Tell to Win: Connect, Persuade, and Triumph with the Hidden Power of Story

Tony Hsieh is the author of the New York Times bestseller Delivering Happiness and CEO of Zappos.com, Inc.

In less than 10 years, Zappos has grown from no sales in 1999 to over a billion dollars in gross merchandise sales annually. Our philosophy is to take most of the money that we would have otherwise spent on paid advertising or paid marketing and instead invest it into customer service and the customer experience, and let our customers do the marketing for us through word of mouth.

In other words, we're really just in the stories and memories business.

From an early age, Peter Guber seems to have intuitively grasped what I slowly learned over my entrepreneurial adventures, which is that the most profitable companies are those that form personal, emotional connections (which we internally refer to as "PEC" at Zappos) with customers. In Tell to Win, Guber shows how the stories we tell -- about our companies, our products, and ourselves -- are what elicit people's emotional reactions and drive word of mouth.

The book includes plenty of examples and guidance for breaking down how a story gets created and delivered. As I read through the book, I repeatedly had to put the book down to think for awhile, because so many stories in the book sparked new ideas on how to improve our business at Zappos.

I hope this book inspires you to create your own "never-ending story" to help take your business to the next level.