• Hi, I’m Brad Abare

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After reading Jeffrey M. O’Brien’s Fortune story about Zappos, you’d think the company and its quirky-brilliant CEO, Tony Hsieh, were near perfect. I was drawn to so many insights in this article, a nod to Zappos being No. 23 on Fortune’s 2009 list of Best Companies to Work For.

From the full time life coach and 10 Commandments, to their high octane culture, Zappos is doing a lot of things right.

The Zappos HR team uses offbeat, cartoony applications and wacky interview questions (How weird are you? What’s your theme song? What two people would you most like to invite to dinner?) to screen for creativity and individuality while filtering out egomaniacs and wallflowers.

All new hires complete four weeks of training, including two weeks on the phones, beginning every day at 7 a.m. They can’t be late or call in sick. Anyone too good to work the phones during a holiday rush isn’t Zappos material. New recruits are even offered a $2,000 bribe to leave the company during training, one final effort to weed out the half-hearted (only three people accepted last year).

Zappos encourages managers “to spend 10% to 20% of their time with team members outside the office, and any employee can give any other employee a $50 bonus for a job well done.”

Love it.

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