I was sitting in the Chicago o’hare airport on a very delayed flight, finding myself watching the TV, something I never do. I was watching nightline and they were interviewing a design firm and they were having them redesign the American shopping cart in 72 hours. I was very impressed with the process that was taken to get the results that were found and implemented. The design firm was IDEO. When I got home I called them to try and schedule a meeting just to meet some people there. At this point I was just a soap company with two employees with annual sales of just about 150k.

A few months later I got a call back. I happened to be in SF visiting my girlfriend at the time and I went down there and got a tour and told the business development person, Dan Bomze the story of Pangea, he quickly went and got a writer and a designer and a few more people, I told the story to them as well. A few weeks later I got an email from Dan expressing IDEO’s interest in branding Pangea. After a few rounds of negotiations we struck a deal. Coming to the plate with many concepts and ideas myself, they partnered me with two designers a writer and a materials expert, together the Pangea Organics brand was found. Earlier that year I was sitting in Joshua Tree National Park for my annual visionary meeting with myself when I decided to introduce the concept of plantable packaging to the world. It took two years but finally we found success.

Read On

Over the past 8 years, Zappos.com has grown very quickly. In 1999, the year the company was founded, we had almost no sales. Since then, our historical gross merchandise sales numbers have been:

2000: $ 1.6 million
2001: $ 8.6 million
2002: $ 32 million
2003: $ 70 million
2004: $184 million
2005: $370 million
2006: $597 million
2007: $840 million
2008: $1 billion (projected)

We’ve been asked by a lot of people how we’ve grown so quickly, and the answer is actually really simple. Our top priorities are company culture and customer service, which has resulted in repeat customers and word of mouth being the #1 driver of our growth. We believe that one of the most important ways for us to deliver “above and beyond” customer service is by letting the personality of our call center reps shine through. This means that, unlike most call centers, we don’t have scripts and we don’t measure call times. Each of our reps are are encouraged to let their individual personalities shine when talking with our customers, because we don’t want to come across as just another faceless company.

Read On

More than six months ago as I was in the midst of writing Personality Not Included I thought about all the great stories I was hearing from people and how interesting it would be to hear them all in their own words - as opposed to just shared in my voice as many of them are in the book. As I interviewed more and more people for the book, the idea for this site emerged. The Personality Project is a group blog which will feature contributed blog posts from authors, founders, bloggers, artists, and many others all about the topic of personality in business and why it matters. In some cases, you will read stories that the contributors have never shared anywhere else. In others, you will get a deeper look at what has made a particular brand or organization successful today. Ultimately, The Personality Project will share these voices over the next year - two per week every Tuesday and Thursday. So subscribe to the RSS feed or by email, or just bookmark the site to return to. I guarantee you will learn a lot along the way.

Here is a list of the first ten contributors:

1. Rohit Bhargava (the post you’re reading!)
2. Dave Balter (CEO/Founder of BzzAgent)
3. Tony Hseing (CEO/Founder of Zappos.com)
4. Yvonne Lembi-Detert (CEO/Founder of Personality Hotels)
5. Premal Shah (President of Kiva.org)
6. Sharelle Klauss (CEO & Founder, DRY Soda)
7. Amit Gupta (Founder of PhotoJojo)
8. Larry Smith (Editor & Founder, SMITH Magazine)
9. John Bell (Head of Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence)
10. Andy Sernovitz (Author, Co-Founder of WOMMA)

These will be published over the next few weeks, and I will also be sharing the next 10 contributors signed onto the project on the first of every month (so the next ten will be announced on May 1st) on the Personality Matters Blog (the official blog for the book). You can read a bit more about the team behind this effort on the About page, but we have already invited more than half of the contributors to the project and will be seeking out others over the coming months. If you know someone who you think could have a great point of view to share here, check out the Join the Project page for more details on how to nominate them. Personality is the difference between good brands and great ones … and this site will give you an inside look at the power of personality through the stories of some of the people who have managed to use it effectively already to build their brands.