Transcripts
1. 0. Course Introduction (2025): Good morning, everyone. Thank
you so much for joining us for business and consulting
skills for emerging leaders. For those of you that
don't know, this is a digital version of a face to face course that I run that's been run in a couple of countries
around the world. Usually, we've run
this course as a two or three day
face to face workshop. But due to popular demand, I've tried to create this
digital version for you, so no matter where
you are in the world, you can go at your own
pace and learn with us. So let's get straight into it. My name is doctor Cameron Mirza. Thank you so much for purchasing this course and for joining
us on this learning journey. I'm a medical doctor
by background. I've had the great
pleasure of working for many years in
the NHS in the UK. I then changed careers and joined Strategy and a
strategy consulting company. I then spent some time
in Saudi Arabia with the Ministry of Health and
also with M 42 in Abu Dhabi. During my time, I've had the great pleasure of working with a number of different
organizations, pharma companies,
local government, retail, in order to try and solve some of
their biggest challenges. So what are we doing here today? Well, this is, as I said, a digital version of my
face to face course. It's probably going to take us around 6 hours or so looking to build the foundational tools for business and
consulting success. What's? What are you here for? It's aimed at future leaders
looking to level up. And most of these
skills, in my opinion, are never officially taught, but they're essential to success
in the modern workplace. After this course, I hope you're going to be confident and well equipped for the next
stage of your journey, and it's going to be a never
ending development journey. You're going to go
back to work with a broader understanding
across a range of topics and the ability to identify future learning needs and hopefully identify your
strengths and weaknesses. So what is the agenda
for this course? Well, we're going to be touching
upon personal branding, communications,
presentations, leadership, as well as problem solving,
data visualization, and some key essentials
in finance and economics. I've tried to create
this in a way that each section has
clear objectives, content that hopefully
is going to be delivered succinctly with the ability
for you to practice, and I'm going to
invite you guys to send me your practice, whether it's a video, whether
it's a written submission. I would love to read it to see how you're getting on and to give you
feedback on that. At the end of each chapter, I've also prepared
a checklist of five key takeaways that are sort of the key
messages for that chapter, and I've also colleted that into a digital handbook that we'll be sharing at
the end of the course. So the nine key areas
that we're going to be addressing during
this program, how can I make an unforgettable
first impression? How can I be a
master communicator? How can I make amazing
presentations? How can I grow my
network with confidence? How can I be a skilled
problem solver? How can I be the leader that
everyone wishes they had? How can I turn boring data into engaging visuals? I'm
not an accountant. What do I need to know
about financial analysis, and I didn't study economics. What do I need to know about
macro and microeconomics? A whole range of topics that hopefully should really
solidify your foundations.
2. 1. The Elevator Pitch: So I want you to
pause for 1 second. This is perhaps one of the most key things that I would like for you to take away today. I want you to pause the video and take out your phone
and take a selfie video. 30 seconds, I would love
you to introduce yourself. Imagine that you are in a professional setting,
in a social setting, at a networking event, and I would just
want you to try and introduce yourself
in 30 seconds. It doesn't matter how it is,
how it looks, try your best, take your phone out,
record for 30 seconds, and please send it to me. I would love to see your video. I'm going to give you 30
seconds to do that now. Great. So how tall
you have done that. I want you to watch
this mind. You're here. Six foot Four guys. Then I might add
something else to this. Six foot four? Black.
Six foot four Black. Well dressed. But
you're a pilot, right? Yes, sir. Okay, so
let's start with this. So you're a pilot. How long have you been a
pilot? Ten years, huh? A decade. Never say ten years. Always a decade. It
sounds different. It has more gravitas. How many hours have you flown? About 5,600. Close close to 6,000 hours. Close on 6,000 hours. When I open a conversation, if I'm this is my opening
intro. Hi, my name is Amandi. I'm a pilot, close on a
decade of experience. I've got over 6,000 hours
in the air and I'd like to talk to you guys a bit about my new startup
that's in logistics. H I got your attention, Agan? So, what did you guys
think of that video? I think it shows the
importance of a really crisp, clear, and well thought
out introduction. When you are making
an introduction, you've really only got about seven to 12 seconds of that first impression where people will
make a decision. Do I want to speak
to this person, or am I going to slowly
slide to fade out? In addition to that,
you've really probably only got 30 seconds to
make your introduction. Anything longer
starts to waffle. And really, you need to
shine a light on yourself. It needs to be a
really memorable and interesting introduction
so that people think, I really enjoyed
speaking to this person. I loved hearing about them, and I want to know more later. This is called the
elevator pitch. It's an opportunity for you
to shine a light on yourself, and it's an
opportunity for you to speak about your
journey and your story. So Chapter one, the
elevator pitch. The objectives for this session. You're going to
understand the importance of a great elevator pitch. You will know the verbal
and nonverbal components of making a great
first impression. You're going to practice
your personal introduction. At the end of this
chapter, you're going to do another 32nd selfie video, and you're going to be
comparing what's changed, what went well, what
didn't go so well, and what are your
opportunities to improve. By the way, I'd love
to see those videos. So what is the
three step process to a great elevator pitch? Well, first of all,
tell me what you do. Simple. Keep it concise, keep it clear and
keep it interesting. Now, here comes a
little bit of magic. What's your secret source? What makes you unique? What do you stand for? What
are you passionate about? What values do you believe in? Are you in a field where there
is an area of specialism? And then tell me a story. Everybody loves hearing a story. Bring your journey to life. What did you have to overcome? What challenges did you face? Make it memorable
and make it fun. Have different versions. You're not always going to be in a position where your introduction
needs to be the same. So this is not a script
that you're learning off by heart and you're going to be doing
every single time. You should have a little bit of flexibility that in
a social setting, and an interview, in a
professional setting, maybe in different scenarios, you should be able to flex
your personal introduction, your elevator pitch and
have different versions. It is a formula
like we discussed. Then what you need to do is
practice, practice, practice. You will just become
slicker and smoother and better at making this
introduction. I will evolve. That's what I'm trying
to show you here that by having
different versions, different scenarios,
maybe the team who you're presenting
to knows you already. Maybe it's a room full
of brand new people. This is going to
evolve with time. Be fun, be engaging. It's not about being prescriptive
or serious necessarily. Maybe the scenario
might allow for that, but really you should
try and be fun, engaging, be vulnerable and be relatable. That's what
people are drawn to. Make sure your story
has an aha moment. The idea isn't that you just
tell a story that is boring. There should be a
reason for you sharing that story that links it
back to why you're here, why you're presenting, or maybe who you are and
what you stand for. So how else to make
a good impression? Well, bear a few things in mind. You have one chance at
a first impression. You can't make a
first impression a second time. You
have one chance. And really, you need
to make that count. Think about experiences
in your life. You may have come across
different people, and if they made a good
impression, that sticks. And if they made
a bad impression, that also sticks, and
that's unfortunate. It takes far longer
to turn around a bad impression than it does to turn around
a good impression. And as I said again,
you need to be genuine and you need
to be committed. And when that shines through, people will think more
positively of you, and that first impression
will really stick out. Hey, everyone. My name's Cathy. I'm from Beijing. I was born in China and I moved
around quite a bit. In the past few years,
I live in France, Colorado, California,
and Chicago. I work in marketing
for FMCG company. In my spare time,
I love doing yoga. I love going on hikes. I'm very excited to be here, and I look forward to
meeting everyone in person. So what did you guys think
of Cathy's introduction? She was warm, she was friendly. She spoke about herself from
a professional standpoint, some of the traveling
she's done, some of her social interests. But then she brought it
back to the group and said, I'm looking forward
to meeting everyone. I'm excited to be
here. So she brought good energy. She spoke clearly. She made good eye contact. But also, she was
quite short, right? It wasn't a long drawn
out, boring introduction. She kept it quite short. And the idea isn't to
give away everything. The idea is just to give enough to make people think that, Hey, this is an interesting
person and I want to learn more about them or I want to listen more
about what they have to say. So as we mentioned
in the introduction, making a great first
impression has verbal and non
verbal components. From a non verbal standpoint, as much as it might seem unfair, the way you look is also the way you're judged.
So dress well. Dress appropriately. If
it's a business setting, you need to wear
business attire. If it's a cultural setting, you may need to wear
something cultural. If it's a social gathering, you'll wear something social. But whatever it is, take
pride in your appearance, be clean and dress well. Body language matters. If you are hunched over,
not making eye contact, maybe that's not
going to come across as confident and open. But if you're using
hand gestures, you're sitting
comfortably, you're not sitting too close or too
far away from people, that really contributes to
a feeling of openness and people can feel that
they can talk to you and that helps in making that
good first impression. Eye contact and smiling. Making appropriate eye contact is so important and smiling shows that you are
interested and engaged and open to
this conversation. Greeting and handshake. So if it's culturally appropriate, have a strong, firm handshake. Show that you are confident, show that you're professional. These will all
contribute to people subconscious about the first
impression that you've made. So those of you
who watch Netflix may have seen a TV
show called Madman. This is a character
from the show. His name is Don Draper. I want you to pause the
video here for 1 second, and I want you to take
a look at this picture. In the context of
what we've just discussed, dress, body language, eye contact, what do you
think about this picture? I want you to pause the
video and take a minute. Let's go back and look at
those characteristics, dress, body language,
and the eye contact. I like this picture very
much because I think it says more than
just a picture. I think he's very well dressed. He's wearing a crisp suit. He's got cuff links, he's got a pocket square, nice crisp white
shirt, very clean. From a personal standpoint,
he's clean shaven. His hair is made. And
he looks the part. He's smoking the
cigarette indoors. Certainly, maybe back in those
days they would do that, but now it's a sign
of confidence. He's got a very open body
posture, legs crossed, arms out wide, look at his
facial expression as well. His eyes are locked in. He's not smiling, he's not
growling, he means business. Would you want to go into business with this person maybe? I know you're making
a snap judgment here, but this is what first
impressions are made of. You look at this person and
you think he's professional, he's smart, and it's going to be a productive
engagement with. So we spoke about
the non verbal side. What about the verbal
side? Well, look, choose your words and
topics carefully. My dad always used
to say there are certain topics it's best not to bring to a
social conversation, religion, politics, money,
that kind of stuff. Use your own better judgment. But the first ten
to 20 words that you use in any introduction or any social
interaction is going to direct the flow
of the conversation. Either people are
going to be engaged or they're going to withdraw
and look for something else. You're at a networking event, you really only have that
first 10 seconds to make that first impression and to see whether people
want to stay or leave. So choose your words
and your topics carefully. Be a storyteller. Everybody loves a story. Everybody loves an anecdote. Tell them about a problem you solved, a challenge
you're facing. Everybody loves a story, and
it really helps to bring your message and your story and your journey come to life. And also don't just talk, talk, talk, be an expert listener.
Now, what does that mean? It means be active
in your listening, replay to people what
they've been saying to you, maybe say it in a different way, draw a parallel between what you've experienced and
what they're experiencing. Being an expert listener shows respect and it's also a very important part
of communicating. What about some of the other
components to bear in mind? First of all, like Cathy,
bring good energy. It's no use you just
sitting in a corner. You're supposed to be making
a strong first impression. Maybe you're presenting
to a room full of people, to some colleagues, you're
meeting some friends. If you bring low
energy in your voice, in your physical behavior, that's what you're
going to be projecting. Bring positive good energy. Respect is so important, particularly nowadays when we're living in multicultural
environments, respecting people's
beliefs, cultures, dress codes is going to be so important that needs to come across in the way you
communicate as well. Having good manners. Think
about young children. You want to teach them,
please and thank you. You want to teach them not
to speak over other people. You want to teach them
other good manners. That projects onto us as
adults, as well, of course. And in any social interaction,
in any social setting, it's important for us
to always maintain good manners and be respectful. Also, it's important
to open minded. Now, what does that mean? Being open minded
is to say, look, I might have a set of opinions, but I'm very open to
hearing your opinion. I'm very open to having
my opinion changed. And, maybe I won't change my opinion, but I'm
willing to listen. It doesn't mean I necessarily agree with
what you're saying, but there's an opportunity for me to listen and
learn something. So being open minded comes
across very well as well. Having a positive outlook. So it's very easy
for us, I think, to bond over negative
experiences. Did you see the traffic?
Did you see the weather? Why did the meeting start late, huh? How bad is the coffee? These are very easy
things for you to bond over negative experiences.
But try and avoid that. Try and bond over positive experiences
because that's what people will
remember you for. Try and think about ways
to bring positivity in the conversation and that's the memory that what
people have of you. Humility and not arrogance. Nobody likes someone
who's arrogant. I'm very good at this. I achieve
this. My salary is this. It doesn't come
across very well, particularly when you are trying to make a really good
first impression. So being humble, being
confident, sure, if you have some
great achievements that you wanted to share, by all means share
those achievements, and by all means, do so,
you know, confidently. But remember, there's
a fine balance between confidence
and arrogance, and you have to
keep that in mind. And lastly, timing
is critical as well. If someone is on their
way to the bathroom, if they have another
meeting to rush to, if they're walking from
place A to place B, maybe the timing of that
conversation isn't quite right. So think very carefully
about the situation you're in and what type of conversation
that you're having. If you try to
introduce yourself in a long winded way to
someone who's in a lift, you probably won't have the opportunity to finish that and it probably gives a
rushed impression. And that's why it's
called an elevator pitch. So as promised, I want
you guys to practice, practice and practice
and practice, and so you can improve. So how are you going to
practice in this chapter? Well, I want you to go
away and write T ten, take 15 minutes, take
a piece of paper. I want you to write
using bullet points, a fantastic elevator pitch. I want you to think about
different scenarios you might find yourself in
in the social setting, in the professional
setting, with family, with friends, with colleagues you know, with new colleagues. Think about the
different scenarios that you might find yourself in. And where you may be chosen
to introduce yourself. They may say, Hey, Steve, some of us know you,
some of us don't. Please, can you introduce
yourself at the start of a Zoom call in a face to
face meeting, for example. That is your
opportunity to shine. That's your opportunity
to put into practice everything that we've spoken about in this chapter. So I would love for you
to take ten, 15 minutes, write down on a piece of paper, your pitch, and then refine it and refine
it and refine it. And once you're happy,
I want you to read it and practice it and then record a 32nd video just like the one you did at
the start of the chapter. And then I want you to contrast
and compare what is good, what is not good,
what can be improved. I want you to pat
yourself in the back for making a conscious
effort to try and improve. Your first 32nd video
probably was unplanned. And now, the fact that
you've taken the time to write this script out and to
practice it, to rehearse it, to look in the mirror,
and to repeat it and to get fluent in what went well, what didn't go so well, I'd
love for you to reflect that. And in addition to that, I would love for you
to please send me your two videos so I can see the difference and send
me your reflections. I would love to share in that
success that improvement, but also share my feedback as well. Look forward
to hearing from. Top five takeaways
from this chapter. Number one, a great introduction
makes you memorable. Number two, everybody
loves a story. Storytelling is a great
way to be memorable. Number three, your
non verbal choices are equally as important
as what you do say. Number four, attention
spans are short. You've got about 10
seconds to grip them in, and you have about 30 seconds maximum to introduce yourself, tell a quick story, and have
an aha moment at the end. And lastly, being
genuine, relatable, and fun are great ways to be
remembered. Good luck, guys.
3. 2. Networking Essentials: Welcome back, guys. I hope you enjoyed
that first chapter. Let's move on to
something that I absolutely love,
which is networking. Networking is so important. Broadening your network,
meeting new people, and seeking out those opportunities
is one of the keys to success in the modern workplace. Let's dive right into it. What are the objectives
for this session? Well, number one,
you'll learn why it's important to network. Number two, you'll learn the key pillars to creating
a great personal brand, which is going to strengthen
your ability to network. You'll learn how to handle individual encounters to
maximize the opportunity, and you'll practice
your newfound skills. So create a great personal brand and be an amazing colleague. Why? Why are we doing this? Well, creating a
great personal brand, being a great colleague
is only going to enhance your reputation and
improve your credibility, and that is what opens doors
and brings opportunities. Generate income. So
maybe you have an idea. Maybe you have a business, maybe you're looking to
monetize your skills. Generating income can only be done by working with
the right people and convincing them that you're
the right person to work with or that your product or service is the right for them. Maybe you have a social
media following, Instagram, Tik Tok, et cetera, and you want to grow your
online presence. Having a really
strong personal brand can only help you
in that scenario. Generally, improving
your personal brand, maybe you have a set of values. Maybe you have a
particular business that you're trying to grow. Maybe you want to
share your viewpoint. This will all contribute
to your personal brand. Of course, job
opportunities externally, promotions internally. If people think well of
you, if you have networked, if you have knocked
on the right doors, then the opportunities should
be there for your taking. So how do we do this? Well, first of all, it
doesn't happen overnight. You have to be patient.
This is a very specific. It requires effort. It requires planning and a very, very
deliberate approach. You can't just click
a button and you have your promotion or you have your salary or you
have your opportunity. You need to have
very specific goals. And in addition to that, in the process of creating
your personal brand, please show your passion. What is it that you stand for? What are your values?
What do you care about? What do you do on the
weekends that drives you? Show your passion, wear
your heart on the sleeve. Trust. Trust for me is the single most
important ingredient in any business relationship. For me, trust is a simple
mathematical formula. Consistency multiplied by time. If you do a great
piece of work for me, you've done a
great piece of work. You do it two times,
maybe three times, you're doing a good
piece of work. But if you do a great
piece of work every week for a whole year,
now you have my trust. Trust is really simple. Consistency over
time. Be organized. People love working with
people who are organized, well structured on time. If you are well organized and you are in control
of your situations, people will love to
work with. Be nice. This is so easy and so
commonly overlooked. Being nice in the workplace
doesn't cost you anything. Be friendly, be approachable, be kind, be polite. These things all contribute to such a great personal brand and makes a great impression of yourself that people will
want to spend time with you, will want to work with
you, and as a result, will consider you
for opportunities. Make an effort. Nobody ever got anywhere in life just by
sitting on the couch at home. You have to make an
effort to meet people, to put your best
foot forward and to use these kind of skills
that we're presenting here. And of course, be genuine. It's not about being fake. It's not about putting a false impression
forward, be yourself, be genuine, and allow that genuine energy to
open doors for you. I want you to take a
look at this picture. This illustrates the
six handshake rule, also known as the six
degrees of separation. What this means is that between you and any other
person on this planet, of which there's
billions, you're only six handshakes
away from that person. If I wanted to meet
Christiano Ronaldo, I know someone who knows
someone, who knows someone, who knows someone, and
through six connections, I'm connected to
Christiano Ronaldo, for example, it doesn't
matter who it is, Kim Kardashian Donald Trump, whoever it is that you
want to be connected to, the law of six degrees
of separation means that you are absolutely
closer than you think. If you want to work for
a particular business, if you want to connect with
a particular individual, it's a lot easier
than you think. And networking is
more powerful and easier than you think to try
and achieve that connection. So as I said, it's very important to identify
your objectives. There's many reasons why you'd want to do
some networking, why do you want to connect
and grow your network. If you're clear about
what your objectives are, it makes your formula
a lot easier. For example, I want to
develop this relationship. I already know someone, but
I want to develop it deeper. Maybe this is a client of mine. Maybe this is a friend that
I want to become closer to. You can use this on
a social perspective and also from a
professional perspective. I want to develop this
relationship further. I want to share my
idea of best practice. Maybe I have a business idea. Maybe I'm in the workplace and I think things can be done
a little bit differently. I want to share this
idea or best practice, and I need to negotiate myself in a position
that I can do that. I want to hear your thoughts. So maybe, I don't necessarily
have something to say, but I want to hear
your thoughts, and I want your opinion
on a particular topic. I want to explore new
job opportunities. There's lots of
people who are out in the market looking for
job opportunities, clicking on LinkedIn, apply
for job, apply for job. That's one way to do it, but
there's a more powerful way, a much more organic way. And by networking and meeting people and building
deep relationships, those job opportunities, I
guarantee you will come. I want support or
advice. Maybe you have a particular dilemma
that you're facing. Maybe there's a
challenge at work, and you want support or
advice to try and tackle. Maybe it's not about them,
maybe it's about you. You just want to build
your confidence. It's quite difficult networking. It's not for everyone,
particularly if you're a little
bit more introverted. It's not easy to approach new people, build
the confidence, to talk about yourself,
talk about your idea, particularly in a room
full of strangers. Maybe your objectives for networking is to try and
build that confidence. Irrespective, it's
really important for you to have clear objectives
before you go into any networking situation
so that you're clear about what you're here to achieve and how you can achieve. I want you to take
a look at this. This is one of my
favorite quotes. It means far more than just
the words on the page. Your network is your net worth. If you have a fantastic idea, it's not going to be any
good stuck in your head, and it's not going to be
any good if you sit in a corner and work on
it simply by yourself. Your network really
is your net worth. Sometimes certain professions demand that you
have a skill set. Maybe you're a doctor or
a lawyer or an engineer. But in many corporate
environments, it's not just what you know, it's who you know, and
the relationships that you build will allow you to
open up those opportunities. What are some of the
general principles about networking and
building that network? First of all, be generous. It's not about take, take take. You should be giving
before you're receiving. Number two, please step
outside of your comfort zone. If you stay within
your comfort zone, you will be comfortable,
but you will not grow. Step outside your comfort zone, push yourself to situations that would ordinarily
be uncomfortable. Networking events, messaging
someone on LinkedIn, knocking on the door of someone in the office that you haven't spoken to before.
Connect the dots. This is one of my favorite
principles of networking. Sometimes networking isn't
about the singular interaction where I ask for something and you ask for something, and
we have an interaction. Sometimes it's taking
a step back and asking yourself, what are
people talking about? What are the trends
that I'm seeing? What are businesses
investing in? If I have a particular
sector that I'm allowed to, education, medicine, healthcare, AI, digital, what are the
trends in this sector? And also, how would
a conversation with person A and person B? Can I connect the two
of them together? I don't have anything
to gain from this, but maybe you're a
teacher, you're a teacher. I think you guys should
connect together. You're an engineer,
you're an engineer. You guys should
connect together. And so being a connector, being an aggregator is very, very powerful as well.
Sometimes be useless. Networking isn't all
about take, take, take, squeezing every
drop of the lemon. Sometimes you'll come across
as I did a few weeks ago, in a position where you're
speaking to someone and you're in completely different industries in different regions, in different phases of your career and actually
just enjoy the interaction. It's not always about
what can I do for you? What can you do for me?
It's great when you can. Be generous, of course, but sometimes it's okay just to have a nice conversation and be useless because at the end of the day,
it's a numbers game. It is about quality, absolutely, but it's also about trying
to meet lots of new people and grow your
network. Be patient. You can't plant a
seed today and expect a tree tomorrow. You
have to be patient. Sometimes the relationship
that you grow today will only bear
fruit in five years time. Similarly, in terms
of being generous, maybe you can't
help someone today, but maybe in five years time, you're going to be
able to help them. And of course, don't
focus only on the new. You have an existing network. Maybe you need to focus on building deeper
relationships with your existing network than necessarily growing
to a new network. Let's take the example of
a social media account. Let's say you have
10,000 followers. It would be nice for
you to grow that to 20,000, 30,000 followers. That would be great. But also
there's logic in saying, maybe I need to engage my
10,000 followers better. If they're paying customers, maybe I need to engage them better and to try and
provide more value to them. That would be more
beneficial to me than necessarily growing to 20 and
30, quality over quantity. Please do grow your networks, but don't just focus on the new. It's worth also developing relationships that are deeper
with your existing network. Through practice and practice and practice,
practice makes what? Absolutely not. Dismantle
that belief system. Practice makes improvement. You can always better your best. You can always go beyond anything that you
have ever done. You never hit a
state of perfection. So what do we learn from that? Practice absolutely gets you better and better and better. Going out there,
putting yourself out in uncomfortable social
situations can only be beneficial to you. Having lots of conversation is going to be
beneficial to you. But also remember, there's
no such thing as perfect. You can improve, but there's no such thing as perfect
in this situation. So what about
individual encounters? Let's say you're at a
networking event or you're in a business meeting and you have an opportunity to
introduce yourself. Well, first of all, you're
obviously going to go back to Chapter one and you're going to practice your elevator pitch. But in addition to that,
take the first step. Be confident, be bold, be open. Go and shake someone's hand
and say, Hey, good morning. I noticed that we were
in the same meeting. I wanted to come and say,
Hi. How are you doing today? How did you find this meeting? Take that first step and
break down that barrier. Secondly, ask about them. People love to talk
about themselves. So that's a great icebreaker.
Tell me about yourself. What brings you to
this conference? What brings you to this meeting? How long are you in town for? Ask them about them. People love to talk
about themselves. Of course, active listening
is very important. It's not simply about asking the question and then
forgetting about the response. Replay back to them, make connections between what they're saying and what your
experiences might be. Be empathetic. Maybe they're talking about something that
they're passionate about. Maybe they're talking
about something sad, something happy, show empathy, be genuine in that interaction. Be curious. It's so important. And it's so important
in today's day and age to be in a constant
state of learning. That's why you're
here on this course because you want to
improve yourself, to develop yourself,
and you clearly are someone who wants
to learn and develop. Curiosity is a way
forward for that. When you meet new people, itsn't just about telling them
what you're about, what you want to sell,
what your story is, be curious about them. Ask them about them. But maybe they've told you about
their product or service. Maybe they've told you something that's
piqued your interest. Be curious, ask questions. It will make you
look like you're a very switched on
and active listener, and it could lead to something. And of course, like
I keep saying, it's not about being fake. Be yourself, be genuine, be your authentic self, and let that personality
shine through. What else? Number one, practice your elevator pitch. You literally will go
into every situation. In any networking
event, any situation, people will say, Can
you introduce yourself? You may go around a room in a Zoom call or a physical room, or when you meet
someone you have the opportunity to
introduce yourself. Practice your elevator pitch. Remember to evolve that
based on the situation. Tell stories, like we
said in Chapter one, be a storyteller, bring
your experiences to life. Talk about events that
may have happened, find opportunities to connect
and to relate to people. Be a connector and
an introducer. Sometimes networking,
like I said, in the connecting
the dots point, isn't just about what I can
get or what I can receive. Sometimes it's about taking
a step back and saying, Bob, I want you to
meet Susan, Susan, Bob, I think you guys should connect with each
other because you have this in common
or that in common. It will make you look
like you're someone who is very able to
see the big picture. That's what networking
is also about. It isn't just about
singular interactions. It's about connecting these
dots, connecting people, connecting themes, and understanding the
direction of travel. What are businesses
investing in? What are people in
your industry doing? If you're able to
speak to people and learn about these things
and connect the dots, it will show you a way forward. It's not just about work.
Obviously, in a work setting, you may start talking about
what do you do for a living? What project are you working on. But look for
opportunities just like Kathy did in the first chapter, to try and find ways to connect with people
beyond just work. Maybe you speak a similar
language to them. Maybe you've traveled to the
country that they're from. Maybe you have a shared
social hobby or interest. So look for opportunities to connect with people on a
different and deeper level. Common pitfall, what should you worry about or keep in mind, what are common mistakes? Bonding over negativity. I'm repeating this point
because it's so important. Let's try not to bond over
negative experiences. Isn't the weather so bad today? Can you believe how
bad the coffee taste? Can you believe how late
the conference has begun? This is what people
will remember you for that you had a
negative outlook. Try and build a
positive personality and a positive energy
in these interactions. Not planning to reconnect
is a big sin in networking. By all means, move on to
the next conversation. By all means spend 5 minutes
speaking to someone, 5 minutes, speaking to someone, 5 minutes speaking to someone, but not planning to reconnect
as a huge, huge mistake. Do say to people, Look, it's been lovely
to speak to you. What are you doing next
week? Shall we grab coffee? Or here's my card. Here is my contact details. Let's plan to catch up. I'll send you an email
with the proposal. I will send you a linkedIn
message with my details. I will tell you more
about what we discussed. Remember, in networking,
it's not about squeezing everything into
that one interaction. It's about making a great first impression, growing
that network, sharing your details, and
planning to reconnect and growing and building that
relationship to a deeper level. Stagnating in one
conversation is also risky. Sometimes you connect
with someone. Maybe you have a
great experience with one person and you think, This is my safe place now. I'm at a networking event or
I'm at a business meeting or I'm going to stick to my
friend who I've now made. That's risky because
you don't open yourself up to the wide opportunities
that may be in the room. By all means, say
to this person. Hey, look, it's been
great talking to you. I'm here to speak to a
lot of different people. Take my card. Let's have a coffee next week. I'll
send you a message. I'm going to try and
catch up with lots of different people
and see who else is in the room. Taking
it too seriously. Now, I know it's important
to do networking, absolutely, but don't
get stressed about it. You don't have to do
everything perfectly. Practice and practice and
practice makes improvement. Don't take yourself
too seriously. Don't take the situation
too seriously. It's about making
meaningful connections and enjoying the joy
of human interaction. And also please please please do not ask for too
much too soon. If you come across someone who maybe works in
an organization that you'd love to work for or
maybe they're a recruiter or a hiring manager going in there too soon and
asking for something, whether it's that promotion, whether it's the pay rise, whether it's the
job opportunity, whether it's the opportunity
to be staffed on a project, whether it's an hour of their time to mentor
you for something, asking for too much too soon can come across a bit needy
and a little bit greedy. You have to be a little
bit careful and build the relationship organically and remember, give
before you receive. So now practice and
practice and practice. I want you to plan three
networking topics. I want you to go away
and think very carefully about an icebreaker that you can talk to someone
about in the social context, current events, work,
your personal hobbies. Think about this and come up with three networking topics. What topics can you use in a real world situation
professionally or socially to try
and break the ice and strike up a
conversation with someone and drive
that conversation. I want you to write this
down, write some notes. Maybe it's about yourself,
maybe it's about what you do, current events, et cetera.
Then here's the hard part. I want you to go away in
the next week and seek out opportunities to have three meaningful conversations with someone that
you don't know, or maybe it's someone
you know who you've been meaning to have a
deeper conversation with. Approach them, find
the right opportunity. Be open in your posture, be open with your eye contact, with your communication
style, be genuine. Think about all the principles that we've been discussing so far and have three
meaningful conversations. Then you can go away
and write about that, very briefly, reflect
on it, what went well. What didn't go well, and how
can you improve on that? This is your first step to opening your mind
and your horizons. I would love to hear
your reflections. How did those conversations go? What did you learn from this chapter that you
didn't know before, that you put into practice in these three conversations?
You have seven days. Please go away, have
three conversations, ideally with a
complete stranger, but it's okay to have that conversation with someone
in your workplace or in your social network that
you've been meaning to have the conversation with find
a conversation topic, drive that conversation
forward, ask about them, share your experiences, and reflect on how it made you feel having
those conversations. Was it really awkward?
Was it really difficult? How did you manage?
I would love to hear your thoughts and
I'd love to hear your reflections and
provide you some feedback. So what are the
top five takeaways from this networking chapter? Number one, practice and
practice and practice, it builds confidence
and slickness. Number two, there are many
motivations for networking. Think very carefully about
what your motivation is and stick to those goals. Number three, being genuine and generous is key to success. Number four, networking
isn't just about speaking. It's made up of active
listening as well. And number five,
networking involves being patient and
connecting the dots. Remember, you can't plant a seed today and expect
a tree tomorrow. Thanks, guys, and good luck.
4. 3. Communicating with Confidence: Welcome back, everyone. Hope you enjoyed the first
couple of chapters. We're now moving on to one of
the key skills that you're going to need to work on in
the corporate workplace. It's communication. So what are the objectives
for today's session? You're going to understand the four key components
to business coms. You're going to
explore communications in some common scenarios. We're also going to do some
coms in challenging scenarios and you'll go away and practice your newly learned
communication principles. So the first question
that we ask is, what are you trying to
achieve and for who? People, who is your audience? The message? What are
you trying to say? The context, in what context are you even having
this conversation? Is there something going on in the background that we
need to be aware of? And let's remember that even
though you're communicating, it's an active conversation
most of the time. So let's deep dive
into a few of these. First of all, who
is your audience? The first question that
we have to ask is, who are the people that
you're trying to communicate with and what is it that you
need to be telling them? What's specific about them? Do you want your
audience to think? What do you want them to feel? What do you want them to do? Remember, communication is
about eliciting emotions and responses in the people that
are receiving your message. What about the message itself? What's the point? Why are you
even sending this message? Why are you even trying to communicate in the first place? Is it to inform them,
give them an update? Is it to persuade them of something? You're
giving them a pitch. You're introducing yourself. You're introducing your idea. Maybe you're introducing
a, you know, kind of you want to
work with someone, for example, or are you looking
to check understanding? Could be lots of other
reasons as well. And what channel are
you using as well? Is it face to face?
Is it a Zoom call? Is it an instant messenger
or Whatsapp, or is it email? And what is the context? Is it a casual setting where you can be a little
bit more relaxed and fun or is it a little bit
more formal business setting? Think about the timing as well. Is it a busy time of year? Is the person or the
people that you're communicating with going
through a busy period? Are they going to be
receptive to your message? How's your existing
relationship with them? Is it a strained relationship that you need to
handle sensitively, or is it a good relationship that you have a bit
of flexibility? It's also very important to read the room, read their responses, have a feel for what kind
of vibe is going on, and that may flex your
message and your style. Let's also think about
listening, as well. It's very important not to
think of communication just as a one way street where
you're just going to be firing off information
at people. You should try and
empathize with them, understand their perspective, understand what might
be motivating them. Reaffirm what they're saying, maybe replay it in
a different way, hear their thoughts
and their concerns. Be open and transparent. It's very important for
you to wear your heart and your sleeve sometimes and recognize that
you're not a threat. You're here to inform
them or to persuade them or to show them something, and you want to work with them. Feel free to paraphrase
what they've said. For example, maybe
they've raised some concerns, shared
some feedback. It's important that you try
and empathize with them and replay back to them what your understanding is
of their perspective. And of course, make sure you listen to what
you've heard and then summarize it back so that it's clear that we're
all on the same page. What about some communications in common situations
where we have the professional setting
where most of you are going to be in your
corporate work environments. You have social settings, you have scenarios
where you might be leading a presentation
or a project. You've also got something
very common emails. Billions and billions of emails are sent every single day, most common form of
business communication. You may be in a position where
maybe you're not leading, but you're explaining something. Also in a common scenario
where you're speaking to people that are
more senior to you and you need to flex
your style a little bit. Let's go into each one of those. Key areas to consider in
the professional context. We've touched upon this before
in the previous chapters. Do smile, do exude confidence, dress smart if appropriate, be open to feedback,
and to learning, have an open mind, be
positive and respectful. We've covered this
already. But what about in some of the
other scenarios? How are you going to communicate
in the social setting? Well, it's more about
finding commonality here. It's about understanding
what language do they speak, what culture are they what hobbies and interests
might they have. Try and make that
connection so that you have that opportunity to build a deeper relationship and to communicate your message
more effectively. Most importantly,
enjoy and relax. It is not a stressful
environment in a social context. It is a pleasure and an honor to be
connecting with people, to be presenting to people, to be communicating with people. Enjoy and relax that experience. When you're leading, it's a completely
different board game. You might be having to give a presentation in a
room full of people, and quite frankly,
it's quite difficult. It's quite stressful.
It's quite nervous. You might be getting
sleepless nights thinking about delivering a presentation to a room full of senior people. So what makes you stand out as a strong communicator when
you're leading something? Well, confidence is one, but being organized is a
critical critical skill. When you're leading something, coming across well prepared
is an easy win for you. Show yourself as
assertive and in control. Make sure you start on time, make sure you have
your documents ready, make sure you have
your agenda ready, and you're able to
exert that agenda. You typically in the
business setting have about 60 to 90 minutes
to lead a meeting. Now remember, it's
not a one way update. Ideally, it's a discussion. You should be engaging
your audience. You should be spending maybe 75% of the time
giving your presentation, but you really need to factor in that there might be
some disturbances, some questions that get asked. You need to invite feedback and questions and a discussion
toward the end of that. Maybe you want to spend less
time on your presentation. That's the easy part and invite questions for a longer duration.
Read the room as well. It's very important
for you to try and understand what's going
on in people's heads. Is your message
coming across well? Are you communicating
effectively? Are people receptive to this, or are they, aggressive
or in disagreement? Read the room. Also, try
and control the mood. Sometimes you may need to inject some humor to lighten the mood, or if you feel like there
is a bit of distraction, you may need to amp up
the energy a little bit. Of course, whenever
you're leading, it's very important at the
end of the meeting for you to summarize what's been discussed and identify the next actions. How about when you're
sending an email? It's the most common form
of business communication. It's estimated that there's 350 billion emails sent and received every single
day around the world. It's a formal record, so you
have to be very careful. You might have been in
scenarios where an email has been kept as an archive or
as a record for things. You must be very
precise when you write. That being said, you should
also try and be concise. Nobody wants to read a page and page and page long
set of emails. Generally keeping things
concise is more valuable, what's the pyramid principle? It works particularly well when you're sending emails,
particularly to senior people. The pyramid principle reverses what you might typically use as logic for
sending an email. Most of the time you might say, Hey, I'm emailing you today. Good morning, hope
everything is good. I noticed this problem and
this problem has led to this and this and this and we lost some money and we
did this and we did that. Then actually I
thought to myself, maybe we should think
about this solution, that solution, that solution. Then now I've worked out that I think this solution is best, and this is how much
it's going to cost. That is very much a chronological thought
process type of email. The pyramid principal
flips it on its head, and it works particularly
well with senior people. You'd start the email
by saying, Hey, the reason for this email is I'm looking for budget
approval for us to implement this new
software. That's it. And then you put your
supporting evidence. I've noticed that we have
had some inefficiencies. I've noticed that some
people have had problems, and I have analyzed
options A, B, and C, and I came to the conclusion for the following reasons that
option B is the best solution, and that's why I'm
suggesting it, it will cost us this, and
we're ready to roll it out. So the pyramid principle
is very effective. For busy people who
don't have time to read all of their emails or they don't have time
to read long emails, putting your key
message upfront, putting the key message
and the ask upfront. I'm proposing that we use solution B and it's going
to cost us $3 million, and I would seek your
approval for that. Putting that upfront is an easy way to focus
your audience, your reader on what it is that
you're asking them to do. Please do proofread your emails. It's so easy to quickly press send without
putting the attachment on, or maybe that
you've got typos or poor grammar or poor
structure to your email. Tools like Chat GPT
can help you do that. In today's day and age, there's no excuse nowadays for poorly written and glaring big
mistakes in emails. Also check for tone as well, especially when it comes to digital communications
where you don't get a chance to speak to someone or have any face
to face contact. Sometimes the message
can be misunderstood. You've probably had
this in your personal life where you said something that was
misinterpreted or twisted or taken
out of context. So think about the
tone very carefully. I want to show you a clip
that highlights this. It's a funny clip.
It's a comedy, but it has a very
relevant message. I've been trying to reach
out to you all day. Are we on for tonight? Geez. What? You can't catch me. You can't catch me. I'm Lance
Moore. Touchdown *****. What? As Ah, shoot. Keegan's been texting me. Sorry, dude. Missed your texts. I assumed we'd meet at the bar. Whatever. I don't care. M. Sorry, dude,
missed your texts. I assumed we'd meet at the bar. Whatever I don't care. Whatever I don't care. That's his problem. Do you even want to hang out? Do you even want to hang out? Oh, that's considerate.
Like I said. Whatever. Like I said,
whatever this die. Jesus, you are priceless. You're the one who's priceless. This is This mother right here. Oh, he wants to. Mm hmm. Okay. You want to go right now? Hmm. I guess I could do that. Okay. Okay, let's go. Okay. Okay, let's go.
Alright. You know what? You know what? You want
to really Do this now. Keegan nut. You're
not putting me out. Yeah, let's do it.
Oh, yeah. *******. First round's mine. Oh, no. Oh, no, they gonna be
no rounds, *******. It's gonna be a free fight. 'Cause tonight. Buddy. Like
I said, first round's mine. A beer and a gimlet. My partner, right? What's that? Uh, I got you a baseball
bat with nails in it. From my post apocalyptic
Jackie Robinson costume, how did you know I hope
you enjoyed that skit. It just illustrates the
importance of checking your tone when you're
sending messages when you're not doing
things face to face. So what else are we doing? Talking about
explaining scenarios. So you'll be in a situation where you're not
necessarily leading, but you may be
explaining something. Again, organization is key, and having structure is a great way to show that you're kind of well organized and you
have things under control. Show the end goal, particularly when you're trying to
convince people of something, do it this way, not that way, purchase this, not that, show them the end goal, show them why it matters to
them or to your business, why it makes perfect sense. Also, people enjoy when they're going through
a new process, to have their hand held. Take them through a process step by step and show them
the end goal at the end. Them through your rationale,
explain to them why this new process is a better way of doing it than the
way we currently do it, or that product X is
better than product Y. Try and win their hearts and minds over by taking
them through a journey, show that you're very structured and you've thought this through, and then hopefully they'll be on board and you'll
have won them over. What about when you're advising seniors, slightly
different context. You have to be a little
bit careful here and it's not the same
as presenting to your peer group or presenting to a more junior audience.
Respect is key. Typically, in some
organizations, you'll have a
hierarchy structure, partners and directors and
executives and C suites, et cetera, board members. Showing them respect, I think, is something very,
very important. You need to take it
pretty seriously. And find ways to
connect with them. Don't just jump straight
into the content. Do take a moment to
introduce yourself, introduce what
you're doing there, and of course, to try and
find some commonality. Do come across
credible by making sure that you know your stuff and that you've
prepared appropriately, and do seek their feedback. Taking the approach of humility is far better than arrogance
in these scenarios. You may know your
stuff and you may be showing them how
to do something, but seeking their feedback and their counsel is a great way
to build that relationship. So what about communication in far more challenging
situations? When you're pitching ideas, you've got a lot at stake here. Making a request, maybe
you requesting budget, requesting support, requesting a pay rise, requesting
a promotion. Getting caught off guard
is very, very unpleasant. Being criticized can be
very hard to swallow. And also presenting up at a board meeting or
something like that is quite a different
set of challenges. So let's go into
these one by one. Pitching ideas can
be very stressful. It feels almost
personal sometimes, but remember that it's never personal. It's the
only business. People may have different
decision making styles, and by that I mean, some
people make decisions quickly. Some people need more data. So people prefer face to face. Some people can approve
things via email. You need to understand your
audience and understand their decision making
styles and feed it to them. A lot of the time, the
simplest way to pitch your idea is to present the story and then
follow it up by facts. We've discussed the
pyramid principle, making sure that
you're a storyteller, making sure that you're
bringing emotion into it, and showing them the end result, I think it's going
to be important. Involving them, making sure
that it's our decision, our team's decision, or it's going to be
benefiting all of us. Be open and transparent. Be open about what you know
and also what you don't know. And remember, influence is a campaign. What does that mean? It means that oftentimes you won't be successful
at the first attempt. Sometimes people bring
their own baggage, maybe they have
their own agenda, maybe they don't want
to invest any money, even if it's on a great idea. Influence is a campaign means
you may need to work on people over several
different scenarios or several different occasions. Making requests, I think is always very scary
for people as well. But being clear upfront
is very important. You need to be very
transparent upfront. I would like to
make a request for X to invest some money
to change our process, for the pay rise, for the promotion,
whatever it might be. Seeking clarity and being
very clear is very important. Timing is also critical. Are you going through
a busy period? Is it a stressful period? Is now really the right time? What headspace is this
person going to be? Sometimes you may
want to strategically create the sense of urgency
to make it seem like, listen, we need a decision
pretty quickly on this. Creating urgency sometimes
can be helpful and sometimes picking and choosing your timing is much
more valuable. Make it easy for them
to have next steps. It's so easy to go to
people with problems or go to people with a general
request at a high level. But if you make it easy
for them and you say, look, I really need
some extra support. I've spoken to Steve. He's
available for a day a week. He's agreed that he could
add value to my project, and he's also agreed to jump on the team
pending your approval. If you're okay, I'd love for you to
approve this today and Steve will start tomorrow and it will really help
us in the project. Make it easy for them to make a decision because you've already provided the next steps. Also when it comes to requests, get in the habit
of being rejected. What do I mean by that? If you speak to any senior person, any successful businessman,
any successful entrepreneur, they probably have been
rejected time and time again. Get used to it, it's
a part of life, but do practice asking. Just because it got
rejected doesn't mean it's personal and it doesn't mean
that your idea was terrible. It simply means you need
to keep working on them. Remember, influence
is a campaign, or you need to pivot your idea or pivot your approach
to a different. Getting caught off guard
is very unpleasant. Sometimes you can
react emotionally. It's important to always stay calm and by yourself some time. Sit back, listen to
what people are saying. Let's take a scenario,
for example, maybe you're in a meeting and you've prepared
three data points, and someone says to you, but what about the other
three data points? And you think to yourself, well, I haven't
even prepared that. My meeting was supposed to be
on these three data points, and now you're asking
about that stuff. I haven't even
prepared for that. So there's a three step
formula that you can practice to prepare for
when you get off guard. Here's what I know.
Here's what I don't know, and here's how I'm
going to find out. So my focus on today's
meeting was Data 0.1, two, and three. I've
prepared for this. I really deeply understand this. But actually, I understand
that maybe there's three other data
points that I haven't considered. Here's
what I can do. I can go and speak
to Bob in finance. I'll go to him
after this meeting. I'll get the data
points. I'll analyze it. I'll include it in
my presentation so that next week
when we meet again, I'll have all six
data points for you. You've effectively bought
yourself some time. You've demonstrated
that you're listening, you're understanding, you
have been caught off guard, but you're not
letting it faze you, you're not getting emotional. You're saying what you know, you're admitting
what you don't know, and more importantly, you've made a plan for how you're going to find out. Buying time is key. What about when you're
being criticized? Again, a very
unpleasant experience, but it's a part of life. Any seniors, any successful
person has been criticized. It's important for
you to listen first. Don't jump in with a response. Don't get emotional, don't take things too personally
where possible. Listen first, stay calm. Use logic, and stay focused
on what's being said. Ask yourself the question,
could they be right? This is around being
open and transparent. Could they be right in
what they're saying? I know it doesn't feel nice,
but could they be right? And what should
your response be? Never respond straightaway.
Don't jump in and say, no, you're wrong or yes,
you're right. I'm sorry. Thank you for the
feedback. Thank you for the feedback
is a great way to acknowledge what they've said without necessarily agreeing
or disagreeing with it. Empathize with them
where possible. Thank you for the feedback. It's valuable. I can see how you've come to
this conclusion. Can I clarify a few things? You said this, is
this what you meant? You said that, is
that what you meant. You're coming across
as someone who's taking the time to holistically understand everything
that's being said and then move on to
the problem solving phase. I understand this is
what's concerning you. Yes. And here's how
I plan to solve it. Yes, and is a great
technique that you can use. Yes, and here's my
plan going forward. Yes, but this is what
I've been doing. Moving away from the
criticism and moving towards problem solving is a great way to channel it into a
more positive way. Lastly, please try your best
to control your emotions. It's very easy to think that things are being
said personally, maybe they are, but you will do yourself no favors by
reacting in an emotional. And lastly, we mentioned presenting when explaining to seniors on the previous side, but now you're presenting up. Know your audience so important, who's going to be in
the room at the time? Is it the C suite? Is it the executive team?
Is it your manager? Is it an external
set of clients? Who is it? What makes them tick? What information are
they going to need? And how will you spoon
feed them that principle? Pyramid principle.
Start up by saying, I'm here today to
present to you A, B, and C. Make it very clear. We have 1 hour. I'm going
to try and wrap this up in about 35 minutes
that will allow us 25 minutes for questions
and discussion. Frame things appropriately. With senior people
better to keep it high level with your
details in the appendix. Have a small set of slides
up front that is crisp and clear with your key
messages at a later stage, if they ask tough questions, refer to your appendix for
the big pieces of detail. Lastly, do expect a grilling. A grilling, I know is
uncomfortable, it's unpleasant, but senior people
typically will want to know that you have dotted
the I's and cross the Ts, that you know your stuff,
that you know the numbers, that you've thought
about next steps. A grilling doesn't necessarily
mean you're doing badly, it shows an element of rigor and it shows that they're taking what you're
saying seriously. So what about practicing? Practice and practice and
practice, like we said. I want you to write for me over the next half an
hour four responses. Spend about 15 minutes
writing each response, asking for support,
giving feedback, addressing a sensitive topic,
and handling criticism. Let's take asking for support. I want you to imagine a
scenario where you're on a super busy project
and you could really do with an
extra pair of hands. You know that your
colleague, Steve, is also super busy right now. That being said, he's got
a little bit of capacity. How are you going to
communicate with him your situation that you need his support just for a
little bit of extra time, acknowledging that he's busy? The second scenario that
I'd like you to respond to is when you have a colleague
who is underperforming. Time and time again, Karen hasn't delivered on the work
that you've asked her to. Maybe the data has been wrong, maybe there's been
errors in her work, and you need to
give her feedback. How would you go
about doing that? How would you
communicate with her? What format would you use and
what words would you use? Dressing a sensitive topic
is always very awkward. I want you to imagine
that your colleague Bob is always late. He's a really great guy, very smart, very accomplished, and he's a fantastic
asset to the business, but he's always
late to meetings. His lateness always
disrupts the meetings. People get distracted. You have to start
again, waste time. He's always flustered when he walks in and he's always late. I want you to address that
in a sensitive manner. Lastly, I want you
to write a response where you personally are
receiving criticism. Your manager has come
to you and said, Look, I'm really not happy with the way this project
is being run. I think there's a lot of things that could
be done better. I think you could
have done better. I want you to assume that half of what your manager says is fair and half actually is unfair and you may
have a response for that. So for the next half an hour, I want you to spend 15 minutes
on each of these topics, scribble down some
notes and really refine what you think
a response could be. And I would love for you to
share with me your responses. Also, I would love you to record yourself delivering one
response in this scenario. What sort of body
posture will you take? What sort of eye
contact will you give? What's your choice of words
and your choice of tone? Are you going to be Is this going to be face to face, or is this going to be an email? I want you to share
your thoughts. And lastly, I want you to share
your reflections on this. You know, now that
you've done your topics, how do you think you're going to implement those in the future? Have you had any experiences in the past of these
types of scenarios? How did you handle it
then and how do you think you'll handle it
now? Best of luck. So what are the
top five takeaways from the communications chapter? Number one,
communication requires a very holistic approach.
It's not just talking. Number two, being concise is
generally a very smart idea. Number three, staying calm
when under pressure is key. Try not to get emotional. Number four, probably the
most important takeaway, understanding your
audience and tailoring your message for
them is critical. And lastly, number
five, we should be actively listening
first before speaking. Get all the information together and then formulate
a logical response. Thank you and good luck, guys.
5. 4. Engaging Presentations: Welcome back, everyone. I
think it's time for us to move away from the social side and more into the
technical side. Chapter four, engaging
presentations. How do you make presentations
that really stand out? What principles do you
need to be following? So objectives for this chapter, you will learn the key areas of focus when you're
creating a presentation. You'll be able to understand how to design beautiful slides. You will learn how to bring
your message to life. You learn about presentation
logic, vertical logic, horizontal logic, which
is very important, and I have some slides
for you to look at. We're going to critique
them together, and I'm going to
ask you to go away and redesign a couple of those slides to see what you've taken away
from this chapter. So tools come and go, but the craft remains. What does that mean?
Once upon a time, in order to get messages across, they would have draftsmen. Then came the typewriter. Then Microsoft Windows
95 word documents. PowerPoint then quickly
took over as the best way. Somewhere along this journey, remember if you're old enough, you remember the
overhead projectors that we had in school. And nowadays you have very
fancy innovative presentations just like the studio I'm in now. That being said, even though
the tools might change, the craft remains.
What does that mean? It means that the point
remains the same. Messages need to be conveyed in an engaging and
visual format. First things first, why are you giving this presentation
in the first place? Is it to give information? Is it to deliver training, to make a sales pitch, to share a big idea? There's a number of reasons why you'd want to
give a presentation. I saw a funny video
recently of a guy who was pitching a holiday
idea to a group of his friends and he put a
PowerPoint presentation together to try and convince them that they should go on
this holiday with. How are you going to do it?
Nowadays, the simplest way to do it is PowerPoint
or Keynote, and you can also find
some other interesting video type presentation
software online. Remember, design isn't
about being artistic. Making sure that it's well
designed, it's clear, it's effective, isn't about
having artistic ability, it's about following
some clear principles. And remember, it always
comes down to the who. Who is your audience? Identify them, create personas. My audience might be high
net worth individuals. My audience might
be my colleagues. It might be people junior
to me that I'm training, it might be people
senior to me that I'm trying to pitch an idea to. Identify them and ask yourself what information
do they need, and how do they like to
process information? What do you want them to do? Remember, there's so
what that happens. Do you want them to
do? What do they know? What do they need to
know? What type of people are they and what questions are
they likely to have? Make sure your slides or your presentation captures
all of these things. What are their needs? Make sure that you've addressed
those needs. Imagine that you
got a love letter. And it said all the nice things as to why this person
was in love with you, but it was addressed to
whom it may concern. It would make you feel,
hold on a second. Was this even for me? Or was I a last minute decision
to be given this letter? And so the importance of that
is make sure that you are tailoring your message and
your slides to the audience. It's like a cover letter when
you're applying for a job. Try and tailor it
to the audience. The content, when you're
crafting the content, it's always best to
make an outline first. Remember to ask yourself
the so what question. Why am I even giving
this presentation? It's not to give a presentation. It's usually to get some outcome to elicit an emotion,
to elicit a feeling. I typically start
presentations with a skeleton. Imagine I was going to be
pitching an idea to someone. I would probably
start by saying, there's a problem in the market. Then I would have
a chapter on what existing solutions are there in the market, and why
don't they work. Then I might have a chapter
that goes on to propose my solution and the
benefits that that brings. I then might talk about
the investment required, the timeline, and
the next steps. And so that gives you
five or six chapters, a structure, if you will, of a PowerPoint presentation. You then go back and
put me on the bone. You then work on each chapter,
each slide individually. But starting with the
outline and so what at the very beginning
is so important in focusing your mind and making sure that you're creating
the right presentation. Of course, as we learn
in Chapter one and two, make it a story, make it something engaging and
easy for people to follow. Text on a slide is necessary, but too much text
can be distracting. Text should be large, large enough to read, and
it should be few. As you can see in my case, I'm not putting whole
sentences on this slide. I'm putting trigger words.
Logic should be there. It should follow a
sequence, a flow. We'll come across vertical
and horizontal logic later. But slide logic and presentation logic and flow
is critically important. Typically five
bullets per section. Better not to have
full sentences, better to have trigger
words that will remind you what to say in
a particular circumstance. And if it's more
than five bullets, if it now starts
to get to ten, 15, 20, think about making this into a document that you put in an appendix or you
send out in advance. Animations can be helpful, but just be careful not to
make them too distracting. If you go on any
PowerPoint course, you can see how to use the transitions and the animations. They're very helpful, but
try not to make them too distracting because it
can look unprofessional. People have a tendency to either listen to what you're saying
or read what's on the slide, not both at the same time.
Use silences appropriately. If you want them
to see something, give them a minute just to look at the slide, take
in the information. If you want them
to read something, then you can stay quiet
and let them read it. Otherwise, they're either
going to be listening to your voice or reading
what's on the screen. Design. Design is
very important. Your slide needs to be clean, your slide needs to be clear, and it needs to have balance, not too light, not too dark, not too heavy, not too soft. Symmetry is something
that you can use, but don't think that you
always need symmetry. It's a common misconception that my slide needs to be perfectly
aligned in the middle, perfectly aligned
horizontally, and everything must look
pretty and symmetrical. I'm going to show
you the rule of thirds that I often use
in my presentations, which is quite a powerful way to elicit emotion in people. So I want to show you this
picture of this cheetah. Now, you might think that if you wanted to take a
picture of the cheetah, you'd put it here in this square because that would
be the center. But I don't think that's
what the photographer wants. You can see that the cheetah is looking in that direction. And so using the rule of thirds, the photographer has made us
get a different impression. The cheetah is looking
towards something. There's open space here. Maybe it seen something it
wants to go and attack or eat. So the rule of
thirds is this you take two vertical lines, two horizontal lines, and
you split them evenly. Now you have nine quadrants. These points right here are
called intersection points. You eye, the human brain
naturally likes to focus on these intersection points when looking at a photo or a slide. You can see this is the
same dimensions as a slide. If the photographer
here just wanted to focus on the cheetah
and show you its spots, its face, the photographer may have put the cheetah
in the center square. But actually by putting
him in this quadrant here, it gives the impression that the cheetah is looking at something. It changes the context entirely, and I want you to try and use that principle when you're
designing your slides. Do think intelligently about what type of picture,
image, video, or slide content that you're creating. Let's use
another example. This could have just
been a photo of a tree. Again, the tree
could have been in the middle square and the
focus would have been that. But I don't think that was
the photographer's intention. I think the intention
here was to try and get a sense of isolation, a sense of vastness,
a sense of space. You can see that the tree
is in this quadrant, in this intersection
point and look at all this space out here
with the sunrise so it gives the illusion of
isolation and it elicits a different emotion
than just a photo of a tree. Same over here. The wolf is looking
out onto a glacier. Again, the wolf could
have been the focus, but the photographers use
the space very cleverly. Lastly, this one
here could have been just a photo of a child
wearing a Superman outfit. But actually, what's happened is the photographers used the
space and made the child run into the sun to give the illusion that the
child is playing with someone or moving into a space or running
into the sunset. While symmetry can be helpful, I don't think it's the only way to have an impactful slight. How else can you make
your slides stand out? Well, color can be very helpful. Generally speaking, it's
better to stay on brand. Your organization,
your business, your product will likely
have brand colors. By all means, stay on
those brand colors. I'll make everything look
so much more professional. Do make associations. Typically, blue might be associated with
trust and calmness. Green generally signals good, red signals problems, bad alarm. Beware of rag ratings. Nobody likes to see
their name in red. For example, imagine that you had red means ten to 20% profit. Amber is 20 to 30% profit, green is anything
more than 30% profit. If someone's name is in red, they've done something
good, they brought back ten to 20% profit. But the fact that their name is in red or their product is in red generally signals
alarm bells inside us. Beware of rag ratings, but do use color to your advantage. What else can you use? Contrast. Contrast
is very important. By making this word
bigger in the sentence, your eyes are naturally
drawn to that. By using a different
color in the sentence, your eyes also are
naturally drawn to that. A, although subtle, bolding some words will also
draw your attention. But remember, use it sparingly. If everything is multi
colored or everything is of a different size
or everything is bold and italics and underlined, it's only going to
create confusion. Remember, you're using
these techniques to control your audience. You want to guide them to specific words or specific
areas of your slide. I'll give you another
example, animations. I only want you guys right
now to look at this box. If I had put this box already there and started
talking about color, you might be distracted
by this box and this box. And by having these
animations on slide, I can control where
you're looking. We're talking about this
box now and when I'm ready and when I'm satisfied that everyone's understood it, we're going to be moving
on to the next box. The next one, information
is around images. JPEGs versus PNG images are
very powerful, by the way. I've used them in
this presentation and I use them frequently
in presentations. A picture paints 1,000 words, and I think it's very
important to try and lighten the text on the slide
using images and icons. Generally speaking,
better to use PNG files because as we'll see, generally of a higher
quality and cut out in a way that makes it much
more stylistically, better on the slide, although JPEGs and high quality
are also very good. Using morph is a feature of PowerPoint that
will allow you to highlight certain
parts of your slide. Most people don't
know how to use that. I'm happy to show you
that in the next slide. And using pictures of a high
quality are very important. Simple icons generally are better rather than
these complicated, off topic off brand type icons. I'm going to show you
a couple of pictures. I'm not a Manchester United fan. These are the only
pictures I could find. Cristiano Ronaldo,
JPEgPhoto, you can see that it's got this what I think is an ugly
black square around it. The picture quality
isn't that great. He's not really
looking at the camera. It's just an okay picture. One, on the other
hand, is a PNG file. You can see that it's cut out, so his silhouette is there. He's clearly taking
this photo in a studio. It's high resolution. He's
looking at the camera. Which photo of him would you rather have in
your presentation? Which one looks
more professional? Imagine I had a text box over here and you just had
this photo to look at. It's fine, but it's just not as professional as
having the PNG file, it's cut out, it's high quality. Now, I was going to show
you the more feature. The more feature
will allow me within a slide to show focus on
one object or the other. The first object I want you
to focus on is this picture. And so that removes the distractions and
allows me to talk. Just to this. I made it full screen, and
we can look at it. Now, out of interest,
you can see that this photos of a
lower resolution. It has the big border, but this is the more feature
it allows us to zoom in. Now, what if I wanted
them side by side? I've now used the
more feature to bring that other photo back into the fold so we can
contrast and compare. So the more feature is very
powerful on PowerPoint. This photo, I think,
is a better quality. It is a silhouette. This photo, in my opinion, is kind
of outdated. Can use it. I still looks fine, but a PNG
file that you can search on Google or make one yourself will be likely
a better resolution, better quality, and more suited to looking professional
in your presentations. So some extra bits and pieces. Video, as we have
seen in this course, can be quite powerful, but use it sparingly. You haven't turned up to
watch a 1 hour video, but it can be used to illustrate certain points or to bring
your examples to life. Better to embed your videos
within the presentation, as you've seen here, you click the button,
the video plays. It could be an online
link to a YouTube video or it could be downloaded
from your hard drive, embedded in the presentation. It means you simply don't need to click away from
the presentation, go to the keyboard and mouse, open up a new window or open
up the file, double click. It opens in a different
format. Click play. You don't have to waste time
doing any of that stuff. Embedding your
video just makes it feel a bit more slick and
a bit more professional. Where possible use
high definition video. I know I haven't done that
in this course so far. There's been a couple
of examples where the only video I could get my hands on was a
low resolution one, but where possible, try and
have high definition content, it's nice and easy
for your viewers to enjoy and better to
keep them short short, snappy to the point,
discuss them, include them, make
reference to them. Looping videos, as
you may have seen at the very start of the course
can be helpful just as a background whilst
you're waiting during an exercise or a practice when I run
this course in person, I'll have the looping
video in the background whilst participants are
practicing and doing things. It just means you're
not looking at a blank slide. What else? Charts are very, very powerful. A lot of people are data driven. Most of us are data driven. We like to see facts and data, and charts are a fantastic
way to illustrate them. And we'll come on to the chapter on charts a little bit later on, but charts are very
powerful do include them. Slide transitions,
as we mentioned, fade and more for
my preferences. PowerPoint has a number of different transitions that
can be quite distracting. They have their little
squares and the lines. It's okay sometimes
for certain audiences, maybe in a more social
casual setting. But generally speaking, in
the professional context, fading it or morphing
the slides 1 to the other is a little bit
better, generally, keeping your slide
design simple is better than having it overly complex, as we're
going to see later on. Backgrounds, generally,
you should use your brand colors rather than making up different
color schemes. Solid colors tend to be easier on the eye than
having very dark colors. You generally will
pick between having a dark slide or a light slide. So my presentations, I like the dark background
with white text. A lot of people have white
backgrounds with dark text. It doesn't really matter
so long as you're consistent and
keeping it simple, of course, is very
important, as we mentioned. So what about some
presentation tips with delivering
that presentation? Practice and practice
and practice. Practice makes improvement.
I'm going to be honest, I was up late last night, past midnight practicing
this very presentation. It doesn't come naturally to me. The information's not on a
script that I'm reading, it's not on the slide
that I'm reading. It comes through practice. Don't be scared before a big presentation for you to start early working
on that presentation, keep practicing
it and get slick. The idea is just to
know your content so well that you're able to
present it naturally. One slide or one set of messages per slide
generally is the rule. Try not to overcomplicate things and confuse
your audience. Always better not
to read the slide. Generally speaking,
have a couple of words on the page that allows it
to trigger your memory, but better not to read your
slide that doesn't come across as professional and
it could have been an email. If you want them to read it,
they can read it themselves. Here it's not a reading contest. You're here to engage
them and present with them and look
around the room and get people's opinions and feedback and not simply read
off the slide. Inviting Q&A, as I just
said, is super important. Invite your audience
to participate. The easy part of the
presentation is you standing and repeating your script or what you've learned or
what you've practiced. The hard part is when you're
in a room full of people and any questions and
ten hands go up and you've got to go around and field some difficult questions. Do invite Q&A. Have an appendix at the back of the document that contains other relevant information that it's almost like a just in case. But do invite Q&A. That's the
point of why you're here. Don't be scared.
Smile and enjoy it. It is a great privilege and an honor to be standing
in front of a group of people or someone and sharing your thoughts,
sharing your emotions. You have 1 hour, half an
hour, however long you have, you have a blank
canvas and it is a real honor and a privilege to be able to present
something to someone. So smile and enjoy it. It can be fun.
Control the audience, not in a manipulative way, but in a way that says, I need you to be looking
at this box right now, or I want a certain
emotion to be elicited. Use photos, use video, use stories, use
animations, use colors, use all the techniques that
I've spoken about just now, but you should be ideally in
control of your audience. To give you an example,
sometimes you might have an audience member
who takes out their phone. A little trick that I like to use is I'll often look
at the slide and say, Well, I was
discussing with Steve recently about XY and Z. If Steve is the
person in the room, he suddenly realizes, my
name has been called, I now need to pay attention. It's a little trick
you can use to try and get someone's attention
who might be off their phone, another way is to
simply go around, make really good eye contact
with everyone in the room, making sure that
they feel welcome and engaged and involved
in your presentation. Be confident, like we
said in Chapter one, speak clearly, have good
energy, Bing positive energy. It can be as stressful,
difficult an environment. You might be getting a grilling, you might be
presenting something. You might be getting criticized. Try and be confident,
try and be positive, be assertive, and bring
positive, good energy. What else is good
for presenting? Make it easy to follow
and understand with your words and also with your slide design and
with your slide flow. It should be really
straightforward for even a complete newbie to understand what it is
that you're talking about. Have a hand holding exercise
where it's so easy. The logic is so clear that
there's no problem there. Like we said, have
an appendix for those people that want to
ask technical questions, typically finance
questions, numbers, raw data, that kind of stuff
can be put in the appendix. You can in and sign post that. You said, Look, if anyone's
got any questions, I'm happy to send out the
data pack separately or I have some slides in
the appendix we can go through doing
the Q&A at the end. Remember to always ask
yourself, so what? The idea here is, you've given this great
presentation, so what? Why are we even here? What
am I trying to do here? Do I want to test
your understanding? Do I want to convince
you of something? Do I want to share
some information? You need to ask the so what, and that will guide
your style and type and content of your presentation. Don't
lose sight of this. It's super important for you to remember why you're there
and what you're presenting. So let's move on to some
principles. Bing Bang bongo. Bing Bang bongo is
a principle that basically says that simple
and logical is better. Here is a really
simplified example. Imagine that I had a
presentation and there were three main things I was going to talk about
in this presentation, triangle, circle and square. In my introduction, I would start by saying, hi,
good morning, everyone. I'm here today to
talk to you about triangle, circle and square. I would then have some slides. Subsequently, one
slide on triangle, one slide on circle, one slide on square or a chapter here, a chapter here, a chapter here. So I said I'm going
to talk about it. I then went on to talk about
exactly what I said I would. And in conclusion, I've
spoken about triangle, I've spoken about circle,
I've spoken about square. Now, there might be a bit
abstract, but in essence, what it means is, do what
you say and say what you do. I said I was going to
speak about these three. I did speak about
these three things and in conclusion,
these three things. It's really not complicated. You don't need to think about all different
sophisticated things. Keeping it simple is
better Bingbng bongo. Now, I promise you we were
going to talk about logic. I'm a big proponent of
horizontal and vertical logic. Now, what is horizontal logic? Horizontal logic is your story. It's the flow of your story as you go through the
presentation over the 45 minutes. So to start with, you might have an
executive summary, where you make point A, you make point B, and you
make a recommendation C. Your flow of ideas
should mirror that. It should be really clear
that A leads naturally to B, that leads naturally to C. Imagine in the other example
where I was making a pitch, where I initially started off talking about the
investment required. Then I started talking about other solutions in the market. Then I started talking about
what the current state is. It's a bit disjointed. Why have you started
here on this slide? Maybe you need to reorganize your presentation in
a way that flows. That's what horizontal logic is. It is the flow of
the slides and it's the journey that you take your audience through as you
deliver the presentation. On the other side,
vertical logic looks at a specific slide and
it asks the question, do I have all the information I need in the body of the slide? To make the conclusion
that we're making. If I'm here to talk
about the current state of a particular
problem in the market, I'm going to talk a little
bit about it in text. I might have a chart here with some data that supports it, and I'm also probably
going to have some insights from the data. All in all these three
things are supporting acts. They're supporting evidence of the title of the conclusion
that I've drawn, that this is the
state of the market. Vertical logic simply says, as you go from top
to down vertically, your mind easily
follows the story. It goes from here and
then it goes from here and then it goes from
there, it all makes sense. It's all flowing and it's all clear and it's
not complicated. The numbers make sense. One plus one plus
one equals three, it makes perfect sense to me. I understand why the title has been written the
way it's been written. I understand the conclusion. That's horizontal logic
and vertical logic. Reverse storyboarding
is something that I love to do and I do it
before any presentation. Reverse storyboarding is
asking yourself the question, what do I want to
present at the end? What is the last thing I want to say? What
is the conclusion? What is the so what
of my presentation? Maybe it's something like
the market is looking bad, the existing solutions
are not great. Our solution is
going to be amazing. That's what I want to
present at the end. That's my executive summary,
that's my conclusion. That's my key takeaway. I want people to walk away
thinking these three things. Now, how do I design a presentation around these three things,
well, Bing Bang Bongo. I'm going to have a section or a slide on the current market. I'm going to have a section or a slide on the competitors
and how they're failing, and I'm going to
have a section or a slide on our product. And so reverse storyboarding is a very useful way when you're struggling to think about what should I put in
this presentation? I've got 45 minutes to provide an update. I
don't know what to do. There's so much stuff I
could do, it's so confusing. Ask yourself, what is the
end result I'm after? Let's reverse storyboard. I'm not going to
start from slide one. I'm going to start
from slide 11. The conclusion. What conclusion do I
want them to take away? Then let's work backwards, reverse it, and then it'll
help me design my slides. It therefore means that
there's probably going to be a very nice horizontal logic to your document because A will
lead to B will lead to C, and it'll be very clearly
laid out at the end. Practice and practice
in practice. So we're going to be looking
at some slides in a minute. I'm going to give you a
minute to look at them. Please pause the video if you want to take a little bit more time to look at the slides, and then there is an example of an improved slide
straight after that. At the end of that, there
are two slides that I've not redesigned that
haven't been redesigned. I would like for you to
go away and think about, number one, why are
these slides not good? How could they be
improved? What's good? What's not good? How could
they be improved as always. And I want you to go
away and redesign one or both of those slides,
and please send it to me. I would love to give
you some feedback and love to see how
you're getting on. I want you to
reflect and improve. Does your new slide
hit the mark? Is it on point in
terms of brand, in color, in contrast? Have you used good
design principles? What sort of images
have you used? Have you used any
videos, et cetera? How have you gone away and
redesigned that slide? And what principles
from this chapter have you used? So let's
jump straight into it. Here is the first slide. I want you to take a look at. Feel free to pause the video if you need a
little bit more time. So this slide is saying how to make a
good first impression. Well, first of all, you've
got capital letter, capital letter, but
these are in lowercase. That's weird. I can see that this icon is just
outside the box. That bugs me. I want that to be a
little bit further down. But the obvious thing is there is a lot of text on this slide. Maybe it's good content,
maybe it's relevant. You've got some
percentages here, you've got some
relevant information. But actually, there is a
lot of text on this slide. Actually, this feels like an email was copy
pasted onto the slide and no real work
was done to try and design it in a way that
makes it appealing. So how has someone
redesigned it? Okay? What do you guys think? I think it looks
quite nice. It looks like they're using
the red and black, sorry, the red and
blue brand colors. They've used some nice icons and illustrations to try
and bring it to life. They've not fixed the
capital letters yet. So that's an area
for improvement. And actually, they've
summarized it into four different sections. So compared to what
it was before, which felt very 1995, they've now updated it and it appears to have a lot of
better design elements. Take a look at this slide. Endangered species
around the globe. Now, I do think that this is
probably a tongue in cheek. I'm hoping that no one actually went to design this and
actually presented this. But if you were to try and
present something like this, you can see that it's
very frustrating. It's distracting, loads
of different animations. Okay, so we have a nice
picture of a whale here. It's not a PNG file, it's a JPEG, it's square. It looks a little bit
ugly. Where's the whale? You know, which one
of these animals is a whale as far I mean,
I can't see that. And it's already
started to disappear before I had a chance to
digest the information and They've already gone to
town with the animations. So how has someone
redesigned it? So this to me looks
a little bit more tidy. I like the color coding. I like the numbers are a little bit more clear in bold there. And actually, the audience
is being controlled, which is quite nice because you have that box that's moving, and presumably someone
is speaking over that to bring light to the
numbers or the situation. And the fact that you have color coded pins on the map show me which part of the world these endangered
species are from. Third and final example
that we're going to work through a straightforward slide, what is inbound marketing. What do you guys think? I think whoever has designed this
has made an effort to be fair to try and summarize and keep it
simple and straightforward. That being said, I
don't think that there is much design thinking
that's gone into it. They could have used a
few different elements. They could have
used the animations to try and bring
different topics. They could have used
boxes, images, icons. It is not a terrible slide, but it's super basic, so someone has gone and
redesigned it here. What do you think
of this redesign? It's a little bit more colorful. It shows now one, two, and three in a bit
more of a linear way. It's easier on the eyes. I still think there's
work to be done. They've made some improvements, but I still feel like there's some room for improvement here. It'd be great to
get your thoughts. I'd love to hear your feedback. So here are the two slides now that I would like
you guys to redesign. Five great productivity
apps, Todoist, Slack, toggle,
Evernote, and Trello. So take a look at this slide.
Tell me what you think. What makes it good,
what makes it not good? What are the areas
for improvement? And I want you to have a crack
at redesigning this slide. Secondly, here's another slide. What is IOT, the
Internet of Things. What are your thoughts
on this slide? To give credit, I think they're trying to not put text on. They're trying to use images. They're trying to use
it as a voiceover. Fair? But I think they've missed the mark
in terms of the design. Lots of JPEG files, lots of harsh edges. I'm not really sure
what I'm looking at. There's so much going on here. Some of them are pictures, some of them are icons
over here in blue, some of the illustrations. There's a lot of confusion here. Have a crack at redesigning
this slide as well. Please send it to me and share
with me your reflections. I'd love to give you
some feedback and hear your thoughts on how this
process was. Good luck. So top five takeaways
from this chapter. Number one, most importantly, knowing your audience
and the message is the first step to creating a really engaging and
fun presentation. Number two, less is more. I'll leave it there.
Number three, techniques such as contrast and animations help you to control the focus
of your audience. Number four, slide
logic, horizontal logic, vertical logic is important in creating an easy to
understand presentation flow. It's really easy for people
to understand your logic, your thought process, and
the story using slide logic. And lastly, it's best ideally to have one
message or one set of messages per slide so as to not confuse or
distract your audience. Thank you, guys,
and best of luck.
6. 5. The Key Principles of Leadership: Welcome back, guys. I hope you've enjoyed the
chapter so far. Our next topic is something that's very
close to my heart, and I think that's probably something that you all
care about deeply, which is the key
principles of leadership. One of the reasons why you
may be on this course and learning about these topics
is because you're now coming into managerial
senior positions, and you want to refine your ability to be
a fantastic leader. And hopefully, that's
what we're going to be discussing today. So objectives for this session. You'll learn the key
principles of leadership. You'll be able to
understand what types of behaviors make good and
not so good leaders. And of course, you'll be making a leader development
plan for yourself, hopefully sharing it with me, and taking that first step towards an improvement in
your leadership journey. So let's summarize, first off, the pyramid principle,
if you like, the eight key principles
of leadership. Number one, create
a shared vision. Number two, practice
what you preach. Number three, consider people
and people and people. It's all about
people. Number four, create a fantastic culture. Number five, own your mistakes. Number six, have a
constant desire to learn. Number seven,
communicate effectively, and number eight,
think outside the box. Those are the eight key
principles of leadership. So why don't we deep dive into some of these in a
little bit more detail. Vision without action is merely a dream. What
does that mean? It means if you have
a great idea in your head and it stays in your head, nothing's
going to happen. It will just be a dream. Action without vision
just passes time. And that's like saying if
you do things thoughtlessly, if you do things without really thinking
about them first, it becomes a hobby. It
becomes a time pass. Vision with action
can change the world. And I think of Steve
Jobs when I think of this quote because what he had in his mind was a visionary way that we would all be
interacting with our phones, the capabilities
they would have, and the interaction
that we would have with a touch screen. But it
wasn't just a vision. He was able to implement that
and execute that and build a strong team and also create a really strong
following of people, employees and customers that would drive this innovation
year after year. And so what's the learning here? A great leader will
have a vision, but he or she will also be able to influence
and inspire those around them and take them through that journey
of execution as well. So, create a shared vision and bring people along
through that journey. The second principle,
a great leader will practice what they preach. The difference between
a leader and a boss, a boss might say to you,
Hey, go and do this. Get this done. A leader
will show you the path. They will illuminate
the way forward. They practice what they preach. They live and breathe the
values that they're preaching. Remember, Leaders are chosen. They're not born. It's not a skill set that you're
simply born with. People around you will see that, Hey, I like this person. I like what they stand for. I like what they're saying, I
like what they're thinking, and I want to do
what they're doing. I want to follow them. Leaders are chosen. If you think about governments
around the world, often, you know, leaders are
elected and not simply born. In some countries,
you have that, but in many countries around the
world, leaders are elected. And so why do we elect
those people over others? It's because maybe they have a certain quality about showing their best foot forward
and actually leading by example. Set the example. So if you're a great leader,
you're setting that example, you're showing your team
how to do things correctly. So great leaders will
practice what they preach. The third principle, it
is all about people. Fundamentally,
leadership isn't about the product that you sell or the service that you provide. It is all about people.
You need to hire well. A great leader will
know how to go through a really rigorous recruitment
process and be able to spot talent and to be able to identify someone who's going
to add value to their team. They will hire well. They
will develop their teams. They will invest in them, invest in their development, whether financially by sending
them on a training course, or maybe by developing them by mentoring them or giving them different
opportunities. They will empower them. They will allow them the
opportunity to grow. They will trust them,
trust them with more work, trust them responsibility, with budgets, with
relationships. A great leader knows when to take a step back and
say, You know what? I'm giving you the
opportunity to grow. They'll empower them
and trust them. They'll involve them as well. Whenever there's an opportunity for learning, for development, for career growth,
or for excellence, a great leader will involve
the right team members. And of course, a great leader
will reward them as well. Verbally, emotionally, financially, whichever
method that they choose, but a great leader sees
that it's all about people, that they're going
to hire them well, develop them, involve them, trust them, empower them, and ultimately reward them. That's how you retain your
best talent as a leader. It's all about people.
I want you to watch this video from Gary Vinachuk where he talks about
culture, culture and people. First and foremost, are you the partners CEOs?
Like, is it your business? Yeah. First and foremost, you have to realize
in a real way, in a non bullshit way
that you work for them. If you do not do
that, you've lost. If you think people
work for you as the CEO or the founder of a company versus you
working for them, you will never,
ever, ever, ever, ever, ever Zoom in
ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever build
a good culture in a company. That's number one.
That is religious. That is number one. Number two, you have to realize that
there is no blanket rules. Everybody in your company, how many employees do you have? 33 30. Great. Nice number. You have to micromanage 330 people's
wants, ambitions, and needs on an everyday basis predicated on what
else is happening in their lives day after day, month after month,
year after year. To figure out what drives them? Is it money? Is it
work life balance? Is it, are they a
huge, you know, Chelsea fan and you buy them random tickets when
they aren't looking, and then they're
like, Oh, my God, you actually know
something about me, right? You think I pay attention
a lot to you guys? I ******* stalk the **** out of my 650 employees
on social media. The only way to build great culture is not only through words that
are written on the wall, but in your actions, you have to make every one of those people understand that you care more about them than you want them to care about you. So what do you think about
this clip from Gary Vinahuk? He touches upon a couple of
really important points. The first thing that
he said that really resonated is that
you work for them. You might be the leader.
You might have a title, a higher salary,
whatever it might be. But fundamentally,
you work for them. If you're not
enabling them to do their jobs, it's all gonna fail. A couple of other
things he mentioned. You really have to care
about your employees, and that isn't so much as, making sure they're doing
their jobs correctly, but you really have to
see them as human beings, understand what drives them, understand what motivates them, and really take a deep
emotional interest in them. Understand who they are. What's the name of their spouse? What's the name of
their children? What football team
might they support? What are they interested
to do on the weekends? What sort of hobbies
do they have? So, fundamentally, you as a
leader are managing people, and if you are focused
on your people, you'll create a
fantastic culture that people will
not want to leave. Here is a short
clip from Salmahak. She's going to be talking
about great leaders owning their mistakes.
Tell me what you think. Did something wrong.
Don't let anybody take your mistake and
use it against you. Even if it's a mistake,
it belongs to you. It's yours. Own it. Yes, I did it. Throw it back in their face and don't
let them take your mistake. Your mistake, it's
a valuable tool for growth and for life. Don't be afraid
to make mistakes. It's better than to do nothing and learn nothing
and not evolve. Your mistake is your
greatest opportunity. And if somebody is making fun of you because you made a mistake, don't go down because of it. If you say so what
to their face. If you say yes, so what,
They are powerless. They are powerless.
Yes, I messed up. Tomorrow, it will
be another day. Next year will be another year. It is my mistake, not yours. You have your own. So what do you guys think
of this clip from Samhaiak? I think great leaders
own their mistakes. But not only that, to go
on from what she said, great leaders will create
a culture where it's okay to make some mistakes,
within reason, of course. If we think back to let's take the Steve Jobs
example again. If we do things the same way
we've always done things, you're only going
to get the same outputs that you've
always gotten. If you think the same way that everybody before
you has thought, Well, you'll live your life in the same way that everybody
else has done previously. Someone has to come along
at some point and say, let's do something different. Let's be a visionary. If you're scared of
making mistakes, it really means you're scared of growing because growth only happens when you leave
your comfort zone. A great leader will recognize
this and say, guys, listen, Go ahead and make
some mistakes if you have to because that's the only way we're going to evolve, transform, and improve. If we want to do things the way things have
always been done, sure, follow the process,
follow the structure. But if you really
want to step outside the comfort zone and really
see fantastic growth, there has to be some
wiggle room for mistakes, and a great leader allows his team or her team
to make mistakes, but a great leader will also own their own mistakes and
say, Yeah, so what? We tried something,
it didn't work. That's part of life,
that's part of business. Let's keep going forwards. Let's learn from our mistakes, and let's keep moving forwards. So a great leader
able to apologize or able to own their mistakes,
but more importantly, learn from them and move forward and create that
culture in the team that your team feels
psychologically safe to go and try new things, make mistakes, and
learn from them. Moving on from that
similar theme, earning drives excellence. A great leader is
themselves focused on learning and wants learning and development for
the team around them. Let's take you, for example. You're here right now
in front of your TV, in front of your
laptop, you know, in front of your tablet, and
you're doing this course. Why? I'm sure you're
highly intelligent, highly qualified, but
you have a desire to continue learning,
to continue evolving, improving, listening to
what other people say, listening to what other
people have experienced, and to try and adapt and evolve and implement some of those learnings
into your own life. That's what drives excellence. A great leader will say, Listen, I don't know everything. If anything, I want to surround myself with smart people
so I can learn from them. I want those smart
people to then go and build teams of smart people so that they can learn
from one another. A great leader will him or herself go on learning
and development courses, whilst also encouraging
their team members to go and learn, develop, read, watch videos, watch documentaries,
watch YouTube channels, go get professional
certifications, do a postgraduate degree, sit with smart
people, bounce ideas. Don't be afraid
to make mistakes. Learning drives excellence and a great leader that I'm sure you are and
I'm sure you will be is going to
allow themselves to learn and drive a culture of learning excellence
for those around. A great leader is a
great communicator. Think about this for a second. Think about someone who you deeply admire, who's
been a great leader. One of the things that you
probably remember about them is the fact that they are really good
at communicating. They're probably very crisp, very clear, very concise. They were probably a
fantastic communicator, which contributed to them
being a great leader. Here we have the seven Cs for communication that I
wanted to run you through. When you're communicating
as a leader, make sure that your
communication, whether it's an
email, text message, Whatsapp, verbal, keynote,
whatever it might be, Zoom call, Make
sure it's complete. Make sure you're
not telling half truths or half the story. Make sure it's very
well considered. You've thought very
long and hard about it, and it is a complete message. It should also be concise. Nobody wants to hear two, 3 hours worth of a
speech or read a very, very, very long email unless
it's really necessary. Great leaders will
generally be concise. If you think about the
keynotes that Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos and other people
have done over the years, generally very concise capture
the whole information. They're very well considered and planned and thought through, and they're concrete,
meaning it's firm. It's not an idea or maybe or we might do
this, we might do that. A great, strong visionary leader will come at you
with concrete plans, concrete ideas, and
will communicate that in a very clear and
concise sort of way. Clarity is important. It's really important that when you're taking
people on a journey, you're asking people
to follow you. You're asking people to agree and think about
what you're saying that your message should be clear and very easy
to understand. It's about taking your
audience through that journey. Your communication should
always be courteous. Respect everyone in the room, respect their cultures,
their background, their story, and remember there's a certain formality
around communication. Be courteous, be polite. And lastly, do the right thing
and say the right thing. Your communication
should be correct. Correct in terms of maybe an
ethical moral perspective. As a leader, you have a
certain responsibility to do and say the right thing. But also, you need
to make sure that you fact checked
what you're saying. It's no good you saying
today, Oh, you know, this is the direction
the business is heading, and then tomorrow, you
say, Well, actually, sorry, I got it wrong. We're actually heading
in that direction. That creates a mistrust, or it maybe shows
that you haven't been well considered and
complete in your communication. So remember the seven
Cs for communication. Should be complete, concise, considered, concrete, clear,
courteous, and correct. I want you to take a minute
just to watch this video. The idea is that you are following the chocolate
under the cup. So this should test your focus. Where do you think? Left
cub? The chocolate is. You have three
options. Let's check the left cub. Middle cup? There it is. If you guess the middle cup,
you got it right. So did you manage to keep
your eye on the chocolate? Were you laser focused and
able to keep an eye on it? Let's do a more complicated. Keep your eyes on the chocolate. So can you guess where the Hershey Kiss is?
Where do you think it is? Okay, so you might have guessed that the chocolate was
under the cup on the left, but did you see the duck? So maybe you saw the duck. Very well done. But did you also see that there was an
extra hand in the video? Look carefully in the top left. This hand with the wristwatch,
that's an extra hand. And his hand comes
in a couple of times during the video.
Did he see that? And maybe you saw the
duck and the hand, but did you notice
that at the beginning, there were blue cups, and at
the end, they changed color. They were swapped
out for green cups. This is good fun. I do
enjoy watching this video. You might have thought
originally that the reason he's showing
us this video is because a great leader will
be laser focused on the target and
drive their team to success and they'll
keep their eye on the chocolate and there'll
be lots of distractions, but they'll be focused on the chocolate and not
the distractions. That's true to an extent, but there's something else
that we can learn from this, which is thinking
outside the box. Thinking outside the box is so critical for
a great leader, someone who can take
a step back and see the bigger picture and not
just focused on the one thing. The analogy that I can give
for the video that we just saw was that some leaders are so focused on
financial returns, for example, or outcomes
or performance. In this analogy,
that's the chocolate. So they have their eyes firmly on the chocolate
underneath the cup. We're following the
cup around and we know exactly where the chocolate is. So they're focused on financial
returns or performance. But what they don't realize that there's
other things going around in the organization
that as the leader, they need to keep
a closer eye on. The analogy I can use is
maybe the duck represents a bad employee and before they realize that you
have a bad employee because you didn't hire well, you didn't keep
an eye on things, and now you have someone
who's bringing a toxic, negative attitude or
culture to the business. The other thing we can
use as an analogy is the extra hand that you
saw with the watch, could be external factors or external influences that are
impacting your business. It could be government actions. It could be the actions
of your competitors. It could be the behaviors and
habits of your customers. And unless you're paying
attention to those, before you realize it, there are impacts to your business
that you're not aware of. And the third and final analogy, was the analogy of and what is the best way for
me to describe this? The changing of the
colors of the cups could represent a
changing of culture. And so you as the
leader have been so focused on the money, the outcomes, et cetera, you didn't realize
that there was a culture change
that was going on, and what started
off as blue cups ended up as green cups,
and now it's too late. You don't know where the
blue cups have gone, and that could be your
good employees leaving, being replaced by bad employees or not the right attitude or culture that you
want for your business. So a great leader will
think outside the box, will take a step back from
time to time and see what's happening in the
entire landscape that they need to
keep an eye on, as well as empowering you guys, empowering your teams to focus on the money or the
chocolate in this case. So there are many different
leadership styles, and I'm sure that
you've worked for many different leaders that have elicited many different
leadership styles. Let's talk about them. A
leader could be a coach. They could be a visionary, they could be a servant,
they could be an autocrat. They could be a las fare
or hands off leader. The coach typically
is motivational, someone who energizes
their team. The visionary is someone
who's very progress focused, inspirational and
sees the future. The servant leader is humble, they're protective
over their team. They will do whatever it
takes to empower their team. The autocrat says, Hey, it's my way or the highway, you better bring the results. The hands off leader
may also be autocratic. This is how we're
going to do it, but I'm going to leave you guys to. What other leadership
styles do we have? The Democrat, the pace setter, the transformational leader,
the transactional leader, and the bureaucratic leader. The democratic leader says, Hey, what do you guys think? They're supportive, they're collaborative,
they're innovative. The pace setter, is
the one that says, Hey, I'm going to
show you how to do it. Let's keep
the pace going. They motivate you,
they show you the way. The transformational leader is challenging and
communicative. They will challenge ideas, challenge ways of doing things, and try and communicate
those improvements to you. The transactional leader is
similar to the autocrat. The transactional
leader says, Listen, I don't care how you
get the job done, just get it done and
give me these outcomes. And the bureaucratic leader is hierarchical
and duty focused, meaning that they just think
about their hierarchy. I do my job, you do your
job, you report to me. He reports to you,
she reports to him. Everybody does their jobs. Your job description is
what you need to be doing. And so in reality,
most leaders will have a combination of styles and
think back to a leader, maybe a good leader, maybe a bad leader that
you've experienced. They probably demonstrate
a combination of these different
leadership styles. So one of the things that I would like for you to do when it comes to the practice
part of this chapter, as I'd like you to think
about the pros and cons for each of these
leadership styles, what is the benefit of
a visionary leader? What is the downside
of a visionary leader? Think about some leaders
that you've worked for. What leadership styles
have they elicited? And then also think
about yourself. What type of leader do
you want to be and create a leadership development plan to try and be that
type of leader? So the ten characteristics of a fantastic leader,
they have integrity. That means they want
to do the right thing. They're confident to
do the right thing, and they are driven by
that shared vision. They can delegate effectively. A great leader knows the strengths and
weaknesses of their team. They deeply understand the
work that needs to be done, and they can delegate
appropriately. We mentioned the seven
seas of communication, a great leader knows
how to communicate. They know who
they're speaking to, they know how to speak
to them and to get their message
across effectively. A great leader is
also self aware. They know their strengths
and weaknesses. I once worked for
someone who would start a lot of meetings
by saying Listen, I'm not the expert, but I've assembled a team
around me who are the experts. And so I'm simply the catalyst. I'm simply the enabler for these good people
to do their great work. A great leader is self aware, and as a result, they're always going to
be striving to do better and learn more and surround
themselves with smart people. A great leader also
shows gratitude. It's one thing, motivating
people, driving people, getting them to kind of work
in a more efficient way, leading by example, et cetera. But a great leader
also shows gratitude. Sometimes that gratitude
can be verbal, it can be financial, it can be public,
it can be private. It can be in your
one to one or it can be through a
public announcement, but a great leader
knows how to be grateful and show that kind
of kindness to their team. Going back to self awareness, a great leader has
learning agility. They pick up things
very quickly. They're open minded to pick
up things very quickly, and they're very much
committed to trying to improve themselves
and to try and develop themselves and
the team around them. A great leader also is able to exert
influence effectively. There are probably
a master networker that knows who to go to to solve what problem can communicate
effectively with clarity and is able
to influence people, influence them to try and
get good things done, and influence them to stamp out bad
behaviors, for example. A great leader also
shows empathy. We're human beings after all. Sometimes we go
through hardships, sometimes we go
through great times. A great leader is
able to show empathy, understanding,
emotional intelligence. They read the room
and they know that the business of leadership
is about leading people. It's all about people, as we
saw on the previous slide. They're able to show empathy
and emotional intelligence. A great leader is also
able to show courage. They're able to stand
up for what is right, and it's like integrity. They're able to see
what's right and what's wrong and stand up when
they see something wrong. They have the
courage to speak up. They have the courage to have
difficult conversations. They have the courage to
admit when they're wrong, admit their own mistakes. And lastly, a great leader generally is well liked
and well respected. And on top of that,
they show respect. It doesn't matter
about your gender, your ethnicity, your background, your culture, your religion. A great leader will see
you for who you are, will be able to get the best out of you and will be able to demonstrate ways that you can improve and support your
development journey. So, integrity, delegation, communication,
self awareness, gratitude, learning agility, influence,
empathy, courage, and respect, the
ten characteristics of a fantastic leader. So let's move to the
practice exercise. What I would like you
to do is to complete the leadership assessment and create a leadership
development plan, as well as reflecting
and improving yourself. I want you to share your
reflections with me, please. I would love to hear, where do you see yourself on
the leadership journey? Maybe you're not yet a leader, but you'd love to
be that one day. What are you going to be
doing between now and then to try and get your
skills right so that when you have someone reporting to you or having a
team of people that look up to you for guidance that you're going to be
the best possible leader. And if you are already a leader, what are you going
to do differently? What are your strengths that you're going
to continue doing? And where do you think there are gaps that you need to work on? I want to see how you plan
to work on those gaps. So let's remind you about this. For each of these
ten characteristics, I would like for you to give yourself an honest
score out of ten, if indeed, you're
a current leader. If you're currently
leading people, where do you think you stand on these? Have an honest discussion
with yourself. Ask yourself, do
I show integrity? Do I show self awareness? Do I, you know, create a culture of
learning and development? Give yourself a
score out of ten. And where it's not ten out
of ten, and by the way, I'm sure there's very few
people in the world, in fact, probably zero
people in the world that have ten out of ten
across all of these. We are all on our own
development journeys. We all have strengths
and weaknesses, and we could all do with taking a stock
check from time to time. So rank yourself out of
ten for each of these. The vast majority, I
expect is not going to be ten out of ten because
nobody's perfect. Create a development
plan for each of these and please
share it with me. I would love to see what your development
plan looks like. How are you going to
address these things, and maybe we can
have a conversation offline about how
you can do that. The other thing is
this slide here. Think about a leader that
you've worked for that was good and a leader that
maybe wasn't so good. What characteristics and
leadership styles did they show? And going forward in your
leadership development journey, what type of leader
would you like to be? I don't think there's
a right answer. I think there's lots of
great qualities here. Even the ones that might seem a little bit strict and firm, they can also be good leaders, but just with a different
flexing of style. So what type of leader
do you want to be? What type of leadership styles do you think make
for a good leader? And how are you going to try and achieve that in your
development journey? Please share your reflections with me. I can't wait
to hear from you. So top five takeaways
from this chapter. Number one, leadership is
about setting the direction, creating that shared vision, and executing, taking
people on the journey. The best leaders
are people focused. Leadership is all about people. Great leaders are honest, they communicate effectively, and they own their mistakes. Eadership is a never ending journey of development
and learning. You guys are here today doing this course because you are
committed to excellence, committed to self development, and you are open
minded to learning. That is a fantastic quality, and you should commend yourself. The best leaders learn
to think laterally. They see the duck. They see
the changing of culture. They see the watch, the extra hand, the
external influences. The best leaders learn
to think laterally, and they take a step back
and sometimes see what other people don't see.
Best of luck, guys.
7. 6. Introduction to Financial Analysis: Welcome back, guys. I hope you're enjoying
the course so far. We now have a technical topic, an introduction to
financial analysis. Now, one thing that must be said is I think this is
such a deep topic, the topic of financial analysis. It's not for
everyone in terms of their interests and
job description and a true deep dive into financial analytical
techniques should be taught by a trained financial
professional, which is not me. But in business and consulting, you do need to have an
understanding of the basics, and that's what this course
is trying to provide. That's what this chapter
is trying to provide. If you have really
specialist interest, please go ahead and do
a professional degree, a postgraduate degree, and really deep dive
into these topics if it's going to be a part of
your day to day skill set. That being said, the
rest of us who aren't financial professionals
still should have a good understanding of the
basics of financial analysis, what we're going to
be touching upon today is the importance
of financial analysis. We're going to be
learning the basics about income statements,
balance sheets, and cash flow statements, which are the key components of a company's annual report. Imagine that you are
going to be assessing, considering the financial health and the financial success of
a big company like Apple, Amazon, or any other business. We're going to be looking at
their financial reports and making a judgment and doing a couple of quick analyses on. As I said, you're going
to be practicing by reviewing a live financial
statement for Apple, a well known tech
company, of course, and you're going
to be looking at the different components of their financial
reporting and so that you can understand
just in numbers terms, how well are Apple performing? So a company's
financial statement is the primary source of data for evaluating their
financial performance. Simply put, we're going to be looking at
the big companies and understanding how have they been performing from a
financial perspective. We look at the balance sheet, we look at the income statement. We look at the cash
flow statement. These are the three
main components of an annual financial report. We can also do something else, which is to look at the
financial statements of their competitors and
to see how they compare. For example, if we're
looking at Apple, we may wish to look at Samsung. If we're looking at Facebook, we may look at Google as well. And this will drive our
investment decisions or our perception of their
financial performance. From the analysis perspective, what evaluations can we draw from these different
sources of data? Well, the thing that most
people are interested in is profitability. Now
what does that mean? It means how much money a company has made in a
defined period of time. That's a mathematical formula. Revenue minus costs.
What's revenue? Revenue is how much
money the company has generated by doing stuff. Amazon, for example,
that we'll see in this chapter is well known for being an
online marketplace, but they also do non
marketplace stuff. Amazon will do Amazon Prime. They might do Amazon
web services. They might do a whole
host of other things, financial transactions,
et cetera. So the revenue is how much
money Amazon generates. Their costs is how much it
costs them to do business, the rent on the buildings, buying stock, paying their
employees, et cetera. And revenue minus costs, when you minus those,
you get profitability. This is how much net income
that they're generating. This is how much
they're able to keep for themselves as profits. Solvency is an interesting
word that you may have heard. It demonstrates a
company's ability to meet its long term
financial obligations. Other words, am I likely to
do business with or invest in a company that doesn't
have their ducks in a row, that they don't seem to
have the capability to commit and to pay their long
term financial obligations? Do they have the assets? Do they have the property? Do they have everything that it takes to be successful
in the long term? So assessing their solvency
is a way for us to judge their ability to do
long term business and meet their long term
financial obligations. Liquidity. This is something that you may
have heard as well. Almost it's similar to solvency, but in a shorter time frame. Does Amazon have enough cash or other things that it can
convert into cash quickly? To meet their short term
financial obligations, their bill that
is due next week, the rent that is due
on their factory, the employees' salaries
that need to be paid. If I was to be doing
business with Amazon, for example, I would
ask the question, how liquid are they? Are they able to meet their short term financial
obligations? If so, great. If not, I might reconsider investing
or doing business with. Stability. This is
very important. Stability shows consistent
performance over time. You would look back at
historical records, historical sources of data,
and make an assessment. Does this business do
well year after year? Have they shown a consistent
level of performance? Have they been resilient
in difficult times? Let's think back to COVID
for the COVID pandemic. A lot of companies
really struggled. How did this company
perform during COVID? Were they resilient? Were they able to adapt their
business model? Did they have enough cash
reserves to stay solvent? And so the stability often
gives an indication as to the leadership to the
core team that they have, the core capabilities
that they provide. And maybe it gives you an indication that
they have a very nice, broad service or
product offering and a loyal customer base. So that's stability,
consistency, over time, consistent
performance, and resilience
during tough times. And so what we can
do is that we can look at a company's
past performance, assess the current market, and give an idea of their
future performance. Is it worth investing
in this company? Is it worth doing business
with this company? And you can also compare that
with other businesses in the same sector to see how do they perform against
the competition. So financial statements are one of the key methods to convey the financial conditions
of a company, and they consist of
three major components. The income statement
the balance sheet and the cash flow
statement, as we mentioned. The income statement has the revenue on it
on a single row. That's how much
money the company has brought in through
its activities. The expenses, as we mentioned, this is how much money it costs them to keep their
business afloat, rent, bills, utilities,
salaries, et cetera. When you minus one
from the other, you get net income, another word for profitability. Earnings per share is also something that you're going to see on an income statement. It gives you a good idea as
to how well they're doing. It influences the stock
price of a company. It's a ratio that shows
how much profit are they're making per share
of company that exists. So it's a nice way for you to have a look and compare
companies and say, What's this company's EPS, the earnings per share,
profit per share, same thing, compared
to this company. And that might give
you an indication as to which company is doing better or which one might present as the better
investment opportunity. The balance sheet. The balance sheet is
a snapshot in time. It gives you an overview of what the company
is worth today. It shows assets, which is
stuff the company owns. An asset could be
tangible or intangible, meaning real and
physical or conceptual. It could be something like a
building, a machine, stock, or it could be something
like a trademark, knowledge, a patent,
for example. The liabilities is what the
company owes to other people. Have they taken a
loan from a bank? Have the investors in the
company issued a bond, which is like a loan issued by the investors of the company that needs
to be paid back? Are there any other liabilities? What do they owe
their customers? What do they owe their partners? And when you take assets and
minus it from liabilities, you get a true picture of
what a company is worth. That's called
stockholders equity, otherwise known as
shareholders equity. Assets minus liabilities, you take away from what you own, you take away what you're owed or what you owe
others, I should say. That gives you a snapshot of what your business
is looking like. And if that number is
positive, then that's good. It means you're in a
strong financial position. It means that you're
in the positive. What you own is worth more
than what you owe others. But if that number is negative, then that could indicate
some financial problems. Cash flow statement.
It gives you an idea as to how liquid a
company is in terms of cash. It's an overview of
their cash in hand. Money comes, money goes, money is spent,
money is brought in. But in a given period of time, what were the cash transactions? That's what a cash
flow statement shows. Going back to that first
one, the income statement shows the profit and loss of a company over
a period of time. You'll see a row that
talks about revenues, how much money
that is generated. It also shows you
the expenses and all the different components of expense in the
different categories. When you do revenues
minus expenses, you get what's known as
a PNL, profit and loss. Hopefully, if a
company is doing well, this will be a
positive number that will show profits that we are making more money than
we're spending and a company that is really
struggling to perform, maybe they're not
resilient in the market, maybe they're really struggling with something that the
government has done, maybe with taxes or rates, maybe consumer
behavior has changed, and eventually they fall into the red zone and
start making losses. Their expenses are bigger than the money
that they're able to bring in and therefore they're in some serious
financial trouble. So let's have a look at Amazon. I'm going to let you take a
look at this for a second. On this side, you can see the 2025 numbers,
the 2026 numbers, and the 2027 numbers for
the year ended December 31, which is the full financial year or the calendar
year, I should say. And in this, you've got lots
of different rows of data, product sales, service sales, operating expenses,
operating income, et cetera. So someone who is skilled in looking at these
and making a judgment and doing financial
analysis will be able to quickly understand what
part relates to what? Here we have revenue, net product sales and
net service sales. Amazon has products, and
it also provides services. So this is the amount of
money in millions of dollars. That's the units
that are used that Amazon has got in revenue. So as an example,
their total sales, their total revenue for 2015 was 107 billion with a
B billion dollars. This next section looks
like operating expenses. The cost of sales, fulfillment, meaning how to actually deliver the products
and services, marketing, technology,
et cetera, operating income, interest
income, et cetera. So this takes the whole picture. So their total operating
expenses was $104 billion. That's how much they paid out of pocket to make this happen. The total non operating
expenses are expenses in other forms that might be paying back loans or other
financial obligations, cost them $665 million. When you take revenue
and you minus expenses, you're
left with profit. Their income before
taxes was $1.5 billion, then they paid their taxes in these two rows here
and their net income, how much money did they actually take home as profit after all things are said and
done, $596 million. I have my phone here. Let's do some quick maths to make sure. I don't know if you
can see my phone. Let's see what numbers we're going to be
putting in there. So the total net sales
was $107 billion, so we're going to go 107006, and that's the starting number. Let's take away total
operating expenses of 104773. We're also going to take
away other expenses, the total non operating income. So we minus 665 from that, and we're left with 1568,
which is this number here. And then you're going to make them pay their taxes, of course, minus 950 and -22. And we're left with 596, which is how much money, $596 million that
Amazon made in 2025. Let's also use this
to compare them. In 2016, Look at that. From $596 million in profit, they improved to $2.3
billion of profit. And the year after that, 2017, $3 billion of profit. What do you think that tells
you about the way they conducted their
business 2015-2017? What impressive growth that
the company saw in terms of their revenues and also in terms of their
profits, as well. A balance sheet, like we said, is a snapshot of a company's financial health
at a specific point in time. It's made up of three sections, similar to the income statement. It contains assets. As we mentioned, these are
assets is stuff that they own, either physically
or hypothetically. It shows their liabilities, stuff that they owe others. And when you take assets and
minus from it liabilities, you're left with
shareholders equity, which gives you a true snapshot as to what the company is worth. The assets can be grouped
together either through sorry, they're divided into whether they're current or non current, current meaning over
the next 12 months, is there likely to
see some movement in this asset over
the next 12 months? If so it's current.
If it's something a bit more long term, it
could be non current. So what are they? Cash
and equivalents of cash, things that can be converted
quickly into cash. These are current assets.
They come and they go. Account receivables is
money that is owed to the company that is due imminently that
hasn't yet been paid. And inventory, stock
that has been bought, that is worth something
that hasn't yet been sold, but it will probably be sold
within the next 12 months. That's your current assets. What about non current plant
property and equipment? You're not likely to sell machinery buildings within
the next 12 months. It's generally a more
long term investment. And your intangible assets as we described
before, knowledge, patents, trademarks
and websites, these things, these are non
current intangible assets. You're likely to keep
them over the long term. This makes up the asset
component of the balance sheet. What about liabilities? Stuff that they owe others. Again, current, we owe these
things within 12 months, and non current, we owe these
things in the longer term. Accounts payable, similar
to account receivable, which is I'm owed money by a customer that it's
coming any day now. In the same way, I owe other companies,
customers, partners money. I'm still holding it now, but it's due very soon
within the next 12 months. Current debt, maybe
you've taken a loan, a business loan with the bank or there might be bonds
as we mentioned before. There may be a longer term debt that's due to be paid
back over 20 years, but it has a current portion. We have this much to pay in the next 12 months for
the long term debt. There's your current
liabilities. What about your non current? Well, maybe your investors, as we mentioned before,
had issued some bonds, which is like a loan, and we need to pay them
back at some point in the future, beyond 12 months. And there may also be
some long term debt, a 20 year loan, for example, or other types of debt so when you take assets and you
minus from it liabilities, you're left with the true snapshot of what a
company's worth. The shareholders
equity is made up of two things, the share capital, which is how much
money the investors originally invested in to try and generate those shares and secondly, retained earnings. Imagine last year we made
$3 billion as Amazon. What did we do with
that money? Maybe we gave some to shareholders. Sure. Maybe we reinvested it, but some of it
we're just holding. We're holding it as
retained earnings that we may choose to do
something with later. And so that's retained earnings. So these two together
give you a true value, true idea of how a company is doing financially
at this moment in time. And remember, if that
number is positive, which is in Amazon's case, they're doing very well,
and if it's negative, it could indicate fines
of financial struggle. Let's have a look at the
balance sheet for Amazon. I'll give you a minute
to have a look at this. You can see here you've got
a section called assets, a section called liabilities and stakeholder equity,
current assets, property, accounts payable,
long term debt is here, stock prices, et cetera. Let's try and break this down. So you have the assets up here, and the total assets here
is worth $83 billion. That's how much Amazon have in terms of the
stuff that they own, the inventory, the
stock, the properties, the factory, everything
that they own, probably their vehicles as well. And in terms of the
liabilities, well, their total liabilities, current portion of their
liabilities, $43 billion. That's how much
they own. This was in 2016, as you can see there. So they have $43 billion
in current liabilities, but then they also have
some long term debt and other long term liabilities, which are these
two numbers here. So when you take this number $83 billion and you -43
-7 billion -12 billion, you should get the total
stockholder equity, which is $19.2 billion. That is a snapshot in time in 2016 as to what Amazon is worth. Let's compare that to
what happened in 2017. They went up from $83 billion stakeholder
equity to 131 billion. Again, it really shows you how well they were performing
in that period of time. The last thing, the
cash flow statement. It shows, as we said,
how much cash is made and used up in a
given period of time. You start with an opening
cash balance from last year. This is how much money
we have on the account. It's almost like a piggy bank. This is how much money
I have. Then you generate cash from
operating activities. You may use up some cash
investing it somewhere and you may make or use up cash
from financing activities. So what you're left with
is a closing cash balance. You start with ten plus
one minus one plus one, and you're left with
11 as an example. Let's again look at
Amazon's statement. Again, I'm going to give
you a second to have a look at all the different components
here that you can see. You can see at the
top, you start with an opening balance. It then talks about the net cash that was
used in operations, and here all the different types of operations that Amazon have. Then they had investing
activities and all the different components of their investing activities. And then lastly, you have
financing activities and all the different things. How much loan did we pay back? Did we issue new
debt, et cetera? And lastly, they have a line
here which we haven't seen, which was the foreign
currency effect. So in different countries
around the world, they have different foreign
currency exchanges, and this is how it impacted
their cash balance. It tells you also what was
the net increase or decrease, and it gives you the closing
cash balance as well. Here we have the
opening cash balance. In 2014, that was $8 billion. They then operated their
business and the operating of their business provided them with an extra
$6,000,000,000 in cash. From the investment standpoint,
they made investments. That's what's indicated
by the brackets. That's a negative number. So they invested $5 billion
into different things. From a financing perspective, they were able to make money. So they clearly were either paying things back
or they were able to generate income through
their financing activities to the tune of $4 billion. The foreign currency effect negatively impacted
by 310 million. And so what happened
was they were left with a net change from this
8 billion up here, they gained another
5.8 billion and their closing cash balance
was $14.5 billion. And how did that cash
balance change year on year? So they started with 8.6. They grew that to 14.5 billion. That 14.5 billion became the opening cash
balance for next year. They grew that to 15
and the 15 grew to 19. So again, it shows you how successful Amazon
were 2014-2016, that time period, they were doing well from their
revenues perspective, from their assets perspective, but also from the cash
they were holding. So they were doing
very well, indeed. So these statements alone, sure, they give you an idea of how
the companies are doing. But these statements
can also be used to perform meaningful
investment analysis. And like I said, if being an investment professional
is part of your career, please go and do a really,
really professional, high quality university
degree postgraduate course. That's really going to give
you some robust skills that will probably take months
if not years to complete, so that you can become an
investment professional. The rest of us who just
want to understand some of these terms and understand where
they may be used, there's a term called
net present value and a term called
internal rate of return. The net present value shows
you how much money in hard cash an investment could generate over
a period of time. The internal rate of
return on the other hand, is the percentage return on investment that something is expected to generate over
that period of time. So for example,
if I said to you, crudely speaking, let's invest $10 million into this idea. And you say to me, Okay, well, how much money am I going to get back if I invest $10 million? I would say that the
net present value for this investment
would be $1 million. That means that we invest
ten and we take out 11. And so how much money and hard cash on an investment could generate over that one
year period $1 million? That would be the
net present value. But if you wanted
it as a percentage, I would say the internal
rate of return was 10%. Because $1 million is
10% of 10 million, and we're going to be
generating that $1 million, 10% in that time frame. So NPV is how much money that an investment
should generate. IRR is the percentage
return on that investment. Let's not overcomplicate it. If you do want to learn
more, please reach out. I'm happy to suggest
some courses and some great institutions to partner with and to try
and learn more about this. But this I think is
sufficient for those of us in the non financial space, but who do need to
understand the value of these terms and
where they may be used in these conversations. So let's do some quick practice. I want you to go to the
Apple website and download their third quarter 2022
financial statement. I'm going to show
you a list just now of all the different things
that I want you to find, and I want you to try
and find them and identify what those numbers
are. Write them down. I would then love to
hear your reflections on what you've learned
in this chapter, but also how do you
think this will impact your ability to
make investments in the future or to make a judgment on the operating
of a business in the future. Do you now understand revenues and costs in a different way than
you did before? I would love to
hear your thoughts. So let's go ahead
and do the example. Let's go to investor relations once you search Apple
Financial Statement. And you have here 2022 fourth quarter
financial statement. And what I would like you
to try and go away and find is the revenue,
the expenses, the P&L, the total assets, total liabilities, the
snapshot, shareholder equity. And then I also want you to find the opening
cash balance, the closing cash balance,
and the cash from operating, investing, and
financing activities. Here's where you need to go
and get. Take a screenshot. Good luck, guys,
and in a moment, we're going to go
through it ourselves. Okay, we're back, guys. Hopefully, you were
able to find that. Let's run through. So here
is Apple's income statement. Let's zoom in and see if we
can find the right numbers. Let's go back out for a second. This was the three months ended, and this is the 12 months ended. So we want the 12 months ended. So we're not looking
back at the quarter, we're looking back
at the whole year. So where can we
find the revenue? That's total net sales. So the total revenue that
Apple generated in sales was $394 billion at
the end of 2022. What were their
expenses? $51 billion. Here we have their net
income after taxes, $99,000,000,000 of profit
at the end of 2022. That's just incredible.
Now, the balance sheet. Hopefully, this
should be a little bit easier because generally, when companies make
their financial reports, they separate these out
into easy to see sections. So the total assets,
$352 billion. Think about what Apple owns
in terms of its stock, the physical stores, et cetera. What about their liabilities,
what they owe other people? Their total liabilities,
$302 billion. Minus the two, you get
shareholder equity, which was $50 billion. That's their snapshot in time. Lastly, the cash flow statement, how much cash is coming
and going and what's it being spent on.
Let's zoom in now. The opening cash
balance right at the top there, $35 billion. That's what they started
start of the year. So that was the end of 2021. That's what they
started with in 2022. The cash generated by their operating
activities, $122 billion. That's them selling
their iPhones and different Apple products. That's how much cash
they're generating. What about their investments? Well, they used up the brackets, remember, means a
negative number. They used up $22 billion in making different
types of investments, payments for acquisition of
property plant equipment, payments in connection with business acquisitions,
et cetera. What about their
financing activities? Looks like they paid back
a lot of what they owed the banks and other
people, $110 billion. This number sticks
out, repurchase of common stock,
repayments of debt. So they obviously spent $110 billion paying some
of their liabilities. And the ending cash
balance was $24.9 billion. So top five takeaways
from this chapter, a little bit of a
technical chapter, I know. Financial analysis is used
to evaluate a company's historical and can be used to project their future
financial performance. The income statement
shows the revenue, expenses, and PNL of a company over a
specific period of time. The balance sheet provides an overview of what
they own, their assets, what they owe, the liabilities, and what's left the
stockholder equity within a given period of time. The cash flow statement
shows how much cash has been generated and used in a
given period of time. Financial statements
are also used to assess the attractiveness of a company's future projects
and initiatives as well. Do we want to do
business with them? Are they a good company?
Are they resilient? Do they have stability
in the long term? Thank you very much,
guys, and best of luck.
8. 7. Introduction to Economics (Part 1): Welcome back,
everyone. Thanks for joining us for this next topic, an introduction to economics. This is another
technical chapter. I don't think this is something
that you're likely to use on a very day to day basis, but I think it's really
important for all of us to have a fundamental understanding of the key concepts
behind economics, because I think it
fundamentally shapes the way we work and the
economies that we work in. So the objectives
for today's session, you'll learn about the
economic inputs and outputs. You'll learn about
the difference between macro and
microeconomics. You'll learn about the drivers for inflation, which
is very important. You will learn how
government policies can impact the overall economy. So economics is a social
science that studies how society uses its resources to produce goods and
services. It's a science. It's a study. And
at the heart of it, economies have
inputs and outputs. It's a simple trade. You're going to be using
something to do something else. And that generates value, and that's how we look at
productivity in modern society. So economic inputs can be land. So this could be
agriculture and farming. It could be real estate, you're growing things
through the ground, you're selling land, and is of value to an
economy, a country. Labor, so people and the use
of people to produce things, to create things, to be
productive in society. What else do countries have
or economies, I should say. They have enterprise,
which is businesses, it's entrepreneurship, it's activities that do something differently
that change the world. And of course, capital.
Maybe you're from a country that has an
extreme amount of wealth, maybe through oil or
other natural resources. And over the years, you've
accumulated a lot of wealth. And so what do you
do with that wealth, you invest it and you can use it for other benefit as well. And what are the
economic outputs? Well, it's goods and services. Goods are things, services
are things that we do. So, for example, you may
live in a country that has a lot of natural, you know, vegetation and some of the goods that you're
exporting might be bananas. It could be coffee,
it could be cotton. It could be diamonds. So it could also be something that you're
producing and manufacturing. Think about Germany,
for example, very well known for
manufacturing vehicles. Think about China and some
countries in Southeast Asia, very well known for
manufacturing clothes. So an economic output could be that you're using
some of your land and your materials and your labor to produce goods. And
what about services? You might have a
certain skill set. Your country might be very well known for education
or for training. And for building a
skilled workforce that provides certain services. Or you may have
created an ecosystem. Think about Wall Street. Think about, you know, these financial
institutions that exist and ecosystems that exist
that provide services. Maybe you provide
healthcare services, financial services,
logistics services. What is your country or your
economy well known for? I would love to
hear your thoughts. So within the study
of economics, there's a number of
interesting terms that I would like
for you to know. Again, if you are really
deeply interested in this, please go away and do
some further studies. You could do diplomas,
you could do MBAs and other higher degrees that will really allow
you to deep dive. This is a short introduction. So the purpose of this is to try and introduce
some topics to you, introduce the terms that you should be aware of in your
day to day workplace. But if you're really
interested, please do study this further because
it really is fascinating. So some interesting
terms to know. Well, macroeconomics studies the overall
national economy. Think about a
country or a region. That's macroeconomics. Microeconomics studies
an individual entity. It could be a business, it could be a market. It could be, you know, your
household, for example. So macroeconomics thinks big, microeconomics looks at
individual entities. Here's some interesting terms and concepts that I think
it's worth knowing. GDP is one of the big ones, gross domestic products, and this is in the context
of macroeconomics. GDP is the total value of goods and services
produced by a country, typically. In one year. So think there's a
defined period of time, which is one year. How many goods and what's
the value of all the goods and services produced by
this country in one year? That's the GDP of that country,
gross domestic product. And this is extremely
helpful because it gives us an idea as to how
productive and politically, economically strong
a country is. Think about the larger
economies of the world, China, the United
States, for example. They typically have
very big GDPs. They are producing
lots of goods. They're providing a lot
of services to the world. Think about much
smaller countries. Think of a really, really small country that maybe doesn't have so many natural resources
or has a low population. Relatively, their
GDP, their value add, is going to be relatively low compared to China and
the US, for example. One way that we
compare countries with one another is by
comparing their GDP, but it can be
slightly misleading because how are you going
to compare the GDP of China with however many
billion population that they have compared with
the United Kingdom, geographically much smaller,
population much smaller. And so there's a concept
called GDP per capita, where you take the
country's GDP, the gross domestic product, the total value of goods
and services produced by a country in a year and divide that by the
population number. And then what you get
is a GDP per capita. It shows you the value or the productivity of
that nation per person. And that's how sometimes
we compare countries, GDP per capita. And
we watch trends. So year on year,
has this country improved its GDP
and GDP per capita? How do two countries compare? And it shows the relative
strength of those economies. Inflation. Another
very important term. Inflation. I want you to
imagine a supermarket basket. I want you to imagine
that you've gone to the supermarket and
you've bought some milk, some bread, some
eggs, some cheese, whatever items that you have. And I want you to imagine buying the same basket of goods, the same items 20 years ago, ten years ago, and today. The price that you paid will
be different in all three. And typically, you'd expect to pay more today than you did ten years ago and more ten years ago than 20 years
ago. This is inflation. It is the general increase
of the costs of goods, of a typical basket of goods, as we say, over a time frame. So typically, you'd
look at this and say, inflation has gone
up by 1% this year. Inflation is 3% in the last
three years, for example. That means that the average
cost of buying a basket of goods has gone up by 3%
in the last three years. And that's a reflection of how
things are costing people. It gives a reflection
of the cost of living. And so wages need to
reflect inflation. Investments need to
reflect inflation. So it's a very
important concept, and governments have a very strong hand
in impacting that. Employment, of course,
employment is another thing that we look at to measure productivity and
economic strength. What is the employment
rate in that country? Is it 100%? Is everyone
employed and ready and working? Is it less than 50%? Is less than half the population able to find work
and deliver work? And so employment rates are indirectly or
directly in a sense, but indirectly linked to GDP. Employment, the more people
you have in your society, who are productive,
who are healthy, who are employed and
providing value in society, the more likely you have to have a productive and highly
economic society. The government, of course,
has a very important role in economy building, and we'll talk about
some of the policies that they can
implement to try and improve or stimulate the economy or to kind of change
people's behaviors. Another interesting term is an economic impact assessment. You might have heard of
this on the news that there's an economic
impact assessment. What this is, this is
effectively a study that looks at a particular
project or policy and says, Okay, if we were
to implement this, what would be the economic
impact of doing so? Would it be good
for the economy? Would it be bad for the economy? How much more money GDP would we expect by
doing this initiative? For example, funding
school lunches or building homes for people or investing in a
particular type of asset, lowering the interest rates, increasing the interest rates. All of these could be different
projects and initiatives, but they all need an economic
impact assessment so that we know what we're
getting ourselves into when we undertake
this project. What about on the
microeconomic side? There's a few interesting terms. Let's imagine you're looking at a specific market,
specific industry. Let's talk about the
automotive industry, cars, let's say, market equilibrium means that the supply
and demand are equal. When a market is in equilibrium, it means that there is good
demand and good supply, and they kind of meet
each other in the middle. When you need something,
you have access to it, and when you've
created something, you have people to buy it. And so when the market
is not in equilibrium, you create this sort
of supply demand gap, and that drives prices,
that drives behaviors. Market structure. Let's also think about the
automotive industry. When you think about
market structure, it's asking the question, how
is this market structured? Is there one big company
that's running the show, or are there loads of companies? How easy is it for a new
business to enter this market? What prices are the
cost, you know, the goods that are being sold, the vehicles in this context, in this example, how
expensive are they? How easy is it for new
players to enter the market? How well regulated is it? So these are the kind
of questions that you need to ask when
you're analyzing. Remember, economics is a study. It's a science. We're looking
to think about things and understand things,
psychology, behaviors. And so market structure
simply looks to define a particular market and
to try and understand what makes it State
owned enterprises is another interesting concept. Those of you who live
in the Middle East might be very
familiar with this, but it also exists
around the world. State owned enterprises are businesses that exist not
simply to make profit, but they're owned by the state, by the government to provide a social or domestic purpose. Think about a public
need, for example, and the government decides
that they want to build or create a state
owned enterprise in order to try and provide that service at a
reasonable price. There may be some profits made, but maybe those profits are
reinvested in the business, or it's not really
about the profit. It's about creating a
sustainable business and providing that
service for society. Let's think about a
couple of examples. Aramco, those of you who know the Middle
East market well, Aramco Saudi Aramco, is Saudi Arabia's
national oil company. They are producing oil, petroleum, exporting
it to the world. And they're doing so
state owned in order to funnel that cash flow back into the country and provide those
services to the country. In the UAA, there's
a company called Etislat that's now called EN. They are a state owned
enterprise to provide telecommunication services for
the population of the UAE. Adnoc Abu Dub
National Oil Company. Again, similar to Aramco. They are a state owned company that is used to extract oil, sell it, and to
reinvest those funds to provide social services
for the people of the UE. You may not know this. The United States Postal
Service in the US. It's a state owned enterprise. It's effectively a
postal service for the United States that is
there to serve a purpose. Yeah, sure, it may make
a little bit of profit, but it's not there
solely to make profit. It exists by the government owned by the government in
order to provide that service.
9. 7. Introduction to Economics (Part 2): So what other
interesting topics are there within the study of
macro and microeconomics? So opportunity cost is kind of similar in concept to an
economic impact assessment. The opportunity cost is this idea that if
I'm going to do X, I'll need to give up
something over here, and that's your
opportunity cost. Let's take an example. If I was a business owner
and I wanted to, let's say, open a new factory because I wanted to
create more products. I wanted to fulfill more orders. I wanted to diversify
our product range. The money that would
be required to build that new factory would
need to come from somewhere. I'd need to give up something in order to build that factory. And so that would be
the opportunity cost. What am I giving up in order to pursue the building
of this new factory? So, for example, I could
have hired more workers. I could have paid
better salaries. I could have bought more stock. I could have spent
more in advertising. I could have built more machines to
manufacture more things. So that would be the
opportunity cost in order to build
this new factory. Correlation and causation
is a fun topic, and it's a very important part
of the study of economics. Correlation and causation
basically look to different variables and see are they connected in some way. Correlation means that
two things are connected, but not necessarily related. So for example, when
something goes up, the other metric goes
up at the same time. I'll give you an example of
correlation and causation. When I go to work, typically, the more hours I work,
the more money I get. So if you looked at
an annualized salary, often you might find
that people that work more hours get paid more money overall over
the course of a year. People that work
part time working less hours probably are going to earn less money
over the course of a year. That's correlation
and causation. Let's look at
exercise, for example. On average, people that exercise more will probably weigh less. It's I guess it's common sense. The more you exercise, you're taking your steps. You're going you're
going to the gym, you're going cycling,
you're going running, you're playing a sport. The more you exercise, the chances are the less
you will weigh because of the benefits of exercise,
correlation and causation. Interestingly, there's
a couple of examples here of correlation
without causation, and this is where economists get very excited
because it's good fun. People who own pets
also live longer. So people who have
a household pet think of a dog or a cat or, you know, something that
you can take out for a walk tend to live longer. Now, you might say, Okay, well, let me go and buy a pet, and I'm likely to live longer. But interestingly,
they're correlated, but they don't necessarily
cause one another. Just by owning a pet, just by buying a pet isn't
going to make you live longer, but the studies show that
the people who do choose to buy pets tend to be more
outdoorsy and outgoing, tend to do more exercise. And tend to be more social, and those things have a
relationship with living longer. So it's not the owning a pet
that makes you live longer. It's something else. Let's
take another example. There's a correlation between ice cream sales and people drowning. And you
might be like, How? So in the summer months, the ice cream sales go up. Imagine you live in the UK, where I grew up,
and in the summer, you go to the seaside
or you go to the park, and the ice cream
vans come out of hibernation and you can enjoy some delicious ice cream
because of the hot weather. And also in the summer months, the sea temperature, the water temperature
is a little bit cooler, so you're more likely
to want to go swimming. So in both cases, the number of ice
cream sales go up, and the number of drowning events
unfortunately go up as well. And so you can't say that eating ice cream causes
more drowning or, you know, people who go
swimming eat more ice cream. It's the weather, but you can see that to
the untrained eye, if you were to just look at
the data, you say, Yep, well, as the ice cream sales go up, the number of drowning
goes up, too, so they must be related somehow. So that's correlation
but not causation. And there's loads of
examples of this in economic theory.
Alright, let's move on. Oh, developed economies,
developed countries tend to have a higher GDP per capita while developing
ones are faster growing. Let's take a closer
look at this one. So here's an interesting
bubble chart. We have on this axis,
shall we say, growth. So this is GDP per
capita Kega which is the growth of GDP 2008-2017. And on the X axis,
we have GDP per capita in US dollars in 2017. So this axis looks at
the GDP per capita. This access looks at the growth of that GDP over
this period of time. And the bubbles in green, you can see are
developing economies, China, India
Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, et cetera, and the more developed economies
are the blue bubbles, the USA, Netherlands,
UK, Germany, et cetera. You can see a very interesting
and clear trend here. There's a group of
countries here, which all happen
to be developing green countries and a group
of countries on this side. So what can we learn from this? When the GDP capita
is very high, Countries tend to reach
a state of equilibrium. Their growth becomes
less exponential. And so that's why they
score more low, 1%, 2%, 3%, this sort of level
on the growth metric. So year on year, they're
not growing as much anymore because they reach some sort of pretty
decent equilibrium. And that represents
what they're up to. They're developed economies,
they're mature economies. They have processes and systems
and governance in place, and they have now worked out what their
economy is all about. They've understood their
natural resources, they've understand their
goods and services. They understand
their market well, and they are, you know, catering to the supply demand. On the other hand,
developing economies, because of their name, because
of what they are up to, are still growing
and developing. Maybe their education
levels are improving, maybe their skill
levels are improving, maybe their workforce
is improving, maybe their international
relationships are improving. And as a result, they have much higher on average growth rates, but on average, because
they're still developing, they have a much
lower GDP per capita. So a couple of
interesting insights between the relationship of
economic size and growth. Economic size, as we said, is a function of
economic output per capita multiplied by
the population, right? So if you look at an individual
person's productivity, multiply it by that, that's
how big the bubble is. That's why China is
a very big bubble, and the USA is a very big bubble because you're looking at
the productivity per person, multiplied by the population, that gives you the overall GDP. That's what's represented by the size of the
bubble on this graph. Economic size and growth
are normalized to population most of
the time per capita, because it allows us
to compare countries a little bit more easily so
that you can compare China, which is huge to a
very small country like the UK in comparison. So, countries have different
economic compositions which change over time. That's something
that's very, very interesting and something that may not be obviously apparent. And the other thing is, they
may also change over time, and they may also change depending on which country
that you're looking at. Let's take three example,
United States, Germany, and India, three quite
different economies in three different continents. The US's GDP in 2013
was 14.2 billion, and that grew to
15.4000000004 years later. Germany's GDP was 2.8 billion, and it grew to 2.9 billion
in that same time frame. And India's GDP was 1.3 billion, and it grew to 1.7 billion
in that same time frame. So the first thing
to take away is that in a period of
time, GDP can grow. It reflects that period of time what the government has done to stimulate
the economy, the productivity
of the workforce. It could even represent
the growth of the population in that
period of time, as well. Maybe a natural
resource was found. Maybe a skill set was developed. Maybe there was a
global demand in that time frame for some of the goods and services that that
country produces. So the first thing to
bear in mind is that GDP can change over periods of time. Secondly, let's look at
the actual composition. Let's take this, for
example, the US. They have a majority, what is it 26% of real estate
and business services. That is the majority in 2013
that made up their GDP. That was just over a
quarter of their GDP was made up by real estate
and business services. And you look at some of
these other buckets, as well, social services. You have wholesale and retail. You have manufacturing, you have public administration
and defense. So this is what the US spent. And this was the contribution,
not necessarily spent, but this was their contribution of these sectors to
the overall GDP. So this adds up here to 100%, which adds up to 14.2 billion
dollar of GDP in 2013. Now, interestingly, that
changed over four years. The percentage went
up for real estate. It went up slightly
for social services, and it went down in
some other areas. Let's take Germany, for example, I stayed the same between
these two time periods. So real estate and
business services remained 25% of Germany's GDP, even though the GDP did
change a little bit. And more or less, this is an example of
GDP that remains stable. There was some sort of
marco equilibrium in Germany over that four year
period where more or less, their GDP was pretty similar and the composition
remained pretty similar. That's a mature
country that says, Look, we know what we're doing. We know what we're good for. We know that we do
manufacturing very well. We do real estate and
business services very well. We do social services very
well. This is what we focus. Let's take India, for example,
a developing country. Notice that even though
the numbers are, you know, all of these blues are
in the same position, so we can compare the
countries easily. But actually, 17%, their
largest percentage, along with what was it, manufacturing, came
from something that the other two countries are not really interested in, which is where is it now? It has agriculture and mining. Let's think of
India for a second. It's a country with a lot of space and a lot of
natural resource. Of course, agriculture and mining is going to be much higher than
Germany, for example. And it's also interesting how things change
over time, as well. Look how manufacturing
decreased in India from 18% to 15% in
that four year period. Look how agriculture
and mining changed from 17% to 14% in
that four year period. But whereas there
was an increase in real estate and
business services, there was an increase
in social services and some of these
other areas as well. And so that reflects
India's changing economy. They have decided actually
we're going to double down on certain industries because
we see a future in them, and we're going to rely less
on certain other industries. Let's think back to the Gulf
Middle Eastern countries from many, many years ago. It wouldn't surprise me if their GDP composition
in the early days was very heavily reliant
on oil. And petroleum. But now look at the UAA, look at Saudi Arabia and how their economies are
developing, maturing, and changing because their
leaders are saying, Okay, we need to diversify our
GDP, which is a smart move. And so they are having more balanced contributions
to their GDP, which allows for long
term sustainability and growth and not over reliance on one particular
industry or another.
10. 7. Introduction to Economics (Part 3): So inflation, interesting topic. Very close to all of
our hearts, I'm sure. It's the constant rises
of prices of an economy, and it has three main drivers. So it's a quantitative measure. It's a percentage,
it's a number. Imagine, like we said,
a basket of goods. Imagine you're going
shopping to a supermarket, Tesco car or wherever
you guys go shopping. And I want you to
imagine that you've, like I said, milk,
bread, eggs, cheese. When I was growing
up, a weekly shop probably costs about
40 pounds in the UK. When I became an adult, I was easily paying sort of 90 pounds. And now in 2025, I don't know how
much does it cost? I hear your I'd like
to hear your feedback. How much does it cost in the UK now or in whichever
country that you're from? How much does it cost to
do your weekly shopping? Probably well over
120, 150 pounds. And so that is inflation. It is the increase of the cost of selected
goods over a period of time, and that reflects so
many different things. So the drivers for
that, the drivers for any change in
price are threefold. One example is a demand pull. Demand for goods exceeds
the production capacity. I want you to imagine Tesla, the car manufacturer,
Elon Musk's Company. And I want you to
imagine that they make a revolutionary solar charging
car. Solar panels on top. And when you drive the car, there's enough sunlight in
whichever country you live in to charge the car and
to provide the energy. Imagine how revolutionary
that vehicle would be. But then imagine that
Elon Musk only said, I'm going to make 100 vehicles. Imagine what the demand
would be for that vehicle. That would raise
the price so high. Because everyone would be scrambling to try
and get their hands on this one, you know, energy making self
driving car that doesn't even need any sort of fuel because it's
all solar charged. That would be an
example where the demand for goods or services exceeds the production capacity
or exceeds the supply, and that would
raise the price of that product causing
the inflation. What about cost push? Cost push is another example, but think about it
from a different lens. If you're making a
product and then all of a sudden you as
the manufacturer, simply it costs you more to make that today than
it did yesterday. You're going to pass that
cost onto the consumer. And so cost push drivers are when production costs
increase prices. Let's take the example
of semiconductors, these little
microchips processes that go into all of the
electronics that we have, our phones, our
smart watches, TVs. Slowly but surely
over the years, the cost of these things
have been going up. Maybe because of the raw
materials that are required. Maybe those are in shorter
supply than they once were, maybe due to other
manufacturing costs going up, the cost of labor, other taxes and things that may be
happening around the world. And so, inevitably, the cost of our electronics have slowly
risen in recent times, not necessarily
because there's not a demand for them or there's
too high a demand for them. There's probably a
decent equilibrium. If you want to get an
iPhone or Android phone, you could probably go to
the store and get one. You wouldn't have any
problems with supply. But what's been increasing
the cost year on year is the price of semiconductors and other electrical equipment. So the cost of a television today costs significantly
more than what it used to, also because the cost of the company making the
television has gone up. That is a cost push driver. Another example is a
built in inflation, which is when prices rise, wages will rise too in order
to maintain those costs. And that means people
have more money to spend. They buy more stuff,
the cost goes up and it cascades upwards. Let's take the example of the Zimbabwe economy back in 2007, where it went through its period of worst hyperinflation ever. I can't even tell you the percentage because
the number is too big, but the inflation that
that country saw back in 2007 at its worst
was incredible. And this was because
the government was printing more money to try and, you know, satisfy more people. People were putting up prices because they knew more
money was in circulation, and so people would demand
higher wages in order to satisfy buying
something that had gone up 100 205,000% in price. And then this meant
that the government was printing more money to
try and meet that demand. And so it was a cycle,
a vicious cycle. And so inflation went
through the roof. And so when the
cost of goods rise, wages have to rise
to an extent to try and allow people
to meet those things because otherwise the
entire system collapses. So those are three examples of drivers affecting an
inflation in price. So governments have
a massive role to play in influencing our economy. They exercise
monetary policy and fiscal policy to influence
the economy's activity. Monetary policy
focuses on money. It regulates the supply of money and the cost and availability of credit to change our behavior. It's either going to incentivize saving or incentivize spending. It's indirect. It's
a little bit less impactful and it's carried
out by the central banks. So remember, it's focused on money and it's done
by the central banks. And the idea is to
incentivize either us as, you know, the population
to save or to spend. Let's take an example.
In response to COVID 19, the US Federal Reserve lowered their interest
rates to almost zero. And that meant that people
found this attractive. They said, Hey, you know what? I can go and get a credit card. I can apply for a loan or
a mortgage or a car loan. I can start a business, I
can take a business loan. And by almost decreasing those interest rates
to almost zero, it stimulated the economy. It increased lending,
which meant there were people had little access to cheaper money
or cheaper loans, we should say that
stimulated the economy. Let's take another
example, fiscal policy. So fiscal policy are measures not necessarily
related to money or interest rates that
governments use to address spending and taxation and to do the same thing to
create economic stimulus. It's a little bit more direct. It's a little bit
more impactful. But as we saw in Zimbabwe,
it risks inflation. And as we said, it's carried
out by the government. Let's look at another example. In response to COVID 19, again, the US government
implemented this act that gave $200 payments
to individuals, and they increased the
unemployment payment to $600 per week to try and stimulate consumer spending and
support the economy. So what did that actually
do? Well, imagine all of a sudden the
government said, Hey, look, here is $1,200 for
you to go out and spend. Imagine
you're unemployed. Here's an extra $600
per week for you to go and look for a new job and to kind of feel a
bit more comfortable. That would create
a sense of ease in an otherwise negative
situation and a negative market. It allowed people to
breathe a little bit, and they felt that they could go out and spend a
little bit of money. And if everyone
takes that attitude, it stimulates the economy. It means businesses
can continue growing. It means services
can be provided, and it stimulates the economy. So governments have
a massive role to play in macroeconomics
and microeconomics, and they exercise
monetary policy or fiscal policy to try and stimulate certain
behaviors in the population. So let's do some practice, practice on this occasion
is going to be a quiz. So let's take the
economics quiz, and I would love to hear
your thoughts afterwards. Please email me your reflections on whether you think this is going to change the way
you perceive things at work or in your society
or in your country. I would love to hear
which country you're and whether any of
these policies or, you know, financial changes
you've seen and how they influence you and what you've learned from this chapter and how you might
take it forward. Would love to hear
your thoughts. So, let's jump into
the economics quiz. I'm going to run through
the questions first. Feel free to pause the video
if you need more time, and then we'll go through
the answers afterwards. So Question number one, order the following
four economic inputs and two economic outputs. So here's a list
of six items which are economic inputs and
which are economic outputs. Enterprise, land, goods,
services, labor and capital. Question number two. During what time frame
is GDP usually measured? Daily, weekly,
monthly, quarterly, annually, every five
years, or every ten years. So when a GDP metric is shared, what time frame does
that usually relate to? Question Number
three. If a company produces a limited supply of a revolutionary
solar charging car and the demand
exceeds the supply, what type of inflation
is more likely to occur? A demand pull inflation, a cost push inflation
or built in inflation. Question number four, Aramco, British Airways, Emirates and
Shell are examples of what? Private companies,
government organizations or state owned enterprises. Question number five,
if the government increases spending on
infrastructure projects to stimulate economic growth, maybe they've decided to
build new housing for people. This is an example of what type of policy monetary policy, fiscal policy or trade policy. Number six, what
is the best metric to use to compare the economic strength
between several countries? Employment rate, inflation rate, GDP per capita, or the diversity
of economic composition. Now, technically,
they're all correct. They're all good
answers, but what is the best and most
widely used metric that is used to compare
economic strength between multiple countries? Question seven, the
strongest economies will have a varying
economic composition over time. True or false? And lastly, question
number eight, eating ice cream causes people
to drown, true or false. If you need more time, I'll
let you pause the video here and you can take your time. I'll
answer these questions. Okay, so let's move
to the answers. Question number one, order the following into economic
inputs and outputs. So we have enterprise, land, labor and capital as the inputs.
And what do you produce? You produce goods and services. Those are the economic outputs. Question two, during
what time frame is GDP usually measured annually. You can measure it in
a shorter time frame, but typically when
you talk about GDP, it's an annual metric. Question number
three, if a company produces that amazing
solar charging car, what sort of inflation
are you likely to see? You're likely to
see the demand pull inflation because there will be a high demand for that product. Question four, Saudi
Aramco, British Airways, Emirates in the UA and Shell are examples of state
owned enterprises. They exist and were created
to provide a service. The fact that they
make a little bit of profit is neither
here nor there. The idea behind them in
the first instance was to provide a state owned enterprise or service or to provide
value to the population. Question five, if the government increases spending on
infrastructure products, it would be an example
of fiscal policy. Montary policy would be changing the interest
rates in some way to try and change sort of saving or spending a
little bit more indirect. Fiscal policy is an example of an infrastructure project investment
by the government. Number six, what's the best
metric to use when you're comparing the economic strength between several countries, GDP per capita, they're
all good answers, by the way, employment rate is a nice way to compare countries. Inflation rate gives
you an indication on how countries have been
performing year on year. That diversity of
economic composition, as we saw in that
stacked bar chart is also a great way
to compare countries, but GDP per capita generally is a really nice metric to
compare countries quickly. Question seven, the
strongest economies over time will have a common
economic composition. Yes, that's true. We saw that in the kind of
cluster charts again. You saw US, Germany, and India and how actually
there wasn't one massive 50%, 75% item or industry that was contributing
to that economy. The best and strongest and
most developed economies, over time, will realize that diversification is important. And number eight, eating ice cream causes
people to drown. Yes. Yes, it does.
I'm just joking. It doesn't. Okay, so top five takeaways
from this chapter. Economics is a science
that studies how society uses its resources to produce goods and
provide services. Number two, macroeconomics
studies the overall economy, microeconomics zooms in to individual markets and entities. Number three, gross domestic
product is a measure of the total value of all goods and services produced by one
economy in one year. Number four, countries can have different economic
compositions that vary with time and
that's perfectly normal. And number five,
developed countries will have a higher GDP
that grows less, and developing
countries tend to have a GDP that grows
at a faster rate, but a lower GDP per capita.
11. 8. Data visualisation (Part 1): Welcome back, everyone. Our
next interesting chapter is around data visualization. You're probably working
with data in some capacity, whether it's customer numbers, financial data, healthcare data. There's a very good
chance that you're working with data and
from time to time, you need to be presenting, analyzing this data, and to be convincing people that this
data is showing something. And that's what this chapter
is going to focus on. Objectives as always
for this session, you'll learn what good
data visualization looks you'll learn a few types
of analytical techniques. You'll learn how to
best organize data. You'll learn the different ways that we can use to present data, and you'll see examples
of pitfalls to avoid when creating charts. So let's jump right into it. So what is a good data
visualization slide? I want you to imagine that
you have a presentation and you're presenting
your study, the data that you have analyzed. So good data visualization is informative.
It's trustworthy. It's accessible,
meaning that it's easy to understand
by your audience, and it's elegant
at the same time. So fundamentally, good data visualization and good data needs to
be trustworthy. You need to be able
to stand behind the data and say, it
speaks the truth. It's like the chapter
that we did on communication where we
talked about the seven Cs, about it being
concrete and correct, for example, in the same way the data that you're presenting
must be trustworthy. When you're working with data, you need to understand and
show how was it collected? Is it a complete dataset? Does it represent
fairly the sample, if it's a sample of data, does it fairly represent
the population or the behavior or the
habit, for example? Is the data accurate, and of
course, is it legitimate? It's basically asking the
question, is this a real deal? Was it correctly collected? Does it represent
what we're trying to achieve here? Is it accurate? You having done your
due diligence first before we come to
any visualization, you need to stand behind
the data and say, yeah, this is legitimate. Data representation can also affect whether your audience is going to trust what
you're telling them. What's the axis? Have you
used a sensible axis? Do I trust what I'm seeing here? Does it capture the essence of what we're kind of talking
about here? Is it relevant? And also when you're
presenting that data on the slide, when
people look at it, whether they trust what
you're presenting or not, are you being consistent in showing colors and
other contrast features, like we think about the
presentation chapter? Is there a confusing layout that makes me think, You know
what? I don't trust this? Are there absent
labels, sources, footnotes or titles
that makes me think, Hold on, where did
this data come from? You've not been
transparent about it, so I'm not sure I believe it. And sometimes it can
be so distracting the style and the font that you use that you
think, You know what? I'm not sure I trust what
I'm looking at here. It's human nature
to feel this way. Good data visualization is accessible. What does that mean? People go through a process
when they look at a slide and they try and understand what it is that you're
presenting to them. They perceive something, meaning they just simply look at
it and take it all in. They interpret it,
meaning that they connect the dots and lastly, they comprehend,
that means that they are able to understand why you're even presenting
this in the first place. Accessibility, the fact is
that your audience influence. This is about them.
Who are they? Remember, think back to
the presentation chapter. You need to be really creating a bespoke message for the audience that you're
expecting in the room. What do they need to know? What do they already
know? What baggage are they bringing with
them to this meeting? Do they have the
time, the capacity, the interest to learn about this data that
you're presenting? So this is a recap
really of what we learn in the presentation chapter that you need to
understand your audience, think about what they need, and then spoon feed it to them. The factors that you
can influence is whether this data doesn't solve or it's not
relevant to them. It's either irrelevant or you've oversimplified it that
it loses its meaning. Your solution or your
proposition is also too complex. You're not explaining
it correctly. There's no labeling, context, like we discussed
on the other side, and they think, You know what? Maybe I trust the data, but I'm just not really
understanding it right now. It's not been presented to me, it's not been made accessible
for me to understand. Good data visualization
is elegant. Now, what does elegant mean? It doesn't mean you're going to have loads of different colors, loads of different fonts, nor does it mean you're
just going to have a black and white slide because you want
to keep it simple. It's subjective. Beauty is in the eye
of the beholder. There's loads of different
ways that you can make slides. Some of you might like the
way I've done these slides. It's dark with white text, but some people might
say, You know what I prefer a light background
with black text. It doesn't really matter.
But you do need to be very serious and you need
to eliminate the arbitary. Nothing needs to be a whim. You didn't just do
it because of it. You have to have purpose behind every design element
that you put on a slide. More importantly, you need to
be thorough with your data. You need to make sure that
I'm presenting something that is absolutely 100% correct. That comes first. Then
we worry about style. Then we worry about
the design elements. As I said, every design
element must be justified. You have to be able to say for certain that there's
a reason why this is bold or the reason this
is red or the reason that this is on the left hand side of the page or the
right hand side, you need to be very
cerebral about this. Don't try and do it
on the first attempt. Give it a go, polish
it and refine it, speak to people,
test it with people. Do you think this displays
my message correctly? Is this effective in convincing you that my idea or this data
is correct and accurate? It's not about minimalism, but simple is better. Try and make things simple and easy for people
to understand. You'll find that with
selected design elements, thinking about the
fonts, thinking about the colors, thinking
about the contrast, the images, the types of charts that you use that we're going to come
onto at detail, these will create the
elegance that's required. So as we mentioned,
your audience will undergo a process
of understanding. They'll start by perceiving. They'll ask the question,
what am I even looking at? If it's a chart, they'll
say, Okay, well, on this chart, where is big, medium and small?
What does that mean? If it's a pie chart, they'll look at the slice
of the pie and say, what portion of the total is it? If you're trying to show two data columns they'll say, well, how do they compare
their brain will start to think about
what correlations might exist in what I'm seeing. What am I trying to
learn from this? They'll then go through
a process after you've given them enough time just to soak it in to interpret it. Which says, Okay, so so
what? What does it mean? Is it better to be big
or small on this chart? What does up mean? Does up
mean I'm spending more money, or does up mean I'm
losing more money? Or does up mean I'm
making more money? Is it meaningful and relevant
or is it insignificant? And also, is it surprising
or unsurprising? Am I expecting to
see this or not? And lastly, when they
have truly understood it, they've comprehended it, they'll ask the
question, so what? Does it matter? What's
the main message here? Is it relevant to our work and what we're here
to discuss today? Has it confirmed what I know or is this something new
that you're teaching me? You have to understand
that whilst you probably, if you collected
the data yourself, for example, you probably
know this data inside out. But don't assume that
everybody knows what you know. They're going to go
through perceiving it, interpreting it, and
then finally, hopefully, once you've given
them enough time and explanation and visual aids, they will comprehend it and
understand the message. Data needs to be manipulated
to become information. So what is data? Data is
just bits of information. It's not information itself, it's pieces of information. Imagine your smartwatch,
for example, continuously collecting
data about your movements, whether you're standing or
sitting, your heart rate, your respiratory
rate, other things that it's capturing about. But in and of itself, it's
just pieces of information. If it's tracking my heart rate, it will say beat. And then there was another beat, and then is heartbeat again, and then is heartbeat again. And it captures
single data points. But only when you take a step back and you ask the question, Okay, this beat and then this
beat, and then this beat. Okay, so the beats per minute
was 40 beats a minute, 60 beats a minute,
100 beats per minute. Now it becomes information. Only when you take a
step back after that, can you say, what's
normal and what's abnormal for him and for
the general population? Is 40 beats a minute good
for him or not good for him? That's you taking another
step back towards analytics. But data in itself are
just bits of information. They need to be processed, organized, interpreted,
structured, and visualized and only then are you really able to reveal
these actionable insights? Do I need to change
my exercise behavior because my heart rate is
not in the right range? It started off with
data collection and it ends with an
actionable insight. So here's an example
of the distinction between data and information.
Here's some data. Company X made $10 million
worth of sales in 2017, and the same company made
$9,000,000 of sales in 2018. Company Y made $8,000,000
of sales in 2017, and they made
$12,000,000 of sales in 2018. What do you think? Interesting data
points. You'll say, this is what happened. These are the facts.
But look what happens when we convert that
data into information. It becomes this chart here. You can see that in
company Y's case, which is the blue, their
sales went up 17-18. You can see in Company
X's case, the orange bar, that their sales went
down 10-9 2017-2018. You can see here that they had this point here where
they interconnected, they had the same
number of sales, probably a third of
the way into 2017. And so it is so easy for you
to get that information. And you could probably
make a couple of conclusions you could
say, You know what? I think company Y although it started low is
now doing a lot better. There's something
about this company, about their leadership,
about their management, about their products
and services, their loyalty of
their customers, the market segment
that they're in. That company is doing well and it probably will
continue to do well. Company X, on the other hand, seems to be having
some problems, not a huge amount of problems. It's not a nosedive,
but they went 10000000-9 million
worth of sales, so we need to keep
an eye on them. You can also do some
mathematical analysis as well. You can
say, you know what? Company Y grew by
50% in the year. And so you can weave that
statistic into your story. You can say company Y sales increased by 50% year on year, surpassing company X by 2018. That information has just
come from this data table, but you can see how
much more easy to read and impactful this
is compared to this. This is data, you manipulate it, you think about it,
you visualize it, and it becomes information that you can then use to
make an investment decision or to make some other
conclusion and then hopefully reveal an
actionable insight. Here's another
example. I'm going to give you a minute to take
a look at this data table. This looks like a
data table that shows different laboratories on
this side and on this side. And these laboratories do
different types of tests, blood sciences, microbiology, anatomic or
pathology, et cetera. Then it breaks it down
into test type and the number of tests available
on the menu for that lab. I look at this table
and think, cool. Thanks for sharing
this information. I can see that there's a lot of labs that have a
lot of disciplines. There seems to be some overlap between some of these ones, and there's a lot of
numbers on the slide. What if we were to
manipulate this data a little this is a
lot cleaner now. This is a data table.
We're not even made it into a chart yet, but
this is a data table. Now instantly, I can see that, there are four disciplines, blood sciences, microbiology, anatomical pathology,
and cytogenetics. Within each of those, there's a number of different tests. I can see on the X axis up here that you have lab
one, two, three, four. I can see the tests
that they perform. I can immediately work out
just by looking at the table, which lab does the most tests, which lab does the test that I'm interested
in learning about. And what else can we do?
We can compare them. So all the labs can perform biochemistry
and hematology tests. That is up here. Biochemistry,
hematology they all do it. That's one conclusion
I can draw. The second conclusion is
that only labs three and four can do
mycobacteriology tests. This is mycobacteriology. You can see that one
and two can't do that, but these guys do it over here. Another insight
is that lab three can perform the largest
number of tests. So you look down here, you say, Okay, you add these numbers up. They do 450 tests
compared to the others, 450 different unique tests. So that was a lot of information that we can actually gain if we manipulate the data and present it in a
slightly different way. Let's go back to this again. You wouldn't necessarily
have been able to make those conclusions
as quickly and as easily if you're looking
at the raw data like this. So take your raw data, sort it, organize it, and you'll see what sort of action or
insights you can gain from. Visualizing data is a
four step approach. Step number one, establish the project context.
Why are we doing this? You're not just doing it
for the sake of doing it. There has to be a
reason. What is the purpose and what is the outcome that
you're looking for? Number two, go ahead and
carry out a robust analysis. Collect the data, make
sure it's accurate, and then do your
calculations and analysis. This is one of the
most key things. Do not under any circumstance
skip this or do this badly. Remember, you're
only as good as what your data is showing
you and you might make a beautiful chart with lots of conclusions and correlations. But if someone says, Hey, look, is this even good
data? Forget about it. Gather your data,
check for accuracy, and then do your analysis
and calculations with accuracy and be thorough
in this process. Step number three, choose the right way of
displaying your data. Whether it's a data
table or a chart, explore your analytical outcomes and make sure you're choosing the right chart that displays the sort of correlation or the sort of
data that you're looking at. We'll come to that later. Number four, highlight
the key message. Remember, it's all about the so what it's all about
the so what? Why are we here? Why are we doing this?
Use colors, shapes, other formatting to highlight your key message so
that your audience knows I knew what I was
doing. I went and did it. Here is the data,
but here is also the conclusion and the
actionable next steps. That is end to end and
that's impressive. Use statistical and
visual techniques to uncover the insights. Statistics and data
analytics is massive. There's loads of different types of different techniques
you could be using. But I just want to take
you through a couple of different ways of doing
it. Deductive reasoning. This is probably what most of us do when working with data. You have a very
specific hypothesis. I think there's a problem, and
so I'm going to go look at the data to confirm or disprove that I think
there's a problem. That's deductive reasoning. You start with a hypothesis. I think we're losing money because the quality of
our manufacturing is low. That's my hypothesis. I'm
then going to go look at the data to see if it supports
that hypothesis or not. Another way you can think
about framing this is inductive reasoning. I don't
know what I'm looking for. I'm just here to play around
with the data and hopefully use my instinct about finding
something of interest. Then we wait and
see what emerges. Show me the data on sales, show me the data on marketing, on manufacturing, on quality, on all the different
things that are related to whatever
industry you're in. Let me have a play
around with the data and we'll see what happens. I don't have a
specific hypothesis. I'm just looking to
make some improvements. Or statistical methods. I want to conduct an
experimental test. This is not me just fiddling around with the data and
seeing what pops up. I'm going to be
statistically looking to see if there's an existence of correlation and consider whether there's
possible causation. I'm not here to I don't
have a hypothesis and I'm not here just
to mess around with the data and see
what looks good. I'm going to approach it with
a statistical mind and to do actual statistical tests to prove or disprove
correlation. There's loads of different
things that you can do, but here is an interesting
starting point for why and how you're going to go about doing that
data analytics. So which data to show? What do you not show
and how do you show it? Well, first of all, like we said, what are
you going to focus on? What are you going to visualize
and from what dimension? What angle is my
story going to be? Can I show multiple angles to demonstrate that
I've been thinking very clearly about this? Is my data even relevant? Is this even relevant to
what we're here to do? Is my data sufficient? Have I collected enough data to be able to make
these conclusions? Am I presenting all the
data or just some of it, depending on the
angle I'm going for. What limitations
do I want to show? What thresholds are there? What date ranges are there? Have I removed the clutter? Have I removed the
confusion from people? Is this a balanced view? Are people going to
criticize me for being very biased towards
one particular thing? If I want to build
that new factory, he's wanted to build that
factory since day one, of course, he's going to
say build that factory. Is this a balanced view? Are you showing the pros and cons of what this
data is showing? Here is data bits
of information. Lots of little lego
pieces lying there. When you sort data, this
is what it looks like. You can see they're
all grouped together. And you can see now,
there's black bricks, yellow, green, white, blue, red, orange and green. Well, what's this one? This is a different shade
of green to that one. So now I can see that
wasn't apparent to me here, but when I sought it, I can
see what colors we have. When you arrange them, you
then realize that actually, there's actually
different amounts of the different colors, and you can have a
rough idea as to how many bricks there
are of each color. When you present them visually, you can immediately see, okay, red bricks
we have the most. That wasn't apparent to
me here here and here, but now I can see when
they're stacked up, we have the most red bricks, followed by yellow, white, and blue and actually a lot
less of these other ones. So I had the data, I sorted it, arranged it, and I
presented it visually. And the cherry on
the cake is when you explain your
data with a story. You take your audience
through a journey and say, This was my hypothesis, this is the data. This
is what it showed. And now let me tell
you what it means, what are the main conclusions, and what are the actionable
next steps that I think as a company or as a business or as a department
we should be going. So choosing a chart. This is crazy complicated. There's so many different
chart types out there. What would you like to show, and how are you
planning on showing it? So let's say you want
to make a comparison, and you want to make a
comparison among items. And you have two variables
or many categories, you can see up here all
the different options. These are bar charts. Column charts, bar charts, tabled with embedded charts, variable width column charts, different ways to show,
depending what it is. Once I've gone through
the whole slide, feel free to take
a print screen, and it will help your
decision making. Column charts and bar
charts are very popular. It's when you're trying to
make a comparison among items with one variable per item with a
couple of categories. If you've got lots of them, you do this type of bar chart. If you've got a few items, then you'll do a column chart. Very, very common. What about when you're doing a comparison, not with items, but
comparing over time? If it's a few periods
and many categories, then you do a line chart
showing continuous change. Or cyclical data might
show a circular chart. If there's a couple
of categories only, then you might do a
column chart again. Bar charts, line charts, very, very helpful when
you're comparing items or comparing
an item over time. What about if you're trying
to show a distribution? Let's say you asked
a question, I have 10 million
followers on YouTube. What's the age distribution
of my followers? Well, if there's a few data points, you
could use a histogram. But actually, a line
histogram would make sense. It might show a
normal distribution. You have some people that
are a little bit older, some people younger, but the majority lie within
this curve over here. If you're comparing
two variables, maybe a scatter chart or a three D area chart if
you're feeling fancy. But this shows distribution. What if you're showing the
composition of your data? Is it static, so it
doesn't change over time? Well, a pie chart
could be an example. A waterfall chart
is a great way to show build up towards 100%. Imagine I was to say, we spent 10 million pounds
this year in the business, and someone said to me, well,
show me where we spent it. A waterfall chart starts
off showing you bar by bar, column by column and builds
up to that 10 million. We spent 1 million here, we spent 5 million
here, 1 million there, et cetera until we reach that
threshold of 10 million, which was 100%. That's
what you can see here. In fact, you can bring
it back down again. Made spent 1 million,
we made 500,000, we made another 200,000, we spent another 2 million, and it shows you over
time the composition. And stacked 100% column charts, similar to what we saw
in a previous chapter. Do you remember the chapter
where we were talking about GDP per country? We had the column charts of
the sorry, it was the USA, Germany, and China and how their GDP was composed
by different industries. That's an example of a
100% stacked column chart. That basically showed us
this is 100% of your GDP and the composition
of that showed us them the contribution of those different
industries to the GDP. You can also use if there's a composition
that changes over time, you can do a stack column
chart that changes. You can do an area
chart and other things. There's a lot of
different types of charts that you can use
to show composition. And what about showing a
relationship between two things? You're trying to show
that correlation. A scatter chart is very common. You might see that
with kids where you're looking at their
height and their weight, and then you plot
them on the chart and it shows what the
trend looks like. Bubble charts, I'm a
big fan of as well. Again, we saw that in one of the previous chapters where
we were looking at GDB per capita and GDP GDB capita
per growth by country. It allows you three variables. You have the X and the Y axis, but you also have the
size of the bubble. You have three variables that you're able to show
a relationship with. Take a print screen of this
if you want, and use it. Next time, you need to do some data analytics and data visualization
and see which of these charts most accurately helps you bring your
message to life. I want you to watch this
video about removing distractions from your slides
to make them more powerful. I work for a company
called Dark Cos analytics, and one of the things that
we like to teach is how you can improve your visuals just by removing
elements from them. And so I thought very quickly, I might take you through
how we could improve this particular pie chart
simply by doing some removal. So we can start by removing the backgrounds and
removing the borders. And we can remove the
regendant legend. There, we don't
need those. We can remove the three
dimensional aspect of it. And if everything is bolded,
then nothing is bolded. So let's remove the bolding. We can reduce the colors. And then we can
remove the wedges. And we can thicken
those lines a little bit and emphasize the bacon. And you can see that
this is more effective. Attractive and inactive. There's our before picture. So I like that video
because it shows that sometimes you might be looking
to overcomplicate things. You might be looking
to make it so visually amazing that actually
you create distractions. And okay, he's being funny, but the truth is, he's right. There wasn't there was
no need for it to be a three D pie chart in
the first instance. A really straightforward
two tone bar chart would be equally as
impactful and effective, and it gets the message across in a simple yet impactful way.
12. 8. Data visualisation (Part 2): So bar charts. Bar charts show changes over
time or compare values. Let's look at this chart here, ly sales in US dollars from
2013 to sort of 2011 to 2013. And as you can see here, 2012 was the year of the most sales. 2021 was high, 2012
was much higher, and 2013, you dropped
back down again. There's another way of
looking at it horizontally. A company that does services. They provide heating,
cooling, and lighting. You can instantly see using a bar chart which department
or which product and service is the
biggest contributor to 20 seventeen's total sales. What are the things
that you need to keep a lookout for when it
comes to bar charts? Well, sometimes when the
axis is not labeled, that causes a problem and choose either to label the
bar or the axis or not both. Ideally, in most cases, the axis should start at zero, so that's what
most people think. I presume baseline means zero and then you
go up from there. Some common mistakes. Building
disproportionate values. I mean, starting that
axis at 1 million, for example, would
be slightly weird. And of course, like in these
two examples, no labeling. Okay, so it says
yearly sales in USD, but what number is that? What number is
this? Is this $1.02 dollars and half $1 or is
this 1 million, 1 billion? Do you know what I mean? It's
difficult to understand. So not labeling your
chart can also be a huge mistake. Let's
look at Pie charts. As we said, Pie charts
often can be bar charts, but a pie chart
can be helpful in some cases to show the
share of the whole, right? General Election
2015 voted for A, voted for B, voted for C.
You can see out there. Most of the time, actually
being able to work out what percentage it is
is quite difficult. A bar chart usually
is better for that. But if you're generally
trying to show a majority, then a pie chart can
be quite helpful. Here's another example, share of revenues from each
different practice. There's a business that
has different practices, and this shows the revenue share from
each of the practices. Now, there are some
things to be careful of. The first slice,
unlike this one, should try and be at
the 12:00 position. If you go over to here, you can see that that first
slice is straight up. Visually, it should try and be symmetrical and the
colors must contrast. This is a good example
where it's easy to see which color is what here, it now becomes a
bit more difficult because you have
here black, gray, gray and another shade of gray, and being able to see those is a little
bit more difficult. So make sure that the
first slice is at 12:00, and the colors should really contrast to try and catch that. Common mistakes, it
doesn't add up to 100%. I've seen it so many times
where actually you've got 50%, 50%, 50% and actually
like, Well, hold on. This is supposed to
be adding up to 100%. Just like this one here, too many slices can
be distracting, particularly if
they're all colored. Like in the previous example,
the video that we saw, if you want to highlight just
one slice and have the rest of them in gray to
demonstrate this is the big one, this is
what we're focusing on. That can be quite impactful. But if there's too many slices, it can be distracting and three D will
definitely distract. Generally speaking,
I really don't see the value of having a
three D Pie chart ever. Yeah, happy to be corrected, but I haven't really
seen a use case for a three D Pie chart.
Stack charts. This is what we showed in one of the previous
chapters where we looked at GDP
composition for country. The stack charts show the ratio of the items compared
to the whole. Here's an example, percentage of kitchen items
consumed at the office. 56% of items were potato chips, 26 chocolate and
19% were coffee, and this is what people
used up in the office. You can also show
that over time. You can say, well, 2016-2018, this is how potato chips, chocolate and coffee consumed in the office changed over time. People were very interested in the early days in what
is it potato chips, and then that dropped
to 55% by 2018, showing a different trend that people suddenly got
a sweet tooth and they really wanted chocolate
much much more by 2018. But as you can see,
each one of those adds up to 100% and it
represents the whole. Things to keep an eye out
for making sure that, of course, that they
do add up to 100%. Usually, you put the most important or the largest
item at the bottom. Common mistakes, too
many categories, again, showing too
much complexity. I felt that way about
the GDP composition. There were so many
different slices to that bar chart that you
were trying to work out what was where and having two
similar colors similar to the pie chart that we discussed will confuse people
and distract. Here's another really nice
example of a stacked chart. This time, it doesn't add up
to 100% because what it's showing is the numbers of men in that country and the
colors and the proportions show the distribution of
ages of men in that country. So in the UK, this percentage
or this proportion, and it's obviously
got population in millions on the X axis, this proportion are
zero to 14 years. This proportion
is 15 to 64 years and a much smaller proportion
is 65 years and older. At a glance, there's a couple
of things that you can see. The US and Brazil have the two largest
populations on this chart, whereas the UK and Germany are much smaller in
total population. That being said,
Mexico seems to have a relatively small percentage of people that's 65 and over, whereas the US seems to have
a much higher percentage. Is that genetics? Is that
the quality of healthcare? Is that the quality
of food? Who knows? But this is what the
data is suggesting. At Mexico and their percentage of zero to 14 year olds
compared to Japan, for example, that
reflects birth rates. Maybe that reflects
cultural values of how big families
are expected to be. Cluster charts compare a
series in the same category. Let's look at this, for example. Here is an example where
a business has done its annual appraisal in
2016, 2017 and 2018, and it has ranked
its employees based on whether they
met the criteria, partially met it or exceeded it. You can see how that has
changed year on year. Ideally, they would
want their employees to if they're training them well and if they're
doing a good job, the purple and the orange
numbers to go up year on year. You're meeting expectations
or exceeding expectations. And you ideally
want the number of employees that are
only partially meeting expectations to go down year on year to demonstrate
that either you're moving them onto
different roles or different jobs or that you're training them
in a way that they are well suited
for the business. So clusters of more than three
can get kind of cluttered, and of course, the categories
need to be meaningful. So that's these things up here. Make sure that these are
relevant data points that people are going to
be interested to see. The clusters need to be well
spaced from each other so that they don't actually confuse you as to what
you're looking at. Individual bars will have a
small space, but of course, have titles and labels so that you are not overwhelming and confusing your audience. Remember, they'll go through that process where
they perceive it and, you know, move on to the
comprehension stage, and you need to
help them through. Bubble charts. I do
enjoy bubble charts. They compare three
quantitative measures. Let's look at this chart here, which looks at the
automotive industry, car manufacturing, the cost of vehicle versus the sales made for that vehicle, and the bubble chart shows you the net profit
that company made. And also on top of that, we've
colored the bubble chart. So you have the black
bubbles that show you Japanese car manufacturers and the gray bubbles that show
German car manufacturers. So what can we see
here? We can see that typically Audi,
BMW and Mercedes, the German manufacturers cost
the most, whereas Honda, Suzuki, and Mazda are the three cheapest
cars to manufacture. And in terms of sales, and I presume this
is revenue, Audi, BMW seem to be on
the higher end, whereas Honda, Suzuki, and Mazda have sold
relatively less. But the interesting one is
the size of the bubble. The size of the bubble
indicates the net profit. Who's making the most money? Mercedes, BMW, Audi, Mazda. There seems to be a correlation here as well that we can see. With a bubble chart
it's looking at cost, sales, and net profit. So you're looking
at three metrics on one slide. That can
be quite powerful. And in fact, you've also
made a fourth metric, which is the
distinguishing between the Japanese manufacturers and the gray and the Mercedes sorry, the German manufacturers
with the black and the gray coloring
of the bubbles. So presentation
tips, bubble size represents something,
contrasting colors help, as we said, too many labels, too many different things
can confuse people. Remember, when it
comes to chants, simple is better and
keeping it not confusing, not complex generally will make your audience understand things and comprehend
things a lot easier. Here's a nice bubble chart. Smartphone growth worldwide. On the Y Axis, it shows the
growth of the units sold. Which markets are seeing more smartphones
sold year on year. Emerging Asia. What is that
Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America are
toppling those. Markets that are a bit more
mature or struggling maybe, Western Europe and
developed Asia are seeing a decline in sales of smartphone growth
in this time period. On this, you're talking
about cost per unit. Emerging Asia has the
cheapest smartphones. Whereas developed Asia and Western Europe and North
America seem to have the most expensive smart phones and 100 million units sold, is the size of the bubble. Instantly, I can see that the market that has
sold the most is China. North America is
pretty big as well. Emerging Asia is massive. The smallest appears
to be central in Eastern Europe and
developed Asia in terms of raw numbers
of mobile phones sold. So this is the power
of a bubble chart. X and Y AXS and the size of
the bubble, and of course, you've got emerging
markets in green, developed markets in blue, so you can make that
distinction as well. Line charts emphasize
trends rather than amounts. Let's look at this, for example. This looks at a company and their revenue and
expenses 2011-2016. On the YXS, you've
got US dollars. So you can see initially,
they were making good money and their
expenses were low. But actually, over time,
their expenses went up. And their revenues dropped. At this point probably
they made some changes, and then they decided to do something about it and
so their revenue went back up again whilst
their expenses dropped. So in this period of time over here, they
were making profit. At this period of time,
they were making a loss, and now they're
into profit again because their revenue is
higher than their expenses. You can see that if this
was on a data table, that would be really
hard to understand. But the line chart really
simplifies that for you. So presentation tips, the data should be continuous to
allow this to happen. It shouldn't be
discrete buckets, it should be a
continuous flow of data. Stretching or
narrowing the chart will make the angles
look steeper. So rather than it being here, if I squish this chart to
this side, what would happen? You'd have a very sharp peak
here for this orange line, and it would almost look more pronounced than it actually was, you have to be aware of how
you position these charts. There's loads of
other charts types as well that can be helpful. We don't have time to
go into all of them. You have area charts that
represent volume over time. A MECo chart is like a three D, sorry, not three D, a two
dimensional bar chart where the width also matters. For example, but
this box over here, this whole thing could be, how much money did
we make last year? And you have client number
one, client number two, client number three,
and these are the different products and
services we sold them. So it's almost like a bar chart where the area also
matters as well. A Gant chart is very powerful. I'm sure loads of you are using Gant charts or have
seen them before. It's effectively a timeline that helps you
demonstrate the schedule. So you can say phase one
is going to start here, phase two is going
to start here, et cetera And so
the idea is that a Gant chart is a
visual representation of your project timeline. Lots of other options as well. So remember, your data
visualization slide should be informative and
it's perfect when there's nothing else
that you need to take away from it to
make it impactful. It's trustworthy.
It's not misleading. People trust it. Nor should you claim it presents the truth if there's no evidence that
it presents the truth. So don't sort of stretch the truth when it comes to the conclusions
that you make. Be factual about that, and
that will make it trustworthy. It's accessible. The objective is to facilitate understanding. People need to understand
it. You should be striving for clarity and not simplicity. Simplicity will help, but
clarity is even more better, and confusion is your enemy. Last one, it should be elegant.
What is an elegant slide? It's effortless, it's stylish, it's dignified, it's graceful. It's not overly colorful, overly complex,
overly confusing. It is really tough to
make that balance. I would love to
hear your thoughts. If you have some
great slides that you've seen send them to me. I would love to include them in this course as examples of really great slides that look fantastic and get the message across in a very elegant way. Now let's do some practice. What I would like you to do is we're going to in a moment, review some good and bad slides. We're going to be looking
at these slides and I want you to fix one of them. Take the data from the slide, take a print screen or use
the materials provided, what I want you to do
is to redo the slide. Go into Microsoft PowerPoint or whatever software that you
use to make your slides. And fix one of the slides. Use the principles that we've
learned in this chapter to completely fix
and redo the slide. Then I want you to reflect
and improve on that. What have you learnt
in this chapter that has made you a
better slide maker, and what has changed in your
mindset that will allow you to now deliver data
visualization in a different way? Let's jump on to the slides now. I'll give you a minute to have
a look at this one first. So this looks like a three
D column chart, right? And you've probably
never seen this before. Very complex, very
confusing, a lot of data. Probably quite meaningful
once you get to it. There's probably a key message here that I haven't
quite worked out. It shows you three
different metrics, three different axes. You've got different colors. You've got ranges down here. This really hasn't hit
the mark in terms of bringing to life what the
key message of this is. There's probably a data
table that sits behind this, which is probably more useful than the data visualization. Let's have a look at this
now. This is a wagon wheel. I think this is cricket a cricket must be an
average score for each of these players or a strike rate or the number of average runs scored or something like that. There's no information about
what we're looking at. I recognize some of the
names as sportsmen. Apart from that, I
don't really know. A, it doesn't seem to
add up to anything meaningful 30 plus 30
plus 30 plus 25 plus 24. What is this supposed
to add up to 100? I don't think it does. Why is it displayed in a pie chart? There's no real there's
too many colors. There's only too
many similar colors. You've got this blue, this blue, and this blue, and this
blue, which are similar. You've got some greens and the players are not even
from the same country. You could say, maybe all the players from England
are in blue, or the players from a certain country are from a
certain country. It's a little bit confusing. Let's look at this
chart now. Not bad. You can start to see that
they have a nice title. They've strengthened their marketing their
market leadership, biscuit market share
by percentage. They don't actually show
the percentages here, which is frustrating,
so I don't know whether this is 100% or 50%. Also down here,
it's not discrete. This should be continuous.
This shows presumably 2013 to 2012 to 2013. This shows 2013 to 2014.
There's overlap there. Why is 13 there twice? Where does 13 sit? Does it sit on this side?
Does it sit on that side? Nonetheless, I understand
what they're trying to do. But room for improvement. What about this one?
Have a look at this. Changing Face of America, percent of total US population
by race and ethnicity, how it was in 1960 and
how it's projected to change in 2060. So this for me is super
confusing, right? Because it doesn't even
feel like it's accurate. This looks like saying
all the people of the white ethnicity live
here in these states. The people who are identifying as Black ethnicity
are in this state. The Hispanic people
are in this state, and you've got all the others. Do they all go and live up here? I don't think that's right. And in addition to that, you're actually showing 1960 here, 2010 here and 2060 here. So is this supposed to
show change over time? How does that relate to the map? It's just very
confusing. I don't think this is the right way
to visualize this. Let's have a look
at this one now. MLS salaries, Major League
Soccer salaries as of May 2013. What do
you make of this? I guess I can
instantly see that LA, Los Angeles have the
biggest salaries, and maybe this team
here have the smallest. But the fact that there is this multiple colored,
multiple stacked, I guess these are midfielder, defensive midfielder goalkeeper, so you have the different
positions and the color code. That's the forwards
there. I thought this was part of that, but
this is part of the key. So it's very confusing, right? Lots of different colors, different lengths, no
numerical values at all. I'm not really sure
what I'm looking at here and what
the key messages. So what I would like
you to do, please, is pick one of these slides and give it a go,
redo the slide, fix this bad slide, and think about what's good about it, what's
not good about it, and reflect on what
you would do to pick a slide and
design it differently. Maybe you're a sports
fan and you want to redo this cricket slide or
whatever metric it shows. Maybe you want to
look at the market leadership slide and say, Hey, I would like to have a redesigning this data
visualization differently. I'd like someone to have
a crack at this one, changing Face of America. How would you show
this differently? How would you show
the composition of a country that
changes over time? Maybe 100% stacked bar chart, three of them that shows the varying compositions
of different ethnicities. You could probably give this one a miss unless you
have the raw data. But how would you show
salary differences for different players with different positions
across different teams? That would be a
challenging one. Okay, top five takeaways
from this chapter. Number one, good data
visualization is informative, it's trustworthy,
accessible, and elegant. Data, as you
remember, needs to be manipulated before we can start
to call that information. Visualizing data is a four step process
that we went through. Reasoning and statistical
analyses are definitely going to help you understand the data and draw out
those conclusions, and you'll need to think
very carefully about what chart you use to make sure that you maximize the impact of your slide. Thank
you very much, guys.
13. 9. Problem Structuring & Frameworks (Part 1): Hi, guys. Welcome back. Thanks
for joining me once again. This next session is
one of my favorites. It's called Problem
structuring and Frameworks. It's a really important skill that all of us need to know
whether you're in business, consulting, and industry or whatever sort of
work that you do, you will come across
a lot of problems. That's the nature of life, and to be able to
structure them and use frameworks to your advantage is going to be really,
really helpful. So what are the objectives
for this session? You're going to be
learning about hypothesis driven problem solving. This is where you think
about the problem and then deliver the project or deliver the
solution in that way. You'll learn to
get to the bottom of the problem statement. You will learn the
Missi principle, the Pareto principle, and
the pyramid principles. You're going to be
practicing driver trees, which is going to be
testing and bending your brain to think in a
very structured manner. So first things first, defining the problem
is critical. There is no point you jumping into the detail when you haven't yet worked out what problem
am I trying to solve. So here's the first question.
What is the problem? What is it that I'm actually
trying to solve here? What's the objective?
What's the goal here? We know what the problem is, but what are we trying to do? Are we trying to
solve it completely? Are we trying to save money? What constraints are
we working with? What's your working hypothesis? What do you think is going on? What are the objectives
of this project? What are the facts that we know? Set in stone, here is why I want to solve this problem.
Here are the facts. What are the gaps
in our knowledge? What do I know?
What do I not know? What questions need
to be answered to answer the bigger question
about what is the problem? Very importantly,
what are the drivers? What are the things that are causing this problem to even come about in
the first place? Let's say, for example,
you work in a factory, why are people not
buying your product? Is it because the
marketing is bad? Is it because the product
is a poor quality? Is it because it
breaks too easily? What are the different drivers that are leading
to this problem? You then have the choice, collect the data,
conduct the analysis, make your conclusion,
and critically, especially in the
corporate setting, give your recommendation. Do not go to your seniors
or to a room full of people with a problem with data that
supports that problem, but what you haven't
done is to make any sensible conclusions or suggested a reasonable
recommendation or plan of action. And don't forget it
doesn't stop there, iterate and scrutinize what
could I have done better in this process of analyzing the problem? I know
what the problem is. I've gone ahead and
done some analysis. What could I have
done better and can I do it again
and again and again? Can I improve on
this even further? What's the real question
that we're trying to answer? Why are we asking this question? There's 20 other
questions we could have asked, but why this one? What's driving this? Is there
some hidden agenda here? Is this a finance question? Is this an operational question? Is this a leadership question? Is there a political power move happening in the background
that I'm not aware of? Why are people asking
this and why are we trying to solve this
question specifically? Who is asking? Is it
the CEO who's asking? What might their agenda be? Is it the CFO who's asking? Is there a financial
question here? Are there any other
factors at play? Why are they asking
these questions? You really have to ask
these tough questions that may seem a little
bit abstract right now to get to the heart of what you're
looking to achieve. Sometimes you might think,
well, it's obvious. Other times, it's
not so obvious. You have to ask why. What
does success look like? If you fast forward and if you
think back to our chapter, where you're leading with
your conclusion or you're leading with the answer
that I want to give you. What does success look like
for you, for the business, and also for those that
are asking? Define that. Success looks by us reversing the trend we're seeing where people are not buying our
product, for example. What is the scope? What
am I allowed to touch? What am I not allowed to touch? What is within remit here? What is the whole picture? Take a zoom out view. What is the whole picture of what we're trying
to achieve here? What constraints is
the business facing? Are there financial constraints? Is there workforce shortages? Is there raw
materials shortages? Whatever it might
be, what constraints are we facing that will, A, help me answer the
question, but B, shape the scope of this analysis that
I'm going to be doing to try and
solve the problem. Have we tried to solve
this problem before? That's one of the easiest
questions you can ask. Do you know why? Because
probably you have. Probably someone has
tried to solve this before and very probably there's a whole load of data waiting for you to use and
interpret as well. Use new lenses,
different point of view, maybe a different context, maybe a different reality. Look at it from the
board's perspective, from leadership's perspective, from the staff perspective, from your consumer or your customer, your
patients perspective. Think about things from
different perspectives that will help you answer. What is the real question
that we're trying to get to? So hypothesis driven
problem solving. There are two main
methods for this, the top down approach and
the bottom up approach. Fundamentally, you're looking to structure the problem and then you're going to go from the top all the way
down to your analysis. You're going to start with
the project objective. What am I here to do? What are we here to achieve? Ask the big question,
what's going on? Then try to understand what are the key drivers that
would impact this. Let's take a really
straightforward simple scenario. Your phone WhatsAp
messages are not sending. As frustrating as that is, you can't send any
Whatsap messages. The objective here is
to get to the solution to try and find out why is my WhatsAp messages not sending. What are the key drivers? How to think about
that for a second. Why would WhatsApp
messages not be sending? Well, it could be
a phone problem. It could be something to do with the settings on your phone
not connecting to Wi Fi. It could be a WhatsAp problem. Maybe WhatsAp is down. Maybe it's one of those rare
occasions where there's a global shortage
or global outage, I should say, of WhatsAp. There's some update
in the server and it's caused a crash. Now, nobody can send
WhatsAp messages. Maybe it's a router problem. Maybe one of the kids has
unplugged the router and you might think that everything seems to be working
okay on your phone, Wi Fi is turned on, but it's
not connecting properly. Maybe there's a ent cable at the back that's
been unplugged. Or maybe it's your
Internet service provider. Maybe whoever you buy
your broadband from or your mobile phone data plan, maybe they're having
some problems. Maybe you've not paid your bills and they've
disconnected you. The idea initially
was to suggest, why is my WhatsApp
messages not sending? Actually, what we've
done is we found some drivers that
will then work out, it's one of these things. You then have your hypotheses
that sit under the drivers. Within each bucket, you're
asking other questions. In what way might my
phone not be working? Is it switched on? Is
the Wi Fi connected? Is there a problem
with the Wi Fi? Is there a problem
with something else? Am I connecting to the
wrong Wi Fi network? Have I entered the
password wrong? What are the different
options it could be? You do that across all the
different drivers to gain some hypotheses as to what
could be doing to impact this, which could be to impact your ability to
send a whatsap message. Now, in reality in business, it might be multiple things
contributing to something. The problem at the top might be, why are people not
buying our product? Why are our revenue
on the decline. It could be because
of bad marketing, it could be because of
a poor quality product, it could be because
the pricing is wrong. It could be sales teams, it could be a number
of different things, and you have a set of hypotheses that
sit underneath that. Then what do you do? You
go and find the facts. You go and ask key
questions that either will support this hypothesis or it will reject
the hypothesis. You'll either prove that this is the case or
it's not the case. If it was, why are people
not buying our product, and then you're questioning
marketing, for example, you're going to be
asking questions about marketing activities, marketing budget, the types of marketing that we're
doing, was it social media? Is it newspaper? How much
are we paying for these ads? What's the return on
investment? Is it working? It's a question around
product quality, you'd go over to the factory
where your product is made. You would be looking
at the processes, you'd be looking at
the raw materials, you'd be assessing to see whether the quality is adequate. Are customers not buying it
because it's a poor quality? What makes it poor quality? You need to be asking those
questions and fact finding. It could be something else. It could be that your
pricing is wrong. It could be that
your sales team are not pitching
themselves correctly. So a top down hypothesis
driven problem solving approach starts with
the hypothesis upfront. It considers the key
drivers to that problem, and then you get
down into making sub hypotheses and then
asking the questions, doing your analysis,
and presenting that. On the flip side, the
bottom up approach, which should ultimately get
you to the same answer, but it's just a
different technique, starts with the analysis. It says, I don't really have any particular
hypothesis in mind. I'm not really sure what the drivers to the
bigger problem could be. But what I'm going to do is I'm just going to start
at the bottom. I'm going to speak to people,
I'm going to ask questions. I'm going to fact find. I'm just going to play around
with my phone settings, with the router settings.
Maybe I'll check online. I don't really know
what I'm doing, but I'm going to be
starting by fact gathering. I'm then going to be presenting my findings.
Here's what I found. I found that actually
the quality of our material seems
to be pretty bad. Why? Why is the quality
of materials bad? Because we changed suppliers recently and that led
to a bad raw material, which has led to a bad product, which means people
aren't buying it. And so that's my finding. And
that leads to a conclusion. You might have
multiple conclusions. You might find that actually not only did we change supplier, which led to the bad product, which means there's
a poor quality, but also we've been targeting
the wrong customer segment. The marketing team
has been looking for millennials when we should be marketing to Gensez or
whatever it might be. And so that's my finding and my conclusion
is that actually this is one of the
problems that's contributing to a
decrease in revenues. And then fundamentally,
you look at your conclusions and you come
up with a recommendation. I recommend we switch back
to the older supplier. Even though they
were more expensive, they delivered the
better quality product. I recommend we focus on this market segment and
not that market segment. Both of these things,
the top down and the bottom up should really
get you to the same point. But it's just two
different techniques that bring you to
your conclusion. Hypothesis driven
problem solving, top down and bottom up. So how do you get there?
What is the process? You define the
problem first off, you outline the goals. This is what we're
looking to achieve. We spoke about scope earlier. What is the scope
of the project? What's allowed or not allowed? What's in and out? What
does success look like? What constraints are we under? What assumptions am I making? You need to test
your assumptions because what you might think is, okay, I assume we have
this much budget. As you know, you don't
have any budget. I assume marketing marketing
to the correct segment. Well, you shouldn't
make that assumption. You need a fact find.
You need to identify the stakeholders
who are the people responsible for these
different departments. Maybe it's your consumers, maybe you need to speak to them. Maybe it's the board
who make decisions, find out who the
stakeholders are and help them solve
your problem, then of course, make a timeline. Be very time focused and
make sure that you have a project plan and you can deliver it within a
reasonable timeline. Then you go around
presenting your data and outlining your conclusions and delivering your
recommendation. This is almost like a high
level problem solving plan. Once you're deep inside in
the heart of the problem, ask what's really going on. A lot of the times we stay a
little bit too superficial. We make assumptions and we
take things at face value. We shouldn't. We should ask the difficult questions,
the five whys. Ask why five times. Okay, so the business
is losing money. Why? Because it's a bad product. Why is it a bad product? Because the manufacturing
is not really that good. Why is the manufacturing
not that good? Something to do
with the process. Why? What's wrong
with the process? Why? Well, it's the raw
materials. They're not very good. Why are the raw
materials not very good? Because we changed
the supplier recently and now they're giving
us bad raw materials. Why did we change the supplier? Because we wanted to save money. Okay. Now we've
asked enough times, we've gotten to the
heart of the problem. It will really get you to the insights that
you're looking for. Ask the difficult questions. Then you have the seven Was or the so whats, I should say. Think about the
possible implications. Let's say you have a solution,
ask yourself so what. Okay, so we're going to build a new factory.
Yeah, so what. So that means we're going
to have increased capacity and a diverse product range. So what? Well,
that means we can, you know, meet supply and
demand even better. So what? Okay. Well, that means that we're
not going to have delays. So what? Well, that means happier customers.
Okay, so what? Okay, well, that
means that maybe we can charge a premium
for our services. Maybe we can retain
customers better. So what? Well, that's going
to affect our numbers. That's going to
improve our revenue. That's going to
decrease our cost. That's gonna improve our brand. So what? Well, that's
the business objective. You ask the five Ys to drill down to work out
what the problem is, and then when you have a
recommendation or a solution, ask the seven so whats to see whether it's
truly impactful. Once you have your conclusions, what are the implications
of your answers? Simple question. Does
it solve the issue? Is your problem now solved? Have you identified what
the implication is here? We've worked out what
the problem is, try it, try piloting something, or does the hypothesis
solve the issue? Are there any
connections that you made on the way or
any interlinkages? Did you find out new things in your data gathering that you now wish to
bring to the table? Is this problem connected
to a wider problem? We're looking to
cut costs so much that we changed suppliers
on our raw materials, it impacted our
quality of product, but we've also been really
cost focused on marketing, on sales, on other budgets, and it's really
impacting our business. The linkage here is that
the CFO is really trying to squeeze the costs down and it's really
impacting our business. That's a connection
or a linkage. Set a criteria to assess whether your solutions and your proposed recommendations are any good. Are they practical? Is it
even feasible to do it? What about economic
criteria? Is it affordable? Is it reasonable for us just to build a new factory or change a supplier or break a contract in order to
find a new supplier? Is that within our
financial scope? Is it ethical to do what
your recommendation is? I once worked on a
consulting project where we analyzed the
different departments of a hospital to understand
which departments were profit making and which
ones were loss making. One of the loss
making departments was the pediatric Center, the Children's Center, one possible
recommendation coming out of that was to say, if you close the
pediatric department, that will really help balance the books in the
long term because the pediatric department is loss making and all the
others orthopedics, et cetera were making
lots of money. Now that wasn't ethical. This was the only pediatrics department in this small area. A lot of unwell kids from around the community were
using their services. We needed to think
of a different solution to that problem. Really, what we needed to do
was to ask the five whys, why is the pediatric
department loss making? Keep asking why
and try and solve that problem and make sure that your solutions have an ethical
angle to them as well. Is it even legal to do what you're
suggesting we should do? Is it within the
legal constraints? Is it allowed to do the
solution that you're proposing? You have to set
these criteria in advance to see whether
your solutions are good and work with your
team to identify what the leadership team
care about when it comes to solutions and what
criteria they will follow. So now I want to share with you three very useful principles that I use on a
day to day basis. The first principle is called
the Pyramid principle. We've covered this
in other chapters. The Pyramid principle says, lead with your conclusion. When I was a medical student, we would be taught how
to examine patients. And it would be very natural
for me to say, Okay, well, so I've examined I've examined their hands.
I took their pulse. I checked this pulse, I
checked their shoulder, I listened to the heart,
I listened to the lungs. I felt their tummy, and, you know, this is what
I think is going on. What mistake I was making
was that I was telling the examiner a really
boring chronological story. They know all of
this stuff already. Tell me what you think is
going on with the patient. So the pyramid principle says, Start with your conclusion
or your recommendation. Lead with your answer.
Good morning, Mr. Examiner. I think that this
patient has condition X. The reason I think
that is because ABC. You start with your conclusion. If you wanted a raise
from your boss, a salary raise, you wouldn't
email them and say, Boss, I have done this project and this has made this much money
and the team is very happy, then I did that project
and I did this and I did that you wanted something
in three months and I did it in two
months and d d du and so I was thinking that because my current salary is X, maybe the market suggests
that my current salary could be Y and maybe you
could consider giving me a salary increase. That's a very long convoluted
way. Lead with your answer. Hi, boss. I wanted to discuss the possibility of me getting a pay rise at the
next appraisal cycle. I've worked efficiently. I have worked with
a good team and I've developed good teams and I've delivered projects
earlier than scheduled. This was evidenced by my team are saying really
nice things about me. We've made you this much money. We've over delivered on
our timelines, et cetera. The pyramid principle is
a communication strategy. Lead with your recommendation
or your conclusion. Then two, three, four
key supporting insights, the conclusions that support
the major conclusion. Then if you're interested, you can get into the
nitty gritty detail. Senior people don't take
long to make decisions. When you're trying
to convince people, remember the chapter
around communication. People's attention spans
are very, very short. Lead with your conclusion. I'm interested in
applying for a role. Here is why and here
is my background. Rather than, here
is my background, this is what I've done,
this is what I'm doing. I saw you had a job
advert. I'd love to apply. Here's my application.
Reverse that, switch it upside down. The pyramid principle is very, very powerful and it's very direct and clear when
you use it correctly. The next principle,
the MCI principle. Mis stands for
mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive. Consultants love this. They taught us this
in consulting. This is a principle
around framing, making sure that you have
captured everything in scope, making sure that
you've thought about all the options and also that each problem or each option is unique and it doesn't mess with the other option
that there's no overlap. I want to give you an example. Think of a bag of
skittles, the sweet candy. Can a skittle be red and
green at the same time? No, it's either going to be a red skittle or
a green skittle. And so if you opened up
a bag of skittles and you decided to separate them
out into different piles, you'd make red and
you'd make green. And say, the red
ones are over here, they taste like strawberry, and they are red skittles. These ones are different.
They are green skittles. They taste like apple or
lime, and they look green. So they are mutually exclusive. They cannot be both red and green skittles
at the same time. Collectively exhaustive means, have I thought about
the whole thing? Have I thought about
the bigger picture? Is there anything I'm
missing here in my options? Yeah, what about the
orange skittles? What about the purple skittles? Okay, so let's take
a step back here. Whilst I was focused
on red and green and defining the
differences between those, I actually forgot a couple of options that were on the table. And so when you're
solving problems, think first about all
the possible solutions, however ludicrous they might be. You need to think about
all of the solutions. And very quickly, you
can say, obviously, closing the factory down
isn't going to be an option, so we can cancel that, right? And so now we're focused on really the meat and potatoes
of this presentation. I'm going to talk about
these three options. Forget the purple skittle
because nobody likes that one. It's all about the red,
the orange, and the green. That's what we're
going to focus on. So mutually exclusive talks about ideas that are
distinct and separate. Collectively exhaustive
means that collectively, you have everything
covered, all basis covered. Let's think another example. Let's think about a
practical example. Why is my house messy? My house is messy because
the kids have made it a mess because the
guests came over and we haven't cleaned
up after them. I haven't really
had time recently because work is busy, no
one's really helping me. These ideas are messy. These ideas are really complex, and it could also be that the reason your house
is messy is because of a couple of things.
That have overlapped. Not only did guests come over
and the kids made a mess, but you didn't really get a
chance to clean the house. Have you even thought
for a second that maybe the cleaner was
off sick this week. When the cleaner
wasn't able to come, that has really left you
didn't even think of this. Your idea thinking is not
mutually exclusive and it's not collectively exhaustive
because you forgot about the cleaner and
your ideas are jumbled. Maybe a smarter way to think
about why your house is messy could be reasons
to do with me, reasons to do with the kids, reasons to do with my spouse, reasons to do with guests and reasons to do
with the cleaner. Now every idea has its own
distinct workflow together, we will definitely find out
why the house is messy. So this could work in a professional sense and also in your personal
lives as well. Think about taking a big problem like why is the house messy
or whatever it might be. Why is the business
losing money? Why are we unsuccessful in doing what we need
to do as a business? Break down that big problem
into smaller, manageable, distinct chunks,
ideas, opinions, options, workstreams,
whatever it might be, but make sure you
don't leave any gaps. Mutually exclusive,
collectively exhaustive. And that way, your
big scary problem suddenly becomes easy
to understand and it's an easier problem to
the next principle works smarter, not harder. The Pareto principle
talks about this. It talks about 80% of your effort generally only
gives you 20% of the result. But 20% of your effort often
gives 80% of the result. What does that mean, really?
It means that actually you should be thinking very cerebrally and prioritizing
your work accordingly. Imagine for a second, you were
hosting a birthday party. You've got 20 different
things to do. You need to sort out the
venue, blow the balloons, buy the decorations,
bake the cake, design the invites,
send the invites, make the invite list, you know, put petrol in the car, all the different
things that you need to do to prepare 20, 30 different items for
the birthday party. That being said, not all of those items are
equal of importance. There are some things
that are make or break. If we don't get the venue booked in ASAP and pay that deposit, forget about blowing
the balloons. There's no point. If I haven't worked out how many
people I want to invite, there's no point in booking the catering or
writing the invites. 20% of the tasks are going to
give you 80% of the reward. Actually, the big 80%, it's
neither here nor there. The choice of the balloon color, the position of the decorations, the design of the invite is
not really going to make a material impact as to how people enjoy
this birthday party. The same thing should
apply to your work life. When you are at work, think
about every single day, what is the top 20% of workflow items that if I get on top of these
and nail these, it's going to give
me immense return. By all means then
start to work on the other 80% that
needs to be done, but at least you've prioritized. The Perretta principle
is 20% of the effort often in life leads to
80% of the results. Learn to prioritize
and prioritize well. So there are some other methods you can use to solve problems. Imagine you're in the workplace and you have a team of people and you're
working together. You know, problem structuring
is always always advised. Structure is always
better than no structure, although overdoing it
can complicate things. Don't create layers and layers and layers
of driver trees and structures for
the sake of it. Sometimes you need to be agile, but generally thinking cerebral and structuring your problems, understanding things,
using the Missi principle, using the Pareto 80 20
principle will really help you. The nominal group method
is an interesting one. Imagine you had a
team of ten people and we're choosing a venue for the Christmas party
or something like that. You list all the ideas silently, create a master list, go around asking for any
clarification so that everybody understands what
the master list looks like, and you do an anonymous vote. It is democratic, it's fast, generally best for low impact, not a big deal kind of ideas. Single question
technique thinks back a little bit to top down hypothesis driven
problem solving. Identify the one key question
that needs to be answered. What problem are we facing?
What is that one question? If we nail this question, usually the first, why? We will then be able to cascade it down and solve
the whole thing. Identify the most
relevant sub questions. Think about the driver
tree. It starts up top. What are the different components
that sit underneath it? Gather the info, answer
those questions, and then work out what
is the best solution. And then ask the seven so
whats the so what my solution. Does it solve the problem?
For more complex problems that require lots
of moving parts, lots of people, lots of
timelines, lots of departments, the program evaluation
and review technique, PERT, it's more like
project management. Identify that final goal, list the key milestones that
are going to signal success, order the events, visually represent it if it
makes it easier, and then break things down into specific activities
and sub goals. Make it into a timeline.
Is it feasible? Is it affordable? Is it legal? Is it ethical core? Work out the critical path. That's the 80 20 rule, again, the Peta principle, work out which items in this project plan are the most critical and start
working on them now. Even if they come
later in the sequence, work on them now because
they will be the blockers to success and then obviously allocate the resources
and then go and deliver. These are some other
principles you can use to solve some problems in the workplace and in
your personal life.
14. 9. Problem Structuring & Frameworks (Part 2): So let's move on and do
some fun practicing. I want you guys to go away, please, and create
a driver tree. Think about the
pyramid principle. Think about that
slide where we had the top down hypothesis
driven problem solving. You had all the
different components, you had the drivers,
you had the hypotheses, you had the findings, et cetera. I want you to do the same thing, but in a more
social fun context. I want you to imagine that a group of us are
going out for dinner. I want you to create a
driver tree for this. Think about all the different
possibilities that we could choose from when going out for dinner. I'll
give you a hint. It could be around cuisine type. It could be around budget. It could be around
dietary requirements, it could be a location. It could be all of the above. Make your own driver try. There's no right
or wrong answer. I want to see how your
brain is thinking. When you're trying to get
into consulting interviews, they often make you
do these exercises, not because there's
a right answer, but because they want
to test your thinking. Let's think about
Starbucks coffee. Here's a common consulting
question that uses mesi and pyramid principles
and all this other stuff. How many cups of coffee do
Starbucks sell in Dubai, for example, every single day? You could take a top down
approach where you look at Starbucks global revenue. How much of that is
made up by coffee, how much of that by region, how much of that by city,
et cetera, et cetera? Or you could take the bottom
up approach that says, a typical Starbucks in a busy city has busy times at morning,
lunchtime and after work. When they're busy, they'll
sell this much coffee. When they are not so busy, they'll sell this much coffee. A typical city will have
this many Starbucks, and then you work your
way up from the bottom. And then you do both of those, and you work out in the middle. The third option
for you to choose from is holiday plans for 2025. We're a group of
friends, and we're all going to go on
holiday this year. Where should we go? How should you structure your thinking
about the different options? Think of it like a flow
chart of decision making. Think of the type of holiday. Is it a relaxing break or an adventure break?
Think of the budgets. Are we trying to save money? Or is this a celebratory vacation because
we've earned it? What activities are we going to be trying to
do on this vacation? Is it lying on a beach and
sipping mocktails or are we hiking somewhere
or are we playing some sports or are we doing something a bit
more adventurous? What travel preferences
will people have? Are we taking flights or is this a train
backpacking journey? Think about the
different options and please do apply the
frameworks that you've learned, particularly the
Missi framework. Something can't be vegetarian and non vegetarian
at the same time. If that's the dietary requirement angle you're
going to go down. Think about something
with clear structure. Apply the MC framework, mutually exclusive,
collectively exhaustive. You should be thinking about
all options and then quickly ruling out the ones
you're not interested in and focusing on the
ones that you are. I would love to
hear your thoughts, please send me your driver tree, and I would love to
hear your thoughts on how you're going to be using these principles in your work life and in
your personal life. These are really
profound and powerful. This is why I like
this chapter so much. It's such an important skill
that I use every single day. In my personal life
and in my work life, I use driver trees
and these principles to make clear frameworks
and clear decisions. I would love to
hear your thoughts and reflections on what you're currently
doing what types of principles are
you already using? You're probably already
using the Peeta principle, 80 20, because you're probably prioritizing things anyway. But has it changed your
thinking in any way? What are you going
to do differently? Please send me your thoughts. I would love to
see your thoughts and also your drive a tree, and I'm happy to give you
some feedback on that. So top five takeaways
from this chapter. Number one, big
big scary problems should be broken down
into smaller ones, particularly when those problems are a little bit more abstract. Keep asking why, why, why, why until you get
to the real issue until you've found
out what question you really need to be answering. Number three, structure is key. The more complex your problem, the clearer the
structure needs to be. Number four, lead
with your conclusion when you're sharing your
findings, the pyramid principle. I know it will be easy to talk about this is what I did and
this is what I achieved. Leading with your conclusion
is profoundly powerful. Number five, 20% of the effort usually leads
to 80% of the outcome. Thanks and best of luck, guys.
15. 10. Key Takeaways from the 2025 BCSEL Course: So there you have it,
guys, business and consulting skills for
emerging leaders, the 2025 update and the digital version of the
physical course that I run. I just want to say
thank you very much to everyone for joining. I really hope that you
have enjoyed this course. I hope that you have found the range of topics interesting. I hope you're going to
take away something valuable from this and
make meaningful changes. Please believe in yourselves. The fact that you are
even here on this course. And you're looking to learn and grow says something about
who you are as a person, that you want to grow,
you have humility, you have a desire and a
thirst for knowledge. Well done, well done, well done, and I wish you every
success in the future. Thank you very much
for supporting this, and I really hope we get
a chance to connect. Please connect with
me on LinkedIn. Please send me an email. I would love to
hear your feedback. But let's go through the key
takeaways one more time. The elevator pitch, a great introduction
makes you memorable. Storytelling is a great
way to be memorable. Your non verbal choices are equally as important
as what you do say. Attention spans are short, you have 30 seconds Max. Being genuine, relatable, and fun are great ways
to be remembered. Remember the chapter
on networking. Practice builds
confidence and slickness. There's many ways and motivations for you to
do your networking. Have a think about
what yours is. Being genuine and
generous is key. Networking is made up
of listening as well as speaking and it involves being patient and
connecting the dots. Remember the chapter
on communication. Good communication requires
a holistic approach. Being concise generally
is a great idea. Staying calm when
under pressure is key. Understanding your audience and tailoring your message
to them is critical. We should be listening
first and then speaking. Chapter four, engaging
presentations. Knowing your audience
and the message is the first step to creating
that killer presentation. Less is often more. Techniques such as contrast
and animations help you to control and manipulate your
audience. Slide logic. You remember vertical logic
and horizontal logic is important in creating any easy to understand presentation, and it's best to have only
one main message per slide. The key principles
of leadership. Leadership is about setting the direction and then taking
your team on a journey. The best leaders
are people focus, and they're honest,
communicative, and are open and own
their own mistakes. Leadership is a never ending journey of
development and learning, and the best leaders
learn to think laterally and see what
everybody else does. Financial analysis.
Financial analysis is used to evaluate company's historical and future financial
performance. The income statement shows
the profit and loss. The balance sheet provides an overview of the
assets and liabilities. The cash flow statement shows how much CAST was generated and used in that period of time. Financial statements are used to assess the attractiveness
of a company, their performance, and their
projects and initiatives. Chapter seven, the
introduction to economics. Economics is a science. It studies how society uses its resources to produce goods and services,
the economic outputs. Macroeconomics looks
at the big picture, the overall economy,
microeconomics studies individual
entities and markets. GDP growth domestic
product is a measure of total value of
goods and services produced by an
economy over a year. Countries have different
economic compositions and it's okay for those
to change over time. Developing countries tend to
have a GDP that grows faster than developing countries.
Data visualization. Good data visualization
is informative, trustworthy, accessible,
and elegant. Data needs to be manipulated before it can
become information, and that visualizing data
step takes four steps. Reasoning and
statistical analysis are going to help you
to understand that data and you need to think
very carefully about how you display your data
and what chart you use. Finally, Chapter
nine, big problems should be broken down
into small problems. Keep asking why, why, why until you get
to the real issue. Structure is key to answering these
complicated questions. Lead with your conclusion,
the pyramid principle, lead with your conclusion when you're sharing
your findings, the Peeta principle, 20% of the effort usually leads
to 80% of the outcome. So once again,
guys, thank you so much for joining me on
this learning journey. Your feedback is
extremely valuable to me, and thank you very much
again for supporting, and I hope you
found this useful. Take care and please
stay in touch.
Dr Kamran Mirza, Strategy Consultant | Medical Doctor
