Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

It’s Not Just Getting the Technology Right, Hiring is Broken, but we Can Fix it

There’s no question that technology is transforming the career market. The introduction of job boards a dozen years ago created visibility on millions of companies and their needs. Many brands suddenly had the opportunity to increase their number of media impressions and share their business blurb through job postings. Technology has since opened the global job market opportunity wide. But it’s not fixed hiring and the candidate experience… yet. A brief history of technology Organizations used job boards to advertise and market. On the operational side, they implemented Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) to handle the inflow of information and the... Read more →

The Commercial Power of Story

Story is the greatest tool we have to counter noise — we use it to filter what we see and hear, and organizations can use it to zero into what will make their customers' lives better. Our filters let only what we think or believe is important through. This drives what we notice. The language of story connects our identity, what we value, with our goals, where we want to go. This connection between who we are and what we want explains why we pay attention to stories with emotional appeal. How we get there is filled with stories. Stories... Read more →

Transition, Change, and the Secret Ingredient to Success

At some point or another, we all get to a stage in our lives and careers where we go into exploration mode. Sometimes there's a catalyst, like a work or life change. Maybe you've experienced it when moving from a city to another, or taking a new job, or wading into a new field and industry. We all want change, but few of us welcome taking the initiative to change, and even fewer embrace change when it happens to them. Transition's uncertainty can be terrifying, but it also open us up to opportunity by rethinking our assumptions. Are transitions and... Read more →

The Diminishing Returns of Partial Empathy

When we interact with another person, there are two main typical reactions that pull us in different directions. We can either feel engaged and responsive, or turned off and stressed. In one situation we are interacting with someone who is reciprocating and engaging with us. In the other, we're confronted by indifference. A middle ground between the two is partial attention, someone who is going through the moves. In this situation, a person is physically present and responds to our questions or provides information, but in a mechanical or rote manner. As when using a script and telling us about... Read more →

Habits, #Fail, and Speeding Tickets: The Value of Motivation

Motivation is how eager we are to take action. Someone else can also give us a reason to do something. It's a condition and it's an act. It's one of the most useful tools we have at our disposal. Pleasure, pain, hope, and/or fear ignite it. We can use several strategies to awaken intrinsic motivation. In a world filled with external stimulation and prompts to act, becoming more aware of and awakening our intrinsic motivation can help us gain clarity on the type of information and experiences we seek. Motivation is a key component of our behavior, and the most... Read more →

How we Choose and Differentiate Based on Seeing What isn't There

Greater choice paralyzes us and makes us poor strategists. This is something we all struggle with in our work and personal lives. There are way too many options to choose from with too little time in a day. When we're done picking a technology marketing stack, multitasking, and ducking in and our of meetings, there's no energy left to pick a toothpaste. Do we really need hundreds of products with very little differences? Is it useful personally to become an expert in wine, cereal, and boxed pizza? When we're faced with a wall of choices, how do we pick? Is... Read more →

The Positive Approach to Success

What problems are we having? What's working around here? The questions we focus on first determines the health of an organization, its brand story, and the level of engagement of its people — it changes things measurably. Strategy requires trade-offs — to choose what we don't do, so we can free up energy for what we want to achieve. It's also human nature to see what we don't want faster. Bad experiences stay with us much longer than good ones, but that's likely because we're trained to look for the worst. Yet, success creates success and not the other way... Read more →

Mastering the Art of Persuasion

When we're passionate about a topic we tend to talk about it at every opportunity. Whether it's a new idea we're trying out, a special project or venture we're starting, our focus is completely absorbed into thinking about it. We approach conversations as opportunities to think out loud. At first, we don't see it as trying to convince anyone, while that's exactly what it sounds like. Trying to arouse the passion of listeners to bend their ear to our cause is what Aristotle called Pathos — one of the three pillars of persuasive speech. Persuasion is the art of getting... Read more →

Narrative Clarity: the Importance of Scope

Narrative clarity is the one thing that is easy to admire and extremely difficult to imitate. It sets an organization and brand apart from the rest. It's the product of hard and crucial work that is often invisible to define high standards. But just setting the bar high is a recipe for confusion. How high is a distraction from the focus, which should be on what holds up the bar — the core principles that sustain it. They are the immutable truths behind a business strategy that make it work even as the business model may evolve over time. Amazon's... Read more →