Co-creator of Zappos Insights. Author of The Culture Blueprint.
Nobody remembers a value statement.
They remember the moment somebody did something they didn't have to.
The origin
I spent years teaching other companies how Zappos did it.
Teams would fly in and take notes. The values, the interview questions, the way the phones were answered. Then they'd go home, implement all of it, and most of the time nothing happened.
That confused me for a long time.
And then I realized… information doesn't change people.
What they were copying were the artifacts. The values on the wall. The handbook. The org chart.
But nobody has ever told a friend about a handbook. What people repeated about Zappos were moments. Somebody stayed on a call far longer than any policy required. Somebody sent flowers. Somebody upgraded a package overnight for no reason at all.
You can't copy a moment. You have to design your own.
What I do now
I design the moments companies keep meaning to get around to.
Every business already knows the places where a customer decides how they feel about you. The first email. The first five minutes in the product. The quiet stretch between signing and going live. The month nobody calls.
Almost nobody designs those. Not because they don't matter, but because nobody's job is moments. It falls between marketing and product and customer success, so it falls.
That's the job I gave myself.
Sometimes the answer is a physical gift. Sometimes it's a game, or an experience, or nothing more than clear instructions arriving at the right hour. The instrument changes. The work is the same: find the moment, then build something worth remembering into it.
The second instrument
Some things need a bigger interruption.
A game changes what a team does every day. Occasionally that isn't the problem. Occasionally a team is stuck on something a new dashboard will never touch.
That's what Xpill is for.
It's to breakthrough unconscious blocks and discover the truth to what's holding you back.
Different instrument, same principle. People don't change because they were told something. They change because something happened to them.
Why this doesn't scale
Taste is the part you can't automate.
Plenty of people will sell you a gifting platform. Some of them are good. Send a catalog link, let the recipient pick, everybody moves on.
That isn't this.
Every gift, every map, every game gets looked at by me before it goes anywhere. Which is slow, and doesn't scale, and is the entire reason it works. A gift that signals you were understood requires somebody to have actually understood you.
So I take a limited number at a time. Not as a sales tactic. It's just arithmetic.
Robert Richman
Co-creator of Zappos Insights, where I spent years teaching other companies how the culture actually worked. Author of The Culture Blueprint. My next book, Make It a Game, is on the way.
I keynote on culture, AI, and the design of experiences that people remember. Speaking inquiries → robertrichman.com
I have spoken to companies like Google, Toyota, Eli Lilly, Bridgestone Tires, and Westin Hotels at the leadership level, and I'd love to speak with your company as well.
Start wherever it hurts.
Most companies are one designed moment away from being talked about. Most will never build it.
Or if you'd rather just talk it through, send me a note.