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Case Study : Zappos 's Vision For The Company

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Holly Williams MGMT 362 Case Study 3 10/17/17 Zappos CEO Asks Employees to Commit to Teal, or Leave Synopsis of the case Zappos was founded in 1999 by Nick Swinmurn with the financial funding from Tony Hsieh and Alfred Lin, Zappos was created out of one man’s frustration regarding his failure to find a pair of shoes that he liked. One shoe store in the mall would have the right shoe in the right size, but the wrong color. Another store would have the right color, but were out of stock in his size. His search continued online where he discovered that there was a complete lack of presence in the online shoe retail market. Because of this, Nick Swinmurn decided to quit his job and create Zappos. Swinmurn’s vision for the company …show more content…

Robertson spoke of a management philosophy called holacracy, in which is when employees are self-managed rather than the traditional hierarchy style of management used in traditional business. This concept clicked with Hsieh as he saw how hierarchical businesses experienced slow growth, almost no innovation, and would eventually end in failure. “Holacracy is the complete practice for structuring, governing, and running an organization. It is a new “operating system” that instills rapid evolution in the core processes of an organization.” (Staff, Holacracy and Self-Organization). Holacracy helps eliminates positions and titles and replaces them with roles. People will no longer delegate tasks to subordinates, because they are all equal within their circles. Employees could join multiple circles if they feel it suits their strengths or looks like fun. Starting with the human resources group, holacracy was executed in early 2013, because of the rules by which it was managed, it took a long time before even the early users began to understand and work within the boundaries. Even with the program now in place, there were still some legacy employees that struggled with the new processes and could not overcome their loss of title and authority. In a final leap of faith for full execution, Hsieh sent a message to the entire company stating that “in order to eliminate the legacy management hierarchy” he was going to fully eliminate all the people management

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