Wednesday, July 22, 2009

After I saw Holland, I'd say, I'd go to Holland again and again

I just read a poem of Emily Perl Kingsley about having a child with disability and I wanted to share it with you..This poem tells a lot and better than most of the sources..



WELCOME TO HOLLAND
by
Emily Perl Kingsley.


c1987 by Emily Perl Kingsley. All rights reserved

I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability - to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It's like this......

When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very exciting.

After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland."

"Holland?!?" you say. "What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I'm supposed to be in Italy. All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy."

But there's been a change in the flight plan. They've landed in Holland and there you must stay.

The important thing is that they haven't taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It's just a different place.

So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.

It's just a different place. It's slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you've been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around.... and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills....and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.

But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy... and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go. That's what I had planned."

And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away... because the loss of that dream is a very very significant loss.

But... if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things ... about Holland.

Zappos & Amazon sitting in a tree =)


I’ve been feeling so excited, happy and curious at the same time since I got the news about Amazon and Zappos. I think I don’t need to tell my feelings about Zappos from the beginning now, but they’re special for me, you know that.



Now Amazon joined the party, too. And now what? I first had the news as “Amazon Acquires Zappos for bla bla” , and there are also a million news as “Amazon buys Zappos”, but it’s actually not exactly like that.

I’m sure that anyone who knows a few things about Zappos also knows that the thing that creates the “Zappos thing” is their culture, values, the people who were chosen carefully to be a perfect fit to Zappos team and it’s not so easy to acquire all of those by a specific amount of money.

As Tony says in his letter today “I personally would prefer the headline “Zappos and Amazon sitting in a tree…””. And yep, let’s say so. Because when we say so, we’d also mention one of the most powerful partnerships and then it fits the spirit of the transaction more.

I’m sure it’d be perfect for both of these companies that I adore.



They both think about their customers, they both make us want to shop like crazy, and they’re both good at building relationships with us, customers and making us happy in a way. Only their styles differ in these processes.

As Tony also mentioned, Amazon makes us happy with low prices, variety of goods, and convenience in a lot of ways while Zappos makes us happy by developing sincere relationships, friendly connections and WOWing us all the time.

So I’m excited and happy about the future of the shopping with these companies. It’s so peaceful to know that both of these companies are going to do their bests for us, therefore the only thing to do for us is to enjoy it.

And I’m really curious about what are these companies going to learn from each other and how is it going to reflect to us exactly?

Zappos & Amazon! WOW!

What do you think?

Friday, July 3, 2009

My Culture, Your Culture, Our Culture..

Zappos Core Values by Me


I came to United States about 9 months ago and yep I changed a lot, but it’s impossible to replace all the past years’ experiences with these 9 months' .

There are about 7 billion people in the world who are all different from the each other; we think differently, feel differently, talk differently, live differently, etc. Although we have nearly similar problems, we have different solutions. But, when we look closer we see that some communities have similar solutions or we can at least group some of the people based on some similarities. We can group people according to their nationalities, according to their gender, and according to their jobs. So, what can we call this thing that connects some people, makes them understand others? It is like a secret agreement among the people in a community that helps them to stay together in peace and to create a unity. Yes, our word is CULTURE.

May be we all born with some characteristics, but as we grow, we learn a lot of things from our environment. We learn how to think, how to speak, how to behave and even how to feel. We start being programmed slowly with all these data. When we want to make some changes in our program after a few years, we need to reach main code of our program to make a permanent change, which is not so possible. But one thing we can do is to add some new properties to our program and use the convenient ones in the convenient times.

So culture makes us connected, helps us to understand each other and to generate common solutions, constitutes the feeling of unity, and as a result creates a society that has the same interests.

While there is the culture for a country that creates the feeling of homesickness, another one is the company culture which makes a substantial company and differentiates it from the others.

Zappos is the company that introduced me the concept of company culture. After observing their efforts on creating their core values and keeping them alive, I started to think the importance of having a specific company culture. And it didn’t take me so long to understand its importance after I started following Zappos blog, following Tony and other Zapponians on Twitter, and reading Zappos Culture book. Everyone is working so hard just to present their culture and core values in a lot of different ways, and they are really good at this. As they always do, they again create another brilliant idea to pull us to more inside of Zappos with their 2 day Bootcamp which is to express themselves in a different way. And I found myself again trying to meet these people, to be a closer witness to their success. May be this is my lucky day..