Seminar 10 Review

The seminar this week covered Business Planning and Storytelling.

According to me, storytelling is actually something everybody should care about and try to improve. It is very important for a human being to convey his thoughts and views to others as effectively as possible to be successful. The presentation on Storytelling covered how best to tell your 'story'. It is said that the human animal is a narrative animal and I feel it is true.

Story and storytelling are tools like any other - a pencil, a computer. An increasing number of professionals are discovering the power and applicability of story proficiency for business management, knowledge management, organizational development, coaching, sales, and software interface design. In large and small corporations, storytelling is not just for the marketing and legal departments anymore. (Source: MIT Media Lab)

"A big part of a CEO's job is to motivate people to reach certain goals. To do that, he or she must engage their emotions, and the key to their hearts is story."
-- Robert McKee, Harvard Business Review, June 2003

Storytelling can be used not only for communication purposes but also for effective leadership, changing organizational behavior, power and influence, public relations, and sales and marketing.

According to Steve Denning, author of the book "The Leader's Guide to Storytelling", "At a time when corporate survival often entails disruptive change, leadership is about moving and inspiring people often to do things that they are not by habit or by predisposition inclined to do: just giving people a reason simply does not work."

I feel a good storyteller can make people listen and agree to what he/she says gets people to listen and implement the ideas and suggestions.

For more resources on Storytelling visit: National Storytelling Network

BUSINESS PLANNING:

Business Planning is something else we discussed in the seminar. We discussed about the various types of small businesses including Limited Liability Partnerships or LLPs.

Definition of Small Business - A business which is independently owned and operated, with close control over operations and decisions held by the owners. Business equity is not publicly traded and business financing is personally guaranteed by the owners. The business will have less than twenty employees.

The only criteria different from micro business here is that a micro business consist of less than 10 employees.

We discussed about the LLPs which was interesting since for my Business Law module I had done a lot of case based questions regarding liabilities of companies. So it was interesting to touch up on that again and also understand what the reasoning behind forming such a partnership is from both perspectives, legal and the owners'.

I was happy to see some statistics on the success and failure of these small businesses. I was not sure about what percentage of the small businesses survives to actually reach the stage where they are able to generate enough revenue to achieve profit. The presentation also listed some of the factors why the businesses fail. I was surprised to see that the largest percentage of failures was due to incompetence. I had always thought that a business might fail largely due to insufficient funds and capital. This presentation was very informative regarding the state of small business and their lifecycle.