My MBA Journey: Business Communication 101

BUSINESS COMMUNICATION

Business communication is everywhere around us from hawkers outcries to Billboards on roads so we will try to understand basics of business communication and move on to personal branding.

History Of Communication

Human communication was revolutionized with the origin of speech approximately 500,000 BCE. Symbols were developed about 30,000 years ago. The imperfection of speech, which nonetheless allowed easier dissemination of ideas and eventually resulted in the creation of new forms of communications, improving both the range at which people could communicate and the longevity of the information. All of those inventions were based on the key concept of the symbol.

The oldest known symbols created for the purpose of communication were cave paintings, a form of rock art, dating to the Upper Paleolithic age. The oldest known cave painting is located within Chauvet cavet, dated to around 30,000 BC.

BUSINESS COMMUNICATION

Business communication is essentially using the media to communicate the vision, product portfolio and services to potential customers. Organisations do it through marketing, customer relations, advertising and many other ways.In a recent session in NITIE by our alumnus Nikhil Kulkarni, co-founder Darwin Travel Tech we were taught about how one can successfully communicate business solution through the Pyramid Principle which is the simplest way to structure a documentin three parts i.e. Introduction, Main Body and Conclusion. He emphasized on the need to find answers to four basic questions before structuring the document -

What is the objective?
Who is the audience?
What is the context in which content will be consumed?

He also mentioned his formula to make documents, presentations and solutions professional and attractive -

Visual Content .
The MECE concept that states that sub-parts of Business communication document should be mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive.

MECE (Mutually Exclusive Collectively Exhaustive)

PERSONAL BRANDING

Personal branding is something that attracts companies, colleagues and sub-ordinates or for the matter of fact any unknown will want to work with you. In these commodity times people too are brands and it is essential to have a brand that would attract people or organisations to work with you. In his session Nikhil Sir mentioned the importance of personal branding and how can one create a personal brand for themselves, he gave examples of very famous celebrities like Dhoni and even people working in the IT or Banking how had created a brand for themselves. Mr Nikhil himself is a well known brand in the consulting industry with eleven years of experience in consulting and he left as associate director from their to start his own entrepreneurial journey. He has a blog since 2004 and encouraged all of us to start something on the digital platform to have a footprint and if all works out even influence. He suggested following -

Start a Blog on medium (preferably)
Start a Youtube channel( Can be about anything)
Make a twitter account and post opinions.
Use social media platforms like facebook and instagram to create content and be visible.

So we have discovered that business communication is required not just for businesses to be successfull but even for individuals. I would like to thank Nikhil sir for the session and allowing us to use his content to have our own visibility, I have attached his blog, have a look if you haven't yet,