I heart books. One monthish (I make up words) ago I saw a tweet that Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, was coming out with a new book. I had the pleasure of hearing Tony speak in Vegas this past February. Let’s just say if I didn’t a) love living in Texas b) like my current job, I may have felt very compelled to up-and-move to Vegas so I could work for Zappos. Seriously, that’s how inspired I was by what Tony had to say about Zappos and the company culture. So naturally, when I heard this new book coming out about Zappos I knew I must have it! Believe it or not (I’m still jumping up and down) I got an advanced copy to review for this very here blog.

Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose“>Being that I love books and I love blogging you’d think that I’d love blogging about books, but ya know what, I pretty much suck am not great at the book blogging. As a blogger every time I read an article, book, magazine, newspaper (ehh not really) I immediately want to blog about it. The problem with books, especially one as fabulouso as Delivering Happiness, is that about ever 4 pages I want to put the book down and copy verbatim the words from the book to share with my blogging friends. You may have guessed I’m not going to do this. But I have had quite the debate about what to share with you about this lovely book. Do I share the story about the people who ordered pizza from the Zappos’ rep, or when Timmy needed a big man watch, or perhaps something more serious like the impact of random acts of WOWness? Well, I have good news and bad… the good news you can read all of these little tidbits (and much more) in the book starting TODAY! The other good news is I have one book to GIVEAWAY! The bad news is, if you don’t buy (or win) the book you will never know how Jonathan helped Timmy with his very important watch search. Betcha didn’t know Zappos sold watches.

Have you stopped reading, because your brain is full of MUST WIN THE BOOK chatter? I’ll try not to be too offended. Here’s how you enter:

One of the big topics of this book is how Zappos came to have The Culture Book. A question was asked to employees of Zappos about the company culture. The (unedited) answers to this question were published in a book that became part of the training regimen at Zappos. So, I thought it would be fun for you to answer this question about your job (self employed, corporate, startup, wherever you make money) as your entry to win your very own copy of the book. You can leave your response in the comments below, write a blog post and link here, or tweet your answer and send a link to the tweet, or I suppose if you want to be anonymous you can send me an email.

Here’s the question: If you had to describe your company’s culture in two or three paragraphs, what would you say? If you asked your coworkers to do the same, how similar (or different) do you think their answers would be?

Quotable from Delivering Happiness:

• “Looking over the crowd, I realized that every person took a different path to get here, but our paths somehow all managed to intersect with one another in the here and now.”
• “I’d won the game of what I was told college was supposed to be all about: getting a job that paid as much money as possible”
• “I wasn’t mentally prepared for this scenario. I’d been thinking about what value meal I was going to order from Taco Bell.”
• “Envision, create, and believe in your own universe, and the universe will form around you.”