Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

Barriers are the Universal Experience

“You will never get any more out of life than you expect.” [Bruce Lee] When we're honest with ourselves, we are free to pursue our fullest development. In The Warrior Within John Little says when asked about how he would raise his son Brandon in a world filled with prejudice, Bruce Lee would answer with a Chinese folktale: There was fine butcher who used the same knife year and year, yet it never lost its delicate, precise edge. After a lifetime of service, it was still as useful and effective as when it was new. When asked how he had... Read more →

Why Aligning Value with Values Matters

We are most successful, we get the best results when we align our personal values with the value we provide. The more our behavior models what we believe in, the more we can close the gap on our promises, the better promises we can make because of trust and credibility. It sounds simple, but it gets complicated in a hurry when we involve social networks. Take for example social networks. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter have built very powerful platforms for marketing, business transactions, media but also for everyday people who just want to stay in touch with a grand-daughter, see what... Read more →

Why it's Important to Have Enough Dots to Connect

Every industry tends to be insular. Day to day operations dictate the kind of work we focus on, the divisional structure within the company drives the list of tasks per line of business or group. The focus can become very narrow. So much so that if we're not careful, we become unaware of the percentage of time we spend on shallow work. Which in turn decreases the percentage of time we invest in breaking out of the same thinking that might have created or not addressed the new problems we face. Something else happens. When we're fully immersed in one... Read more →

Lucky People are not Straight-Line Strugglers

It's counter intuitive, but on the whole it's a fact—lucky individuals take more of a zigzag path, or to use a nautical analogy, they tuck into opportunity. At a time when so many of us are in flux, maybe our skill sets don't fit one role neatly because we are both technical and non-technical for example, or we're looking to reinvent our career even when we're not exactly sure yet what that will be, this is supremely good news. The zigzag path is one of thirteen techniques Max Gunther suggests in How to Get Lucky: 13 techniques for discovering and... Read more →

We Learn the Most When we're Doing and Thinking Together

The idea of that we each have our own individual learning style originated in the 1970s. It was then that we started talking about three main ways to learn—auditory, visual, and kinesthetic (by moving around.) That insight opened the door for learning models, many of which were developed to address both the human need for concrete experience and abstract conceptualization. Kolb's experiential learning theory, which combines experience, perception, cognition, and behavior, also includes two related approaches—Reflective Observation and Active Experimentation. Boiled down to what this means for each of us, when it comes to learning, we all lean on our... Read more →

The Absolute Need for Science and the Humanities to Work Together

As we debate the role of technology in our lives, we are also facing an enormous shift in the types of jobs of the future—near and longer term. It's hard to pin-point exactly which jobs we'll have, aside from those we are creating right now. With open questions on the role of robots and artificial intelligence (AI)—will they be contributing or replacing? Augmenting or eliminating?—the idea is to become more of what we already are, human. Kevin Kelley says that is What Technology Wants. Whether we agree with his point of view or not, unless we plan to write ourselves... Read more →

Role of Culture in Influencing How we Make Decisions

Organizations have cultures. Apple has a culture, Microsoft has a culture, and IBM has a culture. The Macedonian army had a culture, and so did Roman legions. The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Economist have cultures. Cultures persist when so many other things float in change. Culture is a living thing. What we talk about, how we go about doing things and making decisions are all aspects of culture. The word itself is based on a term used by Ancient Roman orator Cicero to describe the cultivation of the philosophical soul, considered the highest form of human... Read more →

Filling the Gap Between Jobs to be Done and the Experience we Deliver

In marketing speak, jobs to be done means why we “hire” a product or service. The focus is the thing we want to do, rather than the feature of the product or service that does it. For example, we want to drill a hole in the wall. Many ways of doing that. Then based on what the hole is for, how precise we are and how little we like to clean up afterward we may select one drill bit or nail over another. These requirements don't have to be explicit for us to find the right product. Because if a... Read more →

Over Reliance on Writing is Hurting Our Ability to Speak in Public

It's no secret than most our day to day interactions are based on some form of text—from sms to social media inside and outside organizations, and the elephant in the room, email—we get things done by writing. Which explains the popularity of products that help us write better and edit our own material or that of others. The reasoning is that information is just one search away and we can compare our version to many more and borrow the best words, or data points, and so on. But to make the information truly ours, at a minimum, we need to... Read more →