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Zappos will take an order as late as midnight and deliver it to the customer’s doorstep before breakfast. It has the world’s largest selection of shoes, and its service includes free returns. If it doesn’t have the shoe you want in stock or in your size, a Zappos call center employee will go to three competitors’ sites to try to help you locate what you want to buy. Seventy-five percent of its business comes from repeat customers, despite the fact that its prices are far from the lowest. (Price is an area where Zappos has made a conscious trade-off in its service model in order to deliver exceptional service.)

It’s not surprising, then, that managers from other companies—including many from service and quality leaders like Southwest and Toyota—make regular pilgrimages to Zappos facilities to learn how the company pulls it off. Everyone wants to know what the heck is going on. A quick look around reveals that part of its success is the company’s IT strategy, including a real-time inventory management system that is 99 percent accurate, compared with accuracy rates as low as 40 percent in other areas of retail. But what gets visitors every time are the clues to Zappos’s true competitive advantage: its culture. And no one inside the company is surprised.

The most visible champion of Zappos’s culture, naturally enough, is president and CEO Tony Hsieh (pronounced “Shay”). Hsieh is crystal clear on the culture he needs to make the company thrive, and he and his team have broken it down into ten core company values: