Robert Richman | Culture Strategist and Co-creator of Zappos Insights

Robert Richman

Culture Strategist and Co-creator of Zappos Insights

Robert Richman
Biography

Robert Richman is a culture strategist and was the co-creator of Zappos Insights, an innovative program focused on educating companies on the secrets behind Zappos' amazing employee culture.

Robert built Zappos Insights from a small website to a thriving multi-million dollar business teaching over 25,000 students per year. Through his work, Robert has been helpful for improving the employee culture at hundreds of companies like Google, Toyota, Eli Lilly, and Inuit.

As one of the world's authorities on employee culture, Robert is a sought after keynote speaker at conferences around the world and has been hired to teach culture in person at companies like Google, Toyota, and Eli Lilly. He has pioneered a number of innovative techniques to build culture, such as bringing improv comedy to the workplace.

His new book, The Culture Blueprint, is a systematic guide to how a workplace can help people grow, inspire amazing service, and ultimately drive revenue through amazing culture.

Robert graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in film, as well as from Georgetown University's Leadership Coaching Program. He is a member of the Transformational Leadership Council, and he is the chair of the business program at American Jewish University.

Robert Richman
Featured Video

Current: Surprise and Delight Your Customers

Time 02:32

Culture Hacking

Robert Richman, former Culture Strategist for Zappos.com, spent years teaching companies how to develop strong culture and service. He put together a step-by-step guide (The Culture Blueprint, coming out this fall) to develop culture at any organization. “It takes a lot of commitment and dedication. Sometimes it takes years. So I became obsessed with how change could happen fast, with high impact, with few resources, at every level. I found it in hacking.” Robert discovered how the principles of hacking can be applied to culture. Even if you have no experience with code, you can learn how to be a culture hacker and create shifts, immediately.

The Values-Based Company

Values-based companies have employees who manage and motivate themselves. Robert shares stories of the strength of the core values at Zappos.com, then shares the science behind why they work so well. Once you learn the secrets behind how values work, Robert then takes the group through a process of becoming familiar with their own core values. Lastly, Robert leaves the group with a process to use in discovering and then implementing the values across the organization.

Employee Engagement

Engaged employees are productive, efficient, have a great time, and stay for decades. This means low turnover, and highly motivated employees you don’t have to micro manage. Robert shares his experiences from Zappos (A company that became the #6 Best Place to Work in America). He then shares the key to how engagement works and gives the audience a model they can use to immediately create their own engagement programs that can be implemented right when they return to the office.

The Game Changing Experience

Robert begins by speaking about how Zappos forever changed the online shopping experience, and then set the standard for best-in-class company culture (in other words, the employee experience). Then in 2009 CEO Tony Hsieh challenged Robert to turn culture itself into a product to sell.

"We started by trying to sell information, and I quickly realized that tips and tricks only go so far. The biggest factor in culture change is what people believe is possible. And you can't talk someone out of their beliefs. At best it doesn't last. And at worst it's manipulative. Instead you can design experiences where the truth is so obvious that change happens, effortlessly."

Robert shows how the intersection of service, staff, and customers is the experience itself. And experience designers are the rock stars of the business world.

To demonstrate the power of experience and belief change, Robert tells the story of how he took his favorite movie and made it into reality, giving people an other-worldly experience of their own power, including:

-Launching a business in a night
-Shaving a half hour off a triathalon.
-Finding a dream job in a single day.
-Eliminating a 30-year limiting belief.

Then, playing without a net, Robert invites an attendee on stage for a live experience so that everyone can witness the power of experience design and instant transformation.

This is brand new for 2016 and attendees have called it "mind-blowing."

Robert Richman
Featured Review

The Fastest Way to Align Your Culture

I love hacks. Hacks are high leverage. Like a good investment, a hack requires low input for maximum output.  And when you're in the culture game, hacks are looked down upon....
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Topics:   Workplace Culture

7 Hacks to Make Your Conference Unforgettable

Hack 1: Send a Pre-Survey Everyone surveys afterward, but by then it's too late! Learn what people want before they come. In fact, at Zappos Insights we found that...
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