Seminar 10 Review

This seminar mainly covered the topic of Business plans and also a bit on storytelling. Another important thing which happened this seminar was the professor distributing, to those who paid, the printed copies of the original version of the wiki. He said the exam was open book and so we could take this into the exam hall.

Prof Lee Gilbert first told us about small businesses and how they are defined. We also learnt about something called a limited liability partnership(LLP). Wikipedia defines it as follows...

A limited liability partnership (LLP) has elements of partnerships and corporations. In an LLP, all partners have a form of limited liability, similar to that of the shareholders of a corporation. However, the partners have the right to manage the business directly, and (in many areas) a different level of tax liability than in a corporation.

We then started to learn about small industries. Some interesting things we learnt were that 50% of them fail in the first yr, and in 5 yrs 50 - 80% fail..... nice encouragement for budding entrepreneurs among us huh?? Then we started to look at the reason y the industries might fail, and these were anything from too less money to bad management and even too much money. Here and at other points during the seminar, Prof Lee Gilbert told us about many examples from his past experiences with these matters and kept the seminar interesting. Next we discussed what companies do to avoid failure and the first step was to write a good business plan. This way we moved on to the next topic... Business plans

So what is a business plan? Wikipedia defines it in this way...

A business plan is a formal statement of a set of business goals, the reasons why they are believed attainable, and the plan for reaching those goals.

In other words it is a documents used by people with business ideas to convince people with lots of money to lend them some. It has various clearly defined parts. First comes the executive summary, the most important part of the plan, by far. Prof Lee Gilbert says(and i have heard this from many other people as well) that more often than not this is the only part read by venture capitalists(the people with lots of money) for them to decide which venture to fund. Only if they are impressed by this section will they even look at the rest of it.

The other parts basically list out who you are, what you propose to do, what your strategy to get this done, what you need to get this done and who are the people going to get this done. Lastly come the Financial statement and the appendices.

At this point he distributed the copies of the wiki, and began the mini lecture on story telling. At first i was wondering what on earth might story telling have to do with business. Then i realised that what he was talking about was the need to grab the attention of your audience. This is a common need between both the fields, of story tellers and business men. Here is harvard business review's say on the matter....

"Persuasion is at the centrepiece of business activity. Forget about PowerPoint and statistics. To involve people at the deepest level, you need stories."

A site, Dutopia, uses this statement to illustrate how important story telling is to succeed in todays business world....

"Google 'storytelling', and you get 18 million hits. By comparison, 'shareholder value' gets you 6 million. Storytelling is hot. Understandably so, since a good story can differentiate you from your competitors."

This part was all about how to make a good story. The lecture started off with the basic structure of any story and then we started to talk about the various steps one might take(consciously or unconsciously) when one is writing a story, i.e. Pre-Writing (thinking about the subject, basic plot, etc) then Drafting(writing the story out once roughly and letting others read it and give you their thoughts) and finally Revising(using the input of the readers to improve upon the story and finalizing it.).

Then we toughed upon the subject of grammar, and how important it is to make no mistakes of grammar or other wise which may add to the noise of the story and ruin the readers experience. The professor also said that it is usually advised to use active voice and avoid passive.

This marked an end to todays seminar.