Market & Competitive Intelligence I TWB_
27 Dec

Market Intelligence for Startups 101

By TWB_ In Leadership, Product Strategy, Strategic Marketing /   No Comments

Market intelligence can be the difference between success & failure of a startup. Market intelligence is mission critical in that it enables you to understand your competitors, customers, and other business environment factors. Most entrepreneurs do not fully appreciate the importance of market intelligence or approach it as a strategic business function though. 

For the most part, entrepreneurs think Market Intelligence is what large companies with their big desks of people churning numbers from a variety of sources including paid reports and open sources. A lot of startups, therefore, rely on gut feel and seat of the pants driving and the VC inputs – to shape and design their products, map out competition and gauge the response of the market they wish to disrupt. But it is not, and it should not be the exclusive preserve of large tech companies.

What does Market Intelligence answer for a startup?

Market intelligence is a good start point to gather evidence for the assumptions of your business. Evidence comes in the form of both qualitative and quantitative information, collected from primary and secondary research that mitigates risk and guides investment. This doesn’t occur only in large companies with a large budget. As an entrepreneur, your investment decisions are even more critical for your success because they may be based on critical cash flows.

What differentiates the custom Market Intelligence TWB_ provides? We focus on creating ‘actionable insights’ married to your strategy rather than more data on your desk.

Market Intelligence can help identify opportunities and monitor market threats. You can create a feedback loop of learning and action involving customers, competition and your marketing action. You can lower the risk of new products or services that you plan to introduce.  Some of what you can answer is,

  • Where, how and who are you going to sell to? That includes geography, pricing models etc.
  • What kind of business models exists? What is the size of each?
  • What are your potential and addressable market? What do you substitute and solve?
  • Are you really disruptive? What are you replacing?
  • Who are your direct competitors? Do they have a diversified portfolio? What is your competitive advantage?
  • How are you going to position yourself? How will you move with market plays
  • Do you compare product/technology claims?
  • What are your weaknesses and strengths in capabilities, USP’s, value & quality, financials, cashflow, people?
  • What is the regulatory environment?

TWB_ Market Intelligence synthesis

What is special about TWB_?

In one word ‘insights’ rather than more data. TWB_ does not just produce data points, rather,

  • Synthesizes research findings & develop insights
  • Uses a perceptual map to build your brand story
  • Defines market segmentation and explain its benefits
  • Conjoint analysis to compute the relative importance of product features
  • Compare various brands and attributes using a perceptual map
  • and lastly, bring a full portfolio of strategic branding and marketing content to help execute your plan

Market intelligence is critical and core process and TWB_ is the partner to produce reliable market intelligence that you factor into your strategic decision making. Market intelligence is an essential tool for viewing the marketplace and making investment decisions and TWB_ has been doing that for the largest telecommunication, life sciences, semiconductor and others for years. It is from that experience we know that it does not have to be a captive function, nor does it have to be standard off the shelf reports. Market Intelligence can be custom, agile, incremental to your needs and focused on actionables rather than data given your positioning and growth trajectory.

Rakesh Shukla, Chief Executive & Founder, TWB_ I The Agency for Technology Brands I www.twb.in

Rakesh Shukla, TWB_ CEO

Tech Entrepreneur, TEDx speaker & Philanthropist, Rakesh Shukla is a BTech-MBA & CEO of the world leader in communications for technology businesses with a worldwide Fortune 500 customer base. Rakesh is a speaker on Leadership, Strategic Marketing, Strategic Communications, creating world-class bootstrapped Startups & resurgence in business. He lives with 800 rescued dogs, has no work-life balance and will not have it any other way! Rakesh has been featured in 100+ interviews on the BBC, CNN, Al-Jazeera, CNN-IBN, NDTV, India’s national dailies etc.

Are you wanting to have real Market Intelligence to help make decisions?

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Convert SMEs to Brand Ambassadors
30 Aug

How do you make your SMEs your Brand Ambassadors?

By TWB_ In Corporate Training, Strategic Marketing /   No Comments

Transition your tech savvy but media-shy SMEs into your brand ambassadors & industry stalwarts.

In the words of Peter Drucker ‘no matter what other roles you have in a company, you always have a sales role’.

Pretty much any company out there wants to engage more effectively with its stakeholders – internal and external  -customers included. In an increasingly engaged world with the amount of information that is available to your customers from your competition – how do you stand out? Is it a struggle to find people within the company that will engage for you? Are you struggling with this ball falling between marketing, sales, product management and other functions?

What if your SMEs were the best Authors & Presenters?

They are the ones who live with it, create it, troubleshoot it. But they also articulate it the least, and perhaps the least well because that has never been an expectation. What if the same SMEs wrote world-class content and were suave presenters?

It is NOT that difficult to help change your SME’s into confident communicators across mediums such as public speaking, presentations, and meetings, e-mails, or authoring high-quality papers and reports. And publishing and engaging with PR, Media and the industry.

How does TWB_ help make this transition?

TWB broadly provides two kinds of interventions:

  • A range of corporate trainings that allow for SMEs to write & present technical ideas in the form of content and language that is suitable for business audiences. This ranges from research papers, white papers, blog posts, op-ed pieces etc. They also learn to engage in inclusive conversations across these interactions.
  • A range of authoring services where we research and produce most of the technically tough content. These services support a range of professionals from SMEs to CEO’s. All are meant to articulate your position and proposition effectively.

Get TWB_ to make this transition. Your business will never be the same again because the people who understand your tech the best will now articulate it the best as well. It has a direct revenue impact.

Looking for a Strategic Marketing partner to create market wins?

  • TWB_ is the world leader in creating & publishing ‘deep content’ – that is Whitepapers, Position papers, and tech evangelism;  ‘engaging content’ – that is blogs, social media posts, explainer videos etc (1-2 minute); and training on how to. TWB_ is the leader in communicating technology. Any Technology. Any audience. Any platform.
  • Strategic Marketing, Branding & Positioning from TWB_ helps Fortune500 and startups win in the marketplace. Call  TWB_ Bangalore 96860 59020 | Houston (832)689-6456 | Tel Aviv +972.544.603.612 or mail shift@twb.in
  • Get more TWB_ insights on the TWB_ Blog | LinkedIn | Medium  | SlideShare
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Purpose and Meaning in Work I Rakesh Shukla, Chief Executive and Founder, TWB_
02 Jan

Finding Purpose and Meaning in Work: Growth and Transformation in the Leadership

By TWB_ In Communication, Corporate Training, Leadership /  7 No Comments

Dreading work is common. That’s why weekends were invented. Ah, it’s the weekend! Oh, it’s Monday!! Or you have a new assignment or a new boss or a restructuring is going on or maybe you’re simply bored in your role. And you ask yourself the question: Why am I doing this? Does my work have any meaning?

The quest for “meaning at work” impacts every job productivity and retention metric. Consider this:

  • A survey of 12,000 employees across companies and industries found 50% lacked meaning and significance at work (see The Energy Project).
  • Employees who derive meaning from their work are 3 times as likely to stay with their organizations, have 1.7 times higher job satisfaction and 1.4 times more engagement with the company.
  • “Meaning at Work” impacts longevity and productivity positively more than other ‘job satisfiers’ including:
    • Learning and growth
    • Connection to a company’s mission, and
    • Work-life balance!

So what can companies do to make their employees feel that their work has meaning? The short-term answer seems to be — making employees feel happy. Terms of employment, lavish cafeterias are all answers to that question — make employees happy. However, this ‘happiness’ is temporary. The other is to make jobs more creative, less monotonous and facilitate a sense of meaning with a career path. But they are still answers to different questions. A more significant one is to give the job meaning and purpose. So what then in meaningful work? 

What is the meaning of “meaning”?

Happiness isn’t the only ingredient to a life well-lived. Sometimes it’s not even a criteria. On the other hand ‘meaning’ is what causes people to go into unknown territories, motivates to do things out of the ordinary and causes personal growth and long-term satisfaction.

The trick is there is no one meaning of “meaning”. While it is important for each of us, it is also different for each of us. In the corporate context, one way to define meaning is through its negation: while companies are rarely good at finding “meaning” poor leadership is connected to a loss of meaning very quickly! There is a lot of research which shows meaning at work can be enhanced if employees have an opportunity to realistically reflect on their work & their contribution in the company and their respective lives. A few steps that are known to enhance this are (a) a culture of ethics (b) keeping high moral standards (c) executing on social responsibility that employees can support.

 

What can management do to give meaning to work?

The following steps allow management to engage with employees in a way that they find work life more meaningful:

  1. Discuss the meaning of the organization & their contribution to it: When employees understand the purpose of the organization and the positive impact it has on business and communities it allows them to be a part of something meaningful. This works best when employees have a clear view of the company’s goals, values and vision and plans for the future. Management should explain how every role impacts the greater organization. When employees see how their work contributes to that big picture it enhances their sense of meaning and purpose.
  2. Culture and community: Management should help their employees feel connected to communities or other employees that are impacted by the company’s products or services, so they understand clearly who it is that they are helping.
  3. Create a purpose: What is the difference between these 2 mission statements (a)“To be the most successful computer company in the world” and (b) “To be the most successful computer company for the world”? They point to a major meaning trap. When you say ‘for’, meaning comes from the impact of our work on others. People aren’t inspired by what they do, they are when they know they matter to others.

 

As an employee what can you do to give your work meaning?

The first thing to remember is that purpose is built, not found. Working with a sense of purpose requires thoughtfulness and practice. Here are some things you can do to find meaning at work:

  1. Become conscious that other people matter: If you have meaningful relationships at work you will find more meaning at work. A Gallup study found that the most engaged workers report having a best friend at work. Those reporting higher meaning are not necessarily those who are doing more, but those who have more meaningful relationships.
  2. Build social experiences: Purpose can be found in the simple things that connect colleagues. Sincerely asking a colleague how they are because you are genuinely interested not because it is small talk, will give meaning to both of you!
  3. Find what fuels you: ‘Meaning’ is not a vague idea it is tangible and you must look for it for yourself. If you value contribution find out how you can contribute to a group, or a customer or a community. If you value humour do you make colleagues, and customers smile?
  4. Don’t invest everything at work: Work gives meaning your life but it is only 1 of 4 parts that do —  faith, family, and community are the others. Life’s’ portfolio is a balance between these 4 things — faith in something bigger than each of us, your family that you nurture, your community that you impact, and success through meaningful work that creates value. Learn to focus on each in turn.
  5. Write a personal statement: One way to create more meaning is to define your purpose by making a personal declaration of purpose. It is a simple, succinct, jargon-free, and expressive. A statement about how you decide to live each and every day. For instance “I’ll always give my children the best opportunities they need”. Just stating it gives your life purpose even though nothing else in your job has changed. Now you know it has mean because it drives a purpose.

Purpose isn’t magic. It is something we must create. The fact is most of us don’t work for fun. For the most part, we work to earn money and to pay bills. Work in itself is a meaningful act of service — parents often work hard for their children, some work to support ageing parents. Focussing on what brings meaning to them will create meaning in your own life. With the right approach all jobs are meaningful.

 

Rakesh Shukla, Chief Executive & Founder, TWB_ I The Agency for Technology Brands I www.twb.in

Rakesh Shukla, TWB_

Entrepreneur, TEDx speaker, Philanthropist, Rakesh Shukla is a 1996 MBA graduate and 1993 BTech. Rakesh Shukla is the Founder & CEO of TWB_ which is the partner for technology & business content for Fortune 500 leaders worldwide. A motivational speaker he speaks on creating success from professional and personal failure. He divides time between his 2 homes in Bangalore and is called the ‘dog-father’ for being papa to the 750 rescued dogs that live with him at the VOSD Dog Sanctuary. Rakesh has featured in 100+ interviews on the BBC, CNN, Al-Jazeera, CNN-IBN, NDTV, India’s national dailies, and at TEDx talks.

 

 

Are you looking to create teams and employees with purpose?

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Technology Manager in Leadership Roles - by Rakesh Shukla, Chief Executive and Founder, TWB_
01 Jan

Moving Technical Managers to Management Roles: Leadership Transformations by TWB_

By TWB_ In Communication, Corporate Training, Leadership /  9 No Comments

Technical Managers moving into Management roles is a script that plays out every day in large tech companies. Managers with the best technical expertise and ability to reach performance goals consistently are the first consideration for senior management roles. It is clearly an expectation from managers that they are promoted to management, the management thinks it is great because it represents continuity and that deep understanding of technologies, products and systems. Until it hits everyone.

The new management candidate gets increasingly frustrated because they spend little time using their technical skills and instead on  “people problems,” navigating office politics, and coordinating.  Such a transition hits hard because there is a no clear fit of existing skills to new professional demands and there is no quick way to acquire them. In this article, we’ll explore how the HR/ Management of the company, the Tech-manager can make the transition. This transition can occur from early to mid-career roles, and again from mid-career to management. Here’s what each of the participants in this situation should need to consider to get Technical Managers to move into Management roles:

The HR/ Management checklist to promoting Technical/ Functional Managers

Making this transition to Mangement roles gets harder as the candidate gains years and experience — so the first thing to consider is transitions that come earlier in career say in the middle management level.  To begin with, how do you determine that functional/technical manager is a good candidate for a management role? To begin with they should have demonstrated these skills:

 

  1. Great Communication & People skills: (S)He has strong great writing, oratorial and presentation skills as well as people skills.
  2. Willingness to suspend ego gratification:  to concentrate on helping others succeed: Management is about ensuring success at an organisational level and is not about pursuing personal success or fulfilment as much as it is one’s colleagues and co-workers.
  3. Strong ‘hard skills’: They need to not only have great organizational, project management, and budgeting skills management requires being able to task-switch among them. It also requires overall inputs into detailed deliverables, and to manage — people, time, technology and money — in getting things done.
  4. Strong strategic thinking bias: They need to have a deep understanding of how the technology works to help businesses and organizations meet their goals and objectives. This requires an understanding of the risks and rewards that technology presents, and how to produce the best returns on customers’ investments and activities.
  5. Ability to manage communications in both directions: Success depends on understanding the needs of those above and below them in the organizational chart. Stakeholders are on both sides with management the incumbent has to communicate to both sets carrying expectations, instructions but most of corporate goals and actions to produce the most positive outcomes possible.

The Technical/ Functional Managers checklist to Management position

If you are a technical or functional manager moving into a management position you need to prepare yourself these 2 fundamental shifts:

  1. The first is your mindset has to change — Your technical knowledge is only limited help in your new management role as you now have to focus on the skills and successes that involves multiple functions and teams.
  2. The second is that your identity in the company will change –Being a superstar in your functional role will not save you from starting at the beginning again, and you need to be prepared for this “identity demotion.”

Here are some steps you can take to make your transition into a management role smooth

  1. Solving Strategic Problems: You need to translate problem-solving into a management context. Problems will require multiple functions within the company and other industry players etc to solve. Reading on cutting-edge business thinking can allow you to think & engage on a broader front.
  2. Build a cross-functional understanding: Technical Managers frequently have a narrow worldview. Unless you understand and leverage the marketers, sales, operations and and others, you will struggle to move beyond your role as a technical manager.
  3. Find a mentor — Look for someone in your organization who has succeeded in a management role coming from a functional role. A mentor can help you avoid some of the mistakes that they made and help get across to the right people within the organization critical for your success.
  4. Stay away from technical work– Resist the temptation to get involved with technical projects that aren’t your responsibility.
  5. Meet with your reports and their teams —  Meeting them allows you to find out what interests and motivates them, and they have the professional environment necessary to be successful in their role. It also allows you to find out what your team expects from you.
  6. Be a good communicator —  You need to learn how to write, learning how to speak and learn how to behave as ‘management’. Emails need to be crafted with care and sensitivity. Communication needs to demonstrate your intelligence, knowledge and thoughtfulness.
  7. Dress up: Your colleagues, the industry and ecosystem you inhabit expects it. Always dress the part for the position.

Technical & functional managers from IT, finance, sales, or marketing are promoted to management because they know their job well. The problem is that they have little management experience and most organizations offer very little management assistance.  In a management role instead of focussing on macro influences, strategic issues, and “people aspect” of their new role, they continue to stay in their comfort zone — their own projects and technical skills. It is important for the organization to focus on how to make the transition smooth so the organization benefits from the deep functional understanding that the incumbent brings as well as fresh ideas and thinking.

 

Rakesh Shukla, Chief Executive & Founder, TWB_ I The Agency for Technology Brands I www.twb.in

Rakesh Shukla, TWB_

Entrepreneur, TEDx speaker, Philanthropist, Rakesh Shukla is a 1996 MBA graduate and 1993 BTech. Rakesh Shukla is the Founder & CEO of TWB_ which is the partner for technology & business content for Fortune 500 leaders worldwide. A motivational speaker he speaks on creating success from professional and personal failure. He divides time between his 2 homes in Bangalore and is called the ‘dog-father’ for being papa to the 750 rescued dogs that live with him at the VOSD Dog Sanctuary. Rakesh has featured in 100+ interviews on the BBC, CNN, Al-Jazeera, CNN-IBN, NDTV, India’s national dailies, and at TEDx talks.

 

 

Are you looking to leverage technical managers transition to management?

 

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7 Steps to Creating a Powerful Technology Brand - Branding for Technology Branding - by Rakesh Shukla, Chief Executive and Founder, TWB_
30 Dec

7 steps for creating a powerful technology brand: Branding for Technology (Part 3 of 5) by Rakesh Shukla

By TWB_ In Communication, Corporate Training, Leadership, Product Strategy, Strategic Marketing /  5 No Comments

Discussing branding for technology, we’ve seen earlier what makes a brand — the idea of brand promise and lessons from FMCG branding for technology branding. In this article, we elaborate on brand concepts and suggest some specific steps senior managers can take to move their companies from a product-centric to a promise-centric, brand-driven business.

Let’s consider how the buyers and sellers of technology participate in the sales cycle and perceive branding,

From a tech buyers perspective: When B2B consumers of technology especially information technology weigh the merits of a vendor’s bid, they weigh not just how well the vendor’s products and services complement their own business and technological environment but also how the purchase decision looks to others. They are just as concerned with the image of the product as they are with the technical merits. Therefore while it is meant to be a rational decision that maximizes value, it is based on objective or subjective data. That is where a technology brand comes in.

From a tech marketers perspective: Conversely managers in high-tech businesses find brand management concepts interesting but see no merit in moving from a product-centric to a brand-centric model. The common refrain is “it doesn’t apply here”. This argument is based on what they believe to be unique characteristics of high-tech products and markets, mainly fast-changing technology and high levels of uncertainty.

As we’ve seen in the previous 2 chapters it is precisely this expectation gap that a technology brand solves. Indeed when things change quickly, buyers face great uncertainty and they want to deal with a company they perceive has a vision of their needs.

Challenges in high-tech branding are the same as others businesses in formulating distinctive and credible promises of value. However, in high-tech markets, offering a distinctive value proposition is especially difficult since competitors match one another’s clearly defined performance characteristics. There isn’t a great deal of trust between customers and companies in high-tech markets simply because there are many and frequent new entrants, and most have not had the time or the wisdom to build a promise of value that goes beyond price-performance.

For technology branding in the first place it important that before defining a brand for the company to define where it is and where it wants to go. In the first instance: what’s the brand promise? Google stands for discovery. Apple stands for quality and innovation. What’s yours? Aspiration? Trust? What should the customer feel each time they think about the company or use the product. This emotion is what needs to be built into the brand.

In the second place, the process involved in the development of a branding strategy requires us to review the purpose of the company, its reason to be. “Why we do what we do” is much more important than “what we do” and “how we do it”. What do customers, prospects, partners, investors, reporters, analysts, even competitors think? Bridging the gap between the two with messaging, positioning, and a visual language is the branding.

7 steps to creating a powerful technology brand

Price – Performance in branding

“Price” and “performance,” for example, may mean different things to different people. Does price mean initial cost or life cycle cost? Does performance mean microprocessor speed, the speed of delivery of services, the product’s ability to keep pace with the market? Does performance include presale and post-sale service and support? High-tech companies can make it clear exactly which aspects of their offerings’ price and performance benefit their customers through branding.

Developing the brand promise

The promise of value must be relevant to the people or businesses a company wants to have as its customers; no business can promise everything for everyone. But it is possible to tailor a promise to meet the desires of a specific subgroup of customers, as long as that promise can be kept and as long as it doesn’t confuse anyone. That’s why a company must consider its own capabilities and its target customer segments before developing its brand message. 

Branding on Benefits

Many high-tech managers are most comfortable a brand as a set of tangible, verifiable product characteristics. However, high-tech purchases involve not just technologists but also business managers and end users, who are far more interested in what a technology product does for them than in how it works. As high-tech managers come to understand this, many start changing the way they speak of their offerings. Instead of selling “products,” they sell “solutions” or “benefits.” Such a shift in thinking is not enough. A company needs to decide it wants to be in the space of product competition or brand competition. Competitors can continually match and leapfrog over one another by offering better and more features and by identifying the benefits of their products for customers.

Brand promises need to be enduring

While a brand needs to make an enduring promise. Making and keeping a promise, and keeping it consistently, can be a powerful source of competitive advantage. However making too many promises, or changing them frequently, raises uncertainty and erodes brand value. There’s a high probability that truly strong brands will continue to be leaders because they make and keep a promise of value over successive generations of technologies. True, newer technologies can eclipse older ones but an enduring promise of value can buy time for a brand in the face of new technology even the face of serious lapses in product quality.

Market share is not brand promise

Companies sometimes think that a leadership position in a market is a promise. However, market share, even overwhelming market share is not, a promise of value. Brand equity will distort customer perception of size and value very quickly and there is no way that a company can stay immune to if the competition focuses on it.

Brands provide emotional rewards

It is very difficult for many high-tech managers to acknowledge,  the idea that emotions can be so important to a company’s success. But goods and services that reside in that third level are indeed developed and positioned as a way of fulfilling a promise of value to selected customers, not simply as technologies in search of a market. How do customers feel when experiencing the benefits of the brand? Do they feel confident? Productive? Innovative? Caring? Responsible? Successful? 

Brands have personality

Brands have deeper values — such things as conservative values, family values, achievement-oriented values. These are characteristics the brand would have if it had human qualities: friendly, warm, caring, confident, decisive, aggressive, or the like. They attract a customer set they are focused on and are the differentiating characteristics of the brand. 

Brand Performance should be measured

Too often the only yardstick of performance is awards or 3rd party rankings – both of which may not be adequate -markers of brand performance. For high-tech companies, it is important to track how customers perceive the brand relative to its competition over time. It is also important to monitor the health of key dimensions of a brand’s promise of value. Even the most benchmarked aspect of customer satisfaction managers need to determine if satisfaction is leading to loyalty.

A company cannot expect to build broader acceptance simply by making a promise of value in advertising. It must first know what promise to make and to whom. That requires the ability to assess the potential of relevant technologies and to anticipate its customers’ current and future needs—even before customers can articulate those needs. It must also ensure that the promise of value is understood and fulfilled as the company manages complex networks of value-adding partners, ranging from consulting firms to systems integrators, from independent software vendors to resellers.

 

Rakesh Shukla, Chief Executive & Founder, TWB_ I The Agency for Technology Brands I www.twb.in

Rakesh Shukla, TWB_

Entrepreneur, TEDx speaker, Philanthropist, Rakesh Shukla is a 1996 MBA graduate and 1993 BTech. Rakesh Shukla is the Founder & CEO of TWB_ which is the partner for technology & business content for Fortune 500 leaders worldwide. A motivational speaker he speaks on creating success from professional and personal failure. He divides time between his 2 homes in Bangalore and is called the ‘dog-father’ for being papa to the 750 rescued dogs that live with him at the VOSD Dog Sanctuary. Rakesh has featured in 100+ interviews on the BBC, CNN, Al-Jazeera, CNN-IBN, NDTV, India’s national dailies, and at TEDx talks.

 

Are you looking to create or improve your technology brand?

 

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Storytelling for Business - by Rakesh Shukla, Chief Executive and Founder, TWB_
30 Dec

Great storytelling for business leadership: What makes listeners connect?

By TWB_ In Communication, Corporate Training, Leadership /  10 No Comments

How many of your management team are true leaders — those who can inspire the organization, set a vision, teach important lessons, define culture and explain what the organization. Of those who are, how many are great communicators? Turns out some of the leadership and all of the communication are learnt skills. The easiest and the most powerful communication skill is telling great stories or ‘storytelling’.

Storytelling is critical for management and leadership because very often nothing else works. Graphs will leave listeners untouched. Conversation and dialogue can be too didactic. But the same listener can be moved with a great story. Storytelling in the business context translates abstract numbers into compelling statements of a leader’s goals —  by drawing the listener(s) into the story. Though business cases are made of hard numbers, stories make them spring to life because storytelling can show causal relationships. The question, therefore, is not about telling or not but rather to tell them unwittingly and clumsily or intelligently and skillfully. Storytelling can be learned by anyone who wants to be a leader — CXOs, Senior and Middle management.

Why is storytelling important?

In a  meeting or a talk in a short time-span, a leader can communicate maybe only 1 or 2 powerful ideas. Storytelling, however, allows for multi-layered complex ideas to be told since they are not sequential but interwoven. It is this association that and sharing of complex ideas that can allow leaders to – spark change, transmitting values, share knowledge and lead people into the future.

Leaders establish credibility through telling stories. The audience can feel and respond immediately and deeply. Stories can communicate complex ideas, break status quo, generate interaction & transformation. Rather than merely advocating and counter-advocating positions through constructed and business focussed meetings, talks, emails and other such communication a  story, especially a personal one, breaks through the acceptance barrier. Communication becomes empowering – even as the leader comes across as more vulnerable – yet someone who is still a leader because (s)he has persevered.  

Why is storytelling so powerful?

Storytelling draws in the listener and draws on the active, participation of individuals as against conventional management focuses on lifeless elements  – mission statements,  strategies, processes, budgets and assets. Stories make people discover a degree of coherence that is otherwise very difficult to achieve — something that has been an underlying principle of psychotherapy.

When a listener hears a story that touches him or her they feel their lives have a meaning.  This feeling eventually vaporises and the listener inevitably falls back into an everyday pattern — but with the difference that a radical shift in their lives have taken place and their motivation and behavior are primed for change.

What makes a good story and a good story-teller?

First and foremost the story needs to be personal and it needs to imply values. People make deep associations with leaders that have the courage to tell a strong personal story, and where the story implies certain values. The second is that the audience associates with people with a ‘consistent’ self‐image. For a leader, it is important to have a clear view of a personal life‐story that is aligned that is the thrust what you want the audience to see.

The leader tells a story to show people who they are. Their identity as an individual doesn’t lie in their roles, it is in the one‐of‐a‐kind person they have become as a result of the experiences they’ve had. The leader must tell stories interactively and model it on a conversation — that creates a relationship between the leader and the listener that is symmetrical — such that the listener could speak next. It is this feeling with the listener of being in an open conversation that the leader is vulnerable that the listener is drawn ‘into’ the story.

Types of storytelling

  • Style: The leader should tell the story as if it were being told to a single individual. The story should be kept simple, focused and clear with no alternate points of view. 
  • Don’t argue the truth: The leader should offer listeners an unobstructed view of the truth and listeners will see it and recognize it for what it is — that any reasonable person would have to agree.
  • Practice ease: Only 7% of the meaning of a communication came from the content of the words spoken 93% comes from nonverbal communication. The leader should seem spontaneous. They should choose the shape of the story and stick to it. Practice ease. 

Points of action

The story needs to have an end in mind — what do you want the listener to do when the story is over? These could include:

  • Sparking action: The story describes how a successful change was implemented in the past, but allows listeners to imagine how it might work in their situation. Communicating who they are – provides audience‐engaging drama and reveals some strength and vulnerability from the leaders past.
  • Transmitting values: The leader uses believable characters and situations and ensures the story is consistent about values and actions.  This feels familiar to the audience and will prompt discussion about why they can’t follow the same values/ action too!
  • Sharing knowledge: Leaders focus on problems and shows, in some detail, how they were corrected and why the solution worked and solicits alternative – and possibly better – solutions.
  • Leading people into the future: The leader evokes the future they want to create without providing excessive detail that will prove to be wrong.

No matter how compelling the numbers of sheets, charts or infographics if they require people to act in unfamiliar ways that is unlikely to happen. But effective storytelling often does. Storytelling can inspire people to act in unfamiliar ways. And remember storytelling not only gets the message across effectively, its incremental cost is zero. 

 

Rakesh Shukla, Chief Executive & Founder, TWB_ I The Agency for Technology Brands I www.twb.in

Rakesh Shukla, TWB_

Entrepreneur, TEDx speaker, Philanthropist, Rakesh Shukla is a 1996 MBA graduate and 1993 BTech. Rakesh Shukla is the Founder & CEO of TWB_ which is the partner for technology & business content for Fortune 500 leaders worldwide. A motivational speaker he speaks on creating success from professional and personal failure. He divides time between his 2 homes in Bangalore and is called the ‘dog-father’ for being papa to the 750 rescued dogs that live with him at the VOSD Dog Sanctuary. Rakesh has featured in 100+ interviews on the BBC, CNN, Al-Jazeera, CNN-IBN, NDTV, India’s national dailies, and at TEDx talks.

 

 

Are you looking to create or improve how your leaders communicate?

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20 Jun

What’s better than the backcover of Forbes, Wired, MIT Technology Review, Fortune or Time? (revisited II)

By TWB_ In Marketing Content /  6 No Comments

Which has the greatest impact on technology businesses? Their ad on the back cover of Forbes, Wired, MIT Technology Review, Fortune or Time? Or content that puts them in front. TWB_ helps make technology content strategic. We deliver results for the Fortune 500, Indian leaders and startups.

TWB_ is unique because it operates on the intersect of Strategic + Creative + Technology. No-one else does that.

This campaign from early 2015 reflects the beginning of the change in our own communication.

TWB_ is the Agency for Technology Brands (2015)

TWB_ is the Strategic + Creative + Technology Agency for Technology Brands (2014)

 

Want help with your tech brand?

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20 Jun

TWB_ is the Agency for Technology Brands (revisit – 2)

By TWB_ In Marketing Content /  5 No Comments

TWB_ is the agency for technology brands – that includes the biggest tech brands. The world’s #1 cloud infrastructure, enterprise servers, mainframes, virtualization, personal computers all have one thing in common – they all come with TWB_ content.

TWB_ is unique because it operates on the intersect of Strategic + Creative + Technology. No-one else does that.

This campaign from end 2014 reflects the beginning of the change in our own communication.

TWB_ is the Agency for Technology Brands (2014)

TWB_ is the Strategic + Creative + Technology Agency for Technology Brands (2014)

Want help with your tech brand?

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19 Jun

The CxO Engagement toolset: for employees, customers & media

By TWB_ In Leadership /  3 No Comments
As a CxO you are also the Chief Engagement Officer

Being on the leadership team of your organization you need to play (a) for all organizations of your company, (b) should be able to see and articulate further than your peers and (c) engage with employees, customers, and the media.

The CxO engagement toolset includes
  1. A nuanced understanding of organization structure, dynamics & strategy
  2. A strategic view about what employees are thinking
  3. A responsive and authentic communication mindset.
  4. An engagement plan on what, how, and when to communicate
  5. A complete suite of traditional and social communication tools
Want to put that in practice?

Reach us to transform how your Leadership team communicates

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