Conversation Agent
Valeria Maltoni
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How Disinformation Became Part of the Current Narrative
Genuine two-way communication is not just dissemination. Information doesn't equal indoctrination. There's a line between getting attention and agitprop. Providing proof or evidence is not the same as the truth. Truth is a conclusion the other person gets to make. These were some of the principles I…
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3 Books to Make Sense of What Was, What Is, and What Could Be
Value and the good are synonyms in Aristotle's thought. You can see it play in 'beauty.' Beauty possesses a motive force and can be transferred to do the work of being, which is why art 'moves us.' Thus beauty is good. But this meaning has been lost to…
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How the Employer Brand Dies in Applicants Inboxes
Applicant experience is buyer experience in recruitment. Buyers are people who come to you once. Based on the experience, they may decide to walk away and never come back. Or, they could come back again and become customers. In some cases, they might tell everyone they know…
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Brands that don’t Need to Steal Energy to Survive, Thrive
I was reading an article about a study by Minneapolis agency SuperHuman about marketing and women above 40. How brands get it wrong. It was 2017, I forgot where they published about it. But I remember I seemed to agree 300 percent with the gap they observed…
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If I Ruled the World
Have you ever wondered what could be if you ruled the world? I have. And since there's no chance of that happening, I'm with Umberto Eco on supporting political empathy. There's so much we would accomplish if interests were not financialized so much. Along similar lines, you can…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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.”…
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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…
About
The mission of my work is to reframe how we value things (and people) to transform work and society.
I pursue it through narrative analysis and story design using conversation as a sense-making tool.
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