Consulting and Personal Branding

 Guest Lecture || Consulting Communication || Personal Branding || Mr. Nikhil Kulkarni

So, it was the 18th of August. Just a normal day like any other. I woke up at 08:35 am, after my alarm snoozed for the 10th or 15th time. Remembering I had a class at 09:00 am, I scurried through my tasks and breakfast and logged into my system at 09:00 am, to see that there were some technical glitches. Suddenly I remembered our Sir had mentioned regarding a guest lecture. I got my notes ready and waited eagerly for what was to come.

At around 09:30 am, came a dynamic young man, into the webinar. He was Mr. Nikhil Kulkarni, co-founder, and director of "Darwin Travel Tech" (www.techdarwin.com). He was a NITIE alumnus and a consultant in KPMG for 11 years.

During the session, we had quite good insights on:

1. How business communication works in Consulting.
2. How should one structure his/her content - The Pyramid Principle.
3. How one can make an impact on the minds of his/her audience.
4. Why personal branding is the best investment.

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:

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: Mutually Exclusive Collectively Exhausted

While considering the aspects, we should ensure that they are MECE. All aspects should be covered and should be independent of each other.

Other key values he shared were:

1. Empathy towards your targeted audience your customers helps grow a healthy business.
2. Create a Network then advertise yourself it would make you visible.
3. Proposals, reports, executive briefing, detailed project report and work papers they are prepared using Word, Excel, and Powerpoint be as natural with these tools as you can you're not selling your product you're selling an idea.
4. Use short videos photos info-graphics as a way to communicate sell your idea and sell yourself with the idea 
5. Organize your ideas your thought from broadening as you go down the chain with the most important aspect being told at the beginning followed by Why, How, What?

Lastly, Mr.Kulkarni emphasized on the importance of personal branding. Now, personal branding is becoming more and more important day by day. It is how you present yourself to the world and effective personal branding will differentiate you from the competition and allow you to build trust with prospective clients and employers. He also talked about the necessity of having blogs, Facebook page, Instagram page, Twitter, and YouTube Channel to build yourself as a brand and how one can make an impact through these platforms.

I would like to thank Professor T. Prasad for giving us opportunities to interact and learn from industry stalwarts. The amount of learning that one can get from experience is always unparalleled.