Zappos Chief Executive is Looking For a Way Forward

It’s tough for a person to replace a C.E.O. with an outsize personality like Mr. Hsieh, said Erik Gordon, a professor at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business, who anticipated that Zappos’s culture will face some changes under new leadership.

“The person who takes over from the founder who created the culture doesn’t have the authenticity or moral authority that the founder had,” Mr. Gordon said. “Can he maintain the same spirit of fun and a little weirdness and positive team spirit?”

(Mr. Hsieh did not found the company, but has been referred to as a founder based on his involvement as an investor and chief executive from its earliest days.)

Mr. Deshpande, who is from Aurangabad, India, came to the United States for a master’s degree in computer engineering, and joined Zappos after stints at General Electric and PepsiCo. He joins a growing list of South Asian chief executives in the United States, at companies like Microsoft; Google’s parent company, Alphabet; and Gap.

Zappos, which derives its name from “zapatos,” the Spanish word for shoes, was an early e-commerce success story under Mr. Hsieh, who wrote a best-selling book in 2010, “Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose.” It argued that a company’s top priority should be its culture and that keeping employees happy translated into success with customers.

The company, which moved from the Bay Area to southern Nevada in 2004 and now has a campus in downtown Las Vegas, developed a reputation for being a fun, almost cultlike place to work, where employees regularly socialized at work and outside the office. The company has claimed that it is harder to get a job at Zappos than it is to get into Harvard.

Mr. Deshpande said Zappos employees had become closer in some ways in the past year as they brought family or pets into the remote-work fold.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/21/business/zappos-kedar-deshpande-tony-hsieh.html