Zappos Only Hires People Who Are Weird And Lucky In Life [MUSIC PLAYING] [Text on screen reads “Business Insider Presents Inspiring Performers: Building a Company Culture”] Henry Blodget (CEO & Editor-In-Chief of Business Insider): So how do you build a culture without suddenly sounding like it's just all these corporate bromides that you see on the wall in every corporation that nobody reads and they're meaningless? How do you actually build a culture that everyone is proud of, makes decisions based on, and so forth? Tony Hsieh (CEO of Zappos): So we actually rolled out our core values in 2005, so about five or six years into it, and we didn't always have core values. And it was actually one of those things that a lot of us resisted, even myself personally, because-- for exactly that reason. It felt like one of those big corporate things do that no one paid attention to. But then we decided to approach it differently because we wanted to come up with committable core values. And a lot of companies have-- they might call them core values, or guiding principles, or so on. But the problem is usually they're very lofty sounding. They kind of read like a press release that the marketing department put out. And maybe you learn about it on day one in orientation but then it's that meaningless plaque on the lobby wall that you were talking about. And, for us, by committable we meant that we wanted to hire and fire people based on whether they're living up to those values, completely independent of their actual job performance. So even if they're doing their specific job perfectly fine, even if they're a superstar, if they're not living up to those core values, then we will fire them just for that reason. And we didn't just have a few senior executives go to some offsite long weekend and come up with something. But, instead, I sent an email out to the entire company asking everyone what should our core values be. I got a whole bunch of different responses back. And we went back and forth for about a year and then eventually came up with our list of 10 core values. Blodget: And so what are some of them? Hsieh: Some of them are create fun and a little weirdness, for example. When we first rolled it out, people either loved it or they hated it. And so one of our interview questions is actually, on a scale of 1 to 10, how weird are you? And if you're 1, you're probably a little bit too strait-laced for the Zappos culture. If you're 10, you might be too psychotic for us. But it's actually not so much the number we care about. It's more how people answer them. Because our belief is that everyone's a little weird somehow, and this is really more just a fun way of saying we really recognize and celebrate each person's individuality and we want their true personalities to shine in the workplace. Because what we found is that's when-- when people can be themselves, that's when the real friendships form, not just co-worker relationships. And that's when the creative ideas come out, and that's when employees are most productive. Blodget:Another core value? Hsieh: Be adventurous, creative, and open-minded. One of our interview questions for that is, on a scale of 1 to 10, how lucky are you in life? 1 is I don't know why bad things always seem to happen to me. 10 is I don't know why good things always seem to happen to me. And this was actually inspired by a research study I had read about where they actually asked that exact same question, and then they got answers all over the board from random participants. And then, afterwards, they had them do a task. And the task was to go through a newspaper and count the number of photos that were in that newspaper. But what they didn't know was that it was actually a fake newspaper, and sprinkled throughout the newspaper were headlines that would say things like, if you're reading this now you can stop. The answer is, say, 37, and collect an extra $100. And they found that the people that considered themselves unlucky in life, generally they went through the task at hand but basically never noticed the headlines. And the people that considered themselves lucky in life generally stopped early and made the extra $100. So the takeaway being that it's not so much that people are inherently lucky or unlucky in life, but luck is really more about being open to opportunity beyond just how the task or a situation presents itself. So that's why we asked that question for that core value. Blodget: You've built this incredible culture at the company. You maintained it as you go through Amazon. Hsieh: It's actually not just maintaining it. A lot of companies, as they grow bigger, the culture goes downhill. And not only do we want to prevent that from happening, but the real key to our future is we actually want culture to scale and get stronger and stronger, not just maintain. And so the only way that can happen is if every employee views as part of his or her job description the responsibility to contribute to our culture and make it stronger and stronger. It's not something I can do as an individual, because as we get bigger and bigger I'm a smaller and smaller percentage of the total employee population.