Super Franks Slide from Jeremy Person on Vimeo.
ChooChoo from Jeremy Person on Vimeo.
Went to Super Franks again today and I don’t know who had more fun…Tyler or me.
Super Franks Slide from Jeremy Person on Vimeo.
ChooChoo from Jeremy Person on Vimeo.
Went to Super Franks again today and I don’t know who had more fun…Tyler or me.
I have two friends named JJ. The JJ in Phoenix has a band called A Save for the Cameras and he sent over some of his songs tonight. My favorite is “Paper Plate Bean Shakers” which I’ve embedded above. I asked him where he got the band name A Save for the Cameras and he said “me and the other guitar player used to always play Fifa together on Playstation and when a guy kicks a ridiculous shot and the keeper blocks it, the announcer says “that was a save for the cameras”. Help JJ spread the word of his band and I’m sure he would appreciate you letting him know what you think.
The January 2010 edition of Inc. Magazine has a great article titled “When and How to Micromanage“. In the article Joel Spolsky talks about a “problem-solving technique developed by Toyota after World War II to improve its manufacturing process. The idea is to ask “why” five times to get to the root of any failure, so you fix the core problem instead of the symptoms.” I think it is very healthy for companies to constantly question the status quo and I liked Toyota’s approach of questioning current processes. Many companies are asked why they do things by their customers, employees, or stockholders and sometimes I know the answer to questions are because someone said so. Rarely are those companies or individuals within those companies challenged to answer the five whys. When a child learns to first talk they ask lots of questions don’t they? Why is it as adults we frown upon asking questions?
Inc Magazine recently wrote another great “The Way I Work” article on Jason Fried who is one of the Founders of 37signals.
Below is what I found interesting from the article:
A wealthy man requested an old scholar to wean his son away from his bad habits. The scholar took the youth for a stroll through a garden. Stopping suddenly he asked the boy to pull out a tiny plant growing there. The youth held the plant between his thumb and forefinger and pulled it out. The old man then asked him to pull out a slightly bigger plant. The youth pulled hard and the plant came out, roots and all.
“Now pull out that one,” said the old man pointing to a bush. The boy had to use all his strength to pull it out. “Now take this one out,” said the old man, indicating a large tree. The youth grasped the trunk and tried to pull it out. But it would not budge. “I – It’s impossible,” said the boy, panting with the effort. “So it is with bad habits,” said the sage. “When they are young it is easy to pull them out but when they take hold they cannot be uprooted.”
Why?
I just didn’t look forward to going to the office. The passion and excitement were no longer there. That’s kind of a weird feeling for me because this was a company I co-founded, and if I was feeling that way, how must the other employees feel? That’s actually why we ended up selling the company. Financially, it meant I didn’t have to work again if I didn’t want to. So that was the lens through which I was looking at things. It’s basically asking the question, what would you want to do if you won the lottery? For me, I didn’t want to be part of a company where I dreaded going into the office. So when I joined Zappos about a year later, I wanted to make sure that I didn’t make the same mistake that I had made at LinkExchange, in terms of the company culture going downhill. So for us, at Zappos, we really view culture as our No. 1 priority. We decided that if we get the culture right, most of the stuff, like building a brand around delivering the very best customer service, will just take care of itself.
So how do you do that?
About five years ago, we formalized the definition of our culture into 10 core values. We wanted to come up with committable core values, meaning that we would actually be willing to hire and fire people based on those values, regardless of their individual job performance. Given that criteria, it’s actually pretty tough to come up with core values.
Tell me what happened.
We spent a year doing that. I basically sent an e-mail out to the entire company, asking them what our values should be, and got a whole bunch of different responses. The initial list was actually 37 long, and then we ended up condensing and combining them and went back and forth and came up with our list of 10. Today, we actually do two separate sets of interviews. The hiring manager and his or her team will interview for the standard fit within the team, relevant experience, technical ability and so on. But then our H.R. department does a separate set of interviews purely for culture fit. They actually have questions for each and every one of the core values.
Can you give me an example of the value and the question?
Well, some of them are behavioral questions. One of our values is, “Create fun and a little weirdness.” So one of our interview questions is, literally, on a scale of 1 to 10, how weird are you? If you’re a 1, you’re probably a little bit too strait-laced for us. If you’re a 10, you might be too psychotic for us. It’s not so much the number; it’s more seeing how candidates react to a question. Because our whole belief is that everyone is a little weird somehow, so it’s really more just a fun way of saying that we really recognize and celebrate each person’s individuality, and we want their true personalities to shine in the workplace environment, whether it’s with co-workers or when talking with customers. I think of myself less as a leader, and more of being almost an architect of an environment that enables employees to come up with their own ideas, and where employees can grow the culture and evolve it over time, so it’s not me having a vision of “This is our culture.” Maybe an analogy is, if you think of the employees and culture as plants growing, I’m not trying to be the biggest plant for them to aspire to. I’m more trying to architect the greenhouse where they can all flourish and grow.
Did the process of developing those core values go smoothly?
Honestly, there was a lot of resistance to the core values rolling out, including from me. I was very hesitant, because it just felt like one of those big-company things to do. But within a couple of months, it just made such a huge difference. It gave everyone a common language, and just created a lot more alignment in terms of how everyone in the company was thinking. If I could do it all over again, I would roll out our core values from Day 1.
What other things did you do at Zappos to sort of reinforce and build the culture?
Probably the most important thing I did was try to encourage employees to come up with their own ideas for building the culture. The actual ideas that I’ve personally come up with are few and far between.
But what were those?
For example, for our offices in Las Vegas, it’s a big building. We’ve probably got 700 employees in Vegas. The previous tenants had multiple doors where you can exit, and the parking lot is in the back. We made the decision to actually lock all the doors so everyone has to go through the front-entrance reception area, even though that means you might have to walk all the way around the building. The reason for that is to create this kind of central hub that everyone has to pass through to help build community and culture. And the free lunch we provide for employees is really meant less as a benefit in terms of a free lunch, and more to get employees to interact with each other. But most of the stuff that happens in our office is really about some employee coming up with an idea and, whether it’s me or other managers, saying, “If you’re passionate about it, just run with it.” At some point, it kind of just snowballs, because once employees see other employees just doing stuff, then that lets them feel like they have more permission to run with their ideas.
If you’re hiring a senior executive, reporting directly to you, what kind of questions would you be asking them?
It’s pretty hard to interview senior executives, because they’re in that position for a reason. They do many interviews themselves. It’s hard to tell from an interview. So I’m not sure there’s that much you can get out of the in-office interview. They need the relevant skill set and experience and so on. But far more important is, are they going to be good for the culture? Is this someone we would choose to have dinner or drinks with, even if they weren’t working for Zappos? Hiring senior-level talent is very hard, it’s hit or miss, and they can do a lot of damage to the culture. We’ve had bad experiences with that. So we have this thing called the pipeline, which is our vision for how we want to grow as a company. We’re hoping five years from now the vast, vast majority of all hires will actually be entry-level, but we’ll provide all the training and mentorship so that, over a five- to seven-year period, they can become a senior leader within the company. That will help protect our culture and also give all the employees a growth path professionally.
If you could ask only one or two questions to get a sense of a person, what would they be?
“If you had to name something, what would you say is the biggest misperception that people have of you?” Then the follow-up question I usually ask is, “What’s the difference between misperception and perception?” After all, perception is perception.
What are you trying to discover with those questions?
I think it’s a combination of how self-aware people are and how honest they are. I think if someone is self-aware, then they can always continue to grow. If they’re not self-aware, I think it’s harder for them to evolve or adapt beyond who they already are.
Article Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/business/10corner.html
Below is a list of Zappos.com’s core values: