It all started with Tony Hsieh's book, Delivering Happiness, which sold more than 220,000 copies internationally and topped best-seller lists at The New York Times and elsewhere. Jenn Lim, a consultant at Amazon.com subsidiary Zappos and producer of the company's now-famous Culture Book, helped launch Delivering Happiness, and is now the CEO and chief happiness officer at the Zappos subsidiary of the same name.
In this video segment, Lim describes a West Coast burger chain that she feels is a great example of delivering happiness and what it's done to build and maintain a thriving company culture.
A full transcript follows the video.
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Andrew Tonner: In hearing this, it definitely rings. I hear certain overtones that we study at the Fool all the time: the idea of conscious capitalism and that you have multiple stakeholders that a business, if it needs to thrive over the long term, must address to an equal measure.
As investors, obviously we're always on the lookout for companies that have this kind of competitive advantage. Are there any companies, off the top of your head at least, that serve as great examples of companies that deliver happiness?
Jenn Lim: Sure. I think there's different companies that have different flavors of what they do. I personally have a favorite, and that's not one of these that's on the board behind me, but there's a really great hamburger chain on the West Coast called In-N-Out Burger.
They, I thought, have done a really good job. I believe they could expand internationally if they wanted to, but they purposely did not because they really wanted to create and protect their culture.
There's an In-N-Out University. They want to make sure people are living and breathing what they believe in, so therefore every single In-N-Out -- it doesn't matter if you're in the middle of Random Town, U.S.A. -- you go to the In-N-Out and you get the same experience, great food, and great customer service, because they purposely did it in a managed, intentional way.
I have much respect for that.
Tonner: Yeah, they're a truly tremendous company, great ownership. Being from Arizona, and someone who's lived on the West Coast for a while, great product as well.
