The Power of Effective Business Communication & Personal Branding!

As an add-on to our course on Business Communication, our Prof. T. Prasad invited Mr. Nikhil Kulkarni for a talk on "Business Communication in Consulting ".

Mr. Nikhil is an alumnus of NITIE and had a successful stint at KPMG. To follow his passions, he later founded DarwinTech, a holiday planning firm that provides a one-stop solution for all travel needs. It is based on B2B and B2C models of e-commerce.

Mr.Nikhil spoke at length about technical skills, presentation delivery, content management and branding.

In Nikhil's view, the Office Suite is vital to the success of any management professional. It enables them to present data meaningfully and thus assist decision making. Tools such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are well suited to specific applications.

Reports and proposals are best presented in Word or PowerPoint. If you wish to brief an executive, PowerPoint comes in handy. A DPR may be drafted invariably using MS Word.

Moving to the presentation skills, Nikhil gave us tips and tricks to make the presentation catchy and compact. He suggested a few ways, to begin with, the presentation. A relevant quote, question, statistic or a video may serve as a good starter. Further, the layout of the content has to be done carefully to keep the audience interested.  The foremost thing is context-setting. It gives a brief idea about what to expect from the slideshow. The main message given through the first few slides has to be supplemented by sub-messages. The sub-messages may take the form of ideas, data, facts or logic. Supporting information may be provided in the form of bullets, charts, etc.

To drive home the point of making effective presentations,  Nikhil elucidated what he calls "The Pyramid Principle ".

The principle actually is a baseline to an excellent presentation. It emphasizes the objective, the intended audience, context of the content and coverage of all relevant aspects. Breaking down the coverage of aspects further, Nikhil insists that we must present all the aspects in a "mutually exclusive,  collectively exhaustive " manner. This means that we must avoid repetition when we speak of various facets of a topic and yet cover all of them. This results in better coherence and tends to appeal to the viewers. Further, it reinforces the way human mind sorts ideas into logical groups.

The next important aspect of a management professional is personal branding.  Branding oneself allows you to achieve your growth without depending upon anyone. Personal branding is more than your CV and speaks volumes before you even speak about yourself. It gets your work done. There are various ways to brand yourself. One very commonly used method is having a presence on social networking sites like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or even blogging on Medium,  WordPress or blogger. With personal branding comes trust, credibility and authenticity.  It makes people feel comfortable to work with you.

In a nutshell, we learnt about how to present our content and personality effectively.  This interaction with Nikhil Kulkarni, therefore, was indeed useful and informative.

Kindly check Nikhil's brain-child here:

http://www.techdarwin.com/

BookMyTraveller: one of the product @techdarwin.com