Zappos CEO on Company Culture

Adam Bryant of the New York Times interviewed Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com. It’s a quick, great little read about company culture.

A few of my my favorite things from Hsieh:

• “So for us, at Zappos, we really view culture as our No. 1 priority. 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.”
• “I basically sent an e-mail out to the entire company, asking them what our values should be, and got a whole bunch of different responses. The initial list was actually 37 long, and then we ended up condensing and combining them and went back and forth and came up with our list of 10.”
• “Today, we actually do two separate sets of interviews. The hiring manager and his or her team will interview for the standard fit within the team, relevant experience, technical ability and so on. But then our H.R. department does a separate set of interviews purely for culture fit. They actually have questions for each and every one of the core values.”
• “I think of myself less as a leader, and more of being almost an architect of an environment that enables employees to come up with their own ideas, and where employees can grow the culture and evolve it over time, so it’s not me having a vision of ‘This is our culture.'”

How about you and your company? Have you consciously created and been a good steward of your company culture, or has it spiraled away from you – our of your control?

Heck, what is your company culture? Furthermore, if I sent a quick email to all of your employees, would their answers be similar to yours … or wildly different?

If you don’t know the answer to that last question, let me ask you one more: does it bother you that you don’t know?

Just askin’ …