Tony Hsieh Day United A Growing Movement Of Innovators In The Field Of Human Capital — With Potential To Transform Work And The World

Just imagine it. Thousands of innovators striving to elevate people in the workplace, transforming people's lives, gaining greater productivity, and honoring the legacy of one exceptional man, Tony Hsieh. The growing movement of leaders, entrepreneurs, teams and companies working on the radical edge of human capital came together in Las Vegas last week to share knowledge and celebrate Tony Hsieh Day. It’s the day of the year when we remember the extraordinary achievements of the visionary Zappos founder and his boundless curiosity for how companies could be elevated by elevating individuals.

It’s also the moment when the judges of the annual Tony Hsieh Awards, past winners, and Heads of Human Resources from some of the biggest, most innovative companies get together to share our insights from this year’s award applications with an audience of entrepreneurs who want to grow their own leadership capabilities. The 2022 winners included:

• Vertical Harvest, an urban farming company that grows crops in the heart of communities by taking underutilized downtown buildings and installing hydroponic, vertical, controlled environmental agriculture (CEA). Vertical Harvest also prioritizes both social impact and profitability, by leveraging a mix of public-private partnerships and operating with an inclusive employment model currently focused on citizens who are often left out. Fifty percent of their employees are individuals with physical and/or intellectual disabilities.
• Human Bees, an AI-powered talent-matching organization that’s #1 on Inc. 5000's list of Fastest Growing companies in America. Human Bees is built on a simple idea: deep vetting—at both ends of job placements, the client and the candidate. The company has a 30% higher retention rate than the industry norm because they really have cracked the code using technology enablement for finding the right fit candidates at all levels of an organization.
• SINA (The Social Innovation Academy) in Africa which operates without a CEO. The focus is on creating a generation of “scholars” or changemaker-makers—18 to 27-year-olds who shift from being recipients of aid to active drivers of their own future, one person and one community at a time within self-organized social innovation groups. Each SINA scholar comes from a background of marginalization: a street kid, a refugee, an orphan, child soldier or extreme poverty. Tailor-made empowerment stages and self-management processes support the scholars in defining their own path in their community—transforming these young people into social entrepreneurs.
• Dropbox and Mindbloom for their extraordinary approach to hybrid work and reinventing work processes at a world-class standard. Drew Houston, the CEO at Dropbox, moved from 10 physical spaces, to 30 global neighborhoods, where instead of an office, he had small studios of collaboration space. And as part of a shift to remote and asynchronous work; Dropbox embraced a culture where meetings are only for the 3Ds: discussion, debate, decisions. Dylan Beynon, the CEO of Mindbloom, eliminated meetings completely. An asynchronous, remote-first work model was created that trusts employees to accomplish work—but with a culture of constant feedback.

Tony Hsieh Day was inspiring. It was powerful. Pretty soon, we're going to have a number of white papers come out, talking about the aggregation of all that we learned about elevating humans in radical, innovative ways. Never before have these kinds of innovators been brought together. This is transformative, not only for the workplace, but for the world. Nobody can fill the founder of Zappos’ shoes, but thousands of innovators coming together might get close.