Guest Lecture by Mr. Nikhil Kulkarni

Today, we had a guest session by our alum Mr. Nikhil Kulkarni for Business Communication. He worked as a consultant for KPMG for 11 years after which he founded DarwinTech in 2016.  He spoke about how communication is important in the business world, techniques for representing data as well the importance of creating a personal brand.

Initially he began with mentioning how the tools like Word, PPT, Excel shall remain our best friends. We need to decide which one to use for best representation of our idea. For e.g., business proposals and reports are presented using Power Points and Word document. But for executive briefing, presentations are more apt. For work papers, Excel sheets or Word are the right tools.

The Pyramid Principle

The Pyramid Principle advocates that “ideas in writing should always form a pyramid under a single thought”. We need to structure our content according to this thought. While doing so, we should keep the following questions in mind-

What is the objective of my document?
Who is the audience?
What is the context in which this content will be consumed?
Have I listed all aspects of the problem?

IDLF

We should organize our communication as per - Idea, Data, Facts and Logic.

MECE

While considering the aspects, we should ensure that they are MECE (Mutually Exclusive and collectively exhaustive). All aspects should be covered & be independent of each other. 

The above principles can be followed when making a poster or video as well. A hierarchical structure should be followed-

Making an Impact

It is important to have the right mix of impact & content in our presentation. For higher impact, we can begin with a startling statistic or image, a relevant quote, a video, a question, or an activity. We can present impactful ideas with an Image as people do not remember too many ideas given in a bunch.

Creating a Personal Brand

A person's brand is an important part of their career. It can help them to excel, get more people to know them, builds credibility & makes people comfortable to work with you as they know your authenticity.

A personal brand can be built by having a blog, YouTube Channel, Twitter or Instagram/Facebook.

It was an enlightening session with useful takeaways which I hope to use in my communication.