There's interesting company called Zappos. Zappos is a shoe company.
They actually ship shoes. Somebody else makes the shoes and they
ship them. And they do a nice job.
And they have a really wonderful website. And they're owned by Amazon.
It's a really nice company. And one of the interesting thing about
Zappos, they have lots of interesting things about them, but one of them Is the
hiring process. And what they do is they bring people in
for training. And they train them for quite a few days,
more or less a week. And at the end of this training, they say
to people, we would love for you to be part of the Zappos family.
We would love for you to start working for here.
But this is not the right place for everybody.
And if this is not the right place for you, we don't want, we don't think this is
something good for you. And therefore, we will pay you to not take
the job. And they started by offering people $500
and now they've increased up to $2000. Now think about it.
What a crazy idea. You come, you do a week of training.
At the end of week of training they say we'll pay you $2000 not to take the job.
Now these are not highly paid people, these are people who are going to get paid
12, 14, $15 an hour to do customer service on the phone.
Why would Zappos pay people not to take the job?
And they're are basically two reasons. The first reason, if you think about the
distribution of people, the people who love the job and the people who okay and
people who don't like it so much. You actually don't want the people who
don't like their jobs so much to be around because not only are they not going to do
a good job, they're going to pollute other people.
And Zappos is a customer service company. They have fantastic customer service.
It's delightful to call them every time. But you can imagine if they had people at
the negative tail, those people would give customers a bad experience and they might
pollute other people. So, one thing is the moving up and up on
trying to eliminate the tail. People who are not that happy or don't
think they'll be that happy, they don't want them.
The second thing, I think, has to do with cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance is a really interesting phenomena.
Cognitive dissonance is about the fact that if we behave one way but don't
believe in the same way, this creates a tension, what Festinger called dissonance.
Can we change what we've done? No.
We've done it already. Maybe we can change what we believe.
And that actually happen quite a lot. You behave a certain way, and then you
shift your belief to, to fit with that. In some of the earlier demonstrations,
they would get people and they would get them to screw screws on a big board.
Really boring task. And they would do it for a very, very long
time. And some people, they paid very well and
some people they paid $1.00. And then they basically looked whether
people would recommend this to other people.
People who got paid very well said, you know, this was a boring task.
I got paid well and this was a boring task.
If you're going to do it, I think the task is boring.
The people who got paid a dollar, had a dissonance.
They worked on it for a long time but was really boring.
Can they say that? No, because they only got paid $1.
They can't justify. They can't say to themselves, ooh I work
for really long time on this boring task for $1.
So what did they do? They shift it.
How interesting they found the task. And now all of a sudden the task was too,
was more interesting, for them. They, and they reported it to other people
as being more interesting. This is, by the way, one of the, the
theory of why playing hard to get is a good idea, right?
Because if you think that if people work harder for something, they shift your
opinions for it. So, if somebody is easy to get people can
say, oh, you know, I don't chase them very hard and I don't like them very much.
But if you chase somebody and your efforts show that you've chased them for a long
time, you spent lots of effort to it, you can't think to yourself you don't like
them that much because there's a dissonance between them.
So you have to increase your opinion. Oh, they must be really fantastic because
I wouldn't have worked so hard if that person was not such a fantastic person
that they want so much. Now, let's go back to Zappos.
What happened to Zappos? You have these $2,000.
Now, it's not as if Zappos is telling you, you know what, for the rest of your life
every morning you could wake up and decide if you want to take the money or stay on
the job. No, no.
You have 48 hours. And if the end of 48 hours you decide not
to take the money, you wake up every morning for the rest of your career at
Zappos and you'll tell yourself, I could have gotten $2000 but I decided to work at
Zappos. That must mean that I really love Zappos,
right? Otherwise, why would I do that?
And because of that, you go to work much more excited and so on.
And from what I hear, the atmosphere there is really like kind of a wonderful cult.
People are really happy with each other. They celebrate birthdays.
People live together. There's all kind of wonderful things
happening. And I'm sure there's lots of reasons for
it but one of them is that now people convince themselves that they must love
the place because they gave up so much to be there.