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Education & Training

Buday TLP Courses for Mastering Key Thought Leadership Skills

In the previous decade, Bob Buday taught on-site training classes on thought leadership content development for an association that is no longer around (the Association of Management Consulting Firms, or AMCF). Ever since, organizations have been asking whether his firm will be teaching those classes again.

The answer is yes, and online. Since 2021 we have taught a live, online course (Developing Compelling Narratives) 17 times to two companies. To date, more than 250 thought leadership professionals — researchers, writers, and marketers — have taken this class and earned certificates. Many have raved about the class on LinkedIn (such as this person and that person in 2025, and this other person in 2023).

Since then, we have added three other courses:

  • Crafting Powerful Prose
  • Illuminating Your Narratives Through Data Visualization
  • Creating Persuasive Client Stories

We deliver the courses live and online, through video conferencing platforms like Zoom and Microsoft Teams.

Developing Compelling Narratives: Creating Powerful Arguments On Complex Topics

 We designed this course to help thought leadership professionals (researchers, writers and editors) and aspiring and current thought leaders develop compelling points of view that they can convey in multiple ways. These include research reports, white papers, op-ed article submissions, conference and webinar presentations, and internal presentations.

Over the course of four two-hour sessions, Buday TLP instructors will help class participants learn how to develop compelling narratives. Participants will learn a proven approach to developing compelling narratives in their work.

At the beginning of the first session, we provide a brief overview of two key success factors to conveying powerful narratives in thought leadership:

  • Understanding the criteria that makes for compelling narratives on better ways to solve complex business problems.
  • Structuring a narrative in a clear, rigorous, and predictable way. At the core of such compelling narratives is the problem/solution outline.

In all four sessions, our instructors engage course participants in exercises in which they write their own narratives on topics of their choosing. In each session, participants will learn how to construct a piece of the structured problem/solution outline through team exercises, as well as through group and one-on-one feedback. Click here for a detailed syllabus. 

Illuminating Your Narratives Through Data Visualization

“Illuminating Your Narratives with Data Visualization” is a course for researchers, graphic designers, writers and editors, and marketing professionals who want to elevate the way their companies present complex thought leadership content.

The course is especially useful for thought leadership professionals who have been through Buday TLP’s “Generating Compelling Narratives” course. In that course, class participants learned how to take research findings and communicate them incisively using Buday TLP’s Problem/Solution outline framework.

In “Illuminating Your Narratives with Data Visualization,” data visualization expert Bill Shander will help class participants take their learnings one step further. Over four virtual sessions, he will teach them how to visualize concepts and data in memorable ways – ones that make a narrative easy and enjoyable to comprehend.

Bill will teach the class in four 2-hour online sessions, held over a two-week period to keep the learnings fresh from session to session. You can find a detailed syllabus here. 

 

Creating Persuasive Client Stories

“Creating Persuasive Client Stories” is a live, virtual course that helps professional services and other B2B firms clearly capture their value to clients.  

The class is designed to help writers assigned by heads of thought leadership, marketing and sales to capture high-impact customer stories. The course uses lecture and role-playing exercises to teach writers how to overcome the steep challenges in collecting, analyzing, and writing these stories – and gaining client approval. It includes four sessions held over two weeks. 

The course explains why a B2B company must make the client the hero of the story, how to showcase a firm’s unique problem-solving expertise, how to get the client to quantify the impact of the work, and how to structure the narrative so that the story unfolds in a way that keeps the reader’s interest throughout. You can find the detailed course syllabus here.

Crafting Powerful Prose: How to Write Persuasive Thought Leadership Content

The goal of every writer of thought leadership content should be clear and engaging prose. Professional writers know that. They spend their entire careers at newspapers, magazines, online publications or book publishers mastering their craft.

But what about people but who aren’t paid to write for a living but nonetheless must produce cogent prose in thought leadership work – researchers, marketers, experts (e.g., consultants, lawyers, accountants), salespeople and others? How do these professionals become serviceable writers who, while perhaps not as eloquent as writers at the Economist, Fortune or Harvard Business Review, must write well enough for their ideas to have influence – externally and internally?

At the very least, how can these professionals improve their writing enough so that skilled editors do not have to completely rewrite or edit the content heavily, time and again?

This live, virtual class will give non-professional writers the skills, tips and tricks of some of the best veteran thought leadership writers – people who have written for top-tier business publications and love to teach what they’ve learned.

Our instructors can teach the class to as many as 14 people at a time, and through online videoconference platforms such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams.

Reach out to Bob Buday (bob@budaytlp.com) for information on these courses.