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:

Designing Thought Leadership Research
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.

Designing Thought Leadership Research

A live online course delivered over Zoom

Available Summer 2026

This course is for companies that make primary research a key part of their thought leadership activities. They believe (as we do) that the ability to repeatedly develop groundbreaking insights from their studies would give them a competitive advantage in getting recognized as leading experts in their markets.

As such, they believe that their skills in selecting and researching topics are core to gaining such an advantage.

Who should attend this class? Our “Designing Thought Leadership Research” course is for thought leadership professionals who manage, design and/or conduct studies to position their firms as top market experts.

Two versions of the course will be available starting summer 2026:

Public version: For 4 to 6 companies (with as many as three people per company).
Private version: For a single company, open to as many as 15 people.

We’ll conduct the course over four 4-hour Zoom sessions held over 3 to 4 consecutive weeks. Why? The course material and exercises are intense – too intense to be adequately absorbed in a 1- or 2-day offsite.

We believe participants will best learn the skills if a) they can take the classes from their desks during their work weeks (and, thus, not have to go off site), and b) they have time between the sessions to design their studies – whether those studies are in the planning stage or are being considered for the future.

For a detailed overview of the course, click here.

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.

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