Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

Words for the Year

The most important things are often the hardest. Each month this year had its challenges. It also had its gifts: that was the focus all along. A recap of the words that carried the day—and will take us into the future. January—impact February—culture March—belief April—habits / behaviors May—perspective June—change July—perception / behavior August—productivity September—attention / power October—role of corporation November—clarity December—lasting Lasting turns into impact through decision-making, and the cycle continues. Creators use words to expand their thinking, anchor action in meaning. Words are human footprints on the world. How lasting? What impact? Read more →

There's no ROI in Likes. The ROI is in Connection.

[Ponte Vecchio, Firenze, Italy. Photo by Valeria Maltoni.] [Note: I published this article on LinkedIn on March 5, 2019 with the promise I would post it to my site. Then my friend developer died and I got busy. 2020 was, well, 2020. So here it is in all its 3k+ words glory.] You don't get connection from status. You get it by enlivening each other other, making people stronger through engagement. Status may give you self-esteem, but alone it does not create change. It's social energy that drives civilization. But we need to figure out how it works and how... Read more →

The Age of Data Malpractice Could be Over: a Shift in How we Understand Relationships

“It's not the Social Network Sites that are interesting—it is the Social Network itself. The Social Graph. The way I am connected, not the way my Web pages are connected. We can use the word Graph, now, to distinguish from Web. I called this graph the Semantic Web, but maybe it should have been Giant Global Graph!” It was 2007#. More than a decade later, Tim Berners-Lee announced Solid#, a path to preserve the decentralization of the web by putting you and your data at the center of it: Solid changes the current model where users have to hand over... Read more →

Getting Closer to the End Product: Return on Quality

“'The content farms' model is going away in favor of quality,” says Paulina Karpis. “Future media will be more distribution of a well-made piece of content.” Karpis is co-founder of BrunchWork, a co-learning model of education. She was speaking on a panel at a Reuters event on marketing and customer experience. My tweet elicited a few sighs of relief: many are exhausted from so much content being thrown at them. And the noise keeps burying the signal. As I said in a short article about bars and signal strength: WiFi connection bars rarely represent the quality of the connection, they... Read more →

Don't be a Trend Chaser: Pick a Small Number of Books and Dig Deeper

[image courtesy Festival della Filosofia, Modena 2020] “Think with your head” is terrible advice. Because it glosses over what it means “to think.” The process of thinking uses reason to consider facts in order to understand something, make a decision, or solve a problem. There's accountability built into it. That's the part we tend to gloss over. Knowledge comes before thinking independently. It has to. And we get that by listening, reading, and discussing topics from different reasoned perspectives. The reason bit makes everyone accountable for the facts... and the lies. Understanding is a prerequisite for any change to happen.... Read more →

How to Structure a Presentation for Maximum Impact

The most popular article I've written in the last 14 years is about persuasive speech. How popular? Hundreds of page views per day. It was picked up by Google Classroom and is being used by two dozen education institutions. Humans have wanted to persuade others since forever. The art of getting our way is most appealing in dozens of situations. From family and friends to work settings knowing how to structure what you say can make or break a deal or a relationship. So why is it that we spend little time learning how to argue our case? What's the... Read more →

Timeless Writing

If you stand for nothing, you fall for everything. I probably heard an ad person say that. It holds for writing. Arthur Schopenhauer believed that people act out of a blind and irrational desire for physical experience, what later thinkers would call the unconscious. As one of the greatest philosophers of the nineteenth century, he tackled many topics from politics and ethics to women and books. In 1851, he published some notes on writing: Writers can be divided into meteors, planets and fixed stars. The first produce a momentary effect: you gaze up and cry: “Look!” —and then they vanish... Read more →

Doing Work that Lasts

“We're like blocks of stone, out of which the sculptor carves the forms of men.” Nigel Hawthorne was standing in front of me asking a very difficult question. “The blows of his chisel, which hurt us so much, are what make us perfect. The suffering in the world is not the failure of God's love for us; it is that love in action. For believe me, this world that seems to us so substantial, is no more than the shadowlands. Real life has not begun yet.” It was 1991, and Hawthorne was portraying best-selling author C. S. Lewis at the... Read more →