Guest Lecture: Communication in Consulting and Personal Branding  

On Tuesday, Aug 18, 2020, we had a guest lecture by Mr. Nikhil Kulkarni for our Business Communication class. The lecture was hosted by Prof. T Prasad alias Mandi Sir. Nikhil spoke on the finer aspects of Business Communication and how he had used it effectively in Consulting and Personal Brand Building. It was a very informative lecture on the practical aspects of communications. 

The lecture started with an introduction to Mr. Nikhil Kulkarni. He used to work at KPMG before quitting and starting his own travel website company. He shared with us about the pros and cons of consulting, how he used to spend 10+ days in a month traveling at client locations. He mentioned the consulting role has no end to it's learning curve.

His website is registered as tripdarwin.com and it focuses on the niche segment of holiday planning. It has recently been opened to the general public before it was catering only to the B2B clients. The website offers the integrated experience of planning a holiday, generating the itinerary and makes booking everything an easy experience.

Business Communication in Consulting

Then we discussed how to effectively communicate our ideas to our superiors, our teams, and our clients. He told us that 80% of the consultant’s work is based on communication. Research and Relationship account for only 5% and 15% of the whole job description.

He explained how the business proposals are presented using PowerPoints and Word documents. The reports are also done in that medium. But for executive briefing, presentations are more apt. For work papers, Excel sheets or Word is the right tool. So these Microsoft Office programs are our best friends for effective communication.

MECE

Nikhil introduced us with the jargon MECE: Mutually Exclusive and Collectively Exhaustive. It signifies that all the points we are using are relevant and don’t repeat themselves. This increases the impact of the report. Our points together should exhaustively cover the whole content. If we follow this approach in writing a report, we shall have a higher impact on the audience.

For effective communication, arguments should be individually supported by Ideas, Data, Facts, and Logic. Every point should be MECE and unique. In the end, we should use a strong summarizing statement. This approach will help us communicate our idea better to the audience.

An image speaks louder than 1000 words. Our slides should be focussed more on an image rather than having lots of text. Text usually bores the audience. He shared with us an image of MSD where his jersey number 7 was visible and he asked to recognize the personality.

This was a very interesting lecture that had very useful takeaways. I hope to use the content that I have gained in improving my communication style.