LearningCurve can help you master the material in this chapter. Go to the LearningCurve for this chapter.

Where did you get those shoes? If they arrived on your doorstep just thirty-six hours after you clicked on them, chances are they came from Zappos.com. The company, founded in 1999, has earned a reputation for not just offering customers a huge selection of clothing and accessories but also for providing a user-friendly at-home shopping experience, complete with free returns. So, when your favorite classic black Chuck Taylors start wearing out, you don’t need to leave the house: just go back to Zappos, click a few buttons, and a fresh new pair is on its way to you. That’s one reason Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh called his management book Delivering Happiness.

But it’s not the only reason. The company’s core business, Hsieh says, has been rooted in what he calls the “Three Cs”: clothing, customer service, and company culture. And it’s the last item on the list that Hsieh feels is the most important: “Our belief is that if we get the culture right, most of the other stuff—like delivering great customer service or building a long-term enduring brand or business—will just be a natural by-product” (Hsieh, 2013, para. 2). For Zappos, the challenge was taking what started as a small, family-like culture to scale as the company grew into a large, thriving organization with close to fifteen thousand employees. That meant formulating a list of core values—such as “Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit” (#7), “Create Fun and a Little Weirdness” (#3), and “Pursue Growth and Learning” (#5)—and using those values as a framework for decision making at every level (Zappos, 2014). Those values, developed with input from Zappos employees, have served as an articulation of the spirit of the company; Hseih notes that he has hired and fired employees based on those core values (Nisen, 2013).

Hseih’s commitment to culture doesn’t end at the corporate office. Zappos recently unveiled a new corporate headquarters in downtown Las Vegas that is designed not to rival the sprawling, city-unto-itself model of the famed Googleplex or Apple campuses, but to become a vital part of the surrounding community.

The management at Zappos takes a particular interest in developing a culture within and around the company that shapes communication. Culture and communication play an important part in all organizations, groups with a formal governance and structure. You see this in action every day: your college or university, student groups, fraternity, religious community, volunteer organizations, and state and local governments are all actively involved in the process of communicating messages about themselves and their members. This is why we stress that organizational communication, the interaction necessary to direct an organization toward multiple sets of goals, is about more than meeting agendas and skills or getting along with moody bosses. It is at work in your life right now (Eisenberg, Goodall, & Trethewey, 2013). So it’s important that we understand these organizations and how we communicate in them. In this chapter, we’ll look at several approaches to managing organizations, issues related to organizational culture, important contexts for communicating in organizations, and common issues facing organizations today.