Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

"The Strategy Book" Bridges the Gap Between Thinking and Taking Action

Mini book read. Say “strategy” to anyone and their eyes glaze over. It's not that we don't understand the value of strategic thinking, we do. But there's never enough time to do a proper job of it. Market pressure seems to override a desire to learn more about the problem—or focus on the right one—the context, and the players. We often don't know enough even about our own business. Action is how we show results, we reason. Yet, we'd still want to focus on the right actions, making good decisions, understanding competitive pressure, engaging our team, and using a proven... Read more →

4 Ways Technology Impacts our Ability to Make Decisions

This post is part of a new series on conversations worthy of attention. Marshall McLuhan observed the effects of media and technology. “The medium is the message,” “We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us,” and “First we build the tools, then they build us,” are three ways of talking about the impact of technology. True to the Canadian educator and communication theorist observation that “Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers,” we're still working on our understanding of the effects of media and technology on business and human behavior.... Read more →

The Anatomy of A Forever Brand

In 1938, the son of the founder of a famous global organization that traded in raw materials met with a young man, a former schoolteacher. Harry Oppenheimer, the son of the founder of De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd. asked the young man, Francis Wayland Ayer, to come up with a way to change people's perspective on diamonds and make Americans fall in love with engagement rings. Ayer had founded an agency with his father and a $250 investment in 1869. He persuaded Oppenheimer to underwrite the cost to research people's attitudes in the U.S. market. This was to be the... Read more →

"The Formula" Explains the Hidden Patterns that Separate the Best Seller from the Flop.

Mini book read. Failure has become a badge, a rite of passage on our way to success. But generally-speaking nobody likes to fail, or even wants to think about it. We enter every project and new venture with a sense of adventure. It's easy to talk about failure from the gold medal podium. Western culture doesn't look upon people who fail to succeed kindly. Unless you can draw a line from failing your way up the ladder to more money and bigger glory, we're just not interested. Yet any study of success needs to start where things are not going... Read more →

It's a Multibillion Dollar Business. Here's What You Need to Know About Belief.

This post is part of a new series on conversations worthy of attention. Stories of online scams often give us pause, didn't they know that it sounded too good to be true? But it's not that easy to tell sometimes. Take for example the home improvement letter: We were doing some work down the street, and I noticed it looks like you could use a new roof. We have some supplies left over from the other job, and we'll have to return them to the supplier either way, so I can use the leftovers to give you a new roof... Read more →

If we Cannot Measure Change, Can we do Transformation?

When we talk about goals, short-term and long-term are part of the conversation. Goals are an expression of intent. To reach them, we generally need to transform. Growth is part of it, but not the end-all and be-all. We want results in the short-term, and fast. Hence why we measure time. Online, we first started looking at page views, and are now talking about time people spend reading as a proxy of interest. We measure time, because we're still learning how to measure change. But it's change that matters. Time is an artificial concept. Change is real—in behavior, in results,... Read more →

"Brave New Work" is a Love Letter to Organizations and the People who Make Them Possible

Mini book read. Reinvention has deep roots in American culture. It's the land of pioneers, the place of the possible. If the current conversation has turned on itself, when we pan out with our lens, we can see the undercurrent clearly—“can do” is in the fabric of the many who made this the land of opportunity. Undercurrent is the name of Aaron Dignan's former charge—a company that evolved to help businesses develop innovation capabilities and pipelines. Aaron took his own advice and reinvented the work. Now CEO of The Ready, he and his team collaborate with businesses on their transformation... Read more →

Small Groups United by a Shared Purpose are Changing Big Tech Companies. Here's How.

This post is part of a new series on conversations worthy of attention. There's a new form of communication that flies in the face of the story that companies lack internal engagement—the open letter from employees to the CEO. Recent examples of grassroots leadership at big tech companies demonstrate that people understand how to lead change. Dear Sundar: “We believe that Google should not be in the business of war,” says an open letter to CEO Sundar Pichai signed by more than 3,100 Google employees. Like many organizations, Google has encouraged employees to share information and communicate with each other.... Read more →

Influencers Make Change Happen

To anyone in business, word of mouth is the Holy Grail of marketing. What other people say about you when you're not in the room can make a difference. If they're talking to the right people at the right time, you could stand to gain a job offer, a sale, or a new friend. A recommendation is the easy part. What's hard is for it to influence a decision. Businesses interested in influencer marketing want to buy a direct outcome from a few people. There's a lot of digital ink spilled on these ideal influencers, a mythology of sorts. The... Read more →

"Cascades" is an Important Manual on How to Start and Sustain Large-Scale Change

Mini book read. I love mystery books, am a voracious reader of them. Greg Satell's book reads like one in many ways. One cannot wait to find out what happens next and why it happened. People, situations, and events build up from chapter to chapter and sometimes leap off the page. Cascades kept my attention from introduction to summary, and I dug through the notes with relish. When I asked Greg Satell about the mystery thing, he smiled. “Unlocking true insight is very, very hard. I think you need to show the struggle that leads to the insight.” It's probably... Read more →