Tony hsieh leadership style and philosophy

IN1249 Tony Hsieh at Zappos: Structure, Culture and Change Winner “Human Resources Management / Organisational Behaviour” category The Case Centre Awards 2018 03/2018-6181 This case was written by Noah Askin, Assistant Professor of Organisational Behaviour, and Gianpiero Petriglieri, Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour, both at INSEAD, with the assistance of Joanna Lockard. It is intended to be used as a basis for class discussion rather than to illustrate either effective or ineffective handling of an administrative situation. It has benefited from the advice and insights of INSEAD Professors Frédéric Godart and Mark Mortensen. Additional material about INSEAD case studies (e.g., videos, spreadsheets, links) can be accessed at cases.insead.edu. Copyright © 2016 INSEAD COPIES MAY NOT BE MADE WITHOUT PERMISSION. NO PART OF THIS PUBLICATION MAY BE COPIED, STORED, TRANSMITTED, REPRODUCED OR DISTRIBUTED IN ANY FORM OR MEDIUM WHATSOEVER THE OF THE COPYRIGHT OWNER.Chg and Culture at Strayer University, 2019. This documentWITHOUT is authorized forPERMISSION use only by Ryan Bradley in Organizational March 24th, 2015 began like a typical morning at Zappos. Employees streamed into the online retailer’s headquarters in Las Vegas, shuffling by the popcorn stand in the lobby, the makeshift bowling alley between desks, and colleagues dressed as pirates. Once in their personalized workspaces, they answered the daily “identify a fellow Zapponian” quiz required to log in to their computers. And then they found a memo from CEO Tony Hsieh in their inboxes. 1 “This is a long email,” the first line of the company-wide message read. “Please take 30 minutes to read [it] in its entirety.” Zappos had been moving towards Holacracy—a philosophy and form of organizing based upon self-management—for a year now. But Tony felt that the transition was not going fast enough, and had not been supported with the widespread conviction necessary for such an overhaul. Therefore, he had decided “to take a ‘rip the Band-Aid’ approach to accelerate progress.” That approach involved a limited-time offer, as he wrote: Self-management and self-organization is not for everyone … Therefore, there will be a special version of “the offer”2 on a company-wide scale, in which each employee will be offered at least 3 months’ severance (and up to 3 months of COBRA reimbursement for benefits) if he/she feels that self-management, selforganization, and our Best Customers Strategy and strategy statements as published in Glass Frog are not the right fit. 3 In order to qualify for the offer, employees had to read the book “Reinventing Organizations” and watch a talk by its author online. 4 If, after absorbing its message, they remained steadfast in the intent to leave, they had to give notice by April 30. One week after the deadline passed, the press was reporting that 14% of Zappos’ 1,443 employees had taken up Tony’s offer. 5 The 210 employees who left included 20% of the tech department. At the time, Zappos was undertaking a complex migration of its web site, which powered a billion-a-year business, to the Amazon platform. The project, labelled “Supercloud” and mandated by Amazon, was arguably “the single largest e-commerce re-platforming in history”. The timely completion of the transition, scheduled for December 2015, was now at stake. 6 Zappos, which Tony ran and had saved multiple times with his own money before it was acquired by Amazon in 2009, was regarded as a shining example of a dynamic organizational culture, lauded as one of Fortune’s “Best Places to Work,” and labelled a potential savior of downtown Las Vegas.
Think about what the CEO of Zappos, Tony Hsieh, was trying to do. Use the questions below as a guide to explore this case:

What was at the center of what Hsieh sought to achieve, and why did he feel this would benefit the company?
If you were the CEO of Zappos, what leadership style would you use and why?
How would this leadership style complement the culture you want to create?
How important are structural support systems in making sure that change initiatives are sustainable over time?