As many of you know, I recently completed Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh’s book “Delivering Happiness” – and loved it. Among the many gems in this book, one story in particular caught my attention. On pp. 123-124, Tony discusses a fundamental decision that his team made in 2003 with regard to their “drop ship” business – which is essentially when they passed orders through to shoe vendors for the vendor to fill and ship. Customer satisfaction with these types of orders was relatively low compare to those that Zappos.com filled directly from their own warehouse/inventory. Although the drop ship business was profitable and “easy money” (no direct owning/tracking of inventory, etc.), the Zappos.com team was not pleased with the level of service to its customers they were getting from this part of its business.
As Tony describes it, they had a fundamental decision to make. They company had decided to put delivering the very best customer service at the center of its brand. It was the fundamental element of the Zappos.com brand. As Tony tells it:
“But was it all talk? Or were we committed? We hadn’t actually changed the way we did anything at Zappos yet. We did a lot of talking, but we weren’t putting our money where our mouths were. And our employees knew it.”
The company decided to discontinue the drop ship business. They did this to remain aligned with their fundamental mission, the core of their brand. It caused some short-term challenges, but made sense longer-term as the company stayed true to its mission. And its employees got the message!
This story got me thinking about our work with our clients. As a consultant, there is one thing that always nags at you; the knowledge that no matter how good your work is, clients can fail to implement. The old “lead a horse to water” problem. Although many of our clients have gone ahead and made significant changes in their marketing, communications, operations strategies as a result of our work; some have not. There are two main differences, I think. One, the existence or lack of dedicated leadership that is willing to “put their money where their mouth is” and make the hard decisions that fundamentally define their organization – even when it makes for some short-term challenges. As Tony mentioned, employees see your level of commitment. They know when change is just talk and when it is for real. The second difference is (as someone once described it to me) “the tyranny of the urgent” – the day-to-day matters that often hold us back from making fundamental changes in the way we approach things. We get so caught up in these daily matters that we never step back and ensure we are pursuing the key long-term goals.
Questions you should be asking:
- Has your organization defined and committed to its fundamental, core values?
- Do employees live and breathe them?
- Have you made fundamental changes in the way you operate to stay aligned with these core values?
- Have you faced the difficult decisions and stayed true to your core values?
I’m really interested to hear your stories about organizations that committed to fundamental, core elements of their brand and their mission..and those that did not.
IDiscover Journal 