‘Be A Good
Person’Culture.
A guide to being a good rippler and human, if you want.

2
“If we can define what organizational culture
is, it gives us a handle on how to diagnose
problems and even to design and develop
better cultures.” - Michael D. Watkins
“Culture is how organizations do things”
- Robbie Katanga
”Organizational culture defines a jointly shared
description of an organization from within”
- Bruce Perron
“What Is
Organizational
Culture? And Why
Should We Care?”
- in Harvard Business Review

3
What is culture?
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast”- Peter Drucker.
Culture is a company’s persona, it’s a handbook that
breathes life into the organization. It’s not a written in stone,
culture changes with the evolution of the organization.
Culture is how everyone should act with no supervision
and promotes a sense of strategy that people are actively
seeking to go towards as one big unit.
Culture is our commitment to each other and to our
clients. Culture is what the world sees when they enter our
organization.

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Involve your team
in the life of your
business. if you do
that, you’ll have
real culture.
Ripplemark wants you to be involved because culture is a collective
creation, not a top down thing.

5
We are ripplemark
A Self Learning Digital Organization

6
This document is
part manifeto and
part employee
handbook.
It’s part who we are
and part who we as-
pire to be.

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So, What Do We
Believe in?
Learning, reading,
knowledge and
heuristics (the
capacity to self teach
anything)
People matter,
empathy matters,
vulnerability and
love matter. In a cut
throat profit driven
world, people make
all the difference in a
company.
Ownership
(of your bad side,
your good side,
your work), results,
accountability and
organization.
Transparent to
our clients and
our people.
If you don’t know it,
GOOGLE IT FIRST! In
Google we trust. Be
internet literate and
understand how to look
for information, if you
don’t know how, we have
a manual on this, because
we have processes
and guides for almost
everything.

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Above all we believe that:
“Success is
making those
who believed in
you look brilliant”
- Dharmesh Shah

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Knowledge, Reading, Developing Your Attention
Span In A World Of Constant Stimuli--- Words To Live
By Everyday Of Your Life.
“Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased
constantly, or it vanishes.”- Peter Drucker.
“The man who does not read good books has no advantage
over the man who can’t read them.”- Mark Twain.
“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The
more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.”- Dr Seuss.
“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good
and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who
works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll
absorb it.”- William Faulkner.

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We Are A Learning
Organization
Training Learning
Training is a series of corporate
programs built around L&D-de-
signed content and L&D-ap-
proved experts.
Learning is an “enviroment and
an “experience,” leveraging ex-
perts, content, and materials
sourced and recommended by
external communities as well as
by other employees and internal
experts (not just L&D).

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We don’t have a water cooler so go gossip
somewhere else we have one actually but the space around it is really small
It’s very hard to enforce this part of our values. To not
waste your time and energy complaining about someone is
paramount to keeping your good energy as a professional
and a person.
If someone isn’t clicking with you, not getting that task done
when you asked, etc. adopt constructive criticism, actively
work with someone close to you in the company to bring the
information to the person you’re seeking to improve on a
work behavioral level.
The resources on constructive criticism are endless, go get
them yourself and read up!
Some people aren’t easily brought to be criticized
constructively or in any other way, you’re dealing with egos
and that’s no easy task in any country, language or culture.
Which is why, if you don’t accept some harsh truths about
yourself or aren’t ready to be put on the altar of feedback,
you’ll have a hard time developing professionally. You can
learn this process, grow into that character and our culture is
here to help you achieve this potential of a growth mindset.

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What is a growth Mindset?
Growth MindsetFixed Mindset
I can learn anything i want t.
When i’m frustrated, I persevere.
I want to challenge myself.
When i fail, I learn.
Tell me I try hard.
If you succeed, I’m inspired.
My effort and attitude determine everything.
I’m either good at it, or I’m not.
When I’m frustrated, I give up.
I don’t like to be challenged.
When I fail, I’m no good.
Tell me I’m smart.
If you succeed, I feel threatened.
My abilities determine everything.
“Talent and intelligence are not fixed traits.”

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We Can All Get Better at Getting Better- Here’s How
to Get Better at It according toW Ulrich Bosser.
“Many people mistakenly believe that the ability to learn is
a matter of intelligence. For them, learning is an immutable
trait like eye color, simply luck of the genetic draw. People
are born learners, or they’re not, the thinking goes. So why
bother getting better at it?”
“A growing body of research is making it clear that learners
are made, not born. Through the deliberate use of practice
and dedicated strategies to improve our ability to learn,
we can all develop expertise faster and more effectively. In
short, we can all get better at getting better.”

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Organize your goals.
Think about thinking (Metacognition: Do I really get this idea?
Could I explain it to a friend? What are my goals? Do I need more
background knowledge? Or do I need more practice?)
Reflect on your learning (It turns out that we need to let go of
our learning in order to understand our learning. For example,
when we step away from a problem, we often learn more about
a problem. Get into a discussion with a colleague, for instance,
and often your best arguments arrive while you’re washing the
dishes later. Read a software manual and a good amount of your
comprehension can come after you shut the pages.)
How to Get Better at
Getting Better:

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Not all of our clients will be a good fit with us and vice versa.
We are a results driven organization and require that our clients
have a good grasp over the nature and complexity of digital
marketing.
We Don’t Sell Services To
Companies Who Don’t
Need Them.

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“Don’t be seduced into
thinking that that which
does not make a profit is
without value.”
- Arthur Miller
Learning, experiencing, growing, if we were a solely profit
driven organization we wouldn’t spend that much time to
create a culture in the first place. Teaching our people new
skill sets, soft or hard, is one of our most prized values and
we’ll never stop doing that.

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We’re Not A Blaming or
Multi Directional Culture.
We take responsibility for our shit.
We’re not pay check driven.
We trust everyone and work actively to make that happen when
we have new people learning our culture
We act in the interest of the agency and the interest of our peers.
We communicate EXTENSIVELY.
WE DON’T Create Cliques (NO GOSSIP).
All departments cooperate.
We are not limited to job descriptions, we actively look for
solutions.

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Leadership is paramount.
We’re trying to create a non hierarchical organization but that
of course requires a lot of education and self management
within the agency. The absence of hierarchy actually promotes
more responsibility among members of a group and we want
all our people to feel a sense of freedom brought on by extreme
diligence and attention to results not just work.
“With great power comes great responsibility”- Spiderman.

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Teamwork!
“Data reveals that successful teams share several defining
characteristics:
1- Everyone on the team talks and listens in roughly equal
measure, keeping contributions short and sweet.
2- Members face on another, and their conversations and
gestures are energetic
3- Members connect directly with one another – not just with the
team leader
4- Members carry on back-channel or side conversations within
the team
5- Members periodically break, go exploring outside the team,
and bring information back.”
Taken from The New Science of Building Great
Teams- The chemistry of high performing groups is
no longer a mystery. By Alex Pentland. From HBR’s
10 must reads On Teams.

20
“For the strength
of the Pack is
the Wolf, and the
strength of the
Wolf is the Pack”
Rudyard Kipling - Author of The Jungle Book

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Imitate, Steal, Amend, Put
Your Own.
We approach all work with this mentality. “Someone somewhere
has done what I’m doing and made it better, sometimes MUCH
better. Why shouldn’t I learn from that person?”
We follow copyright laws and understand intellectual property,
but we also know that creative commons, Wikipedia, and internet
piracy has advanced the knowledge of the human race far more
than patents and copyrights have. We know what to steal, how to
show where it came from (citations! Hello!), and how to abide by
the law.
“what we call
originality relies
on a good deal of
imitation, and even a
bit of theft.”
- James Polchin

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It’s a superpower when you think about it; to have a sense of our
performance, why we feel low or up or energized or confident or
disengaged, well turns out, after years of scientific research that
EMOTIONS ARE NEGOTIABLE.
Why It’s Important to Get
A Sense of Emotional Per-
ception as A Rippler.

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“When you experience affect without knowing the cause, you
are more likely to treat affect as information about the world,
rather than your experience of the world.” Basically, what this
means is that we are prone to accept our emotions as accurate
evaluations of what’s happening in the world, unless we know
the causes of these emotions. For example, people report more
happiness and life satisfaction on sunny days, unless they are
explicitly asked about the weather.
In the same way, it’s easy for us to think that the reason we feel
bored and stressed at work is because our job sucks...sometimes
it actually does suck… But maybe if you got better sleep and
stopped eating fast food and more veggies, you wouldn’t feel
so irritated during the weekly meeting. And sometimes the
difference between feeling anxious and overwhelmed and
feeling challenged and motivated is more exercise, less staying
up late and maybe taking time for yourself (meditate, read and
strengthen your mindfulness practices)
This entire section is from this youtube channel: called What I’ve Learned, amazing channel.

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We can’t snap our fingers and change our emotions
whenever we want, but when we become aware
of the various causes of our emotional state, we
can calmly separate ourselves from the emotion
and start making changes that will allow for better
emotional responses.

25
The Overthinking Generation Studies made by the Dr Susan
Nolen -Hoeksema show that young and middle-aged people
overthink more than older people (those over sixty-five) do.
This may be because of four recent cultural trends:
What Are The Things All
Ripplers Should Avoid?

26
People today have an overdeveloped sense of entitlement. People
believe they deserve to be happy, rich and successful and that no
one has the right to stop them from getting what they deserve.
People tend to focus more on getting what they deserve and what
is holding them back rather than on what they do have. It also puts
many in potential conflict with everyone else.
1. Entitlement Obsession.

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People tend to rely more on quick fixes rather than taking the
slowly working through problems. If one feels sad or dissatisfied,
one looks for some quick solution, like taking prescription
medication or alcohol, shopping, taking up a new sport, or some
frenetic activity. In many cases, however, quick fixes only provide a
temporary or even wrong solution.
2. Compulsive Need for
Quick Fixes.

28
Don’t seek to get approval right away, or to make an impact as soon
as you walk in somewhere. everything good takes time.The hard
part is what success thrives on. You don’t get to be truly valuable in
your work without suffering in the beginning. If you truly love what
you do, they will all pass. Delay gratification and practice stoicism.
It’s also about patience, in a hyperconnected, newsfeed driven,
binge watching, stimulus from everywhere, “look at me selfie”
culture, PATIENCE is everything.
MORE ON This Delayed
Gratification Though…

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Popular psychology and culture encourages people to express
themselves more and develop greater self-awareness. Many
people tend to take this too far, however, becoming too self-
absorbed and hyper-analyzing themselves and their emotions.
Many concentrate too much on “staring at their navels” and
pondering the meaning of every twist and turn in their feelings.
3. Belly Button Culture.
Watch Patrick Bet-David
“People demand
freedom of speech
as a compensation
for the freedom of
thought which they
seldom use.”
- Søren Kierkegaard

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Distraction Is The Enemy Multitasking Myth
According to the US National Safety Council,
mobile phone use while driving leads to 1.6
million crashes annually.
Texting while driving is 6 times more likely to
to cause an accident than driving under the
influence of alcohol is 1 out of every 4 traffic
crashes that occur in the US are caused by cell
phone usage.
Businesswoman Arianna Huffington speaks
about multitasking being the enemy of
creativity.
Task- switching is a sure way to create lots
of mediocre things.
The ‘fear of missing out’ due to not being
online and available causes stress and lack
of concentration.
We are more effective when we focus.

31
Comfort is a drug,
once you get used to it, it becomes
addicting. give a weak man consistent
sex, good food, cheap entertaiment
ad he’ll throw his ambitions
right out the window.
The comfort zone is where
dreams go to die.

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The key to understanding &
overcoming procrastination

33
Musings about
Digital Marketing

34
What Is Digital Marketing?
Let’s define it by what it’s not:
It’s not social media, it’s not growing page likes, shares
or reaching the maximum amount of people, it’s not
advertising, it’s not influencers, it’s not shove in your face
marketing, it’s not boosting posts, it’s not sitting around
posting, it’s not gathering any numbers to make your
report look smart, it’s not promising sales when you don’t
have an online store, it’s not campaigns, it’s not bending
over backwards when it doesn’t make sense.

35
Marketing to customers online is no longer going to an agency, asking
it to do some posts & boosting content to thousands of people while
the agency mindlessly charges for a non result driven service. By
results we don’t mean likes or shares, we mean being able to measure
whether these activities have had a significant effect on the company’s
bottom line. To achieve this we teach our people to be customer centric,
consumer journey driven, and integrated digital marketers. These areas
are all part of a larger discipline of inbound marketing that hasn’t quite
seen the light of day in Egypt. This is due to many factors, some macro,
involving the way our country understands data, and some micro,
involving the nature of clients seeking digital services. Be that as it may,
we’re working towards turning the discipline of digital marketing in
Egypt to catch up with the current global norm.
We’re ripplemark, we’ve been around for a little
while, we’re humble but fierce in what we do.

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Our Marketing Credo:
Ask Yourself, Always:
Being more human and helpful in the way we market
and sell to clients and their customers.
Am I actually making an impact on my client’s bottom
line?
Can I measure this impact? If I can’t then it’s not
marketing, it’s B.S.
How can I improve my knowledge skill sets to benefit
my peers, clients and ripplemark as a whole?

THANK YOU
FOR READING