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Posts Tagged ‘Zappos’

100 Best Companies or Employers To Work For

March 10th, 2011

FORTUNE lists the 100 Best Companies To Work For US Employees.

It’s heartening to learn that there are companies out there taking extra miles for their employees to make working an enjoyable activity.

Here’s the list, and highlights are my personal comments:



1 SAS
2 Boston Consulting Group
3 Wegmans Food Markets
4 Google
5 NetApp

6 Zappos.com – Even by reading Delivering Happiness Book, by Zappos’ CEO Tony Hsieh it’s not surprising that Zappos is a fun workplace. Being No 6 in the list only prove its truth all the more.
7 Camden Property Trust
8 Nugget Marke
9 Recreational Equipment (REI)
10 DreamWorks Animation SKG

11 Edward Jones
12 Scottrade
13 Alston & Bird
14 Robert W. Baird
15 Mercedes-Benz USA – Can you imagine a car company providing generous telecommuting policy? Just goes to show productivity and efficiency is more important than being in office 9 to 5. Of course on-site car wash is well appreciated when not telecommuting.
16 JM Family Enterprises
17 USAA
18 Stew Leonard’s
19 The Methodist Hospital System

20 Cisco – 85 percent of employees work from home! With high pay and other perks, no wonder nobody’s complaining.
21 Container Store
22 DPR Construction
23 Goldman Sachs
24 Whole Foods Market

25 Umpqua Bank
26 Plante & Moran
27 CHG Healthcare Services
28 Bingham McCutchen
29 Quicken Loans
30 NuStar Energy
31 W. L. Gore & Associates
32 Chesapeake Energy
33 Qualcomm – Free lunch seems to be a trend of late in IT companies. Who says there are no free lunch?

34 QuikTrip
35 Genentech
36 Southern Ohio Medical Center
37 Scripps Health
38 PCL Construction
39 American Fidelity Assurance
40 Balfour Beatty Construction
41 Devon Energy
42 Baptist Health South Florida

Healthcare and medical centers seems to be a good place to work in.

43 Shared Technologies
44 Intuit
45 TDIndustries
46 Johnson Financial Group – Six whole weeks of paternity leave! Almost half a mother. $10k per year in tuition reimbursement, this of course encourages further education among employees.
47 Novo Nordisk
48 Build-A-Bear Workshop
49 American Express
50 Baker Donelson
51 Intel

52 Salesforce.com
53 Four Seasons Hotels – Employees stay free in any of its hotels. No sweat when travelling.
54 Atlantic Health
55 Perkins Coie
56 Millennium: The Takeda Oncology Company

57 Aflac
58 General Mills
59 Hasbro – Half-day Fridays, evolution from dress-down Fridays?
60 Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta
61 Mayo Clinic
62 OhioHealth
63 Deloitte
64 FactSet Research Systems
65 Adobe Systems

66 EOG Resources
67 Publix Super Markets
68 Stryker
69 Mattel – Toy makers like to have Half-day Fridays eh?
70 S.C. Johnson & Son
71 Marriott International
72 Microsoft
73 PricewaterhouseCoopers
74 Nordstrom

75 Arkansas Children’s Hospital
76 Gilbane
77 Ernst & Young
78 SRC/SRCTec
79 National Instruments
80 St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
81 CarMax
82 Teach For America
83 Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants – Pet hotel anyone?

84 Bright Horizons Family Solutions
85 Booz Allen Hamilton
86 KPMG – Half-day Fridays, only in the summer though.
87 Men’s Wearhouse
88 Meridian Health
89 Brocade Communications Systems
90 CH2M Hill
91 The Everett Clinic
92 Rackspace Hosting

93 J. M. Smucker
94 Aéropostale
95 Morningstar – No limit on paid vacations or sick time? Of course, this is US. 🙂
96 MITRE
97 Darden Restaurants
98 Starbucks
99 Accenture
100 W. W. Grainger

Let your boss or company know, they can learn something from these companies.
Help make your workplace a better and fun place to be at. 🙂

Good To Know, News , , , , , ,

Tony Hsieh delivered happiness to Google Mountain View

July 22nd, 2010

If you do not know Tony Hsieh, nor Zappos.com, Tony is the CEO of Zappos.com, a website that started off primarily selling shoes online and now has been acquired by Amazon.com.

Tony launched his first book in June 2010 titled Delivering Happiness which I had a post on earlier.

For as long as I know or got to learn about this, Tony has been touring the US giving talks about his book and Zappos company culture.

So if you have not read the book, check out his talk or presentation made in Google, Mountain View about most of what he wrote.

The video will take 55 minutes, so if you do not have time, come back to it later.

Good To Know
Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose made it to number one on The New York Times Bestseller List.
Delivering Happiness is also number one on USA Today’s Bestseller List and Nielsen BookScan.

The book is due to be released in other parts of the world:
Turkey: Release date – July 7, 2011
Indonesia: Release date – July 7, 2011
Poland: Release date – January 9, 2012
Russia: Release date – January 13, 2012
Thailand: Release date – July 9, 2012

Books, Internet Marketing, Review , , , , ,

Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos

June 16th, 2010

It looks like I have been reading quite a number of Business category books of late.

Delivering Happiness is the first book by Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos.com. I don’t know about you, but I’m not very familiar with Zappos until recently. Truth is, I was reading this blog post Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is Delivering Happiness from NikiCheong.com and instead of trying to get a free copy there, I went directly to deliveringhappiness.com to get a review copy.

So here it is, the review of the Delivering Happiness book. I have extra copies of the book too, so if you care to read to the end of this post, I’ll tell you how you can get one. 😉

The book is put into three sections.

Section 1 – Profits
This section is the personal story of Tony Hsieh about his growing up in US, going through college and trying to make money since a very young age.
I personally find this section of the book the most interesting, probably the fact that I’m a software developer and that he wrote it in a funny and simple to understand way.
Tony told stories of his multiple startup business, some of which failed and a few succeeded.
He even had a very short stint in Oracle before starting up his own LinkExchange with a partner and later sold it off for $265 million to Microsoft!
After selling LinkExchange and becoming a millionnaire, Tony then went on to start Zappos and then played poker. No, seriously, poker.

Section 2 – Profits and Passion
While Section 1 is Tony’s personal story, Section 2 is the story of Zappos. This part of the book tells of how Zappos went past survival and then growth.
Zappos had went through growth, downsizing, funding, problem with products shipping and moving from San Francisco to Las Vegas.
Rarely do companies reveal their story and how things work but in this section, Tony shares about how the company culture is and more uniquely, a list of ten core values of Zappos.
Read more about the core values here.
The one that I admire most is Be Humble.

Be Humble is probably the core value that ends up affecting our hiring decisions the most. There are a lot of experienced, smart, and talented people we interview that we know can make and immediate impact on our top or bottom line. But a lot of them are also really egotistical, so we end up not hiring them. At most companies, the hiring manager would probably argue that we should hire such a candidate because he or she will add a lot of value to the company, which is probably why most large corporations don’t have great cultures.

Section 3 – Profits, Passion and Purpose
This final section is finally the purpose of this book, delivering happiness.
Tony shares his finding that happiness is actually the common thing that everyone looks for, although in short term, they might have objective such as retiring early, making money, finding a soulmate or running faster.

My personal opinion is that this book is one of those better ones that instead of becoming reference book, is more of a conversational business book that I will recommend my friends.
It’s a good read if you like stories about web entrepreneur, life of a millionnaire and something about finding happiness in what you do.

Do you have a personal favourite business book that isn’t just another reference book? Recommend me one in the comment section below and if you could, please let me know why it is your favourite. A random selection of comments will receive a copy of Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh delivered to you anywhere in the world.

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