Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 2

Two weeks ago, Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com, agreed to respond to readers’ questions.  Today is the second installment to those questions, the first installment can be found here.

Be sure to read our other interviews in our leadership series.

Also, feel free to jump to other parts of the interview found below:

1. Interview Questions from shmula.com blog readers
2. Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 1
3. Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 2
4. Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 3
5. Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 4
6. Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 5

Comment by Gary James on November 26, 2008 @ 10:43 am
Zappos recently laid-off some of the workforce. I have a few questions:

1) How is morale these days?
2) Everyone is expecting a really tough Q4, what is Zappos doing to mitigate the effects of the downturn?

1. Morale was obviously down in the days immediately following the layoffs, but it’s been over a month now and morale is definitely much better.
2. We are watching our expenses closely and being proactive about reducing expenses, which was the reason for the layoffs. You can read more about the layoffs here and here.

Comment by Bail Me Out on November 26, 2008 @ 10:48 am
Given your predisposition for the customer, what is the right thing to do with the Big 3 Automakers? It seems to me that bailing them out is more about the employees and the US Economy as a whole than it is about peoples experience with Ford, GM, or Chrysler.  Would Tony Hsieh bailout the Big 3 Automakers?

I actually don’t know enough about the details of the bailout or how the Big 3 Automakers’ companies work internally to be able to give a good answer to this.  I will say that in general, I think we should try to support companies that provide the best customer experience and customer service.

Comment by Dustin Robertson on November 26, 2008 @ 1:22 pm
Your free next day air promotion in 2007 skyrocketed your growth. Have you looking into cutting marketing expenditures to fund benefits for the customer like fast shipping?

Yes, most of the money that we would have spent on paid advertising/marketing we’ve put into the customer experience, including free/fast shipping.

Comment by Nancy Low on November 26, 2008 @ 3:13 pm
I see Zappos participating at leadership events – How do you measure your ROI on leadership development within your organization?

We don’t really measure ROI on that. We fundamentally believe that great leaders build great teams, and great teams can add orders of magnitude more value to a company than mediocre teams.

Comment by chad on November 26, 2008 @ 3:26 pm
I would like to know what Zappos is doing to monitor your brand on social sites like Twitter and MySpace. How many employees do you have monitoring social sites, and what is your strategic response when something negative is said?

We don’t really have anyone whose full time job is to monitor social sites. We introduce Twitter to all new employees during orientation, and we currently have hundreds of employees using Twitter: http://twitter.zappos.com/employees

Many employees, including me, monitor mentions of “Zappos” on Twitter simply because they are passionate about Zappos and about Twitter.

Go to Part 3

Be sure to check our our other Leadership Interviews below: