About 6 months ago I was at a conference and the presenter brought up Zappos as the shining example of a company that has a strong culture that translates into sales. The person next to me leaned over and said, “Man, can’t anyone come up with more examples?”
“Sadly,” I replied, “The reason Zappos and Southwest Airlines and Trader Joes and Cliff Bar and the small handful of companies are mentioned time and time again is because there aren’t any other ones to take their place.”
Yes, there are small, up and coming companies who have put their faith in the idea that building a strong company culture will lead to happy employees and happy customers and big profits and I look forward to the day that these companies take the place of Zappos in these presentations and I’m pretty sure it won’t take them very long. But people watching these presentations are hungry for results. Big, impressive results. And saying that Modcloth has $20 million in revenues or Etsy makes $314 million when the audience isn’t even hip to their brands is a tough sell.
But the question I really want to know the answer for is why is it so hard for established brands to implement a strong culture? And I have found a couple of answers to that question:
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