About a year ago, I started seeing advertisements in the bottoms of the plastic bins at the security checkpoints at airports – You know, the containers that you put your shoes and other personal items in before they go through the x-ray machine?

The one advertisement that stands out in my mind from routinely using these bins, was placed by a company called Zappos. Unfortunately, the intended brand impact eluded me at the time… I had no idea that Zappos was a very large and successful online shoe retailer, hence the advertisement at the bottom of the shoe bin. How clever!

Inc. Magazine recently ran an article about Zappos that I found insightful. The Zappos story is very inspiring on its own, and worth reading from a human interest perspective. But, what caught my eye was the leadership insight of their CEO, Tony Hsieh (pronounced Shay).

Hsieh has received some media attention for the financial success of Zappos (their revenues now exceed $1 Billion per year), but most people are far more interested in the counter-intuitive way he runs the company.

What’s his secret? Happiness. Hsieh has decided to make happiness the central focus of his company:

“But Hsieh has a hard time getting excited about [the financial success of the company]. What he really cares about is making Zappos’s employees and customers feel really, really good. This is not because Hsieh is a nice guy (though he is a very nice guy), but because he has decided that his entire business revolves around one thing: happiness. Everything serves that single end. Other business innovators work with software code or circuit boards or molecular formulas. Hsieh prefers to work with something altogether more complex and volatile: human beings themselves.”

Tomorrow, I’ll discuss some of the principles that Hsieh has uncovered in making happiness the central focus of Zappos. In the meantime, try to find these shoe bin ads the next time you’re at the airport…now you know the story behind them!