Let’s assume that you’re supremely effective at your core workplace skill – and that you’ve also got a great feel for business.
And supposing that – as a result of your talents and hard work – you come up with a fabulous new business idea!
It could be inventing an amazing new product; planning a dazzling new range of services; or discovering a more efficient way of working within your business.
This is all potentially admirable, BUT…
…your success in getting your fabulous idea to catch on will ultimately depend on you achieving one extra thing.
It’s the essential need for you and your team to communicate about your fabulous idea brilliantly!
IF YOU CAN’T COMMUNICATE IT BRILLIANTLY, WILL IT REALLY HAPPEN???
If you’re to persuade enough of the right people to go with your plans, you’ll need to convey your idea to a range of audiences.
This is likely to include potential buyers, investors, board members, suppliers, journalists… as well as your own work colleagues.
Because if you can’t effectively explain the benefits of your fabulous idea to the people you need to get on board with it, then it’s going to be pretty difficult – even impossible – to get your plan off the ground.
And that’s still true even if you have access to the best Artificial Intelligence services in the world to help you!
This is because you’ll still need to rely on your own communication skills to confidently and professionally present your proposals to target audience members – and stand up to the toughest questions they can throw at you!
This is where the new Michael Dodd Communications master class can help you and your team.
“Brilliant Business Communication” is designed to enable participants to present something new at an enhanced level – and enable you to shine out in giving great answers to whatever tough and tricky questions come your way.
Early on in this communications-boosting master class, participants get the opportunity have a go at presenting something that’s going to be new to their target audiences.
And they’re immediately grilled about anything that could possibly go wrong – by myself and fellow participants in the session who will be asking mock questions on behalf of those target audiences.
Performances are analysed and scored – and may even be recorded and played back by a video operator to allow for greater scrutiny.
And participants are critiqued – and given techniques and formulae – to help them get across their ideas EVEN better.
This helps pave the way for them to become more impressive still when they need to do it for real.
The techniques and formulae help participants to enhance their content, their structure and their performance style – and to demonstrate this at an ever-higher level as the master class proceeds!
PREPARATIONS TO HELP YOU BOUNCE BACK FROM SETBACKS
“Brilliant Business Communication” can be run in half-day experiential learning sessions for Business Leaders’ Groups.
And for companies, sessions can be run over a full day – or even two days – to give participants enough practice and critiques to take their communication game to new heights.
When time permits, there can even be an extra part of the session towards the end on how to communicate more effectively under pressure IF something unexpectedly goes wrong with your fabulous idea while it’s being turned reality.
This is to help you and team members in the session learn to practise exhibiting grace under pressure as you strive to take your target audiences with you as you get your plans back on track.
Participants of “Brilliant Business Communication” come away knowing how to best plan, prepare and practise their communication – and to be able to use their enhanced skills every time they need to convey something new and to be tested out about it.
“Brilliant Business Communication” has just been run with the business leaders’ group, The Leadership Academy.
The group chairman of The Leadership Academy, Simon Lester, founded the organisation after years of running successful business leaders’ groups with the Academy for Chief Executives.
This is what Simon Lester said after “Brilliant Business Communication” was run with his members in Hatfield, just north of London.
WATCH HOW THE BIG PLAYERS DO IT!
When bigger companies have something new to reveal these days, those responsible for launching their grand new ideas often need to be able to announce it while talking to camera and making their recordings available around the world.
So even though those who appear on screen may be standing in an exotic location addressing thousands of viewers – or even millions – they need to able to talk straight to the camera lens as if they’re speaking to every watcher as an individual.
They need to talk calmly, clearly and confidently.
AND they need to embody the vital E’s of personal communication – Energy, Enthusiasm and Excitement.
This is a skill that, with guidance and practice, can be built over time.
One company that’s just managed to do this fairly impressively is Microsoft when launching its latest offerings in the field of Artificial Intelligence.
And even though the Microsoft team may have used their AI to help them work out what they needed to say, their on-camera performers still had to… well, perform.
And perform they did!
Here’s a link to their team presentation – billed as a special on-screen event – featuring the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, at the start.
The whole video runs for a bit over half an hour.
But you only need to watch the first few minutes at the start to appreciate the energy, enthusiasm and excitement which Satya Nadella projects.
One particular impressive bit to look out for is where he uses a beautifully-crafted line – one that’s so good that I suspect it took a real human, rather than Artificial Intelligence, to produce!
Listen for where he insightfully says:
“You could say we’ve been using Artificial Intelligence on auto-pilot. And now with this next generation of AI, we’re moving it from auto-pilot to co-pilot!”
So how did the Microsoft presentation go down with those technology experts and enthusiasts who were the main target audience?
I sought the view from one such target audience member, Jamie Claret, who is the director and owner of “Autonomate” – the company which seeks to make business automation simple.
I met Jamie Claret while running a recent session on “Give Great Answers To Tough Questions” that I ran at Marble Arch in London for ABLE – the Academy for Business Leaders & Entrepreneurs.
Jamie tells me the Microsoft launch was more impressive for him than the Google one – largely because its opening presenter was way more captivating.
“Essentially they were presenting very similar technologies that do much the same thing,” he says.
“But isn’t it fascinating though how the more ‘human’ presenter, in the end, won over the humans, with their new ‘artificial’ human technology.”
I agree with Jamie Claret that Google’s opening presenter comes across as “stiff and robotic”.
Nonetheless Google’s presentation is full of great information on Artificial Intelligence developments.
So it’s well worth watching some or all of it, if you’d like to check it out here:
“BRILLIANT BUSINESS COMMUNICATION” – FOR COMPANIES OF ALL SIZES
I’m happy to assert that “Brilliant Business Communication” master classes would help both Microsoft and Google to get their presenters to higher levels for their next announcement.
And while the Google performers, based on these video performances, could certainly do with more help, the even better presenters of Microsoft would benefit in one particular way.
Despite their talents, as often happens in the techy world, even Microsoft’s superior presenters collectively use too many fancy words.
A number of these terms could easily leave some of their audience members occasionally puzzled.
Through “Brilliant Business Communication” they would be encouraged to use simpler and more easily understandable terms than “symbiosis”, “graphic user interface”, “synthesiser” and “uplevelling”.
By testing out their proposed wordings more rigorously in front of their colleagues in the fun, constructively critical atmosphere of a “Brilliant Business Communication” session, they would be able to help each other get their audiences to more readily understand everything they’re saying.
For organisations of all sizes, “Brilliant Business Communication” enables you to utilise the presence of your colleagues in the room as a kind of focus group – to identify anything which should be made clearer, simpler and easier for your target audiences to absorb.
If Microsoft presenters tried “Brilliant Business Communication”, then its team members might even come to realise that the session would help them improve what they now, rather bafflingly, call their “natural language interface”.
My aspiration for Microsoft team members by the end of a communication master class would be for them to express this and other concepts in a more easy-to-understand manner!
For your organisation – whatever human or Artificial Intelligence you rely on – if you want to find out about arranging “Brilliant Business Communication” for your team, please reply to this ezine and suggest any times that work for you for a call!
It will be magnificent to have a “natural language interface” call – or what you and I might call a telephone, Zoom or Teams conversation – in ways that both of us will benefit from, understand and enjoy!!!