Corner Office: On a Scale of 1 to 10, How Weird Are You?
January 9, 2010 by admin
Filed under Career News and Advice
This interview with Tony Hsieh, the chief executive of Zappos.com, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant.
Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times
Tony Hsieh is C.E.O. of Zappos.com, the shoe seller that Amazon acquired last year. A core Zappos value, he says, is to “create fun and a little weirdness,” so he values iniduality in hiring.
Corner Office
Every Sunday, Adam Bryant talks with top executives about the challenges of leading and managing.
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Q. What are some of the most important leadership lessons you’ve learned?
A. After college, a roommate and I started a company called LinkExchange in 1996, and it grew to about 100 or so people, and then we ended up selling the company to Microsoft in 1998. From the outside, it looked like it was a great acquisition, $265 million, but most people don’t know the real reason why we ended up selling the company.
It was because the company culture just went completely downhill. When it was starting out, when it was just 5 or 10 of us, it was like your typical dot-com. We were all really excited, working around the clock, sleeping under our desks, had no idea what day of the week it was. But we didn’t know any better and didn’t pay attention to company culture.
By the time we got to 100 people, even though we hired people with the …
Read the original article at NYTimes
