Guest Lecture | Business Communication

 

Guest Lecture by Mr. Nikhil Kulkarni

Hey Guys !

Today, we had a guest lecture by Mr Nikhil, Alumnus of NITIE. Prof T.Prasad invited him and asked him to give a lecture on Business Communication. He spoke on the aspects of Business Communication and how he used it effectively in Consulting and Personal Brand Building. 

The lecture started Mr Nikhil Kulkarni introducing himself. He used to work at KPMG before quitting and starting his own travel website company, Darwin Tech. The address of the website is http://www.techdarwin.com/ and it focuses on the segment of holiday planning. Initially it was catering only to the B2B clients but recently it has started operating in the B2C segment as well. The website user-friendly experience of planning a holiday, generating the itinerary and makes booking everything an easy experience.

Business Communication and Consulting

The topics began with the discussion on what are the requirements to be a consultant .

The job of consultant is divided majorly in three areas viz 80% communication, 15% job description and 5% research. He went on to explain how the business proposals are presented using Power Points and MS-Word. For executive briefing, presentations are more appropriate. For work papers, Excel sheets and Word are the best tools. These Microsoft Office tools are our best friends for effective communication in consulting and one should be very comfortable in using these. By comfortable, he meant , that one should know all the types of shortcuts and formulae used in MS-Excel, so that this tool becomes handy.

He also mentioned about the usage of hierarchical structure to organise our ideas and supporting evidence. He advised us to follow the IDFL and MECE techniques.

The Pyramid Principle

We should follow the pyramid principle to design the content. We should know the objective, audience, context in which the content is consumed, and should be able to cover all aspects of the problem. This is done by MECE (Mutually Exclusive and Collectively Exhaustive) which means all content should be independent of each other and all points should be duly addressed.

Personal Branding

The discussion then moved on to personal branding. He discussed how number 7 became a personal brand for M.S. Dhoni. He gave his own life examples on how personal branding helped him in his job. He has been writing blogs from 2004 and because of that how he got many opportunities.

He emphasized that in this era one must have blog, facebook or twitter account or a YouTube channel. Having a YouTube channel is far more influential, however, as compared to the other three! He gave the example of a Product Manager who is having 5000 followers on twitter and all the followers were people related to her work. 

Because of writing blogs he got connected and networked with many people whom he didn't know personally.

Mr. Kulkarni ended the lecture with example of Bimal Kartheek the founder of Trell and an alumnus of NITIE was able to raise $11.4 million.

Overall it was an interesting lecture and I hope to use the knowledge which I have gained by it in improving my business communication.

#business_communication #Prasad_sir #NITIE