Dr Lakshmi Ramachandran, PhD Leadership Communication and influenceI was in the audience when it happened. Your Opening Is a Doorway to Trust P.O.W.E.R UP · Brilliance to Influence · Edition 26 I was in the audience when it happened. The introduction had been generous. Credentials, publications, years of experience. The kind of build-up that makes a room sit forward and pay attention. By the time the speaker walked to the podium, the room was ready. Then the papers came out,

Lakshmi Ramachandran, PhD, Brilliance to Influence, Edition 25 The Presentation That Took Two Weeks to Build and Why It Failed Priya had spent two weeks preparing. Her deck was forty slides of thorough, well-designed work. Every data point verified, every scenario modelled. She walked into the partner meeting feeling ready. But she walked out without their buy-in. "They said it was thorough," she told me. "And then they said they would revisit." I asked her one question. "Wha

P.O.W.E.R UP Newsletter Edition 24 They met at a professional event and clicked immediately. Their first conversation happened at a conference lunch that was supposed to last fifteen minutes. "You're in strategy consulting?" Maya set her plate down without waiting for an invitation to sit. "Tell me one thing you actually believe that your clients never want to hear." Daniel looked up. He was not used to being asked that on a first meeting. He answered anyway. Forty minutes la

5 min Read Lakshmi Ramachandran, PhD, Leadership communication and influence He was the most impressive person in the room before he opened his first slide. Confident, sharp, full of insight from years of building ventures and leading teams. You would have backed him to hold any room. Then he stepped on stage. The slides appeared. Dense text with errors visible on every slide which was nothing but a wall of information competing for space with the person delivering it. And t