Conversation Agent
Valeria Maltoni
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The Force of Desire
Have you ever experienced one of those moments when everything around you seems to go crazy? You worked very hard on a project putting in insane hours, stretching yourself to the limit, getting all your proverbial ducks in a row and cannot wait for that magic moment, the…
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Our Love Affair with the Screen
I was reading The Sunday Inquirer and came across Karen Heller’s column titled The Tyranny of the Screen Reaches, and Ruins, the iPod. Heller writes “there are too many screens fighting for people’s attention, mostly people under age 25.” She calls what young people view on the…
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The Language of Connecting
A couple of years back I received a copy of Imagine, a small booklet written and designed by Synectics, Inc. to give people a bit of the feel for the work they do in fostering creativity and innovation in organizations. One of the ways in which we can…
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How Good do You Want to Be?
Paul Arden’s book It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want to Be has been defined as a pocket guide to making the most of yourself, the unthinkable thinkable and the impossible possible. Maybe a book cannot do all that by itself. It did spark…
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Blogs as Lovemarks
A recent report by Jupiter Research concludes that only a small percentage of consumers consider blogs and public forums to be trustworthy. When considering a purchase, they are twice as likely to trust information on a corporate Web site or on a professional review service. 20% of advertisers…
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Get Real: Surviving in a Reality-Show World
If you were looking for candidates to vote off the island ten years ago, Mark Burnett might have been on your short list. After distinguished service in the British military, he became a nanny, worked in an insurance office, and then sold t-shirts on the beach. But Mark…
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Word of Mouth vs. Viral Marketing
The September 4 issue of Brandweek magazine contained a small note on how Gary Spangler, who is responsible for word-of-mouth campaigns on behalf of DuPont, rescued the term "word-of-mouth" on Wikipedia. Spangler heard the free online encyclopedia was considering eliminating the term in favor of "viral marketing". He…
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When There is No One to Ask and Everyone is Watching
From 1992 to 1998, Franco Bernabe’ was the CEO of Eni, Italy’s large, energy-focused industrial group. During that time he transformed the organization from a debt-ridden, government-owned and politically controlled entity into a competitive and profitable publicly traded corporation focused on energy production. Along the way, he divested…
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The Knowing vs. Doing Gap
This past week, Guy Kawasaki posted a blog entry titled "Why Smart People do Dumb Things" where he proceeds to enumerate a number of reasons extracted from the homonymous book by Dr. Mortimer Feinberg and John J. Tarrant. Among them he lists hubris, arrogance, narcissism, unconscious need to…
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Welcome to the Conversation
In observing what is happening to the marketplace and the blurring of traditional business roles, it has become increasingly clear to me that what we have called the experience economy from the famous book by Joseph Pine and James Gilmore and the new conceptual age with Daniel Pink,…
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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