Conversation creates a new kind of network within organizations. Current networks are used for competitive advantage, but conversation is focused on encouraging people to realize their potential.
Interpretation
Conversation fosters connections that help individuals discover and harness their abilities.
The quote by Theodore Zeldin emphasizes the transformative power of conversation within organizations. While existing networks serve to create competitive advantages, the act of conversing encourages individuals to unlock their potential, fostering a culture of growth and collaboration rather than mere competition. This shift from traditional networking to conversational connections can lead to deeper insights and enhanced performance among team members.
In practice
In a team-building workshop, I shared this quote to highlight the importance of communication in collaboration.
Conversation is a meeting of minds with different memories and habits. When minds meet, they don't just exchange facts: they transform them, reshape them, draw different implications from them, engage in new trains of thought. Conversation doesn't just reshuffle the cards: it creates new cards.
We think of speaking as something we do naturally, without any effort. But like playing music, it requires attention and knowledge and practice.
So much of what passes for conversation today is degraded. It's either about one-upmanship, or dreary trivia. Even the cut and thrust of wit and bons mots is a form of bedazzlement designed to stop conversations dead rather than broaden them.
It is in the power of everybody, with a little courage, to hold out a hand to someone different, to listen, to attempt to increase, by even a tiny amount, the quantity of kindness and humanity in the world.
I think one of the most important changes of our time has been our attitude to fear. Every civilisation defends itself by keeping fears out and saying 'we protect you from fear'. But it also produces new fears and throughout history people have changed the kind of fears which have worried them.
However fascinating you may think you are, there is a limit to what you can know about yourself.
In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first. This in no sense, however, implies that great men are not needed. On the contrary, the first object of any good system must be that of developing first-class men; and under systematic management the best man rises to the top more certainly and more rapidly than ever before.
My dad was one who - he was nonpartisan, first of all. He learned to work with whatever administration was in office.
I want to tell you that if the Great Spirit had chosen anyone to be the chief of this country, it is myself.
To manage one must lead. To lead, one must understand the work that he and his people are responsible for
I think playing cricket taught me more about working in teams and leadership that has stayed with me throughout my career.
We want to support our troops because they didn't make the decision to go there... but I don't think it should be open-ended. We ought to have a benchmark where the administration has to come back and give us a report.
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