Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

How Small Achievements Make a Big Impact

Experts often fight over which path is best or right and most teach what is easiest to represent. When we are beginners in a field, it can be confusing to have contrasting or different takes on which knowledge and skills matter most. Not to mention the complicated manuals that come with products. To learn, says Kathy Sierra in Badass: Making Users Awesome, we need to focus on: the deeper core perceptual patterns and the kinds of experience (including practice) most likely to build results. Doing the right things in the right ways makes a path robust, even if it's not... Read more →

When is it Okay to Ask?

You give me way too much credit if you think your potential customers read my blog. You misunderstand and misapply influence and you're giving away your inexperience with new media. Let's be clear, I still like you, I just find it easy to skip over your pitch. Go build your own audience. I wrote here almost five years ago. Plenty of time to build an audience. Check your “ask” -- should you be pitching me? Most of the time the answer is no. You know it because your pitch is easy to ignore. So if your pitches go that way,... Read more →

Influence is a Side Effect of Interestingness

We listen to people who say and do interesting things. This still leaves the big question of what interesting means. Take for example John Oliver, a comedian who first came to prominence as a cutting-edge political stand up in the UK, with a string of television appearances and sold-out solo shows at the Edinburgh Festival. His HBO show Last Week Tonight has become for many a go to source of amusement -- and a way to get up to speed on what is going on in terms they can understand. Recent popular segments include current hot topics like: Net Neutrality... Read more →

Culture and Habits

My talk at #dareconfUSA* is focused on making learning a habit to uncover new opportunities. I will be using a personal example of my journey into learning English to illustrate the value of saying yes to new experiences and how to go about it. Mastery takes time, but not necessarily just in a physical sense of managing our time, though that is part of it. It's also about learning to appreciate where we put our energy (that's where our focus falls) and how far into time we project ourselves (where the attention goes.) We tend to see things better in... Read more →

The Essence of Rethinking in Reengineering

“The future is already here, only unevenly distributed,” said William Gibson. Twenty five years ago, Michael Hammer wrote about the essence of reengineering in Don’t Automate, Obliterate# (emphasis mine): At the heart of reengineering is the notion of discontinuous thinking—of recognizing and breaking away from the outdated rules and fundamental assumptions that underlie operations. Unless we change these rules, we are merely rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. We cannot achieve breakthroughs in performance by cutting fat or automating existing processes. Rather, we must challenge old assumptions and shed the old rules that made the business underperform in the... Read more →

How to Conquer Information Overload, High Performance State, and Happiness

Making Sense: Shared meals and stories are the raw material of our lives. Through them, we engage in the daily active construction of meaning and relationships. Consuming media rather than savoring it is akin to semi-processing food -- its nutrient taken out. If we want to conquer information overload, we need to treat what we read as food for the mind. When it comes to creating, the mind behind Tesla, SpaceX, and more says focus on the importance of solving the right problem. How to conquer information overload. Evan Doll: Flipboard now has over 100 million registered users around the... Read more →

Finding Your Voice

Interesting lives are made of many types of experiences. Whenever I talk with people involved in the digital space, I am often surprised and delighted at the variety of backgrounds, experiences, and thus perspectives they bring to bear. It's visible in their work and palpable in the energy they put into it. This is especially true of those involved with making product and creating experiences. When I submitted my proposal to speak at #dareconfUSA, I was also taking a step back into the past -- the story and personal journey that brought me here -- in order to take a... Read more →

Culture Drives 2015 Digital Trends: Making the Adobe Report Actionable

The 2015 Digital Trends report# published by Adobe in partnership with Econsultancy highlights the role of culture in making decisions. Page 29 illustrates this point best (see chart above.) Understanding first, then using the data points extrapolated from that knowledge to inform programs. Given the importance of social and content as expressed by brand marketers in the survey -- which has a fairly high sample of respondents compared to 2014 (34% in North America, 23% UK-based, and 21% in rest of Europe) -- it sounds like experimentation is becoming a more prevalent method to form a clearer understanding of customer... Read more →

On the Importance of Solving the Right Problem

Elon Musk takes a long view on opportunities, and by doing so he manages to solve the problem that affects those results in the present moment. Watch this TED conversation with Chris Anderson for examples. The most salient at minute 15:12 (emphasis mine): That's right. So it's important that the rocket stages be able to come back, to be able to return to the launch site and be ready to launch again within a matter of hours. [...] Yes. (Reusable rockets) And so what a lot of people don't realize is, the cost of the fuel, of the propellant, is... Read more →

Mastery Takes Time and Something Else...

Something that can help you with discipline and to practice the right way to achieve progress reliably. Working on a project or through a step-by-step tutorial are not enough, and listening to a lecture or presentation on how to do something does not lead to mastery. What does then? Learning the techniques that people who have become experts at something used and continue to use to achieve mastery and the reason why they worked is a better method to get you on your way. And something else... That something is commitment to change. To discover new opportunities we need to... Read more →