Richard has been designing knowledge-intensive organizations for nearly two decades, working with engineering, professional service, sales, and manufacturing.
He was recently the subject matter expert for a national study on how to create a culture that encourages knowledge sharing and is currently subject matter expert for a similar study of communities of practice.
Prior to starting McDermott & Co., Richard worked in the Corporate Education department at Polaroid Corporation, where he designed career development programs for technical professionals and experienced first-hand the dilemmas of being a knowledge worker. He was a Research Assistant at the Harvard Business School and a faculty member at Lesley College, teaching management, organizational behavior, and organizational change.
Richard has a Ph.D. from Brandeis University with concentrations in organizational studies and social theory. There he studied the sociology of knowledge with Kurt Wolf and discovered what became his intellectual root, the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Mearleau-Ponty's work on how we make sense of the world, understand each other and learn still pervades his work.
Richard attended the MIT program in System Dynamics and has formal training in Total Quality Management, Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award Assessment, Statistical Process Control for Service Industries, and Socio-Technical Systems Design.
Richard, his wife and two daughters recently moved to the mountains outside Boulder, Colorado. When home, he enjoys cooking, riding horses, flying high-performance kites, and playing chauffeur for the kids.
Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge