Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Memoirs

HAPPY AT ANY COST

Kirsten Grind Katherine Sayre

The Revolutionary Vision and Fatal Quest of Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh

A startling portrait of former Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh who integrated levity and happiness in the workplace and poured millions of dollars into real estate and small businesses to promote the idea of a utopian workplace.

Hsieh treated his employees as family and provided a workplace which eliminated stress and promoted happiness among his workers.
When Hsieh died suddenly in November of 2020, the news shook the business and tech world. Wall Street Journal reporters Kirsten Grind and Katherine Sayre quickly realized the importance of the story because of Hsieh's stature in the industry, but as they dug into the details of his final months, they realized there was a bigger story to tell. They found that Hsieh's obsession with happiness masked his darker struggles with addiction, mental health, and loneliness. In the last year of his life, he spiraled out of control, cycling out of rehab and into the waiting arms of friends who enabled his worst behavior, even as he bankrolled them from his billion-dollar fortune.

Grind and Sayre were responsible for some of the first in-depth reporting into Hsieh's death and here provide a portrait of a brilliant entrepreneur who lived a double life in pursuit of the happiness he brought to his companies.

Kirsten Grind is an enterprise reporter for The Wall Street Journal, where she has worked since 2012. She has received more than a dozen national awards for her work, including a Pulitzer Prize finalist citation and a Loeb Award. Her first book, The Lost Bank, was named the best investigative book of 2012 by the Investigative Reporters & Editors association, and is coauthor of Happy at Any Cost: The Revolutionary Vision and Fatal Quest of Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Katherine Sayre covers gambling and Las Vegas for The Wall Street Journal, where she has worked since 2019. She previously reported for The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, covering business before joining the investigative team. Happy at Any Cost: The Revolutionary Vision and Fatal Quest of Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is her first book. She lives in Los Angeles, California.

Available products
Book Published 2022-03-15 by Simon & Schuster

Comments

Happy at Any Cost is a captivating story about one of the most innovative and complex entrepreneurs of our time, but it's also about the quixotic pursuit of happiness and the darkness many secretly battle.

Kirsten Grind and Katherine Sayre's Happy at Any Cost presents a powerful and important case study of a leader overcome by mental health issues and addiction. Tony Hsieh's story compels us to recognize: as the tech industry grows ever stronger, the eccentric genius founders it idolizes are vulnerable and human first.

Silicon Valley has an insidious cult-of-personality problem. We idolize our most successful entrepreneurs, presuming that they're infallible, and we excuse and enable their worst tendencies, expecting only more and more success. Now, with detailed, revelatory reporting, Kirsten Grind and Katherine Sayre offer a much-needed reality check - a morality tale for our age. Happy At Any Cost is a startling portrait of one of our greatest tech visionaries, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh - his celebrated innovations and his infectious capacity for joy; but also, behind the curtain, his wild excesses and addictions, his poignant mental-health struggles, and the coterie of enablers who hastened his decline.

Grind and Sayre's volume focuses on a flawed man struggling to make happiness part of his business and his life... Beyond their discussion of Hsieh's tragic death and legacy, Grind and Sayre also provide insight on the larger issue of mental illness and addiction hidden under Silicon Valley's sunny surface.

Happy at Any Cost is a beautiful, heart-breaking story that renders the late Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh in all his complex dimensions. On one level it's a story exploring outside-the-box business aspirations, but there is a bigger lesson about the enormous, hidden burdens of people who pour all they have into their work and creative vision. I was sad to read Tony's life story, but very glad to know it.