Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

How Experimenting led to the Ultimate Entertainment Franchise

How does an established franchise relaunch itself to appeal to an audience whose taste has evolved? The secret history of the ultimate Marvel traces the success of the new series to a Hail Mary maneuver, an experiment: A reboot is a delicate thing. When a once-profitable franchise of characters becomes stale, outdated, or overly complex, there will always be voices calling for the slate to be wiped clean: to take the characters back to their basics, retell their origin stories, make them contemporary. But all too often, those rebooting efforts are laughable, pandering failures. Ultimate Marvel was the rare exception.... Read more →

Bill Gates Summer Reading List

As he has done last year, Bill Gates published a list of his picks for summer reading a with a few more things that are on the lighter side. Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened by Allie Brosh. Gates' review: A funny, brutally honest memoir “When you have to spend every social interaction consciously manipulating your face into shapes that are only approximately the right ones, alienating people is inevitable.” It must be empowering for those who have struggled with depression to read this book, see themselves, and know they’re far... Read more →

How Improvisation Reverses "No, But" Thinking and Improves Creativity

In Yes, And: How Improvisation Reverses "No, But" Thinking and Improves Creativity and Collaboration The Second City Kelly Leonard and Tom Yorton say that: We are at our happiest and most successful when we are working as improvisers. When we are fiercely following the elements of improvisation, we generate ideas both quickly and efficiently; we're more engaged with out coworkers; our interactions with clients become richer or more long-standing; we weather rough storms with more aplomb, and we don't work burdened by fear of failure. When we are in full improviser mode, we become better leaders and better followers; likewise,... Read more →

My Video of #dareconf Talk

I gave this talk at #dareconf last week, the events took a few years to play out when I first came to the U.S. The theme of making learning a habit through experience is a lifelong passion of mine. Valeria Maltoni: Make learning a habit and discover new opportunities from Together London on Vimeo. Children feel the excitement of learning more strongly than the fear of the unknown. For adults the balance is reversed: we stop learning when we’re afraid of leaving the safety of what we know. When I arrived in the US I wasn’t fluent in English. I... Read more →

Body Language Affects How Others See us and How we See Ourselves

Social psychologist Amy Cuddy's research on body language reveals that we can change other people’s perceptions — and even our own body chemistry — simply by changing body positions. When we become aware of our body posture, we may find that we're hunching over, or maybe we spread out. We notice those things in others. Amy Cuddy says: we're really fascinated with body language, and we're particularly interested in other people's body language. You know, we're interested in an awkward interaction, or a smile, or a contemptuous glance, or maybe a very awkward wink, or maybe even something like a... Read more →

Finite and Infinite Games

In Finite and Infinite Games: : A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility, James P. Carse says there are at least two kinds of games -- he calls one finite, the other infinite. The difference between the two is that we play a finite game for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing to play. Play or game symbolizes how we show up in life. Of particular interest is the part on storytelling. He says: “Storytellers do not convert their listeners; they do not move them into the territory of a superior truth. Ignoring... Read more →

The Differences Between Being Past, Present, and Future-Oriented According to Philip Zimbardo

In a talk he gave a few years ago, renowned psychologist Professor Philip Zimbardo explains how our individual perspectives of time affect our work, health and well-being. We have different relationships with time, says Zimbardo: what we have discovered in 30 years of research there are six main time ones that people live in; two focused on the past; two on the present and two on the future. The people who focus on the past either remember all the good old times, successes, happy birthdays, nostalgia, these are the people who keep the family records, the family books, who preserve... Read more →

Brian Grazer and the Secret to a Bigger Life

Along with Apollo 13, Splash, Parenthood, The Da Vinci Code, Frost/Nixon, J. Edgar and more, Brian Grazer produced A Beautiful Mind, a story directed by Ron Howard -- his business partner -- and interpreted by Russel Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, and Paul Bethany. The movie won 4 Academy Awards. In A Curious Mind, written with Charles Fishman, Grazer reveals how he got started meeting with people from diverse backgrounds to have open-ended conversations about their lives and work. Early in his career, he learned that to broaden his horizons, he needed to escape the Hollywood bubble: “I have to feed my... Read more →

Why the Page Fold Still Matters

Rather than a set measurement, in digital experiences the fold, or the portion of the webpage that is visible without scrolling, is a concept. In the fold manifesto, Amy Shade says: The fold matters because what appears at the top of your page matters. Users do scroll, but only if what’s above the fold is promising enough. What is visible on the page without requiring any action is what encourages us to scroll. This is true on any size screen, be it mobile, tablet, or desktop: anything that’s hidden and that the user must uncover will only be seen if... Read more →

Empathy and Emotion as Seen Through the Eyes of Children

The preparation for today's speaking event at #dareconfUSA spanned more than 12 weeks. We developed the talks as a team -- Meredith Noble, Sharon Bautista, Hannah du Plessis, and Jonathan Kahn and I -- we each worked to find our voice. What I mean when I think about finding your voice is working in a way that is true to who you are. Work is an expression of self, and if it is not true to it, there is no joy in the doing. Finding the child in you, letting curiosity guide you in solving problems, and tapping into love... Read more →