Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [37]
Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Las Vegas-based Zappos.com, takes it even further than Jeff does—he continues to hammer home a similar message even after people start work, or at least paid training.6 Zappos sells shoes online, but is, like USAA, essentially a customer-service business with a big call center, and has been growing fast. Still a young company, its revenue was more than $1 billion in 2008, up from zero ten years earlier. And so it hires a lot of people to work in its call centers and distribution hub. Hsieh, the company’s founder, guards its vision and internal culture zealously and carefully screens new hires for compatibility with both. But even so, he recognizes, as he says, “Zappos is not for everybody,” and some people will realize that, too, as they go through the training process. So, after putting them through four weeks of paid training, Hsieh makes them an unusual offer: Quit now, and not only will we not hold it against you, but we’ll pay you to leave. Until mid-2008, this quitting bonus was $1,000, but Hsieh doubled it to $2,000 because, he told us, too few people were accepting it. He wants to make sure his employees are there because they share Zappos’s vision, and so he is willing to pay the would-be timeservers to hit the road. Getting people to own the company’s vision emotionally can demand not only real effort but also real money.
But communicating and sharing the company’s vision doesn’t end on day one or during training—that would be too easy. Most people, especially if they’ve gotten the macaques’ proverbial “cold shower” at previous jobs, have trouble accepting that a vision is more than something to be put on the walls, pasted into the annual report, and otherwise forgotten. So getting them to share it and emotionally own it takes time and vision-reinforcing effort. Let’s take another look at the Chardonnay.
Curran, the winemaker, agreed with Davids’s vision of making a great Pinot Noir—she was even thrilled by it. But until Curran was asked by Davids to draw up the winery equipment list, making great wine remained Davids’s vision—not hers. Davids had set her free to draw up a wish list of equipment to make his strategic vision a reality. And she used all her experience as a winemaker to compile her “outrageous” set of demands. But only when Davids approved her list in full did she begin to believe in his vision and make it her own—at least as far as the Pinot Noir was concerned. But in the case of the free Chardonnay, she didn’t connect it to the world-class Pinot Noir vision. Seeing the goal as simply making a great-but-free wine, she made the decision—reasonably, in light of her understanding of the goal—of saving the company money on what was, after all, a promotional product. Davids stumbled on it by chance. As the vision keeper, he then took the time to explain to Curran that saving money on the Chardonnay would conflict with the vision of Sea Smoke as a maker of world-class wines. But he did so in a manner that still relied on her to draw her own conclusions and make her own decision. Case closed.
Ownership of the company’s vision and the freedom to act on one’s own initiative to pursue it are not, as they may at first appear, two separate, distinguishable things. Many companies communicate their visions and try to make people “buy in.” But the results are usually disappointing. People start emotionally owning the company’s vision only when they are free to make their own decisions in pursuing it. Being free to do A or B forces them to think of the criteria for choosing between the two—to ponder the company’s vision. In “how” companies, on the other hand, where people are told to do C and then D, there is no need to ponder the vision. In fact, pondering it becomes a big distraction from following orders. People who are free to act come to know why they did A rather than B, and this “why” becomes their own.