I first met Chip Conley at an event where we were both speaking in 2007, just one year before we hit $1 billion in gross merchandise sales at Zappos.com. When he presented his concepts from Peak, I was instantly struck with how similar our philosophies about building a brand and business were. I later found out that we were both passionate students of the field of positive psychology—essentially, the science of happiness—and that we had both applied our learning to our respective businesses as well as our personal lives. I felt like we were kindred spirits.

At Zappos, our goal is to wow our customers, our employees, our vendors, and ultimately our investors. We strive to deliver the very best customer service and customer experience, and ultimately our brand is about delivering happiness to the world. Our hope is that 10 years from now, people won't even realize that we started selling shoes online, and perhaps 20 to 30 years from now, there may even be a Zappos Airlines that's focused on just delivering the very best customer experience.

Our number-one priority at Zappos is company culture. Our belief is that if we get the culture right, then most of the other stuff, like building a long-term enduring brand, delivering great service, and finding passionate employees and customers, will happen naturally on its own.

Building a brand today is very different from building a brand 50 years ago. It used to be that a few people got together in a room, decided what the brand positioning was going to be, and then spent a lot of money buying advertising telling people what their brand was. And if you were able to spend enough money, then you were able to build your brand.

Today, what you do and who you are matter much more than what you say. Your brand is the combination of everyone's experience with your company, which is ultimately a byproduct of your company's culture.

A company's culture and a company's brand are really just two sides of the same coin. The brand may lag the culture at first, but eventually it will catch up. At the end of the day, every brand is basically a short cut to emotions. All of the world's greatest enduring brands ultimately appeal to one or more human emotions. Peak provides a great framework for thinking about how to accomplish that.

One of our core values at Zappos is to Pursue Growth and Learning, so we offer many different classes to help our employees grow both personally and professionally. We are such a fan of Chip's work that Peak has become required reading for many of our employees, and our training team now offers a class specifically designed to cover all the concepts from the book that you are now holding in your hands.

Every employee and visitor to our headquarters in Las Vegas is offered a free copy of Peak, and we even have posters on the walls of our headquarters in Las Vegas to serve as a daily reminder to our employees to always keep Chip's modified version of Maslow's Hierarchy in mind.

If you're interested in building an enduring brand and business, this book will be one of the best investments you'll ever make. I encourage you to do what we've done at Zappos: get a copy for each and every one of your employees. This book is one of the rare few that can help you and your employees grow both personally and professionally.

Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com ([email protected])

P.S. If you're ever in the Las Vegas area, I would like to invite you to come and tour our headquarters to observe firsthand many of the concepts from Peak in action. To schedule your tour, just go to https://www.zapposinsights.com/tours.