Today we had Mr Nikhil Kulkarni, a veteran with more than a decade experience in consulting and currently the founder of Darwin Travel Tech as our guest speaker in our business communication class.
Business communication in consulting
He talked on the importance of
communication in consulting. At the entry level about 80 per cent of your job
revolves around communication followed by building relationships at 15 per cent
and performing research at just 5 per cent. This shows the necessity of
building good communication skills to survive and prosper in a consulting job.
Next, he discussed that making proposals,
reports, executive briefing, detailed project report and work papers are the
different roles of a consultant and how Microsoft Office tools such as word,
power point and excel are extremely necessary to prepare them. We should learn
these tools during these 2 years of MBA and should be able to use them to our
advantage.
The pyramid principle, MECE and IDFL.
The pyramid principle and MECE are effective tools to structure our
content. The Pyramid Principle teaches that, Ideas at any
level in the pyramid must always be summaries of the ideas
grouped below them. Some important questions should be covered in our content.
These are
1)
What is the objective of my
document?
2)
Who is the audience?
3)
What is the context in which
the content will be consumed?
4)
Have I listed all aspects of
the problem?
MECE is a way of
segmenting information into sub-elements that are mutually exclusive and
collectively exhaustive. In other words, elements should
“exclude” each other, i.e. be distinct and should “exhaust” the relevant field,
i.e. contain everything that belongs to it.
The flow of information should follow a hierarchical structure to
organize our ideas and supporting evidence. It should cover key message
followed by supporting argument following principle of MECE. Our supporting
evidence should be structured using idea/data/logic/fact concept.
1)
Blogs- Blogs are an important means to portray our views on different
topics. He gave his own example that he
started writing blogs in college and now he has informative blogs on wide variety
of topics. He recommended wordpress as an effective medium for blogs. He further
emphasized on its importance by telling how it helped him progress in his career
or even gain new jobs just because people loved to read his blogs. He further
stated we can have our own style of writing blogs
2)
Twitter – He talked about Vindhya C who has 5000+ followers
on twitter. She is not a celebrity but an engineer just like us. She posts
informative tweets about product management which got her large number of
followers.
3)
Video Making – We can start making you tube videos about any random topic like observing
people on the street. Videos are the most effective way of communicating. They
are very useful in conveying our views and eventually we can get skilled on
video making. Bimal Karthik, the founder of Trell and an alumini
of NITIE a lifestyle video making app raised 11.4 million in funding stating
the importance of video making.
4)
Facebook and Instagram- Facebook and Instagram handles are must in today’s digital world
to reach out to a larger world. We should keep posting content in these medium
to build our personal brand.
It was a very useful and informative session and we learned important skills in business communication which would help us grow in our professional career.
👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
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