Such rapid growth was exciting. But it also led Hsieh to wonder how he could preserve Zappos's radical dedication to customer service and its fun, loose work environment. "We always hired for culture fit," he says. "But we were growing so quickly that managers who hadn't been around for very long might not know what our culture was." He wrote an e-mail to the entire company asking for help, and he distilled the responses into a list of 10 core values, including "Be humble," "Create fun and a little weirdness," and "Deliver WOW through service." Then he assigned and collected short essays from every employee on the subject of the company's culture and published them, unedited, in a book that he distributed to the staff.

Every year, all employees, both new and old, contribute a fresh essay to the book, which has grown to 480 pages. Hsieh uses it as a way not only to get employees thinking about the meaning of their work but also to show the outside world what he has built. Talk to Hsieh for five minutes, and he will inevitably try to get your address so he can mail you a copy. The book is painfully earnest and yet affecting nonetheless. There are all the clichés one might expect -- acronyms, ridiculous overstatement (one call center rep compared Zappos to China's Ming Dynasty), and a fondness for the word Zapponians. It often goes way over the top. "Could you imagine if Zappos was more than an online retailer, or the job that pays the bills, but actually became a way of life?" wrote Donavon Roberson, a pastor who left the ministry before joining Zappos.

Most Zappos employees are familiar with all this history. In fact, despite all the research I did before heading to Las Vegas, I didn't know that Nike had spurned Zappos until I sat in on a two-hour Zappos history class -- part of a four-week course on the subject -- and watched as employees called out various