BUS 542 Week 7 & 8 Reading Assignment 4

Chapter 20

Writing as a team

Writing often involves taking chaos of all information and turning the chaos and summarizing into something that makes sense and makes everyone happy.

Things to keep your writing team motivated:

1. Break large projects into manageable sections.
2. Promote group thinking.
3. Risk assessment
4. Set deadlines and alternatives
5. Follow through with team's agreement, don't drop the ball and run.
6. Be flexible, it may take some writers 6 hours to do what you want and others 10.
7. Let them know when they do something that you like, so they know for future projects what works.
8. Let your writers, who know the subject or product well, help you figure things out, their hours and hours of research should be put to good use.
9. Good writers should also be good researchers, ask them to explore some ideas, data analysis or strategies.
10. Let the team work how they work best. Build a diversified team.

Five ways to improve your team's writing skills:

1. Place a value on writing
2. Don't try to fix bad writers
3. Attend your own writing workshops
4. Offer ongoing coaching and training
5. Celebrate success

Chapter 21

Presenting as a team

Teamwork and also team involvement is necessary when presenting as a team. Nothing much different compare to individual presentation except for some few guidelines below:

1. Practise as a team - prepare your material and go through a preliminary presentation together.
2. Introduce yourself and team members
3. Prepare an introduction slide of agenda and presenters' name.
4. Plan clear transitions between speaker segments and supporting data - prepare appendix
5. Double check visual aids capability by performing inspection and also be early to prepare
6. All team members should be available for the Q & A session
7. List down all the notes, additional data and queries.

BUS 542 Week 5 & 6 Reading Assignment 1

Chapter 16

Practising Your Delivery.

5 quick tips of effective presentation :

1. Know the goal
2. Think about the sequence of the main points
3. Jot down one or two key words
4. Be concise
5. Relate supporting facts or data to make and sell your point.

5 Speech presentation Do's:

1. Use physical activity to get the audience's attention - voice, posture and gestures.
2. Present with facts and statistic. - create suspense feeling and also anticipation from audiences.
3. Relate the topic with a simple joke - create a good laughter and warm feeling.
4. Control and in depth understanding of the topic - to gain confidence from audiences on you.
5. Relate a relevant story - Story-telling can be a comfortable and natural way to generate momentum for the rest of the speech.

Chapter 18

Handling Speech Anxiety

Speech anxiety is related to emotional and physical stress. It is a normal feeling for human being.
Below is some of the common symptoms of anxiety:

• "Racing" heart
• Feeling weak, faint, or dizzy
• Tingling or numbness in the hands and fingers
• Sense of terror, of impending doom or death
• Feeling sweaty or having chills
• Chest pains
• Breathing difficulties
• Feeling a loss of control

How To Manage Anxiety:

1. Prepare ahead.
2. Accept the fact that anxiety do exists.
3. Practice breathing and relaxing.
4. Use Visual Aids – PowerPoint, Posters, Objects, Videos
5. Know your topic, audiences, yourself and speech
6. Stay focus on the main point and message
7. Dress to success and gain confident
8. Act as if you are not afraid.

BUS 542 Week 3 & 4 Reading Assignment 2

Chapter 11

Defining Your Purpose

Knowing the Purpose or objective of a certain task, project or deliverable matters alot for the organization.

One of the great example of a essential tools for Project/ Task Planner is the 5-minute Project Planner by 7-Habits for Managers (Franklin Covey) that will help the project team to have a clear "end in mind".

One need to first define the purpose of the project. Think the business reason or supporting factor for doing the project/ task.

One need to define the desired results of the project. You will be creating the key measurement to the success of the project.

One need to also study the priority and the importance of the project to the organization.
Chapter 12

Analyzing Your Audience

To extend the 5-Minute Project Planner tool mentioned in Chapter 11:

One also need to define the key stakeholders/ target audiences. Whether customers, internal or external.

One need to know what is your audience needs and their end in mind. We need to make sure their end in mind or their interest sync up with our primary purpose/ objective.

To add on, we can use the 5-Minute Presentation Planner by 7- Habits for Managers by defining the following questions as a prep for presentation:

• What is teh audience and what are their needs?
• What is the goal of the presentation?
• What are the main supporting points?
• What do I want the audience to do as a result of the presentation?
• How many people?
• What material or equipment available?

BUS 542 Week 1 & 2 Reading Assignment 1

Chapter 1

Strategic Business Communication.

Effective Communication is one of the important factor or key to success for all kind of businesses and work places.

Benefits of effective communications:

• save time
• establish job satisfaction
• prevent confusion & conflict
• organized knowledge library
• understand others and yourself
• raise morale and motivation
• trustworthy
• close-loop feedback communication
• success in business deal

Communication to prevent conflict.

Closed loop feedback Communication

Methods of communications:

1. face-to-face (meeting/ forum),
2. office memo,
3. telephone & cellphone,
4. text messaging,
5. voice messaging,
6. fax,
7. e-mail,
8. brochures,
9. articles,
10. newsletters.

In today's world, a successful company will pay much attention in ensuring the communication systems are up to date and effective. Therefore, data communication is one of the key communication strategy. This include storing the data, extracting the data, sharing the data information & intepreting the data in supply chain linkage that will allow each individual from internal employees to top executive and customers to easily make the informations available precisely.

Chapter 8

Business Letters.

Writing business letters - email, memos or meeting minutes require patience and clear mindset to ensure clarity of the formal communication.

Factors to the quality of writing and editing business letter processes:

• Content - understand your objective and the message convey; main point first sentence
• Organization - know your audiences; straighforward and simple statements; summarize
• Tone & phrasing - positive thoughts; avoid negative statement; emotional banking; grammar error; use word check.
• Correctly spelled names & titles - demographic studies; understanding culture;web check
• Style - simple; bullet form; easier reading; right font & color impact