Half-Course: Persuading Business Audiences

Course Number 1515

Lecturer Bill Ellet
Early Fall, 14 session half course
1.5 credits
Paper

Career Focus

HBS educates leaders, and many contemporary approaches to leadership give a central role to influence or persuasion. Persuasion, written or spoken, is therefore a foundation of effective leadership.

The course introduces concepts and tools of persuasion that help you identify the available means of persuasion in business situations. However, knowing concepts and tools is not enough. You also have to be able to use them. Persuading Business Audiences provides a series of exercises in which you practice persuasion skills and receive feedback.

Learning Objectives

HC: Persuading Business Audiences has three primary objectives:

• Learning to use tools that help you develop effective written and oral persuasion

• Improving the quality of your writing

• Improving the design and preparation of oral communication

The course assumes that writing and speaking are complementary forms of persuasion drawing on the same fundamental skills: clear thinking, knowledge of the audience, compelling reasoning, and clear, correct, and efficient expression.

HC: Persuading Business Audiences uses real world material and short cases as the basis for analysis and writing. We will spend some class time discussing the materials in terms of how to persuade key audiences. You will have short writing assignments due each week and receive feedback either from the instructor or a writing consultant. You will find that the assignments draw on the analytical skills and knowledge gained from other HBS courses.

The course spends a limited amount of time on presentations. The emphasis is on planning persuasive presentations, not delivery of them.

Course Content and Organization

HC:Persuading Business Audiences is a 14-session class. There is no final examination; grading is based on the quality of your assignments and class participation and on-time submission of work. The instructor, Bill Ellet, has 17 years experience helping HBS students improve their writing, including in the summer PreMBA program, and is the author of The Case Study Handbook published by HBS Press. He has had extensive experience in real world business writing. Blair Slaughter, a consultant with years of experience coaching executives, is the instructor for the presentation portion of the course.

The syllabus includes articles, chapters from books, short cases, and texts or videos of real world communication. However, the 2009 syllabus has fewer readings than the 2008 version. In addition, this year's course has been scheduled to avoid overlap with due dates for papers and projects in other classes.