Q. What other things did you do at Zappos to sort of reinforce and build the culture?

A. Probably the most important thing I did was try to encourage employees to come up with their own ideas for building the culture. The actual ideas that I’ve personally come up with are few and far between.

Q. But what were those?

A. For example, for our offices in Las Vegas, it’s a big building. We’ve probably got 700 employees in Vegas. The previous tenants had multiple doors where you can exit, and the parking lot is in the back. We made the decision to actually lock all the doors so everyone has to go through the front-entrance reception area, even though that means you might have to walk all the way around the building. The reason for that is to create this kind of central hub that everyone has to pass through to help build community and culture.

And the free lunch we provide for employees is really meant less as a benefit in terms of a free lunch, and more to get employees to interact with each other. But most of the stuff that happens in our office is really about some employee coming up with an idea and, whether it’s me or other managers, saying, “If you’re passionate about it, just run with it.”

At some point, it kind of just snowballs, because once employees see other employees just doing stuff, then that lets them feel like they have more permission to run with their ideas.

Q. Any other examples?

A. One of our teams — the outdoor team in our merchandising department — decided to decorate one of the conference rooms, and transform it so that when you’re inside, you feel like you’re in a log cabin. They spent the weekend tearing up the floors and putting in a fake fire and all this stuff. It was pretty cool.

But then, the week after, the team sitting next to them said, we can outdo them. The next thing we knew, within two or three months, all 20 or so conference rooms were all decorated by different teams.

Q. What else is unusual about Zappos?

A. We have a culture book. We put it together once a year and we ask all our employees to write a few paragraphs about what the Zappos culture means to them and, except for typos, it’s unedited, so you get to read the good and bad. It’s kind of like customer reviews you might read on Web sites, but these are essentially employee reviews of the company and our culture. We make it freely available to visitors and anybody who asks for a copy.