Thoughts on Having Listened to Delivering Happiness AudioBook (audio book by Tony Hsieh)

I developed an interest in how Automattic company does Software Customer Support. I listened to an audio recording of a book popular in WordPress.com Happiness Engineer (Software Customer Support Engineer) employee circles: Hsieh, Tony. “Delivering Happiness:A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose”

I enjoyed the early chapters. They focused on the broad topic of “profit” and mostly were stories of Tony Hsieh’s entrepreneurship through the years.

Then I also enjoyed the middle section of the book which focused on “passion”. Stories in this part of the book were sometimes about how Tony got interested in Zappos company and how he an his colleagues grew it in its earlier years.

The last part of the book broadly focused on “purpose”. And parts in the middle-to-end of the book started talking heavily about Zappos company culture, events that transpired at Zappos company and with its people. I have to say that some parts in the middle-to-end I didn’t enjoy as much.

The three parts of “profit”, “passion” and “purpose” were mentioned by Tony within the book– I didn’t create these labels.

What(‘s) (are) my take-away(s), and what did I think?

Over all, I very much enjoyed the book.

How does it relate to Software Customer Support, and, why does a Automattic Happiness Engineer like to read it– and what from the book can I apply to my own role as a Software Customer Support Engineer?

A big take-away on software customer support from the book is that customer support can be a way to differentiate one’s company. A story from the book comes to mind when Tony Hsieh encouraged a non-Zappos friend to call Zappos and ask where’s the best place to order pizza. And the Zappos phone agent hardly missed a beat and did help the caller friend look up a pizza place.

Another take-away is that Tony says the company put a lot of resources into building a library and building a set of courses/classes, and effort to hire within and to encourage employees to move into higher-skilled roles in the company. My thought at this point of the book is that I wished to know more about how the employees viewed the courses/classes. At this time the company was hundreds of employees. I wanted to know more about how the employees view the courses/classes, and who among the employees participated in the courses/classes.)

I guess I’ll have to keep thinking about it, maybe read the paper version of the book later.

Note: This post was pre-published on 2016-09-09.

Note: This post was re-pre-published on 2016-10-28.

[2019 edit: Moved to: https://i̶n̶v̶e̶s̶t̶o̶r̶w̶o̶r̶k̶e̶r̶.̶c̶o̶m̶/2016/... .html.]