Tony Hsieh’s Shift from ROI to ROC
by Miki Saxon
Of all the high profile entrepreneurs who have built wildly successful companies my favorite is Tony Hsieh.
Hsieh is amazing from his MAP and the culture it engenders to the lengths he’s willing to go to propagate and share it—which includes renovating an entire city.
Hsieh is one of those increasingly rare people with an abundance of common sense who eschews ideology and focuses on doing real good in his community well beyond what’s necessary.
A healthy take on doing good by doing well in a very capitalistic way.
Hsieh calls this effort the Downtown Project, a $350 million urban experiment to build “the most community-focused large city in the world” in downtown Las Vegas.
The $350 million breaks out as follows, $200 million invested in land and buildings; $50 million for small businesses; $50 million for tech startups/companies and $50 million to be used for education.
Typically companies like Zappos build spectacular campuses offering their employees all the amenities in their own little world, but that approach actually went against parts of the Zappos culture, which promotes unstructured interactions among the staff.
Hsieh took that attitude and created a different vision for the new campus.
He leased the former City Hall — smack in the middle of downtown Vegas — for 15 years. Then he got to thinking: If he was going to move at least 1,200 employees, why not make it possible for them to live nearby? And if they could live nearby, why not create an urban community aligned with the culture of Zappos, which encourages the kind of “serendipitous interactions” that happen in offices without walls? As Zach Ware, Hsieh’s right-hand man in the move, put it, “We wanted the new campus to benefit from interaction with downtown, and downtown to benefit from interaction with Zappos.”
In typical Hsieh fashion the effort is summed up in a way that reflects what is really needed from today’s business leaders.
“Every factory in the world is doing everything to maximize R.O.I. We’re doing everything to maximize R.O.C.—Return On Community.” –Tony Hsieh.
Flickr image credit: Charlie Llewellin
