The riots in London will likely soon be effectively framed by the media as the result of racial tensions, antipathy towards police, and “recreational violence.” There may well be a smattering here and there of economic considerations — that perhaps this discord might be partially a symptom of austerity measures — but even this allowance will, in all probability, be subsumed by talk of anarchic youth and their “alienation, anger, boredom and mischief.” But for those willing to accept that there is an economic aspect to these recent conflagrations, there is probably a need to consider what prescriptions might exist to remedy these problems. Of course, it would be ridiculous to merely throw money at the problem. That would simply demonstrate acquiescence to impertinence! But bequeathing thousands of copies, to the right neighborhoods, of Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose? That might be just the ticket to turn these indigent, rioting frowns upside down. Give a man or woman a fish, feed her or him for a day. Give them exhortations on how to effectively channel their creative energies into profits and happiness, feed them exciting canards that may last a lifetime.

Hsieh is the business wunderkind responsible for LinkExchange, which he sold to Microsoft in 1998 for $265 million. He is currently the CEO of online shoe seller, Zappos, the hiring process for which, according to a New Yorker profile of 2009, involves “all new hires [signing] a document verifying that they’ve read and understood the Core Values, then [undergoing] a hundred and sixty hours of customer-loyalty training. At various points in the process, they are offered two thousand dollars in cash to quit. Workers who want to progress into management positions are required to take a hundred and forty-five more hours of classes, in subjects such as “tribal leadership,” “performance enhancement,” and “happiness.” (Core Value No. 5: Pursue Growth and Learning.).”

These Core Values comprise the following:

1. Deliver WOW Through Service
2. Embrace and Drive Change
3. Create Fun and A Little Weirdness
4. Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded
5. Pursue Growth and Learning
6. Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication
7. Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit
8. Do More With Less
9. Be Passionate and Determined
10. Be Humble

Core Value #1 is perhaps as good an example of nebulous verve as one can imagine: “deliver WOW through service.” Seriously, what can this possibly mean? Even if one is charitable, it seems about as inspiring as rote chants from summer youth camps, wherein camp councilor and child alike commit to mechanical merriment. That this forms part of the bulwark of discovering “purpose” in one’s life and work is difficult to comprehend. Collectively, with the emphasis put to “weirdness,” “adventurousness” and “growth,” the Core Values are perhaps one of the more exemplary manifestations of contemporary paeans to “creative” workspaces, flexibility, employee “empowerment,” and the attempted blurring of leisure and labor time and a drive to make work “cool.”  No more glum Calvinist drudgery — in the exciting world of creative employment, one’s sense of purpose is synthesized with one’s wage labor. This is not, as nattering nabobs of negativity might claim, an acceptance of job “precarity” (Zappos laid off  8% of its workers in 2008) or the colonization of one’s leisure time and autonomy, but glorious self-volition, properly remunerated!

Apparently, a Zappos team member is not simply an employee, but a “Zapponian.” A happy corollary of this identification with the corporate family, of course, would be the eclipsing of class identification or union association. Why create an additional enclave or social designation in what is already a familial space? Moreover, the zany fun that presumably comes with identifying as a Zapponian hopefully helps one gloss over nagging fears that selling shoes online isn’t the optimum deployment of human creativity. To their credit, Zappos appears to have half-decent medical and dental coverage. But listed amongst the “Zappos Benefits” are dubious items like “Monthly Team Outings — to ‘Build a positive team and family environment.’” Paid vacation days, meanwhile, though it’s difficult to read the graphic on which the information is printed, appear to number 160 hours a year, or roughly 6.5 days. This dashes the hope that all the vim and vigor that Zappos is harnessing includes the outrageous enjoyment that might be had in the 3 or more weeks of paid annual vacation that is the province of most employees of OECD countries.

The thing about all of this obfuscating effervescence, is that it simply seems to be a further update of  Theory Y Human Resource Management. This was the revolution in business culture in the 1960s. That appeals to “play” and  “self-direction,” as the key to fonts of limitless human potential and profit, are still used against the fiction of stodgy “Organization Man” and button-down convention seems to point to a weariness in strategies for tapping and disciplining labor. But probably not. The fabrication of Creativity meets Self-help meets (a patently false) Collective Entrepreneurship is a stale, but alluring, concoction that, apparently, can receive limitless facelifts.

In any case, back to the munificent plan of book bequeathing, so as to flog this stale joke to death. Hsieh’s book will doubtless lay to rest the frustrations and material deprivations that would-be rioters might occasionally experience. From an “exclusive” interview he gave Amazon.com (which just recently completed a $928 million merger with Zappos):

You seem to have taken risks with business ideas a lot while growing up. How do you recognize a risk that you shouldn’t take?

“I think it just comes down to really breaking down what the worst case scenario actually is. For most of us, we’re lucky to live in a time and in a society where we aren’t actually ever in danger of dying from starvation or lack of shelter. Most of us have friends whose couches we can crash on in the worst case scenario, so any “risk” we take in starting a company isn’t actually that big a risk.”

There you have it! Stop burning buildings and start a business already! Or jump into the miraculous world of creative labor!