Saturday morning’s email brought two links to Theodore Zeldin. One, a quote sent around by one of our local knowledge cafe founders:



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. That’s the part that interests me. That’s where I find the excitement. It’s like a spark that two minds create. And what I really care about is what new conversational banquets one can create from those sparks.

Second, a link to a talk that Zeldin gave at the Tate Modern in London. This one, from David Gurteen, whose knowledge cafe in London was the model on which the local Boston cafe was founded. (David posted a note on my Ryze page pointing me to the artifacts from his recent knowledge management conference.)

Theodore Zeldin’s talk was a response to a photography exhibit at the Tate Modern. The first 20 minutes of this talk are all about relatedness and the future of work:



…relationships are the main activity of business and work

…Life is a search for other people… the world is about trying to find out who other people are.

…it is through interactions with other people that one learns what it is possible to be

My blog, and its title, derive from a number of sources, two of which are fundamental assertions that resonated strongly with me when I first heard them, over 10 years ago:

Work is conversation.

Speaking and listening are the only tools you have.

Timing is everything.