“Conversation on Value” is a podcast about reframing value in business and society. I’ve been working on the question of value for more than twenty years.
Trailer
“What is value?” is perhaps the most urgent, yet neglected, question of our time.
In the 4th Century BC Aristotle thought the Value Problem concerned the best or most productive use of a thing. Unlike today, he made no distinction between value in use and value in exchange.
Though it is thousands of years old, the Value Problem still matters
because it impacts directly the way we live our life, individually and collectively.
Valeria Maltoni is a strategist and linguist at Conversation Agent. Her Alma Mater, the University of Bologna, was founded in 1088 as a cooperative to co-create value in education.
In the conversation on value podcast series, Maltoni will explore the question of value in language and narrative, commerce and ethics, the internet and much more with professors, researchers, lawyers, and experts in communication, semiotics, and leadership. Together, we’ll engage in the question of what is the best use of a thing, which has been largely lost to history.
Value in Narrative: Christina Patterson, “How to Hit a Heart”
In an age when so much content, including media, is limp and lazy, when we’re appropriate, precise, and thoughtful about the stories we tell we create value.
Christina Patterson is the author of Outside, the Sky is Blue and The Art of Not Falling Apart. While she’s thinking about the next book, she’s building a coaching practice with a related podcast, The Art of Work. (Guests in the current series include former Twitter VP Bruce Daisley, bestselling writer and palliative care consultant, Kathryn Mannix, internationally renowned cellist Steven Isserlis, classicist and bestselling author Mary Beard and T S Eliot-prize-winning poet, Joelle Taylor.)
She’s also been doing her journalistic work, mostly as a literary critic for the Sunday Times and discussing politics and current affairs on the Sky News press preview and BBC Radio 2’s The Jeremy Vine Show.
You can find out more about Christina’s writing and journalism here, more about the coaching and podcast on The Art of Work. Sunday Times reviews here (Requires subscription).
Value in Language: Julie Sedivy, “Connecting with Emotion”
Julie Sedivy and Valeria talk about the interplay between language and emotion in creating identity, and the value of this connection. “We only realize the value of something after we lose it,” says Julie. There’s an “ebb and flow of language in the mind” with migration. Julie says, “languages are the vehicles of our lives. It’s the means through which we communicate our values, and so on.” Language provides cultural context. Preserving the body of work in ancient Greece wouldn’t have been possible without continuity in language. What are the collective cons(equences) of the loss of cultural texture and nuance?
“Learn a language, gain a soul” because we access different parts of ourselves in different languages. E.g., Personality tests (English and Spanish). Dutch study (English more competitive, Dutch more collaborative). Exposure to anglophone culture. Early childhood tighter emotional connection.
Julie Sedivy is a language scientist and a writer. She received a PhD in linguistics from the University of Rochester, where she conducted pioneering research in psycholinguistics, a field that lies at the intersection of psychology and linguistics.
She has taught linguistics and psychology at Brown University and the University of Calgary, and has authored dozens of scientific articles as well as a popular undergraduate textbook on psycholinguistics, Language in Mind.
She now devotes much of her time to writing for non-academic audiences, on language and other topics. Her most recent book, Memory Speaks, explores multilingualism, identity, and language loss. Her forthcoming book, slated for release in 2024, is a series of essays that chronicle the unfolding of language in a human life and its entanglement with experiences of time, love, and mortality.
Value in Use: Peter Tunjic, the solution to humanity’s value crisis
Organizing corporations around the concept of exchange value is making the planet unlivable. The purpose of Peter’s millennia challenge is to develop a lens capable of predicting the current crisis and offering a safer alternative foundation for corporations, corporate law and corporate governance. He calls it the search for Phi.
Peter Tunjic is an experienced lawyer and commercial law theorist based in Melbourne, Australia. His research interests intersect corporate law, theory of value and non equilibrium thermodynamics. In relating physics to corporate law, Peter supports his analysis and advice to clients with rigorous argument and reason. He also writes contracts. Find him at On Directorship.
Value in Communication: “a dance between clarity and surprise” with Nick Parker
Good communication conveys a message clearly. Surprise helps the message stick. But there’s a little bit more to it than that. In this episode of Conversation on Value, Nick and I talk about what it means to find your voice, explain things.
Nick Parker was once creative director at The Writer. Before that, he spent a decade as a writer, editor and non-ironic corduroy-wearer at The Oldie magazine. And waaay back, he was a cartoonist for Viz and a joke-writer for the radio.
A business is one of the greatest problem-solving tools humanity has ever invented. A brand is what happens when a business takes Dolly Parton’s advice to figure out who you are, then do it on purpose.
The best communication is always a dance between clarity and surprise. For years, Nick thought he got that quote from neuro-linguist Steven Pinker’s book, Sense of Style. He just checked. Turns out it was something he’d written in a margin. It sounded insightful coming from Pinker. “Sounds a bit pretentious coming from me.”
Nick still thinks of all writing is essentially joke-writing: focus people’s attention so they arrive at your punchline bang on time, with all the information they need for the lightbulb to go on, and for laughter and cheering.
‘Laughter is just the sound we make when all the truth arrives at once.’ Someone who is neither Nick nor Stephen Pinker said that.
Most good ideas are just two unrelated normal ideas, mashed together.
If nothing else, Nick tries to have lots of unrelated normal ideas.
