Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

A Conversation on Post-Industrial Economics with Esko Kilpi

Esko Kilpi was the founder and principal of Esko Kilpi Oy, a research and consultancy firm based in Finland working with the challenges of knowledge work and digital work environments. I didn't know Kilpi, and his death (January 2020) means I won't be able to have the conversation with him. The article from October 2015 I wanted to discuss is no longer online. But I had the presence of sharing it in its integrity by email. I shared thoughts about it with a friend in a short thread. To this day, email continues to be the most underutilized social network.... Read more →

What Happens to the Brand in Acquisitions?

When a brand dies, we hardly even notice anymore. And yet, a rebrand is not a superficial thing. Forget customer pledges. Unless you truly intend to keep your promises. There are consequences to the business and the community beyond what happens to followers and fans in social media. In 2015, DuPont announced their new sustainability goals for 2020. The following year would be a difficult one. “For practical purposes, DuPont doesn't exist anymore,” said Abraham Lenoff, chemical engineering professor at the University of Delaware after DuPont merged with Dow Chemicals to create DowDuPont. In an article about the death of... Read more →

Human Progress: What 'it' is and Where it's Going

Human progress is not measured by good enough, but by those who strive (with great sacrifice) for a more perfect misunderstanding. Versions of this thought have been part of my conversations with Peter Tunjic for the better part of twenty years. It goes in the same category with “those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Consider an example of this concept in a comment about corporate governance Peter posted on a LinkedIn Group ten years ago. Here's what he said (insert your pet theory in place of governance, and it still works): Believe it or... Read more →

How Did we Move so Far From the Human Universe?

Scrolling through good conversations in my inbox, I came across an article I used to discuss what happened to management science. The article makes the case that physics might still be part of our human universe, not just an increasingly abstract description of some “uber-folded N-dimensional meta-scrapple.” To the question (emphasis mine): “Do you think that physics has neglected some of these foundational questions as it has become, increasingly, a kind of engine for the applied sciences, focusing on the manipulation, rather than say, the explanation, of the physical world?” Tim Maudlin says: “Look, physics has definitely avoided what were... Read more →

We can Get at Truth When we Stop Searching for Answers and Start Asking More Questions

“As the body assimilates what is homogeneous to it, so will a man retain what interests him; in other words, what coincides with his system of thought or suits his ends.” Schopenhauer argued the world is a representation, Vorstellung. His work followed Kant's claim that our knowledge and experience of the world is always indirect. Everything that exists, said Schopenhauer in 1818, exists as an object in relation to a subject. Fast forward to 1986, the year archie first came on the scene. Part ingenuity, part serendipity, Peter Deutsch and Alan Emtage ended up working their way up the Internet... Read more →

On the Value of Reading for Writing

The pause should not surprise you. It was time to reassemble. I'm reading In the Margins, and realizing how much harder it is to write as a woman. Most of my ideas are original. I do write from a multiplicity of egos as Virginia Woolf suggested. But I haven't tried my hand at fiction, yet. I wonder what would have happened if I had adopted an elusive and enigmatic persona like Elena Ferrante. Freed from a physical context that invites assumptions, I might have taken more risks early on. But back then I had 50,000 regular readers. “Although I was... Read more →

Read Different to Think Different

Is there a good way of knowing things you can use? I've been asking myself this question more frequently as of late. On one hand, you can train yourself to ask better questions. Which is especially useful about topics that are right under everyone's nose. Take the internet, for example. We consider it infrastructure. Like with the roadways, we rarely challenge the changes to it. But this is failure of the imagination (or pure laziness). Wondering about the premise could give you a new frame of reference. So I asked on your behalf: Is the Internet a significant break from... Read more →

Philosophy as a Lens to Understand Money... and Yourself

“The philosopher's job is to be an interface between things that would not normally communicate with each other. We think about policies, strategies, business models, priorities: they are all open problems, where the philosopher has his perfect place.” Oxford University professor Luciano Floridi considers himself a digital philosopher. Digital communication has become a much greater part of our lives. And some of the best strategists I've worked with did use philosophy as a lens to make sense of things. His statement also bears with my own experience. For example, when I taught advanced digital marketing and communications to master students... Read more →

Is the Internet a Significant Break from the Past?

And if so, how should we think about what we do with it? Innovation is not a single thing, a eureka (Greek for I have found) moment. There are many factors that go into taking a discovery to making an impact. Bringing something new to the world means standing on the shoulders of giants across generations and working with many people. Rather, innovation is a process where you match the right kinds of questions and the right strategies or resolve. But we should not confuse the objectives with the issues we're actually ready to tackle. As it often happens when... Read more →

What if Ordinary People had Actual Power in Social Media Platform Decisions?

If it were up to me — and many other people who love using Twitter to find ideas — Twitter lists would have been a much better product. Better than hashtags, Twitter lists are a simple way to signal interest and focus. The image above in just a small snapshot of the lists other people put me on. List inclusion depends on the topics and themes you write about and the content you share. I use lists to group topics, industries, and interests to accelerate my research. When Twitter lists first came out, I described them as a new mainstream... Read more →