Delivering Happiness

Delivering Happiness is a business memoir. Tony Hsieh tells how he went from small childhood ventures to founding an internet company, selling it to a giant, and then turning an online shoe store into a worldwide benchmark for customer service. At each stage, he pauses to draw a lesson.

The common thread is a question that keeps changing shape throughout the story: what really makes a business, and the lives of the people who work in it, worthwhile? At first the answer seems to be money. Then, culture. In the end, happiness, understood as something you can plan for and measure.

Because the writing is personal, it mixes anecdotes, mistakes, and advice. That makes it an easy read, but it also means the theory grows out of one person's experience. Keep that in mind: the book is a firsthand account, not a comparative study of several companies.

The author says that ever since he was a boy he tried to make money with simple ideas, like starting little home businesses and selling whatever he could. Not everything worked, and he says he learned more from the stumbles than from the wins. It's the kind of entrepreneurial childhood you see in lots of neighborhoods, from selling candy at school to running a lemonade stand.

Later, at Harvard, he tried businesses on a bigger scale and realized he enjoyed building things with people. After graduating, he worked at a tech company, found the environment dull, and started looking for something of his own. That was the push that led him to team up with a friend to create an online ad-exchange service.

That first venture grew fast in the nineties, during the internet boom. Too fast, as the book goes on to show. Success brought money, but also a problem the author took a while to name: the company was gradually losing what had made it fun.

As the first company grew, hiring came to focus only on résumés and technical skills. Little by little, the atmosphere changed: unmotivated people, exhausting meetings, less and less desire to get up and go to work. The author even felt he no longer wanted to walk into the office he himself had built.

That's when he understood that culture is a consequence of who comes in. If you hire only for competence, the group's values are left to chance. If you also hire for fit with the way people work, the environment holds up even with thousands of employees. Anyone who has worked at a company that changed owners will recognize this idea.

When the company was sold to a tech giant, he made a lot of money but felt empty. The sale didn't answer the question of what made him happy. That lack of happiness after the financial windfall is one of the book's emotional turning points.