Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

A Compass and a Lifeline: 3 Readings

Before entering the corporate world, the two main things I worked on, were writing and researching/analyzing. I started with the hardest part: short poems. I was six. Then I built from there with short stories and essays. My stories were good, my essays borrowed from them in character development. The first full on research and analysis project I did was for my finals in middle school. This was in 8th grade. I was 13. My idea is that you could string together all subjects under one umbrella topic. The school district was brand new and they were experimenting with methods.... Read more →

Federico Fellini on Storytelling and the Ultimate Change

[Federico Fellini with Marcello Mastroianni in a pause during the filming of 8½] “It's the story of a man like there are many: the story of a man who has reached a point of stagnation, a total traffic jam that strangles him.” 8½ was Fellini's autobiographical movie. He admits so himself in a bizarre conversation with Oriana Fallaci in 1963. A cathartic move. The story line was meant to show people their fears, doubts, rogue behavior, cowardice, ambiguity, and hypocrisy. All things that are the same in a director, a lawyer or a family person. Mirror, mirror. According to Fellini,... Read more →

How do You Approach Culture?

“What important questions are the least answerable empirically, and how should these questions be approached?” was a question put to Tyler Cowen recently. As he says, “Maybe that is too broad a question.” But his first response touches culture: I am not sure we ever will understand “culture,”as more empirical work perhaps will broaden the concentric circles of our ignorance and create more open questions, by both teaching us more detail and showing how much context-dependence matters. In my notes, I actually wrote broadening both knowledge and ignorance. Two sides of the same argument. Culture doesn't escape the universal force... Read more →

A Conversation on Unvarnished Business

In March 2010, Patrick Prothe hired me to speak at the Fall User Conference he put together for the software company where he was working at the time. We've been in touch ever since. I was delighted to be guest No. 6 on his Unvarnished Business podcast. We talked about domains where I've built quite a bit of experience over the years: Community building–from the lessons learned grades sixth through eighth in Italy, to the ups and downs of a pre-social media online network run on a listserv and grown organically to an impressive referral and learning engine. Communications–from the... Read more →

How to Build Momentum

In Good to Great, Jim Collins tells the story of the chicken and the egg: Picture an egg just sitting there. No one pays it much attention until, one day, the egg cracks open and out jumps a chicken! All the major magazines and newspapers jump on the event, writing feature stories—“The Transformation of Egg to Chicken!” “The Remarkable Revolution of the Egg!” “Stunning Turnaround at Egg!”—as if the egg had undergone some overnight metamorphosis, radically altering itself into a chicken. But what does it look like from the chicken’s point of view? It’s a completely different story. While the... Read more →