Storytelling with Nancy Duarte: How to craft compelling presentations and tell a story that sticks

Nancy Duarte (00:00:00):
A lot of people think that the only time you really need to present well is when you have a big stage talk and you make the big investment in the script. The big investment in the contrasting story. I'll tell you a dirty little secret. I can get my husband to do chores for me on the weekends with a real quick, what is, what could be new bliss. So, the ability to just have that contrast as a framework in your brain during a meeting, on a phone call, any moment of influence, like literally it works. It works in any format.

Lenny (00:00:29):
Welcome to Lenny's Podcast where I interview world class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today my guest is Nancy Duarte. Nancy is the type of guest that I never imagined being able to get on this podcast, but I'm so happy that it happened. Nancy is a bestselling author, speaker, and CEO of Duarte Incorporated, which has helped create over 250,000 presentations for the world's most influential business leaders, brands and institutions including Apple, TED, Google, the World Bank, and famously Al Gore on his Inconvenient Truth presentation. In our conversation, Nancy shares a ton of tactical advice for how to improve your own presentations, how to tell better stories, how to lay out convincing arguments, how to reduce your nerves when you present, and even a simple communication framework to improve your relationship dynamics. I had such a good time chatting with Nancy and I'm sure you'll love this episode. With that, I bring you Nancy Duarte after a short word from our sponsors.

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Nancy Duarte (00:03:31):
Thank you for having me, Lenny.

Lenny (00:03:33):
How many presentations have you helped craft at this point, both directly and indirectly?

Nancy Duarte (00:03:38):
That's a great question. People know I'll like take a swag at data and pretend it's real. So, I had a president who took us a whack at that number in, it was 2014, and he said at that time it was 225,000, and that was almost 10 years ago, so I can't even tell you, I mean we stopped tracking, but it's a lot. I mean, in 35 years we have thousands of projects we open and each sometimes has two to a hundred presentations in it, so it'd be hard to tell.

Lenny (00:04:13):
200,000.

Nancy Duarte (00:04:15):
He said 250,000, but that was 10 years ago and I didn't do the math. So, when my team questioned it, I'm like, oh, Dan did the math. They're like, "Oh, then it's accurate." Because they thought I was just making up this number. I'm like, no, no, we actually went in and looked.

Lenny (00:04:31):
Okay. I was not expecting it to be that large. That's insane.

Nancy Duarte (00:04:34):
It's so funny because I have the whole history of the Silicon Valley in a way. It's like every little startup and then they grew to massive brands like Cisco and you could actually look at the rise and fall of all these companies. And then I actually have all the decks. I still have a lot of these archives, so I could actually verify that number exactly.

Lenny (00:04:52):
Okay, well this next question's going to be extra hard then. Of all the presentations you've worked on, which one stands out to you as the most memorable or most impactful?

Nancy Duarte (00:05:02):
I mean, it has to be Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth. It kind of hit the world in a season where nobody really knew or had an example of a really well done presentation. So, it came out before TED Talks were even out on the web, and so people had never seen someone tell a data story and stand in front of data and the scale in 90 foot screen, but we had worked with him for five years before an Inconvenient Truth. People think he went from vice president to this presenter and I didn't work with him. I let my team work with him. So, they were the ones jetting around jumping backstage at Oprah. They loved it. It was a real peak season.

(00:05:40):
But the thing actually that was most memorable is we work with these 20 some year old CEOs here in the Valley and they tend to show up and act like they know better than someone who's been doing this for so long. And what was so interesting about this large figure politician communicator is the team would sit in a room and say, "Hey, we think you need to do this way. We think you needed to convey it this way. We think it should be visualized this way." Or whatever it was we were proposing. And he would literally pause and touch his chin and really think, and really consider that we might actually be experts.

(00:06:18):
And more times than not he would adopt the way we said it should be done. And so I think as the customer who actually probably had some of the most power in the whole world to thoughtfully defer to us as experts was delightful customer and consulting experience. I mean, I remember when they called me to say it was going to become a movie and that it had gotten funded and I started to get the information. They wanted us to do a lot of work to get it movie ready. And I'll never forget, I said, "Wow, that's going to be a lot of work we'd have to do for free, and who's going to go see a movie about a slideshow anyway?" That's literally what I said. So, yeah, I just didn't believe it would become what it became. So, the whole process was amazing.

Lenny (00:07:05):
Did you expect the impact of what happened after that presentation or was it just like, oh, we got this one job we got to do, let's just get through it and then move on?

Nancy Duarte (00:07:14):
Well, we've been doing it for five years. I think the strategy, whether it was intentional or not, I don't know. So, he would go city to city to city, because he was traveling for five years seeding, like planting seeds for a groundswell, and he went into, he would go to the Stanford campus invite the Bay Area Elite, and it was always private and it was always VIP. And so he did a really good job for five years, traveling, traveling, traveling, traveling and really delivering that talk. And I think that created a desire. I don't know that it would've gotten that much traction. I don't know if people already didn't know about the presentation and hadn't already seen the presentation and they brought their friends to the movie, is how I kind of picture at least that part happening.

(00:07:59):
And he was generous, Lenny. I mean, at the end, when he traveled around for those five years at the end, he always had a slide with our name on it and would thank us if you're in the audience. I mean, super, and paid, mostly paid for what we did that we did give a lot of our own time. But yeah, super generous and yeah, movie became what it was. It was a bit of a surprise. It was good. The movie was good.

Lenny (00:08:24):
It was good. It also makes me think about a pattern that I often see of it wasn't just one presentation that changed everything. It was, you said five years of prep ahead of that, and you always see these wow overnight success stories and you always find, okay, it wasn't actually that.

Nancy Duarte (00:08:42):
Yeah, and he did a good job after, once it got traction, we built a whole training program where he could fly people out to his place in Tennessee and start to train people. So, it almost became a train the trainer and he could sanction you as a ambassador for it. So, it was just the way the whole thing kind of unfolded and scaled and then got traction was lovely.

Lenny (00:09:03):
Speaking of impressive clients, I only learned this recently, but Apple has been a client of yours since the day you were founded as an organization. Is that right?

Nancy Duarte (00:09:12):
Yeah, it was. Yeah.

Lenny (00:09:12):
Okay. How did you land that initially? And then also just what have you learned from that experience that's informed your approach to presentation, design, communication, and how you work with clients?

Nancy Duarte (00:09:22):
I love that question. So, yeah, I had a real job. I was working my real job and my husband had bought a Mac and he's like, "I think this is a business. I think it could be a real business." And he was an illustrator, wasn't a designer, but he had been a fine artist. And he's like, "Look, I can draw." Of course it's all pixelated and bit mappy. He goes, "Look, I could draw lines in here." And if I could show you his art studio, his work is just gorgeous. So, he's definitely a fine artist. And he's like, "I think this is a business. I think this could be a business." And I'm very pregnant. We were talking about that earlier. I am very pregnant with my son and I'm like, "Dude, you're going to go get yourself a real job. I don't want you playing around with this little Mac thing."

(00:10:02):
And he begged me twice in our marriage. He literally has gotten on his knees and to try to get me to see his perspective begged me. He's like, "Just read a Mac World magazine, just read it through once, and if you still don't think this could become a thing ..." Because I was working on a mainframe, I'm like, I work on a real computer. So, what happened was I made some phone calls. I called NASA and I called Tandem, which is now HP, and I called Apple and we won contracts at all three brands at the same time. And back then our company was called Duarte Desktop Publishing and Graphic Design.

Lenny (00:10:36):
Oh, wow.

Nancy Duarte (00:10:37):
I know, I know. And we slipped in. When you talk about a product lifecycle, very early, everything was still bit mappy, was not attractive. Most people as users didn't know how to typeset, didn't know how to do columns, didn't know how to make in this tool at all. And there's about an 18 month window in the life cycle of the Macintosh where graphic designers refused to use it, refused. It's a toy, it's ugly, it's bit mapped. Nobody would do it, a font like that. We use Linotype. It was very, the snobby kind of, we won't touch it. And that's right when we entered right then went and checked out books at the library on type setting, we tried to figure out what we could do, what could we do with this tool, and then the rest was kind of history. And so that's how it started and the timing and just kind of pushing the tool that nobody was that interested in that we're in the design community. It was small adoption.

Lenny (00:11:36):
So, that's interesting that it was cold emails basically are cold reach out just like, "Hey, we want to work with you." Yeah, that's an awesome [inaudible 00:11:42]-

Nancy Duarte (00:11:42):
Cold calling. Cold calling, yeah, it was.

Lenny (00:11:45):
What did you take away from that experience that kind of informed what works and doesn't work in presentations?

Nancy Duarte (00:11:51):
Presentations used to be 35 millimeter slides in an old carousel. In fact, that's what Al Gore had when he showed, he was like, here's my slide carousel from the seventies. It was just how it was done. But Apple was the first company to hook up the computer to a projector at scale. Now the projectors at these big venues like San Jose Convention Center, I mean it was huge and it was risky. So, because we were first in, they pushed us to start to do the presentations in this tool and it was black and white. Everything was black and white when we first started. And then we started to push and push and push from how we illustrated things in the tool, how we would colorize clip art. I mean, I'm talking like clip art packages just came out and they're like, "Hey, grab these, colorize them."

(00:12:32):
And so it was a really momentous moment to win them as an account. And I remember the tool had started to really take off and it was ugly. You can call it fugly, I don't know what you want to call it, but everyone who made slides did it so poorly, just so poorly. And we were kind of pushing the boundaries of it to make it look attractive. And there was a sales conference in 1992 in San Francisco and the leader of sales at the time was kind of a creative savant of sorts. And I remember he's like, "I don't know how you're going to do it, but I want you to take the whole slide." This is when slides were basically teleprompted covered in text. If you could stick a piece of clip art on it, you were lucky. And he said, "I want you to just make the whole slide, it's just covered with the word big in hot pink. And I want the background black, because when this slide pops up in all pink big, I want it to actually light the faces of the people in the audience."

(00:13:26):
And it was like I didn't know how to, we couldn't do that. We had to go into free hand, convert it to this, do these six steps, and then we came up with a small JPEG at the time or png or something and we scaled it up. So, it was still kind of pixelated. And I remember I was in that hall during the rehearsal and the production team gasped. Couple people squealed. They're like, "Who did this? I mean, it was just the word big in magenta pink." And I just remember thinking, this is how it's supposed to be done. Putting the tool in the hands of the masses kind of destroyed the medium itself.

(00:13:58):
And I feel like the first 10 or so years I was in business, it was reshaping this medium that ran amuck when it got into the hands of the users, it just went completely the opposite way that it was supposed to. So, it's weird to say that was a real defining moment for me to say, wait, we can do this different and we can return to how they used to be done when they were 35 millimeter slides. So, that's one story. And then I think we're very good at mapping to the brand requirements. So, we take this tool, whatever the tool, we have all our brands use different ones. They use Slides, Keynote, they use PowerPoint. We use whatever tool the brand wants and we push it in each medium. But we take their brand guidelines and really push it into the spoken word medium where when they stand up on a stage, it's cinematic. The visuals can become an experience in itself.

(00:14:57):
And I remember when Apple came up with the Think Different campaign. Steve Jobs was just back and my designer, everyone Photoshop was new. And everyone's doing these beveled backgrounds with tons of crap on the background. And I walked by, I'm like, "No, oh, we can't have a blue frame looking photo frame to for the Think Different campaign. This is not going to work." And so I remember looking at all the posters and remembering the Alfred Hitchcock ones. It had these particulates like these particulates, and it was just shadows.

(00:15:34):
And I found a stock video that Adobe had made at the time, and it was just particulates floating through the air at the angle and we stuck the six color apple on top of it. That was so revolutionary back there to push the brand and get out of the way every, the whole world was making these hideous templates. So, there are these moments that pushed the company forward because of an idea that I knew would not be okay for the Apple brand, therefore it shouldn't be okay for any brand. And I think those are just a couple stories of how to really push the medium in a way that is more pleasing to the audience. The audience just likes it better when it's really clear what you're supposed to focus on. We love that brand. We love it.

Lenny (00:16:22):
Okay, so let's get a little tactical, because you're talking about some very specific things that you've found to be working. So, everyone listening to this podcast has probably heard many times it's really important to be great at presentations that there's so much power in storytelling and communication, all these things. And they probably read a bunch of books and blog posts and watch videos of how to give a great presentation. But myself, and I feel like most people sit down at a deck when they're about to present to an all hand, say a week later or are going to do a meeting. And I'm always just like, okay, what do I do? Okay, there's like a beginning, middle end, they should have some kind of problem. And it's always like, I don't know what I'm doing. So, if someone were to just be listening to this podcast and they're like, I'm going to write a post-it to myself of three bullet points of things that I should remember when I'm starting a deck, what are those three bullet points?

Nancy Duarte (00:17:11):
Your audience is the hero. That was in my TED talk from 2011. I would say it's infuse your talk with story. And I would say it is asking yourself, can they see what I'm saying? Those would be the three tips other than starting with empathy. I mean that that's, well, audience is the hero, is the empathy centric approach.

Lenny (00:17:33):
Let's dive into these then. And I was actually going to ask around empathy, and it feels like that comes up a lot in your recommendations to people's empathy is kind of the heart of your methodology of telling great stories, telling great presentations. So, let's spend a little time there. Why is that so important and what does that actually look like in practice?

Nancy Duarte (00:17:50):
Empathy is important to Duarte, everything we do is empathy first. And some of it comes from my own childhood story a little bit. I was raised by a clinically narcissistic mom and narcissist are missing the empathy gene. So, I feel like that void of not having it modeled for me is why I keep clawing at empathy as being important. And I think a lot of people listening might work for a boss that does not have empathy, that isn't other centric, that doesn't think before they talk and all of those things. And I was raised by someone like that. And so every single book and every single model that I ever make has empathy at the core because you have to have to think about who am I speaking with, especially in communication, who am I speaking with? And so when I went on my journey through storytelling, I figured out that I thought, okay, the presenter's the hero, for sure the presenter's the hero, they're the central figure. They're talking the most. They're well lit, they're up on a stage.

(00:18:48):
So, when I started to look at all the archetypes, that's where I landed. And then I was like, oh my god. When I got to really digging into the mentor, I realized it's really the mentor in myths and movies that's the presenter and who really holds the power in the room of a presentation is the audience, the audience gets to make a choice if they accept or reject your idea. So, the balance of power is with them and not you. So, it really is the role of the presenter to be the mentor. And in myths and movies, the mentor comes alongside the hero. In other words, the presenter should come alongside the audience and help them get unstuck or bring a magical tool. So, I think Obi Won Kenobi's a great example.

(00:19:32):
He did two things for Luke Skywalker. He gave him a light saber, which was for his outer journey, the physical journey he was doing, and then an inner tool, which was the resolve, which came to him through the force. So, when you're speaking to an audience, they're going to have an internal conflict that you have to give them something to soothe. And then you're asking them to therefore go and do this thing, take this action, do this call to action. That's asking them to physically do something or physically change in some way. So, they're not going to do that for you if you haven't empathetically thought about how hard what you're asking them is going to be for them to do. And so you have to change your mindset when you're starting to build your deck to think about who am I talking to? How am I going to help them get unstuck? And that's just a super foundational principle in everything we do.

Lenny (00:20:29):
What is an example of that in practice as we go through these? Because this is really great of that implemented the deck that we know about maybe?

Nancy Duarte (00:20:38):
Oh, that we know about. So, I could talk about our own internal ones. Most of what we do is under MSAs because they're fantastical brands. So, in my own company, before I do a presentation that's going to require goals or them reaching goals or we do an annual vision talk, we do a listening tour first. So, some of it's based in survey, some of it's based in interviews. And we feed that information up and then we compare it to what we're going to ask them to do. And we do some gap analysis. We literally, there's some actual questions you can ask yourself, which are somewhat classic design thinking kind of questions about where they're at. And then what we do is I create a real rough cut or the exec team creates a real rough cut and then we invite the next level of leaders in and we do a fake, I mean the slides are ugly, we don't spend time on the slides.

(00:21:31):
This is about the message and maybe a model or two or three that we're going to go through to feel like it may amplify or make the message more concrete. And then they get feedback and that's when it's hard. It's hard to go from rough cut, here's what we're going to say to making it absolutely resonate. And then we deliver it after all of that work has been done, then we share it to the company. So, we go through that knowing that's the hardest presentation I deliver all year. I used to travel and speak and be a public speaker, but it's my own internal ones I have to take more time with.

(00:22:05):
So, when I travel and speak, they're like, oh my God, I love your models. Oh my gosh, can I get a picture with you? But when I'm standing in front of my own team, they're like, I wonder what she's going to say, because she's about to either make my job harder or she's going to change my priorities. They come in more skeptical. And we definitely have nailed the annual kickoff meeting. Definitely have nailed that. And then we do quarterly updates to that annual kickoff meeting. And it's a cadence and people get enthused and we're kind of killing it right now.

Lenny (00:22:40):
Yeah, that's what it feels like from the outside. I'm just thinking about the pressure to create presentations within Duarte Design. If you think about your job as hard, creating a deck for your company, imagine that.

Nancy Duarte (00:22:52):
Presentations in front of presentation experts is like-

Lenny (00:22:55):
Oh my god.

Nancy Duarte (00:22:56):
And I get nervous. I get really nervous because I have one slide that's kind of flawed or I say um or I pace too much. You lose a third of your team each time. They're such experts. So, it's hard.

Lenny (00:23:10):
I want to walk through these three bullet points. So, the first is make the listener the hero of your story. And that comes from being empathetic and understanding their challenge. So, if you're trying to do that, what are signs that you're doing it well or not well? Is there the way the flow of the story start? Is it the here's the way it starts? Or what should people identify of I'm doing this well or I'm not doing this well?

Nancy Duarte (00:23:31):
If the audience is the hero, you would see visible signs that they get it. People would come before I did a really good talk and people were tweeting saying, "Hey, come to this talk. It's really good." So, you'd see a reaction. You know you've done it well if you're infusing your talk with story, which is the second bullet by utilizing story structures. So, when I say storytelling, I'm talking about an anecdote. When I say story structures, I'm talking about this format of a three act structure of storytelling that goes back tens of thousands of years, which is fused into the brain like FMRI machines now you can see them while a story's being told and the science is beautiful, if you're telling me a story and I'm listening, our brains are firing in the exact same order, in the exact same place. So, it has power to align our brains.

(00:24:26):
And so by implementing attributes of story like a beginning, a middle, and an end, and we have method for that. And in also incorporating the rise and fall story kind of builds tension and releases it. And that's why we love it so much is we escape through someone else's messy middle and conflict and problems like it's messy and then it resolves. You build the tension and resolve it. And that's what a really well structured presentation can do. It can pull on that rise and fall in a way that creates longing.

(00:24:58):
So, story creates longing. It helps people long for something they'd never wanted before because if the future is told in the shape of a story and they see this alternate future, so many people escape through sci-fi. They escape through movie making into these future worlds. And so picture that you could verbally paint a picture of this future state and then you could bring your whole audience to this future state in an amazing way using this cadence of rise and fall. That's how you can incorporate story into a presentation where you need to influence others, actually really can be beautiful when it's done well.

Lenny (00:25:38):
And so you gave a TEDx Talk on this exact topic. And so I want to go deeper here. And you kind of shared this very visual way of thinking about a great story where it kind of goes up and down and up and down these teeth almost. Can you actually talk about-

Nancy Duarte (00:25:51):
[inaudible 00:25:51] pumpkin teeth. Yeah, it does.

Lenny (00:25:54):
Can you share what that structure visually looks like? And we'll share a link in the show notes of what that actually looks like and then just why that is so impactful and important.

Nancy Duarte (00:26:02):
Yeah, I love that. So, I went on a three year journey through story and I knew that the greatest speeches overall time did have that rise and fall and rise and fall. But it wasn't one single story. It had a whole lot of other very important information, but it still did this rise and fall and risen fall. So, I am not a digital native. I took a quarter inch graph paper and I would listen to all kinds and map out, took the words. When I analyzed Steve Jobs's iPhone launch speech, I did it all by hand. I wrote every word I did quarter inch graph paper. I needed to know, I needed to see it the way I work, which was analog. And so at first it was zigzaggy and I realized, wait, you can't map something over time and have it be a zigzag.

(00:26:49):
There was too much data lost. So, to verbally describe it, you could picture a line at the bottom of your screen and that line going left to is what is. And you need to set up every talk by stating what is. And then it moves straight up and you move to what could be come back down to the bottom line again say what is, back up, what could be, what is, what could be, what is, what could be? And then at the last what could be you state the last horizontal line is what we call the new bliss. So, this motion of traversing between what is, what could be, what's is, what could be, what is, what could be, that sense of longing for the future, it makes people leave their current state or the status quo or our current reality and makes them long for this future state by using contrast.

(00:27:37):
So, that rise and fall of hey, here's our current problem, here's a solution, or here's the state of the union. But we imagine it could look like this. There's so many different ways to build that cadence of contrast that's so lovely. I mean it really works. I think the talk came out in 2011 and the amounts of notes and emails of things people have accomplished by changing the structure of their presentation has been really astounding.

Lenny (00:28:09):
The State of the Union is a really interesting example because I'm trying to imagine this and presentations I've seen and that totally resonates of just like, here's the problem we're having and here's where we're going to go. Here's another problem we're having. Here's what I'm going to change.

Nancy Duarte (00:28:20):
Steve Jobs was great at that. When he launched the iPhone speech, he always did, here's the state of the company, here's how we're doing. Oh my God, our stores are more full than 10 Mac world expos. He always did a setup of what was going on. And then he did a really rapid what is, what could be when he started to compare the iPhone to the Blackberry. It's like, look how much it sucks now that you've seen what we're doing. It's just what is, what could be, what is, what could be. And so I took all the classic speeches, historical speeches, everything, presidential speeches and knew that if I could find a pattern in Dr. King and Steve Jobs's iPhone launch speech that was the same, that had the same type of nature of cadence and pulsing to it, for lack of a better word, that I knew I had solved it using story. It was a really great moment to finally draw that out on my quarter inch graph paper.

Lenny (00:29:19):
I love that.

Nancy Duarte (00:29:19):
It was awesome.

Lenny (00:29:22):
I feel like there's just so much opportunity for primary research that still I feel like that's why my newsletter does well is I just spent the time doing that work that you're describing of watching a thousand interviews and then just distilling, here's a takeaway here.

Nancy Duarte (00:29:34):
Pattern finding, that's an interesting point. I worry sometimes with the emergence of new technologies and stuff, the ability to be able to sit and think, synthesize and all of that is because a human's going to come up with different insights and synthesis than any future machine can do. So, I think it's fascinating that you do that so well and it really shows that.

Lenny (00:29:34):
Wow, I appreciate that.

Nancy Duarte (00:29:59):
Yeah, you're really putting your mind and heart into it all.

Lenny (00:30:02):
Enough about me, I'm thinking about, but I appreciate it, I'm thinking about product managers and founders maybe listening to this and they're like, oh man, every time I do a deck, I need to create this whole story and this up and down thing. In your experience, when do you go that far to create? Is this when you have an epic important presentation, you think about a story structure like this, or is there always a way you should put this into your presentations of some kind of story with this contrast?

Nancy Duarte (00:30:31):
It's interesting question. I think a lot of people think that the only time you really need to present well is when you have a big stage talk and you make the big investment in the script, the big investment in the contrasting story. But I'll tell you a dirty little secret. I can get my husband to do chores for me on the weekends with a real quick, what is, what could be new bliss, kind of just that first bit, what is, what could be new bliss. It's like even the very, very short talk that Abraham Lincoln gave in the Gettysburg address, it was basically a funeral, it was a eulogy. And back then eulogies used to be two hours long. It was an Aristotelian structure and he only had a couple hundred words, so there's no pictures of him giving it because it was so short, so tight and done.

(00:31:16):
They were setting up the cameras, still thinking they had tons of time. So, the ability to just have that contrast as a framework in your brain during a meeting, on a phone call, any moment of influence, getting the husband to do some chores for me, literally it works. It works in any format. And I think the investment that you make in the longer form or when it's a huge audience, you add the visuals, you really hire the speaker coaches, you really make that moment. And there's these moments that breach above all other moments where you really have to nail it just in basic conversations, in a moment of influence. If you practice it enough, it'll live in your head as a mental model for when you're in a situation where there's influence in the air that you could do.

Lenny (00:32:07):
How do you actually do it with your husband if you could share for helping you do the dishes?

Nancy Duarte (00:32:11):
Well, I won't get graphic about what the new bliss might be, but early in our marriage we figured out that, not early, I actually spent almost in the only the last 10 years we've been married for 40. And we realized that when we tangle it's usually only about process. So, the gaps are if I ask or he asks me to do something or we start to kind of pick on each other, it's because the way I'm executing something is different than the way he chose to execute it. And so it'll be anything from like, "Why are you chopping onions like that?" He'll say to me. And now I'm like, oh, we have a process gap. "Do you want to chop the onions or do you want me to chop them my way?" So, for the what is, what could be new bliss, it happens all the time.

(00:32:59):
So, he needs a lot of context. He's a detail-oriented person and I've started to learn with him that my what is needs to be quite a bit longer than sometimes I have patience for as I start to frame, "Oh hey baby, I need you to take the dog over to the dog care." I don't start there. I start with, "Oh my gosh, tomorrow I've got back to back meetings, in fact, I'm going to be on Lenny's Podcast right about here. And that's when she's whiny. And what's going to happen is if that doesn't happen, I'm going to have to reschedule next week and next week it's just loaded up. And you know how it is when I'm stressed out at the end of the day and I'm kind of hard to deal with and I say, well, what could be, the doggy place, she was loved it last time she was spooning with a red cavalier king spaniel and loved it."

(00:33:46):
It's like that, I have to unpack it a little bit more for him. And then the new bliss could be any sort of marital promise you want it to be, but I just have to unpack the current state a little bit of the process, and then I state what could be. And it's funny because acts of service like that, like him taking the dog to the doggy daycare for me or is I feel loved. So, when someone does something generous with their time for me, it's how I feel loved. And so there's a whole lot there in shaping how you communicate with someone. Empathetically at my company, everyone knows each other's love language. They know that this person feels more appreciated when they get a written note. This person feels more appreciated when they get a gift and everyone knows that. So, that's just baked into our, I don't know, our marriage, our company, just how it rolls.

Lenny (00:34:43):
I imagine people listening to this podcast were not expecting marriage advice. And so I love that. I'm going to try.

Nancy Duarte (00:34:50):
You can scrap that if it doesn't work the process tip though is good.

Lenny (00:34:52):
This is going to be the best part. This is going to be the whole podcast is just the segment. Just joking. But this is really good advice. I'm going to try to use it myself. So, the structure, I think it's even easier to think about this less as story, infused story. For me it's more this, what is, what could be, what is the ideal bliss, that's almost the simpler way to think about it. The story is this like, oh my God, I got to think of a story.

Nancy Duarte (00:35:17):
It has a beginning, middle, and an end. So, the first, what is is the beginning. The middle is the messy middle. That's where you're trying to contrast and show them that it's messy. It might be hard, it's worth it. And then the new bliss, you end with what in western cultures, where's like a happy ending. So, the new bliss is just imagine a world with your idea adopted, and then you paint a picture of that world poetically or pragmatically, and it works. It definitely works.

Lenny (00:35:41):
Okay, this is really great. So, just to recap, point one is to make your listener the hero of the story and come at it with empathy. And I was actually thinking the Think Different campaign is an excellent example of that because it's about you thinking differently and being this incredible creative. And then item two is infuse your presentation with story and this what is, what could be new bliss. And then, okay, and number three, what was number three again?

Nancy Duarte (00:36:09):
Oh, it was ask yourself if they can see what you're saying. Can they see what I'm saying would be written on the note?

Lenny (00:36:16):
I love this. Okay, let's talk about that. What does that mean and how do you do that?

Nancy Duarte (00:36:20):
Yeah, so for people to see what you're saying, that you have an opportunity to use visual tools like the presentation software, you have opportunities to have live sketchers sketch it while you're talking. There's so many ways you can help people see what you're saying. I would contend that you can use something in your talk that gives people something they'll always remember. We call that a star moment. And it could be a piece of dramatic data where the big numbers put up there. It could be an evocative story, it could be a beautiful picture. And one of the things that happens really well, especially with tech companies, is demonstrating through a picture so you can get alignment. So, the concept of a diagram when you describe your product that you're working on, is this thing inside of it, outside of it attached to it, is it on it is above it, especially architecture slides or just how technology works as something flows through a complex system.

(00:37:20):
When people can see that and it accompanies your verbal narrative, they can actually understand what you're conveying and move on. If you only had a verbal narrative, it wouldn't work as well. There's a lot of times though, where you don't have the support of a presentation or slides. You could be at a dinner table. If you're in a interesting conversation and you want someone to see what you're saying, that's where you pull out the napkin and you draw it. So, you could both see it, in meetings sometimes someone will just walk right up to the board and draw something. And my team, especially my design team is so good at this because they'll just stand up and say, I want to draw for you what I see, because we're about to prepare them to present to an audience. When you verbally said that, I saw this, was that your intent?

(00:38:03):
And then the room will stand up and we'll start all co-creating a graphic so that everyone sees the exact same thing, the exact same steps, the exact same insights in the order. So, nobody leaves with a question in their mind. And that's just so important for there to be an alignment around what is this? What are we all fighting for? What are we all living for? What are we all working for? And those moments of alignment are so, so important. And I'm a leader who sees things in the air. I just see it. And to me, my pattern finding nature, which you're like that too. I could see these patterns and to me, I see a whole scene and I could see it all clearly, but when my team's trying to look at the same thing, they might see 22 mosaic tiles out of a massive mosaic beautiful picture.

(00:38:53):
I see the final beautiful picture, but I've only served up a little tiny mosaic tile in a few places. And so I even have to be better about really bringing it to earth and saying, oh, here's the seven steps to get to this amazing outcome. Sometimes we see things so plainly in our mind's eye, and I was working with a really famous, powerful CEO and as she was talking, it's like, yeah, I could see her. I was watching her hand motions too, and she was like in this thing and she's moving her arms around in a distinct way and I said, I can tell you you have a picture in your mind's eye.

(00:39:31):
Let me draw for what I, and I did the same thing, walked up, drew had this, had this, had this. And she's like, "Exactly." And we were brought in because nobody could articulate at all what she saw in her mind's eye. And so that was a massive program to be rolled out to the entire retail. It was like a hundred thousand retail workers needed to understand this graphic and the whole process she was trying to roll out wasn't getting traction. So, the minute people could see what she was saying, then it had all the breakthroughs that needed to happen around that program.

Lenny (00:40:04):
That reminds me of when I was working on the super host program at Airbnb. I don't know if the story will be of any interest to anyone, but I just remember I had this very clear handset of motions that described the strategy of the super host program. And then my friend's like, you should draw this on a slide-

Nancy Duarte (00:40:19):
You should draw it. Unless it's such a powerful hand gesture, right? Yeah, you could do that because your body is visual. And the other thing we try to get our customers to do is, if Dr. King had slides that day of the I Have a Dream speech, it just wouldn't been as beautiful. His words painted the pictures in our mind's eye. And so when we can have the slides off so people are focused on the verbal stream and what's coming out of your mouth that is such a powerful moment is to not have any visuals supporting you. So, they're a hundred percent focused on your body, how you're showing up and on the words coming out of your mouth and they're verbally seeing what you're saying versus actually pictorially seeing what you're saying. It's good.

Lenny (00:41:03):
I like the idea that people are not staring at me and I prefer them distracted with a slide and I want to talk about nerves and stuff presenting in a bit. But that's interesting. So, you were talking about very kind of some concrete tips for slides and something I've heard a lot is when you're sharing a deck internally or talking an internal meeting, it's really powerful to just have obviously just a quick image thing, but then also the title of the slide is the point you want them to get from that slide. Is that something you recommend? And then generally any just very tactical advice on how to make a slide effective?

Nancy Duarte (00:41:35):
Yeah, the concept that each slide should make one point. So, your whole presentation should be grounded in what we call the audience journey, which is the big idea where you're trying to move them from where you're trying to move them to. Then a big idea is what is your point of view and what's at stake if they do or do not adopt it? That's the organizing mechanism for your whole deck. And then each slide itself that supports that one big, big idea, each slide itself should make one point in support of that big idea. People can't process too many things at one time, so depending on where you work, some people want something that's not the key insight at the top of the slide, some people do. So, some might want the action to be taken or some might want the dreamy future state to be clear.

(00:42:22):
Some consulting firms where the slides are much denser because they were paid millions of dollars to make a big old deck. Some of them are like, "Oh, it always belongs in the lower right corner." So, it's kind of a little bit up to the brand and everyone believes it belongs somewhere else. If you're making what we call a slide doc, which I think your listenership would be interested in, presentations go from big staged event to in a meeting where you're trying to persuade your peers too. Can I make a presentation I can just circulate on email and everyone gets it? Well, that's called a slide doc. You put more words, you put stronger picture. You could have a hundred page appendix and maybe the front of it's only five slides, but everything they need to see your thinking, it follows behind it.

(00:43:08):
And you could circulate those and people read it. You write full sentences, you write full pros. It's kind of like the six page memo that's so popular to Amazon, but we contend that the F words and pictures, the six page memo is better. So, how do you send a memo around without the help of a presenter? And that's on one extreme. And those are called slide docs that you build in presentation software. And then the other extreme is I'm on a massive stage somewhere and there's all kinds of usage in between. And so I think the one idea per slide is important. And then this guiding principle, don't make a single slide unless it supports the one big idea of your whole talk. That's another principle for slide making, because most people go back to some sort of repository in some data store somewhere and they dig through old crappy slides and see if they can assemble something super quickly.

(00:44:01):
And that's a cop out. Most of the time if you really think empathetically about your audience, going to the repository might get you halfway there, but you should be modifying and mapping all of the content based on who you're talking to and especially if it's high stakes. And sometimes you're speaking to an audience that wants high density slides, because that's how they communicate in their culture. And if you showed up with cinematic stage ready slides, they'd laugh you out of the room. And so you really got to, I mean, you got to know your audience, you got to know how they communicate, who they talk to and map to that.

Lenny (00:44:39):
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Eppo does all that and more delivering results quickly, avoiding annoying prolonged analytics cycles and helping you easily get to the root cause of any issue you discover. Eppo lets you go beyond basically through metrics and instead use your north star metrics like activation, retention, subscription and payments. Eppo supports, test on the front end, on the backend, email marketing, even machine learning plans. Check out Eppo at geteppo.com, that's geteppo.com and 10 x your experiment velocity. What's your take on the Minto Pyramid principle? I don't know if you think about that. Yeah, because there's a recommendation of just start with the conclusion and then explain why. And you're saying sometimes that's effective, sometimes not. Maybe in [inaudible 00:46:00]-

Nancy Duarte (00:45:59):
Sometimes it's effective. So, the Minto principle is amazing. She's got the, was it horizontal and vertical thinking? So, your main segues or your main section head should add up and then all the slides should support it. And then also how the construct of it is and when you state the conclusion first, that's a great thing to do with execs. It's a great thing to do when you are fundraising. There's a certain type of an audience that works for, and there's other audiences where they really need to be taught to long for this future state and you need longer to unpack it. So, one of the reasons you would start with the conclusion is especially in a funding round, now my version of a conclusion or result or is different than how she describes it. Because I would say you start with the new bliss. So, if you're trying to raise funds, you would say, I am going to share with you something today and you share how your solution increases human flourishing.

(00:47:02):
It needs to be tied to the humanness and the big problem you're going to solve and how humankind will benefit. Well, that's different than just a consultant would show up and say, hi, I have this 800 page deck and the results of it are this. Let's unpack it. It's just a completely different motion and we use a three act story structure that's quite a bit different too. But that work is solid and it was based kind of like my work, her work was based in going super deep in McKinsey's thinking over time, whereas my work is going laterally across the 35 highest performing brands in the world that have been our customers. So, I went laterally across all those brands and then come up with solutions that are based, foreign story and are based in a bit of a broader application across companies that I have tons of respect for that body of work.

Lenny (00:47:57):
Awesome. And willing to, I wrote a post about this whole concept for folks that want to dig deeper. Maybe one more question around tactical slide stuff, and I know this is, people ask you about this stuff all the time, but I can't help it. I guess just any other tips for just like you're sitting there trying to create a couple slides. What else maybe people should keep in mind to make it effective and let's say this is for a small meeting kind of thing.

Nancy Duarte (00:48:18):
Yeah, that's a good question. I think that if do some thinking first, if it's important, if it's an important point of the meeting, my team is taught to just kind of sketch, change your environment up a little bit. A lot of people will fire up the deck, which is very linear. It's like make one slide, second slide, third slide. So, just think and plan for a minute. And we tend to draw up storyboards. It's like, okay, the first point, the second point, the third point or the just think first. It can be analog or digital. Put a page in front of all your decks. It's just boxes. Just get the narrative right. And then when you actually open up the software, that's where you have to think about, what's the slide type that will convey this the most? Is it a table? Put a table. Especially for program managers, you have to convey dense project information, program information, product information, and that comes with density.

(00:49:12):
So, if you're in a room with your peers and everyone in the room is a team and everyone has their own shorthanded and way of working, put that common slide up there. That common slide for that team might be dense to the outside world, but everyone's used to using it so there's no harm in using a commonly known, commonly acceptable framework or slide or table or Excel spreadsheet because you're aligning around a process. And so don't feel like every needs like cinematic pictures of kittens because that's not going to get you anywhere. You're trying to move an objective along, and that does mean that your slides might be more dense and sometimes internal slides have a lot more important information that needs to be on it to kick a product along or kick a process along.

Lenny (00:50:00):
You were just talking about process and that is a great segue to a question I wanted to ask is just what does your process look like when you're working with a company to help them craft an awesome presentation?

Nancy Duarte (00:50:10):
Yeah. Yeah. It's funny because I don't have to do this much anymore. I haven't done it for about 15 years, which is nice. I have a gorgeous team of strategist, writers, conceptual thinkers, beautiful design.

Lenny (00:50:22):
I was curious.

Nancy Duarte (00:50:24):
Coaches. Yeah, I know. I get coached. It's fun. I definitely, my books look awesome, not because of me, but because I'm followed around by people that do really gorgeous work. But the phrase that we use internally and sometimes with customers is we make presentations the way Pixar makes movies. And that's very similar to the way we get somebody that has this high stakes moment where it's a big deal in this moment. You have to win in the moment to push things along. And so we do, we literally craft a narrative, craft the big idea, craft the script and visualize certain moments. We start to map it out, we start to chunk it out.

(00:51:05):
And then big models sometimes when you're really making a revolutionary model, one that could drive all the web assets, a lot of that stuff people don't realize actually happens in the presentation first as an idea. So, sometimes we'll start working on some of the key models right away too, and we start to circulate that around the company, because everyone has to build consensus around it. So, sometimes there's multiple motions happening at the same time. Let's sketch this. You go away, you work with this department, you try to get this settled, you get that set, you get this.

(00:51:36):
And then it gets reassembled at the end. And then the narrative is where you work all the kinks out and then when they stand and deliver, it's like, yes, it's the voice track that all the process supported. And then other times we're building a report in a slide doc, or there was a time where we had a head of a multinational company that will remain nameless and the guy that was head of all of India was going to come over here and petition the CEO for a hundred million dollar budget.

(00:52:09):
It's not trivial. And he comes, is like, "Okay, I need your help with these five slides." And he just sends us the five slides and we're like, "Well yeah, a hundred million. That's kind of a lot. You really want to put technology between you and the CEO. Do you really want to sit side by side and both be looking at a computer in this moment where it's like you're petitioning him for, that's a lot of money." And he's like, "Yeah, you're right." So, what we did is we made a mental model he could hold up in his head and the structure was so simple and clear. And then there was three moments where we're like just, I don't know, just grab a piece of paper or go to a whiteboard and just start to draw in front of him. Let him see your eyes, let him have eye contact.

(00:52:46):
Let him see your passion. Don't be dispassionately looking at this computer. And he did it and he called us and he's like, "I got a hundred million bucks." So, it's just those moments where you have to realize, wait, wait, wait, wait. Do I need a deck? Who am I talking to? And should is this a cookie cutter thing? And does the same process work every time? No. So, every time we solve something it's very different and we try to make it unique to the presenter and the audience that they're speaking to.

Lenny (00:53:18):
Along the same lines, a lot of presentations now are actually remote and on Zoom and virtual. What do you recommend to people in terms of how they present and put presentations together being remote?

Nancy Duarte (00:53:28):
Yeah, it's funny, we spent a lot of time coaching people to look in the camera. So, while I've been talking to you, I'm not actually looking at your face. I'm looking at the little dot at the top of my screen and my camera. And not a lot of people can do that. So, it's gotten to where I can see that little white glowing dot and my heart warms, I know you're there, I feel you. I can get sensations in my skin when I know I'm talking to someone that I adore or admire. And that took a long time to get there. And I was presenting remotely pre COVID. So, a lot of our coaching was about eye contact and doing that. The other thing that happens is people don't see our hands anymore. They're under the table. They can't see how much space in a room we're taking up.

(00:54:15):
They can't see a lot of the characteristics that are common in communicating. And so there's a lot of coaching around presence and how do you have presence in a room? How do you even get the microphone away from someone that's remote and all those kinds of things. And a new study just came out, I just came across my desk today and it said that soft skills really suffered. And the people who did it right say and looked at the camera, they don't have good eye contact skills anymore. When they are looking face-to-face in someone's eyes, it's like, oh, they're not used to it. It's been so long.

(00:54:50):
And then the other thing is, where do I sit in a room who's got the position of authority? Just kind of some classic things that convey information in real life. So, it's interesting, it peaked and now people are going back to the office some. A percent are back in the office. And now we have this weird place where it's, oh, it's half in the office and half people are remote. And the people that are remote are having a hard time getting their voices heard because the people in the room consume most of the air. So, it's kind of going through this undulating life cycle of new communication skills people need while they're remote. It's all changing.

Lenny (00:55:34):
I'm glad that I was not a PM in this remote world to be honest. I never experienced it, but I have a lot of empathy for being a product manager in this remote work world. Feels like the job got a lot harder.

Nancy Duarte (00:55:44):
It did. I think it did.

Lenny (00:55:46):
Yeah. So, let's talk about nerves and stage fright. So, I hate public speaking. I get extremely nervous people. They may not feel this when they watch me, but it's not my natural state. You work with a lot of people that I imagine are like, oh my god, I'm so scared to give this presentation. What advice do you give them to help them through that and feel more comfortable?

Nancy Duarte (00:56:06):
Yeah, I think people who are more thoughtful and contemplative about speaking have better content. They tend to really think through stuff than someone who's like, I got this. I'll just wing it. I'll just walk on the stage. Anyone who's like, tells me I am a nervous presenter, I'm like, you have probably got gorgeous content in your heart that the world needs to hear, because usually they are really deep and thoughtful. Like you already mentioned, you're a pattern finder and you like to do thoughtful work. And so it's hard. My husband is actually a brilliant communicator, just getting him to feel like he wants to take up the space. He's a better communicator than I am. And so what happens is the reason you get scared, it's a fight or flight instinct. For some reason stepping out on that stage, you feel your body and your mind and your psyche is feeling threatened like you would be attacked by an animal.

(00:56:56):
That's literally what's happening. And so you couple things you could do. You can actually sit in one of the seats of the auditorium and just sit there and look at the stage, look at the setting so you can imagine yourself on it. But then picture yourself as that friendly face, the one that's happy to see you, the one that's delighted that you're speaking. And then as you're standing up, remember that you saw yourself sitting there smiling and very happy. You have to change your visual model that people's faces will be scowling, they'll be judging you, they'll be doubting you. All of those things are only in your head because getting you out on the stage to be able to start to expose people to this amazing content you have, the biggest battle is to get you out on this stage and delivering it.

(00:57:47):
And I asked a bunch of people once, I did a survey of all these public speakers and was like, how do you prepare? How do you prepare? What's your pre-talk ritual? And some of them were like, "I play heavy metal music and I skip around the entire convention center, just get all fired up." I'm like, "Wow, I have to calm myself down because I already have over to the top energy." So, I literally find the dark. I don't go to the green room, that stuff. I don't like to hear gibber jabber. I have to be focused on my content. And so I find the darkest corner of the backstage and calmly sit and just breathe. I just breathe. Sometimes if I'm nervous, if there's someone real famous in the audience, I have a little list playlist of funny things that people sent me, but I never watch. And that way right before I walk on stage, I chemically, my whole body chemically shifts from nervous to laughter. And that really helps me too, because it's chemical and you have to train your chemistry a bit.

Lenny (00:58:46):
I really like that tip. What are these funny things you watch if you-

Nancy Duarte (00:58:50):
It's like YouTube things, TikTok things. Just things that I tag and I try not to watch them or things that make me laugh. There's this dorky low watched video of a guy with tin cans wrapped around his waist and he plays them. And my husband walks around the house like him and making the noise and I could probably sing the beat if I had to. And so sometimes I just play that, because it just transports me home, because a lot of times I'm presenting away from home and it just makes me laugh at my husband who's hysterical. So, it's just random things, but if you laugh and somehow can transport yourself outside of the fear of walking out there, it helps reset you before you walk out on stage.

Lenny (00:59:39):
I really like that. Is there anything else just off the top of your head that just like right before you go on stage that you find to be really effective? So, watching funny videos, I love that. [inaudible 00:59:47] use it. Anything else?

Nancy Duarte (00:59:48):
I breathe. I think I've learned a breathing pattern. I take a deep, deep breath and then I take that one while my lungs are full, I take another gulp of breath and I have to let it out real slow. But when I got the feedback that my friend and some people get over their fear by headbanging to heavy metal, so I'm not saying that's not the wrong thing. So, I thought, well, maybe I should try that before I do a talk. And so I literally didn't do that. But I stretched, I jumped a little, just low jumps, put my arms real big up in the air. And then I walked on stage and I happened to be speaking at a massive medical company, like big brand. And I finished my talk and my assistant got a call and they were like, "We're little worried about Nancy. We think she might need to see a doctor. She could never control her breathing and we're really concerned."

(01:00:38):
And it was just because I just pumped myself up a little bit. So, I don't do that whatsoever anymore. I went back to my calming, contemplative, meditative pre-talk ritual. So, for some people, literally I do encourage people to try headbanging to heavy metal. It might work. It's just a matter of what you need. And nobody would guess that I'm not one to dance around or pump myself up, but I am not, I have to calm myself down. It's the opposite.

Lenny (01:01:09):
Awesome. Just a few more questions.

Nancy Duarte (01:01:12):
Sure.

Lenny (01:01:12):
So, you wrote a book called Illuminate and something that stood out to me from that book is this idea of a torch bearer and torch bearer leader. Can you just talk about what that is and why that is important in power?

Nancy Duarte (01:01:22):
Yeah, I loved writing that book. Co-author Patty Sanchez, a hat tip to her. So, to come up with this book, we knew that there's one presentation, there's a single presentation, could be on a stage, could be in a meeting, just updating people on a project status. And we knew though that every presentation usually is part of a larger movement where you're trying to move people in mass to this alternate future. So, we studied movements, we deconstructed the largest movements. We met with Marshall Ganz at Harvard to say, "Hey, could this be true?" Because he studies movements. It was so fun. And then movements have a five act structure. So, picture, there's this moment where you have to verbalize the dream like, hey, we're going to head to this new place and this is what I have to do at my kickoff meetings. It's like imagine this place in the future that we're headed to.

(01:02:15):
So, it's five steps, it's a five act story structure, if you want to call it five acts. It's dream, leap, fight, climb, arrive. So, the torch bearer, the reason we called that is the leaders know where they're headed, but they might not ever see it super, super clearly. And we chose a torch because a torch, if you're in a cave and you have a torch, you only see about five, eight feet around you, but it's enough to dissipate the fear of the people following you in. And so nobody sees the future clearly. Nobody has that kind of level skill. All we know is I need to traverse this direction to be at the right place in the future so all my staff is safe, all are, we stay a leader in the industry. That's all I know. And as we start to head there, there's these moments of communication you need to do, which is, hey everyone, here's the dream. Here's where we're headed. That's the dream phase.

(01:03:09):
Then there's this moment where they either choose to jump in and go with you or they choose not to. You could talk about Frodo like Sam and only a few hobbits followed him. And so it's like people select to commit this journey. That's the beginning of your movement. But then the middle is the messy middle of a story. We call it the fight and climb phase. So, what happens is they commit to your idea, they commit to your program, your project, and they're like enthused at first. And then they go into the state of, oh my God, this is harder than I thought. It's a long slog. This climb is getting exhausted. I don't know if I have this much fight in me to make this all work, not fight with each other, but like, oh my God, I'm having to overcome this roadblock and that roadblock and we have to go get that budget.

(01:03:53):
So, it's just, it's like a fight, climb, fight, climb, fight, climb. And then ultimately you arrive. Each one of those five phases you need to use speeches, stories, ceremonies and symbols at each phase to give the people traveling with you the emotional fuel they need to keep going, to keep seeing that idea become realized. And it literally is about fueling the right emotions with speeches, stories, ceremonies, and symbols while you're moving people toward a bigger initiative. So, it's bigger than just one presentation, it's multiple presentations, multiple stories, multiple ceremonies. So, I loved that book. People are really feeding off of it right now because leading change has been nonstop. It's just been change, change, change the last especially few years.

Lenny (01:04:40):
Change is the only constant like they say.

Nancy Duarte (01:04:42):
Exactly.

Lenny (01:04:43):
I really like this metaphor of the torch giving you a sense of, as a leader, you can see some portion around you, but you're not going to see the entire cave necessarily. That is really interesting. Maybe a final question very tactically is I give an interview where you shared that you had kind of two videos, one where it's very informal, you're just standing in front of whiteboard in jeans or something, just talking about some about data, I think in presentations. And then you had a similar video where it was very well constructed, high production value, and the informal video did a lot better. Is that something you're seeing? Just that kind of content ends up being more successful and why do you think that is?

Nancy Duarte (01:05:21):
I think video content, production quality now isn't the expectation for it being high quality. It's just completely shifted over the last five, eight years or so as everyone's an expert and can show up as an expert. There's a big difference to me about showing up as a keynoter, which is like, I'm going to stand, I'm going to look right. I'm going to have this eye contact, I'm going to nail it. My slides are gorgeous, I'm driving the industry. And for people to think that our explanations of things needs to be done as a stand and deliver keynote, that's just not true. So, I experimented with that and I had some videos I had done, and one of them, like you said, was me looking in the camera. I even had HD makeup, a film crew. I was well lit, I looked amazing. I mean, I did look amazing and it was polished.

(01:06:09):
I delivered it really well. And then I thought, because on LinkedIn I post a lot, that's where my primary channel is, and I thought what would happen if I just posted a rando shot of me? And I'm maybe airing on a little bit like orange, I look a little Trumpian, a little bit orange. It's not color corrected, but it's super informative, really full of information. And that was my highest viewed video so far. And I realized that it's like people want the content and we do as a presentation company, I have to nail it maybe more than others, but it doesn't have to be fully video edited, infographics spinning, swooshing things forward and swooshing things back.

(01:06:50):
That kind of nature of it is not necessary to get the message across. And so we actually have a whole process and program we're rolling out where you're going to see a lot more video from us, partially from that insight, but partially because my team, I have a team of experts, they have a lot of great things to share, and so I'm trying to give them, I'm trying to make it be like Duarte does not equal Nancy Duarte. I'm trying to make it so it's like so many experts work at Duarte, you got to watch any video from any of them is where we're moving at Duarte. They're freaks of brilliance and just experts. They're world class experts. So, that's what we're trying to do.

Lenny (01:07:27):
I feel like you have a similar challenge to me where I named my newsletter, Lenny's Newsletter.

Nancy Duarte (01:07:32):
Yeah, same thing.

Lenny (01:07:33):
[inaudible 01:07:33] talk about that.

Nancy Duarte (01:07:33):
Same thing.

Lenny (01:07:33):
Yeah, can never be anyone else. It's a challenge, but yeah, don't know, it worked out. Okay. Actually, real final question before we get to a very exciting lightning round. Have you seen examples of product managers specifically telling really good stories?

Nancy Duarte (01:07:46):
The product management process has multiple phase. There's the creative explorative process all the way through to getting it produced. And I think story can take you along in each phase. So, there's example, which I read about, I wasn't actually even part of, but Brian Chesky at Airbnb, there was a whole article where he unpacked this moment in their product development cycle where they decided they would take a walk in the shoes of their customer and they hired a Pixar illustrator to illustrate each scene as the team's like, okay, okay, they said this is her name. And they were like, okay, what happens? Her alarm goes off. Okay, what happens next? What happens next? Okay, now she's decided she needs to book something. What does she do? She wants to do that. They realized from this little walk in the shoes of their customer just this day in the life, which is a classic storytelling method for any product, they realized that they had their strategy wrong, that they needed to move as soon as possible to a mobile first strategy.

(01:08:46):
And it was just because they actually thought about, okay. She goes, brushes their teeth, they do this. They were just literally walking through the life of their ideal customer and that was when they realized they had it all messed up. But the other phases, after all this work people put into product and the making of the product and the managing of pushing it through. We have a large client that makes shoes or athletic things. I love telling stories, but I can't say this. And there's this moment where we get brought in and could you please train our product people in story? We're like, "What's the big problem?" They're like, "They'll spend a year or two on a shoe and be like, chunk, put it on the table. And they're like, what do you have to say about it?" They're like, "It's red." And it's like all these years of investment, all these years, they couldn't unpack any sort of story or any sort of reason or even their passion for why they chose red.

(01:09:41):
And it was like, here's my shoe, it's red. And so this ability to move things along by adding meaning or why and then wrapping it in a story actually can get a product chosen or rejected or there's just so many examples of different spaces in the product cycle that could benefit from a really well told story from, like I said, how the products innovate in the roadmap all the way through to what gets accepted. And then the big reveal, you think about even all the big Apple launches, it's about a big product reveal. It's about revealing this thing that had been hidden for so long and it's another moment to tell amazing stories. So, that's kind of a little bit of an insight on the product side of how to use story.

Lenny (01:10:27):
The Airbnb example is an awesome example. It's all true. When I joined Airbnb is actually right there in the process of doing that.

Nancy Duarte (01:10:34):
I love that.

Lenny (01:10:36):
And they ended up drawing these key frames of the journey as you described, and they put it right in the center of the office. Here's the journey of a host and a guest that's like 12 frames of that journey. And that actually became the strategy of the company is let's pick six of these frames and make them awesome. And that's what we're going to do.

Nancy Duarte (01:10:36):
That's awesome.

Lenny (01:10:54):
Make booking experience awesome. Make the arrival experience awesome. So, there's a lot of truth to that.

Nancy Duarte (01:11:00):
And it was visualized, right? The vision was visualized like what you're saying we're headed in the future. And it was super clear. I love that story. So cool you were there.

Lenny (01:11:09):
Yeah, it was very cool. And they actually were very mobile. You could grab one of these drawings and bring it to your desk and how are we going to make this moment better this week?

Nancy Duarte (01:11:17):
That's awesome.

Lenny (01:11:19):
And it was actually indeed, Pixar storyboard artist that they hired for a year. That was his job. Draw these key frames.

Nancy Duarte (01:11:25):
Oh, that's amazing.

Lenny (01:11:27):
And it connects so directly with your point about empathy. That was the epitome of empathy. Here's what the guest and hosts are going through, and here's where we can do better.

Nancy Duarte (01:11:37):
Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah, it does tie together.

Lenny (01:11:40):
If folks want to look this up, by the way, we'll link in the show notes. If you just Google Snow White Airbnb, you can watch a video of how they all kind of came about this. Well, with that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got six questions for you if you're ready.

Nancy Duarte (01:11:54):
Yep, I'm ready.

Lenny (01:11:56):
What are two or three books that you recommended most to other people?

Nancy Duarte (01:12:00):
I think I always classically recommend the gospels because there's just so much love and groundbreaking thinking there. And then for people who do wind up taking an interest in story, I think one of the best books, if you want to pick that up, is Chris Vogler's, The Writer's Journey, where he took Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey, made it 12 Steps, and he was a Disney story analyst. So, it's just really classic body of work that had really helped people get their minds around story and the archetypes.

Lenny (01:12:30):
What is a favorite recent movie or TV show?

Nancy Duarte (01:12:33):
It's my little sinful pleasure. It's way into K drama, Korean drama. Don't even ask me how, but I'm way into that. I've seen almost all of them now. I'm at the bottom of the barrel of them.

Lenny (01:12:44):
Is there a favorite?

Nancy Duarte (01:12:45):
No, my husband just watched one. It's called Business Proposal, and he watched it with me and he's like, oh no, now I'm going to be hooked too. They're just real. They're just cute as a button. And they have a longer arc. They're like an epic length tail. They drop in 12 part seasons or one season 12. Anyway, don't even get me started. It sounds dumb, because I like the epic tales and the dramas, but they're cute.

Lenny (01:12:45):
I love it.

Nancy Duarte (01:13:07):
They're just cute.

Lenny (01:13:08):
This is great. Getting very real. What is a favorite interview question that you like to ask people that you're hiring?

Nancy Duarte (01:13:14):
Oh, favorite interview question. We ask a lot about who they are. So, we use psychometrics a lot here, and we really understand who they are, and we actually ask people to tell a story. And if that's uncomfortable or those psychometrics are uncomfortable, they're not really a fit, because we are a systemic story culture, and we define empathy at the company as know yourself, accept yourself, kind of work on yourself, and then adapt to others. So, if people aren't open to really understanding how they show up then and then adapt and change under our care, then we don't hire them.

Lenny (01:13:51):
What is a favorite product you've recently discovered that you love?

Nancy Duarte (01:13:55):
I'm excited about a tool I just paid for last week. It's called writer.com. So, it's built on multiple language models and including, it's going to be trained on our own, all my IP, all my books, every blog post, it'll learn the voice and it'll use my own kind of language model to help us write faster. So, we put really good prompts in and we get a really good product out. So, I'm super excited about that.

Lenny (01:14:17):
I'm actually an investor in that company, so this is great to hear.

Nancy Duarte (01:14:20):
Oh yeah. That's awesome.

Lenny (01:14:21):
Writer.com. What is something relatively minor you've changed in your approach to developing presentations that has had a big impact on your ability to execute and get them out?

Nancy Duarte (01:14:33):
Yeah. I think there's the biggest roadblock for so long that made things painful was the edit cycles. How do we do a round with a client? Then you have multiple version, then you have version control. So, we've come up with this annotation system, so everyone on a project knows exactly the status of that slide, and there's no way really to check slides in and out. And so we've come up with this amazing, beautiful, very visual process where everyone knows the exact status of the slide, and it's really easy. You could put it in thumbnail mode and be like, hmm, we're 80% complete. Everyone's going to focus on just these two things. So, that part of the process, especially enterprise at scale where 20 or 30 people are contributors to a deck. That process we made is the clients are really liking it.

Lenny (01:15:14):
To leave people with one final tip to give better presentations. What would that be?

Nancy Duarte (01:15:18):
To become a better presenter, pick a topic you are passionate about, something where you're like, oh my gosh, I've got to see this happen. And pick that topic and be so passionate about it. Work on that talk or stand up at a volunteer thing and really work on something that makes you feel passionate. And then in the future when you're presenting something that you're not passionate about, everything you learned will apply to a business presentation, but you're going to have that feeling. You're going to know what it's like to present from your soul and from a place of passion and the great presenters tap into that passion point and pull from that, and that's what makes them a great presenter on other topics, that they might not be as passionate about.

Lenny (01:15:58):
Nancy, I so appreciate you making time for this. It's been an honor.

Nancy Duarte (01:16:01):
You're amazing.

Lenny (01:16:02):
Everything. You're amazing.

Nancy Duarte (01:16:03):
You're amazing.

Lenny (01:16:05):
You're amazing. Two final questions. Where can folks find you if they'd like to reach out, and how can listeners be useful to you?

Nancy Duarte (01:16:12):
Oh, they can find me at duarte.com. There's also a duarte.com/nancy where I've got a ton of free stuff where you could find a lot of the things I've talked about. I'm on Twitter @NancyDuarte, and I do connect to everyone who connects to me on LinkedIn, which is kind of fun. So, I think, how could they be useful to me? I think it will cure so many problems if everyone became a really good communicator, so you can help me by working hard on your communication skills, working hard on your clarity, and making everyone around you much happier people.

Lenny (01:16:47):
What a beautiful way to end it. Nancy, again, thank you so much for being here.

Nancy Duarte (01:16:50):
Oh, you're amazing. Thanks for having me.

Lenny (01:16:52):
We're amazing. Let's end it.

Nancy Duarte (01:16:52):
We are. Let's just say it.

Lenny (01:16:56):
All right. Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.