I believe that conversation is a core business practice. And conversation is different than discussion. Very different!
Theodore Zeldin wrote the most beautiful book about conversation: Conversation – How Talk Can Change Our Lives.
Here are some of my favorite Zeldin statements…direct quotations from his lovely book.
- 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.
- Having one’s ideas challenged and transmuted by verbal intercourse makes one aware how much one owes to others, how much a partner can contribute to one’s intellectual, moral and emotional development, thought one remains a separate, unique person.
- Conversation, like families, dies when it is inbred. Or when your guests have had more or less the same experience as yourself.
- Conversation has to explore new territory to become an adventure.