As I transition from full time employment to being fully self-employed (starting in September), I’ve had the wonderful opportunity to talk with a number of potential clients from all industries, with all types of past experiences and varied budgets. In the last month alone, I’ve talked with over 20 different companies. During these talks I’ve learned one major thing that surprised me. I suppose because I’ve been working for individual companies for so long I didn’t realize there were so many misconceptions about developers, web development, and productivity out there in the business world.

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I finally had a chance to finish up reading the Delivering Happiness book I’ve been reading and writing about for the last few weeks. In all, I do recommend the book both to startups, and to those running a larger company. The book is almost two books in one. The first half, as I covered in my posts, Discovering Happiness and Now This is Real Passion, are about Tony’s early startup experience and the path he was on that led to his personal discovery of what his passions really were. This was the part of the book that I enjoyed the most as it focuses on my situation and on one of my favorite areas of interest: internal motivation and discovering one’s passions.

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As I continue to read through the Delivering Happiness book from Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, I’ve come to the introduction and discussion of the Zappos Culture Book. If you are a fan of Zappos you have probably already heard about this famous book. The idea for it came when Tony and others at the company wanted to improve the chances that any new employees hired would fit in with the company culture. To Tony, company culture at this point had become the number one focus of the company. They not only wanted to be sure new employees fit in at work, but also that they were a fit personally with everyone. They wanted a manual to hand out that discussed the company culture, and then decided the best way to do that was to ask the current employees to write it themselves.

They invited all employees to submit 100 to 500 words describing what the Zappos culture means to them. They committed to using everyone’s contribution, unedited, even if it was a complaint. Management learned a lot from the book, and it is now published yearly and made available not only to prospective employees, but also to vendors, and even customers. In fact you can request a free copy of it, as I did over the weekend, by sending an email to ceo@zappos.com.

This middle section of the book, ‘Profits and Passion’, goes into a lot of detail on what that culture was, how they established it and why. Tony believes that in the end, the only competitive edge Zappos has over anyone is: Brand, Culture, and Pipeline. Everything else can be copied. The section goes on to give some great tips on creating culture in your company.

Don’t forget to leave a comment on this post or either of the other two Delivering Happiness posts (Discovering Happiness or Now This is Real Passion) in order to have a chance to win a free copy of the book.

In my previous post I wrote about the first section of Tony Hsieh’s book where Tony discusses discovering his true happiness and passions. I began the second section today, and while I haven’t finished it yet, I had to write about the period during which Zappos was struggling to make any profit. They had sales, they had employees, offices, a warehouse, and a real growing business model, but they still weren’t making any profit.

Tony was only working for $25/year full time at Zappos. He had invested millions from the investment fund, Venture Frogs, that he’d started, to the point that there was no money left. He then began to invest money from his own personal funds but that began to run out. They had to layoff some employees and significantly cut the salaries of the others, but in order to make that work and still keep the employees, Tony put them up in his own loft without charging rent. He also began selling off the property he had purchased as an investment in order to put that money into Zappos and keep it going. He even listed his favorite loft at less than market value, and then dropped it by 40% in order to quickly turn it around, get the cash and keep Zappos going.

VC’s said it was a bad investment; naysayers said people won’t buy shoes online. The business plan, should someone have ever bothered to put one together, would not have indicated any of this was a good decision. But Tony believed in the idea, he believed in the team, and he believed in himself and he was willing to risk everything for his passion of building something. In the end, he decided to liquidate everything he had and have a “fire sale” in order to raise the final round of money to keep hope alive.

We all know how it worked out in the end, though I can’t wait to read more and learn how. This book will teach you lessons in commitment and following your dreams, as well as motivate you, so I highly recommend it…again. And don’t forget, leave a comment on this post or the last one, or the next one, for an opportunity to win your own copy.