Mirificam Press

SXSWi 2009: Tony Hsieh Opening Remarks

March 18th, 2009 in Web Design Culture

by: Matthew Griffin

Tony Hsieh, co-founder of Link Exchange and current CEO of Zappos.com, kicked off SXSWi with the opening remarks on Saturday March 14th. In fitting SXSW style and spirit he conveyed the story of his .com success which has touched two decades (a rare winning streak in internet entrepreneurship) and shows promising signs of continuing into a third. I say his presentation was in fitting SXSW spirit because of predictable worldview claims and a smattering of hip socio-techno phrases and themes. Unconventional hiring and firing methods, "company culture", "create fun and a little weirdness", and "the science of happiness" are just few in a long list. But I'm getting ahead of myself. There was much in Tony's presentation that the Christian worldview would find agreeable and may even fit more neatly than many of the methods of so-called "Christian businessmen". I'm going to discuss the shiny side of the coin first and then briefly explore the implications of the deeper philosophy being promoting by Tony and other "happiness experts".

Corporate Culture

Tony started by describing one of his biggest regrets in the building of his first business, LinkExchange. Rather than hiring employees who fit the overall culture of the company, Tony focused primarily on valuable skill-sets. This created an environment of dissonance in the community life of the business and eventually he dreaded going to work.

Determined not to make the same mistake at Zappos.com, Tony decided to focus on compatibility between prospective employees and the already-established culture within the company. His commitment to cultural compatibility became so strong that he passed on a number of valuable talents based on that one defining criteria. He found that this new strategy fostered a tight-knit culture within the company and that employees enjoyed work. In fact, so successful was this strategy that eventually he established a standard offer to all employees-in-training: quit before your training is over and we'll pay you $2,000. The intention was to further refine the hiring process and weed out employees who didn't feel a strong attachment to the community from the beginning.

I'm in agreement with Tony on this one. He stumbled upon a great truth that modernist business models have neglected for some time now. He realized that human beings are human; not just machines or tools of production. It's funny, human beings like to be treated like human beings. They feel more fulfilled and complete when they are approached and viewed as what they are: complex beings, unified yet diverse, spiritual and material, social, and feeling. In short, man is personal.

Committable Core Values

The most striking characteristic of Tony Hsieh's business management model was his perspective on corporate vision and core values. As cliche as "core values" and "corporate vision" have become, Tony did an incredible job revitalizing these concepts.  Most of us have experienced exciting compulsory employee training meetings where core values and corporate vision are introduced only to be shoved back into an employee handbook never to see the light of day again.

Tony sees the core values of a business as those values on which the company is willing to hire and fire—what he calls "committable core values". A company should never hire a person who has values fundamentally incompatible with those of the company and, likewise, should fire any employee who shows such an incompatibility. In this way the core values of the company are set up as a transcendent law—no surprises, no compromises. In a similar fashion, the corporate vision should be established early and revisited often to keep the individual members of the company working together toward a unified goal.

I couldn't agree more. This is the very essence of worldview thinking: that we start from foundational principles and work to the particulars; that the principles of our perspective are continually revisited and affirmed. But in the Christian worldview, our transcendent principles are fixed. They are transcendent because they are revealed by a God who precedes our existence; who conceived our essence; who transcends our world and, therefore, is trustworthy. This is where Tony moves away from Christianity to a postmodern existential view of "core values". When he uses the word "transcendent" he means only that the core values transcend any one particular human being and become the values of the tribe. He used this quote to demonstrate his perspective:

It doesn't matter what your core values are, as long as you commit to them.

On that point, I couldn't disagree more.

The Ubiquitous 7 Steps to Happiness

So what are the implications of a business model in which the value of values are determined by the level of commitment members of the company feel toward them? Well, they're huge! Values with no objective value are not really values at all, they are preferences. In order to be meaningful, values need a foundation—an underlying solid principle to govern them.

This isn't lost on Tony and I have to applaud him for continuing on to the deeper issue. Unfortunately, that's where my applause stops. In pursuing this deeper teleological thread, Tony comes to the conclusion that personal happiness is the underlying unmovable principle upon which all values can safely rest. He encouraged the audience to carve out time to specifically devote to the study of the "science of happiness". He takes happiness very seriously and has a complex view of how it functions and how to attain it. Far from being hedonism, Tony's theory of happiness (along with many other modern happiness experts) leans more toward Epicurean philosophy, which promotes moderation and long-term happiness as opposed to conscious, unbridled debauchery to achieve a temporary high. Epicureanism is a classic Greek outworking of a purely materialist philosophy. Basically, it says that since there's nothing truly transcendent, we may as well feel good while we're floating between the poles of nothingness—birth and death.

Tony explains his position by proposing that when asked "why" enough times on any train of thought related to vocation, a person will invariably degrade to the answer "because it makes me happy." That may be true for the majority of western civilization right now, but I wish Tony would ask me why. I have a different answer; an answer that makes "personal peace and affluence" look like mud pie.

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