Nobody can fill the founder of Zappos shoes, but thousands of innovators together might get close. We can honor his legacy by building a movement committed to his mission of elevating human capital.
We created the Tony Hsieh Award to celebrate leaders, entrepreneurs, teams and companies innovating on the radical edge in the space of human capital and evangelize their collective insights and change the way the world works. Nobody can fill Tony’s shoes, but thousands of innovators together might get close. We aim to honor his legacy by building a community that shares his curiosity and shows the same willingness to elevate human capital. In our first year of the awards, we met hundreds of entrepreneurs, chief people officers and CEOs of unicorn companies who are deeply interested in cracking the code. In the second year of the Tony Hsieh Award, we've had thousands.
Individual elevation
Tony often articulated the belief that the company was the vehicle for the individual developmental competency, an individual's elevation. A great example we found in the latest awards was a company called Vertical Harvest. Vertical Harvest grows crops in the heart of communities by taking underutilized urban buildings and installing hydroponic, vertical, controlled environmental agriculture (CEA). This means urban farming can happen in urban, underserved neighborhoods on a fraction of the land required by traditional agriculture, while using 85% less water to deliver produce.
Vertical Harvest also prioritizes both social impact and profitability, by leveraging a mix of public-private partnerships and operating with an inclusive employment model currently focused on citizens who are often left out. Fifty percent of their employees are individuals with physical and/or intellectual disabilities. The organization is creating jobs in communities struggling with food insecurity and extending economic inclusion to are differently abled — and have done a beautiful job of it. And they're outstripping the financial returns of their competitors.
If Vertical Harvest inspires you:
- What could you do in your performance reviews or in your development programs to create a human elevation-centric mindset?
Holacracy: the potential and future of self-managed teams
One of the real takeaways in the first year of the awards was how the strong focus on the happiness of the individual and engagement has significant bounteous returns. This was at the core of Tony's teachings and his book Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose. But once you have an engaged population, why wouldn't you shift to significantly engaged teams who require less management?
Teams that shift to a social contract among them that affords a degree of accountability, development, coaching, elevation, and achievement — a shared commitment to the mission, but a commitment to each other in the process to achieve that mission. Many people have experimented with a modified degree of holacracy, or self-management, as Tony did as an out-in-front innovator in the space. And when we announced the latest award winners, we had some of the world's greatest thinkers and self-managed teams come together and look at the possibility and future of self-managed teams.
We found organizations like SINA (The Social Innovation Academy) in Africa. It really is a fundamentally different organizational model, operating without a CEO. The focus is on creating a generation of “scholars” or changemaker-makers — 18 to 27-year-olds who shift from being recipients of aid to active drivers of their own future, one person and one community at a time within self-organized social innovation groups.
Each SINA scholar comes from a background of marginalization: a street kid, a refugee, an orphan, child soldier or extreme poverty. Tailor-made empowerment stages and self-management processes support the scholars in defining their own path in their community — transforming these young people into social entrepreneurs.
This way of developing social enterprises fosters an entire African generation to embrace purpose-aligned action! So far, SINA has helped to launch 59 social ventures, with 348 meaningful jobs created. If SINA inspires you, what could you do to step back from control-oriented management of teams and begin to negotiate a social contract where team members commit:
- To a shared mission that acts as a North Star
- To speak candidly in service of the mission
- To be accountable to each other.
Nobody can fill the founder of Zappos shoes, but thousands of innovators together might get close. ... [+]
Human capital and technology
The latest awards were the first time we saw the integration of human capital and cutting-edge future technology. Geetesh Goyal and Ranil Piyaratna’s talent-matching organization Human Bees is #1 on Inc. 5000's list of Fastest Growing companies in America. Human Bees is built on a simple idea: deep vetting — at both ends of job placements, the client and the candidate.
The company has a 30% higher retention rate than the industry norm because they really have cracked the code using technology enablement for finding the right fit candidates at all levels of an organization. They see “Culture as an Algorithm” — using AI to help predict the hiring, socializing and placing of the right individuals into jobs for their clients.
They have a passion for making sure people find purpose in their work, particularly blue-collar workers. Within their own organization, Geetesh and Ranil “promote through merit, without limit” — throwing out the normal model of time in role and climbing the ladder at the same pace others did. “We will promote anyone when they are ready,” says Geetesh.
If you’re inspired by Human Bees:
- Challenge your CIO to partnering with your business leaders to explore how AI and predictive technologies can transform business operations.
World-class approach to hybrid work
It’s not a surprise that among the latest winners were two extraordinary companies, Dropbox and Mindbloom, both of which showed the way for what it means to be out in front of others and not just change the place you work from and where you are, but change how you work. They are setting a roadmap for reinventing work processes in an increasingly hybrid world in a world-class way.
Drew Houston, the CEO at Dropbox, moved from 10 physical spaces, to 30 global neighborhoods, where instead of an office, he had small studios of collaboration space. And as part of a shift to remote and asynchronous work; Dropbox embraced a culture where meetings are only for the 3Ds: discussion, debate, decisions. They agreed as an organization four ‘‘core working hours’ as a company-wide framework for collaborative work across global teams. There’s now the lowest attrition and highest employee satisfaction in Dropbox’s history. Ninety percent of candidates cite Virtual First as why they decided to apply.
Dylan Beynon, the CEO of Mindbloom, actually eliminated meetings. Dylan said we're not going to have meetings, they're the enemy. An asynchronous, remote-first work model was created that trusts employees to accomplish work. In the absence of physical interaction and which may feel is an environment for healthy feedback, Mindbloom adopted a culture of constant feedback: “I like” and “I wish” feedback is remotely and regularly provided to managers and at least one peer every two weeks. And when many companies complain of mental wellness being degraded in the always-on hybrid work world, at-home psychedelic therapy is offered for employees’ mental health and well-being. Mindbloom’s team has grown 10x from fewer than 30 members to over 300; collectively creating and cultivating a culture that fosters personal, psychological, and spiritual/ontological transformation of its employees.
What these world-class remote and hybrid companies demonstrate is that in a world where you don’t come out of a meeting and walk down the hallway, you can create a cadence of giving 360-degree real-time feedback to your peers where everybody talks about what they wish or what they want.
If you are inspired by Dropbox and Mindbloom:
- Adopt High-Return Practices like Energy Check-Ins and the Personal Professional Check-in to boost team well-being.
- Adopt world-class asynchronous practices like the Decision Board to reboot team collaboration.
A movement worthy of Tony’s legacy
The world we're living in today is more divisive than ever before, but these leaders are creating co-elevation, coaching people to behave in a way that we wish society would behave. They're getting outsized results, they're doing practices that we should all learn from. We need to start disrupting the human capital models and disrupting business models that get ahead of the curve and join these individuals. I invite all of you to be among the CEOs, the Chief People Officers, and the thought leaders to go on this journey. The reality is that nobody can fill Tony Hsieh’s shoes but maybe hundreds or thousands of us coming and building a movement in his legacy can make a start.
To apply for this year’s Tony Hsieh Award visit:
or contact hello@thetonyhsiehaward.com
