Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

The Power of Rituals in Commerce

[image via] A former police detective wrestles with his personal demons and becomes obsessed with a hauntingly beautiful woman. The ex-cop has a paralyzing fear of heights, yet has the task of preventing a friend’s wife from committing suicide. To establish internal conflict and create a sense of uneasiness, Hitchcock used for the first time an in-camera visual effect created using a dolly zoom. Everything about Vertigo goes together to distort perspective and disorient: the music, the 1950s grainy film with dull colors, the changing light and the incredible shot locations. It's like a dream where opposite forces are at... Read more →

One Way to Reclaim Your Power

Is this you? Calvin. Says it all. Without saying a word. One of Bill Watterson's early creations was a copy of Michelangelo's “Creation of Adam” from the Sistine Chapel. It was the middle of his sophomore year at Kenyon. The idea just came to him. He decided to do it, figured out a way. He had to paint over it when the year was up. As he said in the Kenyon College commencement address in 1990: Despite the futility of the whole episode, my fondest memories of college are times like these, where things were done out of some inexplicable... Read more →

The Power of Story

Alfred Hitchcock understood the power of story. He was a bold storyteller. Mixing recurrent themes like the ordinary person, the wrong person, the likeable villain, the observer, stairways, mothers, heroines, silent scenes, sexuality, and distilled wine, he tempered fear and fantasy with a good dose of realism and humor. This last bit was critical and it varied with his collaborations. Black humor, parody, farce/screwball comedy (Cary Grant's style) and romantic comedy in his films entertain and reveal. The greater his creative freedom from the pressure of the studios, the more tongue-in-cheek. The director knew that people don't want to be... Read more →

Using the Right Metaphors

[metaphor for strategy] I worked in and around insurance and financial services for fifteen years. During those years, I gained a deeper understand of the distinction between risk and uncertainty. Uncertainty and risk are concepts in economics and the stock market. The concepts are related, but not the same. You cannot avoid risk, every act of creation involves it. Even not doing anything has a risk component. But you can learn to move away from uncertainty, especially when you're called to make important decisions. Metaphors structure the way we talk, but they also impact the way we think. A metaphor... Read more →

Social Media Bubbles

Social media algorithms determine what you see when you search and scroll the platforms. Not your friends. Due to their serving tech companies business model, these algorithms are always changing. The changes can be difficult to measure for subsets of industries, never mind individuals. But these changes affect your business, if you rely on them. So from a business standpoint, you could view the rules of the game set by Facebook and Google as constraints. The Australian government seems to think so. They're looking to limit the scope of these arbitrary changes (NYT gated content): If the bill passes in... Read more →

Transmission and Ritual in Culture

Transmission and ritual are two metaphors we associate with communication. Mostly unconsciously. We might be moving messages across space or we might be producing a shared world and affirm common values. Transmission and ritual are both part of the origin story of communication. Transmission is the most common in all industrial cultures. It's communication with the intent to impart, send, or give information to others. Its metaphor is geography and transportation. We transport goods and we transport information. This view of communication comes from one of the oldest dreams of humanity: to increase the speed and effect of messages as... Read more →

Listening Skills Need Exercise

“Listen” is the anagram of “silent.” Only when we're able to quiet what is going on in our head we can truly listen. It's not intuitive, but listening is a large part of communication: in conversation and in writing, unless we're open to the information and (even) ready to change our mind, nothing happens. No action. "Just talk." Listening helps us be less wrong. It's part of our feedback loop, a mechanism to stay grounded in reality. Understanding how reality works and how to deal with it should be on every job description (instead, we talk about multitasking, which decreases... Read more →

Good Selling

We love to buy. We don't like to be sold to. “We’ve internalized an image of selling drawn from capitalism’s worst moments, which gives rise to a suspicion that selling somehow injures those to whom we sell.” That's a cultural stereotype. The moral compass of a salesperson isn't fixed, neither is their skill. Selling is all about contextual alignment. We appreciate when we feel understood, when someone addresses our current problem. I worked with hundreds of salespeople across the world: there is such a thing as good selling. From the technician at my local appliances store who cuts through the... Read more →

Transition and Change

We all want change. Few 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. Start with rethinking assumptions. For example, do Mondays need to be bad days? Transitions and change Are they the same thing? We typically see transition as a passage from one form, state, style, or place to another—we're familiar with where we are, and have hopes and dreams about where we're going. Moving to a new country, a brand new house or school, starting a new job... Read more →

Slow-Motion Effects

Speed is the mantra of our times. Business jargon is filled to the brim with words like “acceleration,” “fast,” “momentum,” “agility,” “velocity,” because technology can help make some (not all) things exponential. And our yearning to conquer, achieve, drive, elevate, gain ground, go ahead, launch, move forward, promote, make headway, propel, skyrocket, hasten, and push gives us a sense of progress. Yes, we're going places. But it's hard to turn this mental programming off when it comes to relationships... and even our own self-talk. We rush to conclusions. Poor decisions and bad habits are collateral damage of shooting from the... Read more →