Zappos is holding a 2-day Live event on July14 and 15, and I really want to participate!
This post serves 3 goals:
- Talking about how much and why culture is important to me
- Explaining why I want to be one of 20 and go to the conference
- Applying for the only(!) blog-scholarship to the conference (it costs a lot and I can’t afford a month after business school)
How much and why culture is important to me
- Culture and specifically the way to lead it is my passion, and it led me to the Goizueta Business School
- I believe that an organization with a positive culture can go a long way, survive when it faces challenges and thrive
- My career path includes army service, start up companies, internship for a corporate and now helping a not-for-profit. It’s a mix of cultures and I’ve learned a lot from each of them. I aim high. It’s important for me to learn from these culture experiences and to influence my future colleagues through culture.
- I believe that it is important to understand culture and to teach it. It will improve the quality of our life and even the result of our business.
- For the last year I am working to develop a conference in my school with the title The Future of Leadership, which will bring together some great business leaders to discuss various ideas around how to lead a business with better culture.
- I love Purple Cows – culture is a key ingredient in creating a purple cow
Why do I apply to Zappos Insights Live
- I am facinated by Zappos story and culture.
- It led me to speaking about Zappos in class a few times. Specifically giving the example of paying employees to quit and the importance of this to the culture.
- After watching the video of Tony Hsieh talk in BIF-4 (link) I wrote him an email. He replied (how many CEOs do?), telling me that they are sending me the Zappos Culture book. It arrived after two days. I took it to class too.
- In a market where too many companies use diversity as a buzzword, Zappos does it (read the book)
- On his email Tony invited me to come to attend a company visit. These Live-2-days seems like a good chance.
Why am I asking for a scholarship
- My loan
- I will keep spreading the word and promote culture, because I believe it’s essential (see above)
Please read their 10 Core Values and visit http://bit.ly/yklJA to learn more about Zappos Insight
Categories: Goizueta · Ideas · Leadership Conference · Marketing
Tagged: core values, culture, Goizueta, leadership, Leadership Conference, live, people, Zappos
Free, The Future of a Radical Price is Chris Anderson’s new book. Not yet published , the book already created a turmoil around the web.
It started with Malcolm Gladwell’s review in the New Yorker and then came Anderson’s response. This gentlemen duel divided the web: Gladwell’s supporters like BusinessWeek’s Nussbaum on one side and Anderson’s supportes like Seth Godin on the other.
I think it’s a tie.
The tectonic shift in media and its revenue model has started already:
- Consumers will have more free options
- We as business leaders will have to create better content and improved product in order to succeed
For a better understanding about the behavioral aspect of free, read Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational – a great reading.
Categories: Books · business
Tagged: Anderson, Chris Anderson, Creative Commons, Dan Ariely, free, Gladwell, Malcolm Gladwell
I am a happy customer of LinkedIn and utilize the service a lot in my line of work. To me, it’s the professional version of social networking, and it is a company that brings a lot of value to its customers and respects them.
I was therefore disappointed when LinkedIn tried to join a recent trend in the market and asked for a “free-sourcing” translation service. An article on NYTimes titled Translators Wanted at LinkedIn. The Pay? $0 an Hour describes the justified fury among translators for LinkedIn’s offer to join its “crowdsourcing” efforts.
LinkedIn seems to embrace only parts of the web culture: Ask for free work on one hand but keep its API close to developers. It is kind of ironic to have someone translate for free a service he will not be able to access once he’s done.
Categories: Ideas · business
Tagged: CroudSourcing, free, LinkedIn, negative, NYTimes
Congratulations to the BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos team for winning the Netflix prize.
After publishing a post about the competition last year, I followed the competition. It is interesting to see that the winning team is a collaboration of different teams.
Now it’s time to subscribe.
Categories: Ideas
Tagged: algorithm, competition, crowdsourcing, Netflix
Business Week published an interesting article by John Winsor titled CrowdSourcing: What It Means for Innovation in which he describes some examples of CrowdSourcing by LG, StarBucks etc.
The use of online communities for innovations now becomes mainstream as it allows companies to cut costs on innovations and to expand their options and resource reachness: Independent (or groups of) inventors are available worldwide and serve as a valuable alternative to design firms.
After I have posted about it here I have joined InnoCentive and I constantly enjoy the vibrant environment there.
Go ahead, pick your favorite crowdsourcing community and start sharing.
Update: FastCompany’s Joel Rubinson writes a great post about CrowdSourcing: Best Ideas Can Come From Anywhere
Categories: Ideas · business · design
Tagged: business week, CroudSourcing, FastCompany, innovation, sharing
