Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

How Good Leaders Tell if Someone is Lying

“A lie has no power whatsoever by its mere utterance,” says Pamela Meyer. “Its power emerges when someone else agrees to believe the lie.” We are not always willing participants. Master forger and con man Henry Oberlander who was active in the 1930s understood human psychology well. “Everyone is willing to give something for whatever it is they desire the most,” he said. This became famous as “Henry's Rule,” and gives us a view into why deception is so profitable. Research reveals the complexity of lying. Meyer says: On a given day, studies show that you may be lied to... Read more →

How to Share an Idea

Our minds are filled with ideas. Most of our ideas are linked together —they form our personal worldview, our brain's operating system (OS). It is the network of our ideas that helps us navigate the world. Talks have secret lives —they can travel from our own neural networks to those of our listeners via the connection we make through sharing an idea. Journalist and publisher Chris Anderson has been curating the TED conferences since 2002. From his experience as host and curator he has distilled four guidelines in TED Talks to help build connections between the ideas in our minds... Read more →

Which Opportunity are we Trying to Open?

“Because we think we know, we stop looking.” [Alan Judd] There is still plenty of opportunity in the gaps between what we say and what we do, between what we want and what we actually need, and in good experiences. In The Ten Faces of Innovation IDEO's Tom Kelley and Jonathan Littman say the people who are most valuable in organizations have a solid grounding in the social sciences. Subjects like linguistics, cognitive psychology, and/or anthropology. For example, people who fill the role of Anthropologist—the person who goes into the field to see how customers use and respond to products,... Read more →

How we Are Limiting Our Experiences

When we search for an item, the list of entries our browser brings back to us is more or less a self-fulfilling prophecy —the list of items most linked to, searched by and clicked on as a result of our own search behavior and the average of the people around us. The business model of search engines is based on this data and at last look it's still quite vibrant. A very similar thing happens when we go to social networks to discover new things —our experience is based on that of the things we have liked before and that... Read more →

John Lasseter: The Focus of What we Do is Still Story and Character

“The best scientists and engineers are just as creative as the best storytellers.” [Steve Jobs] If we were to say Pixar in 1996, not too many in the business world would have paid attention. But Steve Jobs did. He understood this was no technology company, that they were in the business of entertainment, and worked hard at helping the company bankroll itself while hatching its first success. Since Snow White was released in 1928, says Jobs, every single major studio has tried to break into the business. Disney had been the only studio that had made a major blockbuster —at... Read more →

How Successful People Rise on a Tide of Advantage

Why do some people succeed, having remarkable and productive productive lives, while so many more never reach their potential? Culture, especially American culture, would have us believe success is the product of individual effort. We would like to believe hard work pays off. But the truth is as usual a little more complex. In a recent interview, Malcolm Gladwell talks about his 2009 book, Outliers: The Story of Success. He wrote the book to figure out what crates success and why. He says: The point of Outliers is, I mean, there’s a number of points. But one is that I... Read more →

John Cleese on How Playfulness and Putting off Decisions Help us Be More Creative

“I criticize by creation, not finding fault.” [Cicero] There is a reason why we get some of our best ideas when we're in a dreamy state. Ideas bubble up from our consciousness as we are about to let go of the awake state with its often frenetic activities and busyness. He says: I noticed years ago that when people (myself definitely included) are anxious they tend to busy themselves with irrelevant activities, because these distract from and therefore reduce their actual experience of anxiety. To stay perfectly still is to feel the fear at its maximum intensity, so instead you... Read more →

Now is the Time to Understand More, so we May Fear Less

“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.” [Marie Curie] She was a physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity —her research papers are still radioactive more than 100 years later. Marie Curie discovered two new chemical elements —polonium (named after her native country) and radium. She carried out the first research into the treatment of tumors with radiation, and she was the founder of the Curie Institutes in Paris and Warsaw, which are important medical research centers. Curie was... Read more →

Mastering Skill as a Foundation for Creative Work

“Principles for the Development of a Complete Mind: Study the science of art. Study the art of science. Develop your senses—especially learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.” [Leonardo da Vinci] In the early 1480s, Italian polymath Leonardo da Vinci wrote a letter to Ludovico Sforza, then Duke of Milan including a list of his capabilities. Sforza was looking to employ military engineers, so da Vinci included minute details about his skills to that effect: My Most Illustrious Lord, Having now sufficiently seen and considered the achievements of all those who count themselves masters and artificers... Read more →

Charlie Munger: the Safest Way to Get what you Want is to Try and Deserve What you Want

“From 1733 to 1758, Ben Franklin dispensed useful and timeless advice through Poor Richard's Almanack. Among the virtues extolled were thrift, duty, hard work, and simplicity. Subsequently, two centuries went by during which Ben's thoughts on these subjects were regarded as the last word. Then Charlie Munger stepped forth.” [Warren Buffett] In a Commencement Speech at USC Law in May 2007, Charlie Munger set the tone by acknowledging the importance of wisdom acquisition, in his view a moral duty, Confucius' idea of filial piety, and the value of knowledge transfer from one generation to the next. He says: I'm going... Read more →