The article “Why I Sold Zappos” is adapted from Tony Hsieh’s new book, “Delivering Happiness”, and well worth a read.
He outlines how the board pushed him towards a sale, and how the recession took its toll on Zappos as well. Even though they generated more than $1,000,000,000 in sales, they were afraid of the banks being unwilling to help them buy more inventory. This would have halted the expansion of the business, obviously, and throughout the article you sense how frustrated Tony Hsieh is with the board essentially calling the culture in Zappos “Tony’s social experiments”, not understanding that it’s the foundation upon which the company is built.
This part of the story obviously makes it worth the read, but at the end of the article something interesting is presented:
In the first quarter of 2010, net sales at Zappos were up almost 50 percent, and we’ve added several hundred new employees. The growth has made Amazon very happy, but it’s also creating new challenges. I’ve noticed that at company happy hours, you don’t see as many employees from different departments hanging out with one another.
To address that, we’ve begun tracking employee relationships. When employees log in to their computers, we ask them to look at a picture of a random employee and then ask them how well they know that person — the options include “say hi in the halls,” “hang out outside of work,” and “we’re going to be longtime friends.” We’re starting to keep track of the number and strength of cross-departmental relationships — and we’re planning a class on the topic. My hope is that we can have more employees who plan to be close friends.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a system that essentially creates a living, breathing social network analysis continuously. One could assume that the data is constantly evolving and thus provide the most accurate representation of the relationships, seeing it comes from the employees themselves in real-time.
Definitely interesting, and I hope we get to hear more about it later on.