Start Something That Matters

by Blake Mycoskie

  One way I do this is by having a private email account as well as a business one. Try it—and remember not to look at the latter on weekends. I tell my staff that I don’t want to hear from them on weekends, and I do my best to save my ideas in draft form so I don’t interrupt theirs either.

  Clean out your closet. Clean out your storage drawers—at least four times a year. I firmly believe that the less stuff you have sitting around, the less stuff you have cluttering up your mind.

  Write one sentence to answer the questions below that pertain to what you are trying to do. For some of you, that could be all of them; for others, it might be just one:

  1) What is your business about?

  2) What do you want to be known for as a person?

  3) Why should someone hire you?

  4) What social cause are you seeking to serve?

  5) If you are designing a product or a service, look at it and then decide: What else can you remove from the design or service and still keep its function intact?

  The key is to answer the appropriate questions using a single sentence. If you can’t, then consider going back to the drawing board until you’ve honed your answers down to a simple statement.

  TIM FERRISS’S TIPS ON SIMPLICITY

  Since my friend Tim Ferriss is an expert on time management, I asked him to offer some tips on how to master simplicity in your life. Here’s what he had to say:

  First, on the bright side, most people are rediscovering that, even if a 401k or salary drops 30 percent, the most important things are actually the easiest to obtain: great friends, good food, and a decent bottle of wine. They are, in effect, living philosopher Seneca’s advice: “Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: ‘Is this the condition that I feared?’ ”

  Put another way, it’s better to design an ideal lifestyle and then fill in the gaps with high-output streamlined work than to fill the calendar with as much as possible and hope an acceptable lifestyle will be the by-product. Based on more than 1,000 case studies on my blog (www.fourhourblog.com) and elsewhere, it’s clear the latter just doesn’t work.

  Here are several tactics to help keep things simple, uncluttered, and high-impact:

  1) Do an 80/20 analysis of how you spend your time and create a “not-to-do” list

  What are the 20 percent of activities and distractions/interruptions that consume 80 percent of your time? Use a program like www.rescuetime.com if you must, but figure out what’s eating your usable time. Then write the top two to four distractions/interruptions on a not-to-do list and review them each morning, attempting for just one to two days to stop doing them. Consider using Rescue-Time to block sites like Facebook and Twitter during certain hours.

  2) Experiment with a low-cost virtual assistant (VA)

  What would you do if you had three-day weekends for the rest of your life? If you can save just eight hours per week with a VA, that’s effectively what you’ve done. It’s well possible for most people to remove ten to forty hours per week within two months this way. It gives you the breathing room not only to pursue dreams otherwise postponed until retirement but also to focus on high-yield, revenue-generating activities versus administration and personal chores. It is a fundamental lifestyle upgrade and an eye-opening experience. Once you try it, you will never go back to how things used to be. Check out www.tryasksunday.com, www.elance.com (search “virtual assistant”), or even the refugees of www.samasource.org to get a taste of the options. If you prefer U.S.-based help, take a look at www.redbutler.com.

  3) Don’t check email until 11 a.m.

  Focus on completing your most uncomfortable “to-do” before that time.

  4) Learn to let the small bad things happen

  Many people have accepted and made peace with letting little bad things happen to get the big important things done—for example, returning a phone call a bit late and apologizing, paying a small late fee for returning “X” (books, DVDs, whatever), or losing an unreasonable customer. The answer to being overwhelmed is not spinning more plates—or doing more—it’s defining the few things that can fundamentally change your business and life. Then you can allow yourself to let the smaller things slide.

  Think of the small, reversible (or just unimportant) bad things as your productivity tax. Parking ticket? Irking that high-maintenance “friend” who sucks the life out of you? Focus on the critical few, not the trivial many.

  He who does not trust enough will not be trusted.

  —LAO-TZU

  Over the last two decades, Tony Hsieh, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, has been one of the most successful entrepreneurs in America. His first business, founded in 1996 when he was twenty-two years old, was Link Exchange, an Internet advertising company that, at its peak, reached more than 50 percent of all Internet-enabled households every month. He and his partners sold the company to Microsoft in 1999 for $265 million.

  That same year, Tony joined the start-up Zappos, the online retail giant. By 2008, Zappos was grossing more than $1 billion in merchandise sales (and is continuing to grow). A year later, it was bought by Amazon.com for an approximate valuation of $1.2 billion on closing day.

  As part of the Amazon deal, Tony and his team vowed to stay on at Zappos and continue not just to grow the company but to nourish its culture as well. Zappos has built a reputation as one of the country’s best places to work (it ranked among the top fifteen in Fortune magazine’s 2010 “Best Companies to Work For”) and to shop (its customer satisfaction is extremely high; on any given day, 75 percent of its orders come from repeat customers).

  Tony has shared with me many of the secrets to his success, but one of the most important is the highly respected culture he created at Zappos, a culture that, at its core, relies on trust. “Trust is a fundamental part of a business,” Tony says. “It’s the most important part of getting our work done right. A brand succeeds or fails based on whether or not people trust the company with which they’re about to do business.”

  That trust works on various levels and includes employees, vendors, and customers. For example, according to Tony, “Organizations can only function at peak capacity if their employees are looking out for the best interests of the company, not just motivated by their own selfish reasons.”

  To further trust, Tony encourages his employees to get to know one another as friends and to spend time together outside the office. By building high levels of trust through their personal interactions, they can establish communications that work well inside and outside the company. “People are more likely to do favors for each other if they are friends, not just co-workers,” he says.

  Another way Zappos builds trust among its internal and external partners is to mean exactly what it says. “The other day I sent out a blog post updating the situation on the one-year anniversary of our acquisition by Amazon. When the acquisition first occurred, I wrote a long memo to the staff, covering every point I could think of to make it clear exactly what was happening and why this acquisition was a great moment. In my blog, I followed up on every point in that letter, showing what was promised and planned and what actually happened. For example, we’d vowed we would remain independent and maintain the Zappos brand. Plenty of naysayers said they had heard this kind of stuff before and that it was never true, that the acquired company always gets swallowed up. That may indeed be true for most acquisitions, but Zappos still has its independence, and that letter I wrote a year ago still stands.”

  Unlike many companies, Zappos actively encourages its employees to join its aggregated Twitter account and to Tweet whatever they wish. Whereas other companies police their employees’ words, Zappos tells its employees to use their best judgment, and that’s it.

  And then there are the programs for which Zappos has become famous, the best-known being its custom of giving $3,000 to any prospective employee who takes the company training but decides
not to take a job. Zappos wants committed employees. Approximately 98 percent of trainees refuse the quick-cash offer and join the company.

  Another quirky program: Zappos lets employees give anyone else in the company a fifty-dollar bonus if they feel that person deserves it, up to one bonus a month.

  As a result of this trust, Zappos employees tend to stay. The turnover rates vary by department, but all in all they are far lower than those of Zappos’ competitors.

  Zappos also works to ensure trust with its vendors and customers. The company deals with more than 1,500 brands, but none get lost in the shuffle; all are treated with a personal touch. “We don’t see a business relationship as being just business. Trust is something you build in all aspects of all relationships,” Tony says.

  “Traditionally there’s been an adversarial relationship between the retailer and the wholesaler. This is because it usually plays out as a zero-sum game: There’s a limited amount of money to be shared between the two, and every penny the retailer makes is one the wholesaler loses, and vice versa. Since we look at our vendors as partners, our goal is to build a business that makes sense for both companies in the long term. If you trust each other, you can build a business relationship bigger than the sum of its parts.”

  Trust is Zappos’ default way of thinking. Other companies may earn trust, but at Zappos trust is built in from the beginning. “And, yes, sometimes we do have to deal with untrustworthy people, but it’s been so rare it hasn’t caused anyone to doubt our general policy,” Tony says.

  Trust is an enormous subject, but I want to boil it down to two fundamental aspects: 1) the internal trust you build within an organization as a leader and 2) the external trust you build with your customers, your vendors, and your donors (if you’re a nonprofit).

  Between the birth of the Industrial Revolution and the modern workplace, a wide chasm formed between employer and employee. Frederick W. Taylor, whose book The Principles of Scientific Management was the bible for the industrial age, applied so-called scientific analysis to improving workplace productivity. Fundamental to his theory were the following ideas: Workers are inherently lazy and do not enjoy their jobs. Managers should break down work into the smallest possible tasks and supervise and control everything their workforce does. Workers should be paid according to their performance over a set amount of time. Workers are most productive when driven by monetary incentives.

  A business organized by Taylorite principles sent a clear message to its workers: You are not ever going to be trusted with any significant responsibility. And you shouldn’t trust your employer to do anything beyond pay you for the hours you’ve clocked in.

  Not all employers ruled like this, and not all employees felt alienated and dehumanized by the companies they worked for. But it’s safe to say that, in general, the word “trust” was not baked into the operating DNA of business leadership during this period.

  I cannot think of any area of business during the past few decades in which the mindset of successful leaders has changed so much. Today, trust between employer and employee is the cornerstone of your business and your future.

  As a leader, your job is to motivate your staff, your co-workers, and your partners—anyone you’re in a position to influence and direct. Whereas past leaders tended to be egomaniacal and charismatic, commanders in the mode of a General Patton, these days great leaders are those who trust and empower their staff. After all, we all derive enormous satisfaction from feeling that we’re in control of our jobs rather than being victims of them—and, as a leader, that’s not a difficult feeling to provide.

  Always remember: The better your employees feel about their jobs, the better your business performs. One way to motivate is to make sure your team is all on the same page, or, as one of my mentors, Lou George, says, “that we are all hearing stereo.” When the team is working together and hearing the same direction, their confidence soars.

  Although many reasons exist for the recent shift from authoritarianism to trust, a leading factor is the way that knowledge moves through the workforce. It used to be that information traveled vertically, from the top down: The important ideas and information were generated in the executive offices at headquarters and then filtered, selectively, to employees.

  The contemporary workplace is much flatter: A company can enjoy valuable contributions from all levels of employees at all locations, whether they’re interns, part-timers, or executives, and whether they’re based in Chicago, Shanghai, or the Shetland Islands. There’s no telling where the next great idea will come from and how it will move through the organization—top down, bottom up, or zigzagging through the middle.

  For good ideas to flow smoothly, your people have to first feel empowered to offer—and execute—them. You can’t motivate someone by giving him or her the position but not the power to do the job or to voice input. Powerlessness is the ultimate demotivator.

  Among the modern leaders who turned the tide away from the Taylor management model is Bill Hewlett, cofounder of computer giant Hewlett-Packard. As recounted in the book The Speed of Trust by Stephen M. R. Covey, Stephen R. Covey, and Rebecca R. Merrill, one weekend Hewlett went to a company storeroom, searching for a tool, and discovered a lock on the tool bin. HP had always allowed employees open access to all tools, a decision made to show how much the company trusted its workforce. Hewlett broke open the lock and put up a sign: “HP Trusts Its Employees.”

  Packard was later quoted as saying, “The open bins and storerooms were a symbol of trust, a trust that is central to the way HP does business.”

  A phrase that has gained much traction over the last four decades is “servant leadership.” Coined by writer and business consultant Robert K. Greenleaf in his 1970 essay “The Servant as Leader,” the term refers to someone who uses qualities like empathy, listening skills, stewardship, and awareness rather than power to assert his or her authority to lead.

  Certainly leaders of the past offered this kind of authority; as far back as the fourth century B.C., the Chinese thinker and politician Chanakya wrote that “the leader shall consider as good not what pleases him but what pleases his subjects.… ” Throughout history, scholars and philosophers from Gandhi to Martin Luther King, Jr., have advocated this kind of guidance.

  Recently the concept of the servant leader has enjoyed a surge in popularity, with good reason. Today’s successful leaders are those willing to share credit as much as possible, who give away as much as they can, and who promote an environment of creative cooperation instead of rabid competition.

  I confess, when I started in business more than a decade ago, my goal was to become a rock-star business leader, someone whose name would resonate throughout the world, someone whose fame would supersede that of others of my generation—the typical cult CEO. But the more I learned about business and, along the way, about the world, the more that urge dissipated. In its place rose the desire to lead with a softer, more human touch. I don’t want TOMS to be only about me—everyone in the organization must feel attached to TOMS to the degree that anyone can be a spokesperson whenever it’s appropriate.

  A leader can create a company, but a community creates a movement.

  Truly great servant leaders are inspiring. They create loyal employees who are attached to the company and its mission rather than only to their own careers. Servant leaders realize that their primary job isn’t about figuring out what they can get done and cross off their to-do list, but how many people they can help get things crossed off their own to-do lists. It’s about making sure that everyone on the team is performing to their fullest capabilities.

  So, as a leader, your job is to help others do their jobs better. This is why I tell my top people to help serve everyone in their group.

  For example, two of the major executives at TOMS are both quintessential servant leaders—Candice Wolfswinkel, our Shoe Glue, and Jill DiIorio, who runs TOMS’ retail sales and marketing in the United States. Interestingly, Candice works in our
main office, and Jill operates out of Houston, Texas—almost 1,400 miles away. Both motivate their staffs by inspiring them, recognizing their accomplishments, and letting them get their jobs done as they best see fit. The resulting amount of work is far greater than what either Jill or Candice could have accomplished if they were prioritizing their own tasks instead of enabling their staffs to work better and smarter.

  Although there are many aspects to servant leadership, one of the clearest ways to build the kind of trust you’ll need to succeed is to admit your own mistakes.

  In any endeavor, you (and everyone else) will make them. This is good! Making mistakes can be one of the most important ways for an organization to grow. If you view mistakes not as errors that impede the flow of progress but as opportunities to build more trust in your organization as you work through them, you turn a negative into a positive that will build the trust you’ll need.

  Certainly I made plenty of mistakes at TOMS. One of the worst was the Airstream shoe debacle.

  When TOMS started, we used to travel around in an Airstream trailer, hosting events to raise awareness of our brand and our mission. I love the Airstream brand—it’s cool, classic, and stylish, and it stands for an appealing kind of on-the-road freedom. Guessing that other Airstream fans were equally passionate and that they’d love an Airstream shoe from TOMS, I convinced our production team to create 800 pairs, which was a lot for us at the time.

  The shoes were beautiful: gray and navy, the Airstream colors, with the image of a U.S. road map as a liner. To promote them, we then decided to have our 2008 sales meeting at the Airstream convention in Perry, Georgia, where 2,000 devotees from all over North America gather every year.