Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

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 →

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 →

Embodying Values in Business

Dame Anita Lucia Roddick founded The Body Shop out of a desire to make ends meet in 1976. Her husband had left for the Americas for two years to ride a horse from Buenos Aires to New York. You can still find some interviews she’s given online. Listening to her talk, she sounds like a sort of Dame MacGyver, someone who can use the tools she has at her disposal to make things happen. She could take you from traveling for work to starting the franchise to the rise of the World Fair Trade Organization in six and a half... Read more →

How do You Get to "Good Enough"?

It took Clare Trapasso nine months of scouring the market in three states, touring dozens of homes, losing multiple bidding wars, and rescinding another offer on a fixer-upper that would need more work than they could afford to put in, before she and her partner finally closed on a cute, renovated Cape Cod outside of New York City last year. Along the way, Trepasso, who is a writer for Realtor.com, learned a few things that no amount of writing about the housing market could teach. If you're on the hunt for a house, her article could be valuable to shortcut... Read more →

Open Innovation: What if Work Were Everyone's Business

How much value do you put in one breath? Consider that we can go three days without water, and up to twenty days without food. For breath, we're talking minutes. The greatest freediver can teach you techniques to breathe better. Relaxing helps: “Calmness. Stillness. Barely-there-ness. There are dreamlike contours to the plunge.” The limit of breath holding is dictated by your metabolic rate. It regulates how little oxygen and how much carbon dioxide you can tolerate in your body. Similarly, the limit of creating a safe space for holding innovation depends on the company where you're operating. Your culture regulates... Read more →

Incentives do Work: Some Lessons from Crowdfunding

How people make decisions is a topic of constant study and reflection. Alone and together. For example, I've wondered when do individuals make better decisions than teams? Do people do what they in their process? Or is the process rigged to back the decision with data post-hoc? I wrote an entire series of articles to zoom in and out of when and how people use information in marketing. Behavior is often automatic, and also cultural. Words have the power to persuade and close a sale, before anyone has reasoned on the details. When researchers analyzed 45,000 Kickstarter projects, they found... Read more →

The Connection Between Narrative and Culture

“Economics has re-discovered the power of folklore: the themes in world folktales are linked to current culture.” Professor Ethan Mollick shared a recent study that exemplified this core concept. Cultures with stories where tricksters are punished are trusting; stories where men dominate have more gender bias; stories of risk rewarded have more entrepreneurship. These are the findings of a working paper by Stelios Michalopoulos and Melanie Meng Xue. They found that those patterns hold across groups, countries, and second-generation immigrants. The myths at the origin of the collective imagination are at the root cause of success or failure. It makes... Read more →

Why we Need More of the Right Kind of Books

I love books. The ones I've read, and the ones I'd love to read. Reading is a form of freedom. Libraries and bookstores are some of my favorite places in the world. Growing up, we had a library of 5,000 books in the house—so much possibility. Right at a point in my life when I also had the time. Though there's always time for good books. Lately, I started reaching out to people who I think should write one. Because we seem to miss the books we could really use. Whenever I come across a substantive body of thought—usually in... Read more →

Can we Make Transformation Natural?

Ever since I can remember, I wanted to be a translator. From parent to sisters talk was my first interpreting work. Then it was from teenager to mother. Not just language. Turning ideas into things was a favorite. But also creating experiences. I've had several careers. After the jobs above. Simultaneous interpreter and translator for neurological development. That's where I picked up the strong foundation of what makes humans work... and what doesn't. Marketing, communications, strategy, creative, product in five industries all followed. With considerable overlap. Coaching and advising evolved from there. Transitions were much easier early on. Almost natural.... Read more →

Vendoring in Culture

I read a lot of other people's writing. I recommend it, especially in the form of good books. One of the unspoken rules of many writers is that you don't blackbox something if you don't need to. Writers quote authors—a dependency—for efficiency, not ignorance. In my case, you can assume I've read at least one of their works for context on their thought process. But in writing, as in thinking, you can also copy someone else's idea and modify it for a different purpose. The work you do to reframe a concept allows you to get a deeper understanding of... Read more →