Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

How to Listen, for a Change

“When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.” [Ernest Hemingway] Listening has become a rare skill. In a visual and written world we are losing our ability to pay close attention to what we hear so we can respond to what is happening in new ways. We react to situations mostly based on memory because we are not aware of our thinking. In The Responsibility of Form: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, semiotician Roland Barthes explains the distinction between listening and hearing. He says, “Hearing is a physiological phenomenon; listening is a psychological act.” Hearing is always... Read more →

How Understanding History is Essential to Creating the Best Possible Future

Neal Stephenson is an author of speculative fiction who weaves minutely detailed historical and technical information into his complex stories, usually combining it with a wicked sense of humor. His ground-breaking novels include Snow Crash, which weaves virtual reality with Sumerian myth, Cryptonomicon, which leaps forward and back between World War II and the World Wide Web, and Anathem, which transports readers into an alternate universe where scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians live in seclusion behind ancient monastery walls until they are called back into the world to deal with a crisis of astronomical proportions. Stephenson's passion for history is also... Read more →

Genius and Curiosity, the Power of Conversation to Discover and Appreciate Reality

What is real and what is the product of our mental storytelling? We discover the gap between our perception of work, life, and events and the real story (or a more real one) when we engage curiosity. Why is that so? How can we find out? Beyond the obvious, which is we see the world based on internal filters and environment, there is an element of us trying to protect ourselves from the information. Because maybe once we come into contact with it —or with the someone who has a different version of the story— we need to change in... Read more →

How we See Others Drives the Value of our Self-Perception

In a paper on Warmth and Competence as Universal Dimensions of Social Perception published with Susan Fiske and Peter Glick, Amy Cuddy presents a framework that synthesizes how individuals and groups perceive a combination of these traits to determine status as they decide whether to collaborate or compete with someone. We use warmth and competence as human data to decide who to trust because they help us answer two critical live saving questions: 1./ what are another person's intentions? 2./ can they make good on those intentions? The characteristics of warmth include traits like morality, trustworthiness, sincerity, kindness, and friendliness;... Read more →

How to Stop Sabotaging Ourselves by Learning to Recognize our Ignorance

“I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think.” [Socrates] The mind is a subject of eternal fascination. We remember things we never experienced, and with Google just one short click away, we may think we know more than we do. Learning to think for ourselves is a good first step to help us self-assess. We can ask for feedback, but often business relationships and social constructs blunt the more useful data points. Knowing we don't know American author and aphorisms writer William Feather once wrote that being educated means, “being able to differentiate between what you know... Read more →

When We Work on Tree-Ideas, we are History

“Our job in this life is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.” [Steven Pressfield] Regardless of whether we consider ourselves artists, maybe others see us that way because we are able to add that special twist to things that just makes them work. It takes years of practice to learn to separate bedrock from sand. In The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles Steven Pressfield addresses directly why doing the work is the only way—because... Read more →

How to Turn Knowledge into Data: Customer Reviews

We are constantly pressed to do more with less, or to become better at producing more of the things that get us greater results. We want to spend more of our time doing things that work and less on failing. To do that, we need to become more of what we are. Because of our biases and assumptions, we learn more from the feedback we receive from others. Which takes some parsing, as others are also focused on self. Our methods should helps us experiment and iterate to build momentum. This is preferable to testing, although that is valuable downstream,... Read more →

Explaining Complex Information Visually

Einstein predicted Gravitational Waves 100 years ago, and their existence has now been confirmed. “If scientists are still doing his homework from a 100 years ago,” says Stephen Colbert. He must have been pretty smart. Astrophysicist Brian Greene explains that gravitational waves are essentially ripples in the fabric of space, like what we see when we throw a pebble into a pond. Except for the waves occur in space itself. Einstein discovered general relativity in 1915, a year earlier. He found that gravity comes from warps and curves in the fabric of space. The sun warps the space and keeps... Read more →

A Valuable Insight on Learning, from an Emperor

From Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar. “Like everyone else, I have had at my disposal only three means of evaluating human existence: the study of self, which is the most difficult and most dangerous method, but also the most fruitful; the observation of our fellowmen, who usually arrange to hide their secrets from us, or to make us believe that they have secrets where none exists; and books, with the particular errors in perspective to which they inevitably give rise. I have read nearly everything that our historians and poets have written, and even our story-tellers, although the latter... Read more →

Rethinking Recruiting

In an attempt to manage risk tightly, most organizations still have an industrial approach to hiring. This involves the formulation of increasingly more detailed task-oriented long descriptions of to do things for individual positions, which are then entered into systems still configured to spit out form letters in response to input. Sometimes the content of the letter is out of sync with the actual experience —for example, when a note says: “Thank you for interviewing with Vanguard. Although we were impressed with your background and qualifications, we have interviewed other candidates who more closely fit the needs of the position... Read more →