Richard Conrad grew up in Washington, D.C., studied engineering and economics at Vanderbilt University, earned a master's degree in Economics as a local student at Fudan University in Shanghai, China, and later earned an MBA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.Richard worked for the last sixteen years for a large U.S. money management firm researching, analyzing, and investing in Chinese and Japanese equities. Richard is fluent in Chinese and Japanese and continues to live in Asia with his family.

The go-to guide to transforming the way you work from award-winning international speaker, Amazon #1 best-selling author and renowned culture change expert Colin D. Ellis.Culture is the #1 determinant of team and organisation success and yet too many people still don't know where to begin the evolution process.Often, they will change the office layout, implement the latest silver bullet method or have the CEO start walking around saying hello to people through gritted teeth. These are lip service responses to culture change that don't provide any incremental improvements to people's working lives.Culture Hacks is filled with simple, actionable ideas that over time can transform the way that work gets done. From emails to book clubs and meetings to podcasts take regular steps to build a fantastic work culture that everyone wants to be a part of.As there are 26 Culture Hacks in the book, readers and their teams can try a different one every two weeks for a year. Alternatively, they could pick one thing every month, or they could divide them across different areas within their team so that different people are doing different things. Or they could put them all in a hat and pick one out to try. Doing something differently will make your team memorable in a host of great ways and create stories that they'll share for years.Culture change isn't hard you just don't know how to hack your day. With Culture Hacks, you do.

Culture Hacks are the agile instrument to fill the desired corporate culture with life in the daily business routine. They keep the postulated values present and provide the necessary reflection of daily actions. Culture Hacks address the mindset and the concrete behavior, thus making the corporate culture tangible for all employees at every level of the hierarchy. This book is dedicated to this topic, which is increasingly perceived as important. Culture hacks represent an important element in shaping corporate culture. The topic is still relatively new, and the book is the first to present a comprehensive concept for the strategic use of culture hacks. It creates the link between corporate strategies and operational processes. The concept presented is very pragmatic: concrete models, tools, design principles and roadmaps clarify and accompany the implementation in operational practice. The book creates a framework for the targeted and strategic use of culture hacks to optimize corporate culture. The book is aimed at all managers and employees involved in corporate culture. The reader can expect the following content points: What are Culture Hacks? Strategic Hacks - Nudging - Tips & Tricks Irritations and pattern breaks as ways to change behavior Mindset and behavior - addressees of interventions Impulses through and for New Work, Management 3.0 and Agility Culture hacks as a guerrilla strategy Proven design principles - suitable fields of application Personal and organizational maturity levels How they can be integrated into everyday business life Inventory and roadmaps - Drawing from a pool of knowledge Dynamic design of culture hack strategies With digressions on Paradoxical Intervention, Empathy, Psychological safety, mindset and behavior Successful implementation - Do's and Don't's Numerous examples illustrate the procedure

"International business requires a deep level of industry insight but also a keen understanding of the cultural differences that impact how business is done. If you're an American working in China or Japan for the first time, you may not realize the way each culture thinks and reasons is quite different from your own, which can lead to frequent misunderstandings" (ed.).

"We regularly read and hear exhortations for women to take up positions in STEM. The call comes from both government and private corporate circles, and it also emanates from enthusiasts for free and open source software (FOSS), i.e. software that anyone is free to use, copy, study, and change in any way. Ironically, rate of participation in FOSS-related work is far lower than in other areas of computing. A 2002 European Union study showed that fewer than 2 percent of software developers in the FOSS world were women. How is it that an intellectual community of activists so open in principle to one and all -a community that prides itself for its enlightened politics and its commitment to social change - should have such a low rate of participation by women? This book is an ethnographic investigation of efforts to improve the diversity in software and hackerspace communities, with particular attention paid to gender diversity advocacy"--

In an effort to keep up with a world of too much, life hackers sometimes risk going too far. Life hackers track and analyze the food they eat, the hours they sleep, the money they spend, and how they're feeling on any given day. They share tips on the most efficient ways to tie shoelaces and load the dishwasher; they employ a tomato-shaped kitchen timer as a time-management tool.They see everything as a system composed of parts that can be decomposed and recomposed, with algorithmic rules that can be understood, optimized, and subverted. In Hacking Life, Joseph Reagle examines these attempts to systematize living and finds that they are the latest in a long series of self-improvement methods. Life hacking, he writes, is self-help for the digital age's creative class. Reagle chronicles the history of life hacking, from Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack through Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and Timothy Ferriss's The 4-Hour Workweek. He describes personal outsourcing, polyphasic sleep, the quantified self movement, and hacks for pickup artists. Life hacks can be useful, useless, and sometimes harmful (for example, if you treat others as cogs in your machine). Life hacks have strengths and weaknesses, which are sometimes like two sides of a coin: being efficient is not the same thing as being effective; being precious about minimalism does not mean you are living life unfettered; and compulsively checking your vital signs is its own sort of illness. With Hacking Life, Reagle sheds light on a question even non-hackers ponder: what does it mean to live a good life in the new millennium?

If you’re striving to make products and services that your customers will love, then you’ll need a customer-driven organization. As companies transform their businesses to meet the demands of the digital age, they find themselves grappling with uniquely human challenges. Organizational knowledge becomes siloed, employees move to safeguard their expertise, and customer data creates polarization and infighting between teams. All of these challenges widen the distance between the people who make your products and the customers who use them. To meet today’s challenges, companies need to do more than build processes for customer-driven products. They need to create a customer-driven culture. With the help of his friend and mentor Monty Hammontree, Travis Lowdermilk takes readers through the cultural transformation of the Developer Division at Microsoft. This book shows readers how to "hack" their culture and reduce the distance between them and their customers’ needs. It’s a uniquely personal story that’s told amidst a cultural revolution at one of the largest software companies in the world. This story acts as your guide. You’ll learn how to: Establish a Common Language: Help employees change their thinking and actions Build Bridges, Not Walls: Treat product building as a team sport Encourage Learning Versus Knowing: Help your team understand their customers Build Leaders That Build Your Culture: Showcase star employees to inspire others Meet Teams Where They Are: Make it easy for teams to to adopt vital behavior changes Make Data Relatable: Move beyond numbers and focus on empathizing with customers