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