Education & Training
We not only help our clients determine how to compete with superior expertise (i.e., devise a sound thought leadership strategy), create exceptional content, and take it to market, we also help them develop exceptional thought leadership capabilities inside their organizations.
We do this in two ways:
Our Annual ‘Profiting from Thought Leadership’ Conference
We co-host the leading conference on thought leadership, “Profiting from Thought Leadership.” Now in its 6th year, this event has been the brainchild of Bob Buday and Jason Mlicki of Rattleback since 2016. The conference features top thought leadership practitioners – senior marketing, research, editorial, events, and other professionals — who explain the remarkable things that they and their organizations do. Thought leadership experts from McKinsey, Bain & Company, Innosight, Cognizant, Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, Gartner and other organizations have presented at PTL.
Check out the agenda and the highlights from our Nov. 2-4, 2022 “Profiting from Thought Leadership” event here.
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. Over the last year, we have been teaching a live, online course that we call Developing Compelling Narratives. In the fall of 2022, we are adding a second course, Crafting Powerful Prose. 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.
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.