Above, watch Ingrid Vanderveldt's interview with Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh at the recent SXSWi confab in Austin, which Dell just released on its YouTube channel. Watch the video and read Ingrid's takeaways below.Continue reading...

There are more than 24 million accounts in the database of the Amazon-owned e-tailer Zappos, and all of them had their information accessed by a hacker recently, according to the Los Angeles Times. Luckily, the hackers did not get access to customers’ full credit-card numbers and payment data was not accessed, the paper notes. But they did get each member’s name, email address, billing address, phone number, the last four digits of their credit card, and a scrambled version of each password, the Times reports.

All Zappos user passwords will need to be reset and CEO Tony Hsieh said in a statement that the company would shut down its phone system and handle all customer relations online due to the massive amount of requests coming in. "Over the next day or so, we will be training everyone on the specifics of how to best help our customers through their password change process now that their passwords have been reset and expired,” he told employees in an email sent o Sunday. “We need all hands on deck to help get through this."

The whole thing left Hsieh worried about how the attach would affect the company’s brand: "We've spent over 12 years building our reputation, brand, and trust with our customers," Hsieh said in his email message. "It's painful to see us take so many steps back due to a single incident."

At the very least, it's got people thinking (again) about online security breaches.

Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh could have kicked back after selling his web shoestore to Amazon for $1.2 billion. Instead, he wrote a book, Delivering Happiness, which naturally turned into a bestseller. That turned into a cross-country bus tour, delivering random acts of kindness across America.

Now, as announced at SXSW, Zappos is launching a new lifestyle brand called Delivering Happiness. Zappos Chief Happiness Officer Jenn Lim (above) is heading up the new company, which is geared to spreading its philosophy and advising value-based management while creating a product line of motivational apparel.Continue reading...

The life cycle of the successful business today, with "successful" defined by remaining on the S&P 500, is 18 years. That's less than two decades to launch, nurture and grow a company, compared with a lifespan of 30 years in 1983 and 57 years in 1958.

Those sobering stats come from Mark W. Johnson, whose new book is called "Seizing the White Space: Business Model Innovation for Growth and Renewal." Given that harsh reality, Johnson spells out why he believes the name of the game today is transformation: building a brand capable of shifting with the peripatetic tides of doing business in the 21st century. For Johnson, Amazon personifies the very model of that modern brand.

Since it launched with a splash in 1995, Amazon has grown to the largest online retailer in the world. From its roots as a Web-based bookstore, Amazon’s product line now includes movies, music, books (all digital or hard copies), plus computer software, video games, electronics, apparel, furniture, food, toys and a mind-boggling "much more." It operates standalone websites serving Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, and China. But Bezos is not just after global domination.Continue reading...

It sounds so easy. Happy employees make for a healthy and profitable brand. So why doesn’t every company make brand engagement a priority? Two reasons:

(1) Theorizing about brand engagement is much easier than actually putting the ideas into practice.

(2) People are weird. Just ask Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com. The NY Times reports that if you would like to work for Zappos.com, be prepared to answer this question:

“On a scale of 1 to 10, how weird are you?”

Creating a successful culture in any work environment begins at the interviewing process, and, unfortunately, this is where brands often go wrong. For many people, the most dismaying facet of modern times is the blurring of social lines. There was a day when news was separate from entertainment, your phone was separate from your television, and peoples’ personal lives were separate from their professional lives. Those days are gone.Continue reading...