Leadership Style: What Do People Do When They Are Leading?
Strayer University
Assignment #4 Submitted in Partial Fulfillment
Of the Requirements for the Course
BUS 520: Organizational Behavior
Dr. Michael Sithole’
Summer 2013 Objective 1: Tony Hsieh brief background.
Tony Hsieh is an online internet entrepreneur who co-founded the internet advertising network LinkExchange but eventually sold the company to Microsoft. Before Tony Hsieh became famous he grew in San Francisco Bay Area of California with both his parents. Tony graduated from Harvard University in 1995 where he graduated with a Computer Science Degree. While Tony was attending school he also worked at a pizza parlor where he managed and sold pizza to students in his dorm. Tony Hsieh who is now the CEO of Zappos, helped out the online shoe and clothing company grow to more than one billion in gross merchandise sales over a period of ten years. Amazon.com bought Zappos in a deal in the fall of 2009 and it valued over one billion dollars. Objective 2: Analyze the CEO’s leadership style and philosophy, and how the CEO’s leadership aligns with the culture.
The leadership style stated by Tony Hsieh is the best leader is those who lead by example and they are both team followers as well as team leaders. The CEO of Zappos believes that most of their best ideas came from the employees who are not managers or supervisors but the people who start from the bottom up. The people who started from the bottom helped the consumers before anyone because they deal with the orders and purchasing of merchandise from the company. Tony Hsieh philosophy at Zappos is different. The company tends to not focusing on individuals as assets; they instead focus on building as our asset a pipeline of people in every single department with varying levels of skills and experience, ranging from entry level all the way up through senior management and