Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

What Makes Telling a Personal Story Valuable?

How do you go about it? I can tell you that it's a long process and takes a lot of work. Because of one key element your story needs to have to be valuable -- human context. Tomorrow we will take the stage and #dareconfUSA and tell our stories. Mine was a defining moment in the arc of my life and the story arc will convey how much that decision has changed me from that point forward. Stories without a turning point are just anecdotes. Peter Aguero, The Moth's StorySLAM host says: “I’ve seen people tell stories about things that... Read more →

Science and the Human Condition According to Emily Levine

Emily Levine is a philosopher-comedian. In this 2011 TED video, she talks about science, math, society and the way everything connects. Borrowing from Lewis Hyde's book Trickster Makes This World: Myschief, Myth, and Art, at minute 13:09, she says: trickster is a change agent. And the qualities that I'm about to describe are the qualities that make it possible to make change happen. And one of these is boundary crossing. I think this is what so, in fact, infuriated the scientists. But I like to cross boundaries. I like to, as I said, talk about things I know nothing about.... Read more →

Media Consumption Habits

We spend a lot of time to learn how to use digital tools effectively for marketing and business -- or at least try to. Yet, we often dedicate little time to understanding how we use digital media and the web and figuring out better and more effective ways to use them to our advantage. Intuitively, we know that to get anything done, we need to balance reading with doing. In an interview on digital literacy tips and tricks, Howard Rheingold talks about: attention -- [...] attention to information—what I call infotention—is the first literacy that the others depend upon crap... Read more →

Balance Reading and Doing with Kathy Sierra

How can we as individuals (and organizations) keep up with the speed of digital? There are new technologies, features being launched, and tools at our fingertips every day. What can we do to keep up with all the new opportunities? This is how we start many of our conversations, whether at work or at events, even among friends. There is always going to be a new tool, a new shiny object, a campaign, program, what the other guys are doing, etc. Only one of you. My bet is on making yourself smarter and more effective. Start here: find the best... Read more →

Meeting of the Minds in Business

Marketing is a fascinating profession. We tend to ignore most of the marketing tactics aimed at us as consumers, especially online -- see for example recent news on ad blocking and that fewer than one person in a thousand clicks on a standard banner ad# and as marketers we fret over how half the display ads paid for by us are unviewable# and how half of all U.S online advertising - $10 billion a year - may be lost to fraud#. The people who most obsess over a brand are marketers. The rest of us love product experiences, go back... Read more →

The Importance of Learning to Make Trade-offs for Performance

In economic terms we call them opportunity cost. They involve sacrificing something to do something else. Every day, we trade our time, attention, and resources as we go through our day. As individuals and organizations, we are reservoirs of potential energy that can be recruited to do things. How we spend our days does end up creating our lives. As Jim Loher and Tony Schwartz say in The Power of Full Engagement, a book I read a dozen years ago, managing energy, not time, is the key to high performance and personal renewal. The book's central thesis is that to... Read more →

Dan Pink on the Value of High-Concept and High-Touch

When Dan Pink wrote A Whole New Mind, he presented six aptitudes that are highly subjective, socially- and culturally-dependent. In his view these fundamental human abilities are absolute essentials for professional success and personal fulfillment. In his view: Design is an asset above function Story is an asset above argument Symphony is an asset above focus Empathy is an asset above logic Play is an asset above seriousness, and Meaning is an asset above accumulation In the book, Dan uses neuroscience to create a metaphor to articulate the value of what he calls high-concept, high-touch work. He says R-directed is... Read more →

Building the Company you Wouldn't Sell

Zach Klein started and then sold his company Vimeo when he was 23. He starts his story by outlining a plan to make something cool to solve all his upcoming (financial) problems in one summer. He was 17. So he locked himself in his room for a whole summer to come up with the biggest idea he could. With a first attempt at an improbable business behind him, Zach joined some friends in a startup. They moved to California, and swept in the spirit of possibility of the age came up with an idea of a video sharing site. The... Read more →

Memory, the Mother of Science, and Flow

In his famous book Flow, Mihali Csikszentmihalyi includes a chapter on the flow of thought and takes us back to the origin of the mother of science. He says: The Greeks personified memory as lady Mnemosyne. Mother of the nine Muses, she was believed to have given birth to all the arts and the sciences. It is valid to consider memory the oldest mental skill, from which all others derive, for, if we weren't able to remember, we couldn't follow the rules that make other mental operations possible. Neither logic nor poetry could exist, and the rudiments of science would... Read more →

Learning Tools: Still Time to Subscribe

Technology is fantastic. Thanks to the web, we have access to more tools than we'll likely ever find time to try. Take for example Mind Node, a tool that helps you create a mind map. Mind maps are a visual representation of your ideas, starting with a central thought and growing from there. This allows you to brainstorm & organize your thoughts in an intuitive way, so you can focus on the idea behind it. But when the problem is we are trying to connect some dots and don't know where to begin, tools cannot give us good answers. That's... Read more →