are then just make those the corporate values.

Studies find top 3 most stressful moments in people's lives: death, divorce, and properly pronouncing "Worcestershire sauce."

Chase the vision, not the money, the money will end up following you.

If I was going to go into an office I wanted it to be with people I would choose to be around even if we didn't have to work together and so that was one of the major reasons why I decided out of all the different companies we invested in to work with Zappos.

Open, honest communication is the best foundation for any relationship, but remember that at the end of the day it's not what you say or what you do, but how you make people feel that matters the most.

Happiness is really just about four things: perceived control, perceived progress, connectedness (number and depth of your relationships), and vision/meaning (being part of something bigger than yourself).

Your culture is your brand.

Good businesses generate missions to drive their profits. Great businesses generate profits to drive their missions.

Our belief is that if you get the culture right, most of the other stuff, like great customer service, or building a great long-term brand or empowering passionate employees and customers, will happen on its own.

Don't be cocky. Don't be flashy. There's always someone better than you.

Sorry, investing was pretty boring and I really missed being part of building something. I felt like I was always standing on the sidelines, so Zappos... really liked the people there and got involved full-time and I've been full-time ever since.

Businesses often forget about the culture, and ultimately, they suffer for it because you can't deliver good service from unhappy employees.

Don't play games that you don't understand, even if you see lots of other people making money from them.

Learn by doing. Theory is nice, but nothing replaces actual experience.

A lot of people realize "I don't have to work in this job that I'm miserable at every year, or every day, and I don't have to live in, for example, New York City where it's super expensive and if I live somewhere else that is less expensive and could pursue my passion like, I can afford to do that."

Service Over the years, the number one driver of our growth at Zappos has been repeat customers and word of mouth. Our philosophy has been to take most of the money we would have spent on paid advertising and invest it into customer service and the customer experience instead, letting our customers do the marketing for us through word of mouth.

My advice is to stop trying to "network" in the traditional business sense, and instead just try to build up the number and depth of your friendships, where the friendship itself is its own reward. The more diverse your set of friendships are, the more likely you'll derive both personal and business benefits from your friendship later down the road. You won't know exactly what those benefits will be, but if your friendships are genuine, those benefits will magically appear 2-3 years later down the road.

It doesn't cost anything to say hi when you pass someone else in the hallway, whereas, most corporations if you pass you avoid eye contact.

For individuals, character is destiny. For organizations, culture is destiny.

To never forget that the most important thing in life is the quality of life we lead.

I think maybe 50 years ago people and businesses felt like they had to choose between maximizing profits and making customers happy or making employees happy, and I think we're actually living in a special time where everyone's hyperconnected, whether through Twitter or blogs and so on. Information travels so quickly that it's actually possible to have it all, to make customers happy through customer service, to make employees happy through strong company cultures, and have that actually drive growth and profits.

Your brand is your culture.

Launching a business is kind of like a motorboat: You can go very quickly and turn fast.

Most companies are very quick to hire and slow to fire, when really it should be the other way around.

We decided that if we get the culture right, most of the stuff, like building a brand around delivering the very best customer service, will just take care of itself.

Be true to yourself. If you follow that principle, a lot of decisions are actually pretty easy.

Ask yourself: would you be comfortable printing everything your employees, customers & partners have to say about your culture?

Whatever you are thinking, think bigger.

There's a big difference between motivation and inspiration: Inspire through values and motivation takes care of itself.

Get the culture right, and everything else just falls into place.