Without more context than the title and the linked email, it's pretty easy to call Hsieh's move brash or tried-and-futile. But the guy is often regarded as the premier management CEO of his generation, and homogenous culture is strongly enforced in his hiring process. Employees love Hsieh because they're (largely) on the same page, not bc of a reality distortion field. After seeing Hsieh's track record and reading "Delivering Happiness" (Zappos' story) and "The Everything Store" (Parent Amazon's story where Zappos gets a vignette), I'd rather watch and learn than shoot it down based on my engineering sensibilities.
> But the guy is often regarded as the premier management CEO of his generation
Erm...what? By whom? I only know of the incompetent Tony Hsieh that burned through cash at such a rate that his investors thought it a miracle that Zappos was still around when several large companies started looking to get into the online apparel business at the same time. It is widely rumored within Amazon that Zappos was a few weeks from bankruptcy when they were bought by Amazon, and it is pretty well known within Amazon today that they still aren't profitable. A match made in heaven?
Even if you don't see the same negative picture that I do, by every "track record" objective measure you can think of, he is two orders of magnitude worse of a CEO than Zuckerberg and Larry Page, and still not even in the same league as Elon Musk, or if you want to stick to apparel, Kevin Plank.
It is one thing to take puff pieces seriously, and another thing altogether to take autobiographical puff pieces seriously.
> Employees love Hsieh because they're (largely) on the same page, not bc of a reality distortion field.
His associate-level employees love him because they have a pretty good job that they couldn't get elsewhere. His managers hate him because they view him as incompetent and irresponsible. Everyone I know that works in or with Zappos sees this as a clear power play. He's trying to cut them out of the picture.
It's not about engineering sensibilities, it's about human sensibilities. So many great leaders in human history have been effective, loved by their followers, good at enforcing a homogeneous culture, and abusive.
I am impressed that the effort to enforce a corporate monoculture (if we want to be uncharitable to Hsieh) has such a humane escape clause—3+ months severance and COBRA is nothing to sneeze at. I would be curious to see if there's any kind of option for bailing later, as a sort of "I've tried it, and now I know it's not for me" option.
