Dealing With A Major Shift In An Organization + Business Coach

Business Coach Shares How Industry Leaders Handle Change In Their Organization

Business coach continues to break down how Tony Hsieh announced big changes.

Continue reading this business coach’s excerpt about Tony Hsieh and Zappos below.

Q: Are Tony, Alfred, or Fred leaving?

No, we have no plans to leave. We believe that we are at the very beginning of what’s possible for Zappos and are very excited about the future and what we can accomplish for Zappos with Amazon as our new partner. Part of the reason for doing this is so that we can get a lot more done more quickly.

There is an additional Q&A section at the end of this email, but I wanted to make sure we got the top 3 burning questions out of the way first. Now that we’ve covered those questions, I wanted to share in more detail our thinking behind the scenes that led us to this decision.

First, I want to apologize for the suddenness of this announcement.  As you know, one of our core values is to Build Open and Honest Relationships with Communication, and if I could have it my way, I would have shared much earlier that we were in discussions with Amazon so that all employees could be involved in the decision process that we went through along the way. Unfortunately, because Amazon is a public company, there are securities laws that prevented us from talking about this to most of our employees until today.

We’ve been on friendly terms with Amazon for many years, as they have always been interested in Zappos and have always had a great respect for our brand.

Several months ago, they reached out to us and said they wanted to join forces with us so that we could accelerate the growth of our business, our brand, and our culture. When they said they wanted us to continue to build the Zappos brand (as opposed to folding us into Amazon), we decided it was worth exploring what a partnership would look like.

We learned that they truly wanted us to continue to build the Zappos brand and continue to build the Zappos culture in our own unique way. I think “unique” was their way of saying “fun and a little weird.” 🙂

Over the past several months, as we got to know each other better, both sides became more and more excited about the possibilities for leveraging each other’s strengths.  We realized that we are both very customer-focused companies — we just focus on different ways of making our customers happy.

Amazon focuses on low prices, vast selection and convenience to make their customers happy, while Zappos does it through developing relationships, creating personal emotional connections, and delivering high touch (“WOW”) customer service.

We realized that Amazon’s resources, technology, and operational experience had the potential to greatly accelerate our growth so that we could grow the Zappos brand and culture even faster. On the flip side, through the process Amazon realized that it really was the case that our culture is the platform that enables us to deliver the Zappos experience to our customers. Jeff Bezos (CEO of Amazon) made it clear that he had a great deal of respect for our culture and that Amazon would look to protect it.

We asked our board members what they thought of the opportunity. Michael Moritz, who represents Sequoia Capital (one of our investors and board members), wrote the following: “You now have the opportunity to accelerate Zappos’ progress and to make the name and the brand and everything associated with it an enduring, permanent part of peoples’ lives… You are now free to let your imagination roam – and to contemplate initiatives and undertakings that today, in our more constrained setting, we could not take on.”

One of the great things about Amazon is that they are very long-term thinkers, just like we are at Zappos. Alignment in very long-term thinking is hard to find in a partner or investor, and we felt very lucky and excited to learn that both Amazon and Zappos shared this same philosophy.

All this being said, this was not an easy decision. Over the past several months, we had to weigh all the pros and cons along with all the potential benefits and risks. At the end of the day, we realized that, once it was determined that this was in the best interests of our shareholders, it basically all boiled down to asking ourselves 2 questions:

Business Coach Shares The Two Questions:

1) Do we believe that this will accelerate the growth of the Zappos brand and help us fulfill our mission of delivering happiness faster?

2) Do we believe that we will continue to be in control of our own destiny so that we can continue to grow our unique culture?

Business Coach Provides Answers To These Questions:

After spending a lot of time with Amazon and getting to know them and understanding their intentions better, we reached the conclusion that the answers to these 2 questions are YES and YES.

The Zappos brand will continue to be separate from the Amazon brand. Although we’ll have access to many of Amazon’s resources, we need to continue to build our brand and our culture just as we always have. Our mission remains the same: delivering happiness to all of our stakeholders, including our employees, our customers, and our vendors. (As a side note, we plan to continue to maintain the relationships that we have with our vendors ourselves, and Amazon will continue to maintain the relationships that they have with their vendors.)

We will be holding an all hands meeting soon to go over all of this in more detail. Please email me any questions that you may have so that we can cover as many as possible during the all hands meeting and/or a follow-up email.

We signed what’s known as the “definitive agreement” today, but we still need to go through the process of getting government approval, so we are anticipating that this transaction actually won’t officially close for at least a few months. We are legally required by the SEC to be in what’s known as a “quiet period”, so if you get any questions related to the transaction from anyone including customers, vendors, or the media, please let them know that we are in a quiet period mandated by law and have them email [email protected], which is a special email account that Alfred and I will be monitoring.

This business coach has more content about Zappos on additional posts. Learn more leadership skills from a leading business coach on thrive15.com.