Jeanne Bliss talks with Alfred LIn of Zappos.com

I think, well, the spirit to believe—we here sort of equate that to just pure empowerment. And all of our customer service representatives here, they believe in the culture and the core values of the company. And we only sort of recruit people who we believe also believe in the future of Zappos. And then we tell them about what our values are and our core values are and our culture. And we not only judge their performance based on what they do for the customer, but also if they believe in the culture of the company. And so they truly believe in what we're trying to do. And because of that, I think everybody here is just a lot happier and they're all aligned on what we're trying to do. And it just makes decisions very, very easy and very, very natural. And we have a very non-hierarchical culture here. And the organization is not a top-down driven culture. We believe in a very bottoms-up driven culture. And so we tell all the new hires during new hire orientation, this company is not me or Tony or Fred. The three of us get up and say, you know, the three of us come up with all the great ideas—three great ideas in a day, a month, a year. But if we all come up with great ideas, there's 1,400 of us, that's 1,400 great ideas in that same time frame.

So the concept is that, so we came up with this idea that—and Tony started the idea and basically came to me and said that was a great idea, let's check with legal and HR. And they hated it. They thought it was the worst idea you've ever thought of. And the concept was that if someone is not committed at Zappos, we should pay them to leave because there's just friction between being here and not having a job. So you're here purely because you don't want to get over the inertia of finding your next job. It's difficult. So if you pay someone a certain amount of money, you get rid of that friction. And so the concept was refined to, we'll offer it during training. So we're trying to weed out the people who are not committed. The other thing that we're trying to weed out is, you know, I'm sure our recruiting team is very, very good at recruiting and interviewing, but if you're really good at judging people, maybe you're right 60 to 70% of the time, which means you're still wrong 30 to 40% of the time. So we're trying to get rid of the 30 to 40% faster. You know, this is—we tell people this may not be the right place for you, and we know that it's not always the right place for everyone here. So we want to sort of figure out how to sort of transition them out in a respectful way. And it started out with a few hundred. Very few people took it. And over time, we raised it and raised it and raised it, and it's now $2,000. But still not enough people take it because we're not seeing that 30 to 40% of the people are taking it. The other thing that was interesting is, you have to turn down $2,000. The turning down—the actual act of turning it down—makes you more committed because you just turned down something that you could just walk away and get, especially in this economy.

It is a test of culture. It's a test of commitment. It's a test to believing in the 'why.' And I think the thing that you mentioned at the end was important, because when I tell the story about this thing, is that you enable people to leave with their grace and dignity intact. And you know, you use the words 'get rid of,' but people don't feel like they're being ushered out the door. You make it be a reflective decision that they personally make, which I think is really, really the secret sauce here.

I didn't really mean 'get rid of' in an active sense, but because it's their decision that they want to leave. Anybody who wants to work here and we believe can do the job and believe in our culture, we work very, very hard to figure out how to make them fit here too.