Contemporary Leadership Tony Hsieh

Taina Hogu

Tony Hsieh: Redefining Contemporary Leadership at Zappos

MGMT 510 Leadership & Ethics

Dr. Rebecca M. Chory

Frostburg State University

May 3rd, 2015

Tony Hsieh Background

Tony Hsieh built an entire empire on the concept of “happiness”. Hsieh strives hard to ensure customers remain happy but more importantly employees. Hsieh understands that employees are the cornerstone of any good company and empowering workers ensures that his brand remains viable. Traditional leadership empowers only leaders and not followers while contemporary leadership empowers followers who in turn choose to “submit” to their leaders’ rule. Hsieh takes this a step further with holacratic leadership. With holacracy, employees take turns being the boss choosing which assignments to take charge of (Holacracy, 2015). Hsieh may be the CEO at Zappos but he may not be the boss. Zappos is not only a billion dollar company (Executive Leadership, 2014); it’s a laboratory for the evolving field of contemporary leadership.

Born to Taiwanese immigrants in 1973, Tony Hsieh is a first-generation American who grew up in San Francisco, California (Entreprenuerwiki, 2015). Even as a child Hsieh exhibited entrepreneurship traits creating mail order buttons and venturing into other business opportunities (Hsieh, 2010). He studied computer science at Harvard University where he met life-long partner Alfred Lin (Entreprenuerwiki, 2015). After graduating from Harvard, Hsieh worked for Oracle as a software developer but soon became disenchanted with the corporate culture (Bryant, 2010). Hsieh soon after founded LinkExchange with fellow Oracle ex-developer Sanjay Madan which was sold to Microsoft to the tune of $265 Million after just four years in operation (Bryant, 2010). Although profitable, Hsieh cited a dread to “get out of bed” and work at LinkExchange as the key reason for selling the business venture. Dissatisfaction with...