Nancy Duarte: The Storyteller’s Guide to Remarkable Presentations

Guy Kawasaki:
We just want to help people become remarkable. And today we have Nancy Duarte. At the end of this session, people are going to learn how to be a remarkable speaker and presenter and influencer and persuader. That's all we expect. Nancy. So first of all, Nancy, can you just explain what do you and your firm do?
Nancy Duarte:
Yeah. We've been crackalackin' at presentations since 1988, and we have two different ways that you could work with us. One is that we will write and produce and get you ready for your staged talk, or you could learn from us how to do it for yourself so you could work with us or learn from us.
Guy Kawasaki:
Now, I don't know if you can publicly admit a spot. Just between you and me and all my listeners, let's just say that you help a very successful computer company based in Cupertino, California. Did I just get you in trouble?
Nancy Duarte:
That may or may not be how we met, Guy, but the rumor's true.
Guy Kawasaki:
So whether that client is Apple or not, you are an observer in Silicon Valley. So can you just explain to us from a pros standpoint, what were the elements that made Steve Jobs so effective as a speaker and presenter?
Nancy Duarte:
Oh, that's amazing. I made a Steve Job bot just for fun, put all of the transcripts of all of his talks and I ask it question sometimes. I think the analysis I did of his iPhone launch speech from years ago was quintessential Steve. He built this momentum about what was possible.
Most of his talks are like what is possible, what the future could look like with Apple products in your pocket, but the thing he did, I think the best was that in every speech he gives, almost every speech he has the audience viscerally and physically reacting to what he's saying.
So in about thirty second increments, they're either laughing or clapping. And the other thing he did was he would marvel at his own products. It's not like he was seeing these products for the first time, but he's modeling for the audience the nature of the affection they should have for it. So he would marvel at his own product. And he used a lot of exclamations like he was famous for saying "boom" and different ways of really almost making navigational sound effects of how he's feeling about his products.
Guy Kawasaki:
And do you think that someone listening to this will say, "Okay, so from now on I'm going to marvel at my own products, I'm going to make these sound effects and I'll be another Steve Jobs," or was it only Steve could pull this off?
Nancy Duarte:
He was, I thought, the quintessential business communicator and there's other people that are doing a pretty good job. He spent a lot of time. It's not like these were just all built by someone else, personally fidgeted over every pixel on every slide.
So I think that Apple knows the power of a presentation. Now a lot of people used to stand in the physical line now they stand in the virtual line waiting with bated breath for Apple's presentation. So it's been a major marketing tool for them. They put the effort in, they put the energy in, and they make them excellent in a way I don't think anyone else does.
Guy Kawasaki:
I think some people listening to this, they will miss a point that you just said very quickly, which is that Steve Jobs cared about every pixel and they may have had this impression that Steve Jobs is a natural. I'm a natural. I can be like Steve Jobs, I don't need to rehearse, I don't need to care about every pixel. I'll just go up there and dazzle them because I'm going to rise to the occasion. So just burst the bubble here, what did Steve do to practice and to prepare for a presentation like the iPhone launch?
Nancy Duarte:
Yeah, it is interesting because I think you're a natural and comfortable on stage. I think Steve was comfortable on stage, but it was not without a lot of preparation. And sometimes people who are natural on stage don't put in the work. A lot of times the introverts put the work in to be ready for a stage.
So even though there is a nature of someone who's very natural, an audience can tell if you're winging it or if it was planned or how much energy you put into connecting with them and all that work. All of that work went in into every ounce of everything. The demos, how they were planned. In the iPhone launch speech, they called Starbucks.
Someone was at Starbucks ready to answer that call. Every single person that was, as they flipped through the scrolled through anything, the names chosen and curated, every single detail, is cared about almost in a literary way. Every single thing that was done and is done on the stage is curated into their own individual arcs.
And I think Tim Cook, those were huge shoes to fill, and I think he's been doing a really good job transforming himself as a master curator of content and people coming up on stage. And has really become a thoughtful and meaningful opposite. He's the opposite of Steve and just as thoughtful in what he's delivering and how it's shaped.
Guy Kawasaki:
I would make the case that as you just described, Tim Cook, it means that you don't have to be "a Steve." You can be something else and still be a good presenter.
Nancy Duarte:
Exactly. Be your true self. Be empathetic to the audience and show up as your true self.
Guy Kawasaki:
If the iPhone is being introduced on day zero, when did the preparation for this presentation start? Take us back. What's the timeline for something like this?
Nancy Duarte:
Most of our customer base on the consulting, the agency side, they know what it takes to put the work in. We have several projects in right now. We have one customer that we work all year, all year long, and we take a crack at it and as he travels around to the employee bases around the world's practices, so when their huge annual event comes up they've not only practiced, but they've gotten real time reactions so that when it's the big staged event they're nailing it.
So there's a piece written about how much preparation would go into it. There's an actual article written that I can cite, but I also know that it's weeks and weeks. Something starts almost three months ahead of time and then the big product launches are ongoing just to get the framework done then to get the images pixel perfect. And then there's so many layers to getting it just right for the day of launch. It's non-trivial how much work goes into it?
Guy Kawasaki:
If you were the product manager of the iPhone, what's your life like for three months prior to the introduction? Is it just a living hell and Steve is just ripping you to shreds?
Nancy Duarte:
No, I can't talk much about it, but I will say he always referred to our team as the Mozart's of keynotes. So I do think he highly valued what we did. And it's hard. It's a strain. It's a strain on everyone. And our team works very hard. We go through peaks and valleys.
So everything peaks and then it regulates, and it peaks again. There's the river run throughs it, all the work we do and then the launches are pretty spectacular spikes that happen. So I can't talk a lot about this supposed brand that we supposedly really do work with. I can't share too much.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. So tell us, obviously Steve is gone. So who else was in the Nancy Duarte Hall of Fame for presentations?
Nancy Duarte:
Yeah, I would love to say all my customers, the ones that care. I think that Benioff is really strong. I think CEO of ServiceNow is really strong. One of my favorite presenters is Scott Harrison of Charity: Water. He kills it every time. I think Dharmesh Shah at HubSpot's really strong presenter. And these are people that come from either tech or sales backgrounds.
And sometimes I think the tech people who put the time in to really transform themselves, getting them on a stage is hard enough, but when you can get them to commit to the stage, they put the work in a really beautiful way. It's a high bar to reach, to emanate or be as classically notorious as Steve was, but I think some people are on the way.
Guy Kawasaki:
Do you ever get approached by companies and the CEO or the VP of MarCom or whatever, you can already tell that this guy or this girl is full of shit and thinks he or she is a natural and this is unculturable. Does that ever happen?
Nancy Duarte:
Usually who we hear from isn't them. They wouldn't been calling us if they're blind as a bat. Sometimes, bless their heart, it's usually the exec comm team or sometimes the HR team, the head of HR where they're starting to see the impact the CEO is having on the internal culture, or the brand group is seeing the impact on they can't get them out on a stage and be effective out on an industry event or earnings call and stuff like that.
So it's really interesting. I wrote a book with Patti Sanchez who's been on your show, and we thought what would happen is when people read the book, leaders like the scales would fall off their eyes and they would suddenly see how to be empathetic.
The big point of the book was that based on where your audience is, the audience needs a different level of fuel from you so that they keep going, so they stay in your broader narrative. And the eyes didn't fall off, the scales didn't fall off the eyes like we hoped it would, but it's a great book for us to give to people, to give to their leaders because if we're not looking at your audience through an empathetic lens you will not be effective.
And we're starting to see, I think from my perspective, the companies who are really strong communicators are the ones that's going to win. And they're the ones that do win. And it is modeled from the exec down. So if you picture a culture who's really committed to storytelling, you could say, "Hey, this is a company that does really good business storytelling."
For us to be able to put that stamp on a company it means everyone from the CEO to the individual contributor, the CEO needs to be modeling storytelling and the individual contributor needs to understand the mechanics of storytelling. And getting the execs on board changes the entire culture. They model for the teams what excellence means, and that is such a critical component of getting traction in a company.
Guy Kawasaki:
Do you ever encounter a CEO who is just beyond hope and you have to pull him or her on the side and say, "Listen, let your VP do it. Let somebody else do it because you just can't handle it."
Nancy Duarte:
So when we are sent on site, and my coaches are there, so my speaker coaches aren't classic speaker coaches, they are storytelling experts and coaches. So they'll come in, they'll tweak, adjust what the actual content they're being told and on the fly they can try to coach. Most of them are very, very acceptive of it, but whenever there's a post-project review, we will propose a more effective way than the whole curated session could have gone.
So I think just getting them on the stage, if they're willing to be on the stage, that means they have some skin in the game, but we have yet to give them the proverbial hook and said, don't ever let them on the stage again. I just think we're too kind too to do that.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, I promise you, this is my last question about Apple. All right. So what if you are the CEO of a company and you need to do a product introduction or presentation and your products simply are not as cool as Apple's, what do you do?
Nancy Duarte:
That's interesting. A lot of people in product have us come and teach them storytelling. So I can't name another very famous shoe company and their product designers would try to be teeing up, "Hey, this is what I've made. This is my design." And they would just throw the shoe on the table and be like, "It's red or whatever. It's the color red." Nothing about why the decisions were made, nothing about why this is better than different than anything out there. So we had to actually teach them to attach a story.
It could be the origin story of the product, it could be anything about the product that gives it meaning. And I think that's one of the things that the really good brands will do, but it has to come from the origin of the product and carry along with it. And so I think if you can actually set your product, it was in my TED Talk years ago where I say the audience is the hero because if you put an idea out there and the audience rejects, your idea dies.
And I think the same goes for a product. Your product has to wind up being the thing, the product that gets someone else unstuck. So the customer is always the hero and the product has to help them get unstuck or has to help them have human flourishing. It has to be this instrument in their life that becomes particularly meaningful to them. And the only way to really do that is to attach story to the product and meaning to it. So it becomes a valuable part in the day, in the life of your consumers.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, let me give you a hypothetical question that might ruin your life. And let's just say that I'm asking you this question as a professional, not as a just citizen or voter or anything, as a professional.
Oh, God help you Nancy, but if by some chance the RNC calls you up and say, "Nancy, we love Steve Jobs, how we presented the iPhone. We love Tim Cook. We love ServiceNow. We love all these clients you mentioned. Can you just help J.D. Vance become a better vice presidential candidate?" What would you say?
Nancy Duarte:
We stay massively apolitical. I think what's happening is the way people communicate has changed massively the expectation of CEOs and politicians. I'm seeing that when CEOs show up too polished, too teleprompted, somebody else is actually putting all the words in their mouth because they can't speak from their heart, there's actually a bit of credibility problem when that happens.
So what's interesting is we had started a little video series, and it was about Duarte experts, it's our experts program we call it. And it was so interesting when we had our experts present the information, my own son called me, he goes, "Why do you hire actors to be on your YouTube channel?"
I'm like, "Oh, those aren't actors. Those are actually my experts." Like, "Experts should be experts, not presenters." And so I think that what's happening is there's an inability or some have the ability to make it very clear, "Hey, this is what I'm thinking. This was on my mind. This is what's happening."
And for some reason that's resonating over these tightly scripted, tightly teleprompted moments that make it feel like somebody else is putting things into the mouths of CEOs and politicians. I think YouTube changed all that. How people and experts show up on YouTube has changed our appetite for highly controlled messaging. Yeah, I didn't answer your question there about Apple. So it's very interesting.
Guy Kawasaki:
No, you did answer. Backtracking a little bit, can you explain specifically what is the Duarte method?
Nancy Duarte:
Yes. So the Duarte method is a 100 percent grounded in empathy with the mechanism to it being story and storytelling. And so that's at the core. If it was a Venn diagram that would be at the very center is empathy. And the three circles off of it, one would be story, one would be visuals and one would be how it's delivered.
How it's delivered is how you show up on stage, but it might be what you distribute through email. So we are communication experts at their finest. So the method is a mechanism to become a really strong communicator. So all our materials and the method if you work with us or learn from us are steeped in excellence and methods in those categories.
Guy Kawasaki:
I noticed that Venn diagram and empathy is in the middle, but when you say empathy, are you saying that the speaker has to have empathy for the audience or the speaker has to have empathy for the ultimate customer of the iPhone. Whose empathy? Whose head are you trying to get into to be empathetic?
Nancy Duarte:
Yeah, that's interesting. We'll do profiles of who's in the audience. What industry are they in? But not just that, what is the day in the life look like for them? So in storytelling, there's a lesser known, but very beautiful moment where the protagonist or the hero puts on the skin of the enemy and gets access to their camp. So Avatar, he turned blue and he's, "Wait a minute, now that I empathetically understand them, the Na'vi are not our enemy."
It's like putting on their skin, understanding what a walk in their life looks like, understanding what they love, what they use, how they would use it. Really understanding does this meet something that's causing them pain? Will this get them unstuck? Will this create human flourishing?
And how does it do that? Because if you don't know who you're building this thing for, you shouldn't build it because it should be solving a pain. It should be soothing and/or amplifying something that's very important to them.
Guy Kawasaki:
I don't know what you're going to say to this question. Obviously, I have to ask the question, which is what if this person simply is not empathetic? Not everybody is born empathetic. Are you saying empathy can be learned?
Nancy Duarte:
I think so. So every book I've ever written has models for empathy in it. And one of the reasons I did that, Guy, was because I was raised by a narcissistic mother. She was missing the empathy gene. So she didn't know when I was in the room, she didn't know what I did, never really learned the names of my kids or their spouses. So she was literally lacking that. And there's really deep research about how important it is for a daughter to see empathy modeled by their mother. And so I worked hard.
I have worked really hard, Guy, at building these models for myself that I can keep them in my head so that when I'm thinking before this talk, I spent a lot of time thinking about you, my affection for you, your long history, the impact you've made on the world just so that I could already have my heart warm towards you. So there's these things I have to do in my head to become other centric.
I feel like I've really grown, but that's one of the reasons. And a lot of leaders, a lot of leaders do not have empathy. And if I change even a hundred leaders and make them more empathetic in my lifetime, all of the suffering I went through would've been worth it. So mom was a mess and it's what made my body of work mostly powerful.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. I had no idea. I think you're the first guest who ever prepared for this interview by trying to be empathetic with me. I'll just tell you Nancy, I prepared for this interview with you by surfing.
Nancy Duarte:
I know.
Guy Kawasaki:
That's why you're Nancy and I'm Guy Kawasaki.
Nancy Duarte:
I know. Well, you get to get away with it.
Guy Kawasaki:
So you've said the S word several times, so give us the gist of how you become a great storyteller.
Nancy Duarte:
Yeah, I think part of it is being comfortable in your own skin a little bit. Because what storytelling requires in the nature of the three act structure is there's this likable person who goes through these hardships, and I just shared one. Maybe that's weird to your followership that I would share that. And then you root for them.
They overcome the crisis of the messy middle, they overcome it. So people root for me because I am authentic about how messy life is. So again, there's this likable hero, they go through these hardships and they emerge transformed.
That's the nature of a story. If people and/or leaders aren't willing to say, "Life was messy, I had this thing happen, but I'm different because of it," they won't be as effective of a storyteller as ones who will say, "Hey, I messed this up at my last job. Hallelujah. We're going to nail it at this one because I'm never going to make that mistake again."
I'll follow a leader that makes mistakes and/or goes through tests and talks about it how they passed or failed them before I'll want to follow one who pretends that they have it all together and life is easy, and this is going to be easy. I'd rather walk with someone who's already been down some tough roads before. And I think everyone feels that way.
I'm not the only one that would feel that way. People want to know that their leader knows how to navigate difficult times, and the only way to know they did that is if they're willing to talk about the difficult part of some stories. And to start, you just have to learn the mechanics. You have to understand the nature of what a story is and then go there.
So that's why even Brené Brown, different people, they're like, "Hey, telling stories makes you come across as transparent and authentic." And it's because the messy middle. It's because you have to go there and say, "Hey, messed this up. Messed it up real bad. I'm changed. I'm better for it."
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, so let's say I'm the CEO of ServiceNow. So I tell the story of how our clients, they have thousands of support tickets and they can't keep track of them and customers are off, they're losing business and all. So you tell this story of how ServiceNow fixes this help ticket situation, is that what you're saying?
Nancy Duarte:
Yeah, it can be. So that would be a "they" story. That would be this company, they did this thing. Now if you were on the team that solved it, you can tell that story with more conviction because you could say, "We did it. We solved this problem." If you solved it, you could say, "I did it. I solved this problem." So you can tell an "I" story or a "we" story with incredible conviction because you lived it and you can paint the color, the conflict and all of that.
If it's a "they" story, you have to really try to embody it to have it be a third person story, but those are just as effective for case studies. So there's a nature of a story that can always stay a "they" story, "they" did this thing, but yeah, telling stories that you did are more persuasive than stories someone else did, but they're both effective.
Guy Kawasaki:
Do you feel a moral responsibility because someone could tell a story while it may be true, it does not necessarily statistically represent the population. Let me give you an example. My uncle smoked a pack a day every day for sixty years and he didn't die of lung cancer. I'm telling you this story. It's okay to smoke. Isn't that a good story?
Nancy Duarte:
I think that gets into how you can manipulate through the spoken word, and you can manipulate all kinds of ways. And the sad thing about that example is I think story is more powerful as a persuasive device. And yeah, I think that's a sad story.
I do have an interesting story to tell where I told a story and it wasn't the right one to tell, and that was when you and I actually spoke at an event, and I thought it was a private closed event and it was all women. You probably don't even remember this. It was years ago. It's one of my biggest mistakes I've ever made.
And I had just finished writing a book and I climbed to the top of Half Dome. And my VP of HR was with me and it was this great story for women because I was on the surface, I was on the face of Half Dome and I couldn't make it. I had altitude sickness, and I was just like, "Oh my god, I'm just about to die."
And she was going to come all the way back down and be with me and I'm like, "No, you keep climbing to the top." Because as women we're communal. So she was going to fully come down and not reach her dream just because I had altitude sickness. And so I told this story, it was really dramatic, blah blah blah, and the reaction was maybe too dramatic.
And then you get up after me and you're like, "Wow, Nancy, all I did when I finished my last book is I bought myself a larger monitor" or whatever. And it was so funny, I didn't realize that it was actually being broadcast. And so the next day I heard from people like, "Oh, we saw you on TV." And I was like, "Holy cow."
If I'd gotten a memo that people outside of the room were going to hear that story, I never ever would've told that story because it was so raw and it was just, I don't know, it was just so raw for me. And when I was done, you had to add levity at the end because everyone was like, "What the heck just happened? She just told this crazy amazing story that overwhelmed me."
Guy Kawasaki:
Wait, why was that a mistake? Because it put the other person in a bad light?
Nancy Duarte:
No. Oh no. It actually put her in an amazing light because she finished it. She did what I said, and women pushed women forward instead of women coming back.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, what's wrong?
Nancy Duarte:
But I thought it was just for the women in the room, but it was actually being broadcast to the public. And I would've picked something different knowing it was a broad audience and not that it was a small room full of women.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wait, I still don't understand what's the story. So what if everybody heard that story?
Nancy Duarte:
I don't know. A couple people at my company got some calls and they were like, "I don't know, I saw Nancy tell him some story about climbing the face of Half Dome." I don't know why. I just think of that as it was a mismatch.
Guy Kawasaki:
Just for the record, I don't see a mismatch at all. At all. That would be like Simone Biles telling Sunny Lee, "Go for it. I hope you get the gold in the floor exercises." What's wrong with that?
Nancy Duarte:
Oh, that's the moral of the story. Nothing was wrong with that, but I mean you don't recall the intensity. The story has this real intensity to it. And ultimately she didn't turn around and we kept going and then I actually got a hold of my breathing and everything and I made it to the top too. So we have a commemorative photo and all of that. It was a great story.
Guy Kawasaki:
I would say if that's one of your worst experiences, one of your biggest mistakes, you're doing all right. My God. At least you didn't say she was a childless catless woman who went to the top without me.
Nancy Duarte:
No, she likes dogs.
Guy Kawasaki:
Before I forget, I got to ask you. So I face this all the time because I make a lot of speeches and I always wonder what exactly should I open with? I know the theory of opening with a joke. I also know the theory that if you open with a joke and it fails, you're digging yourself out of a hole. So what do you tell your clients? What's the opening story? The opening line, do you say, Oh, thank you very much. I'm honored and so happy to be here."
Which is total bullshit because you probably just flew twenty-six hours to get to Mumbai and you hated it, and the customs line was long and now you got to say, "It's such a pleasure. I'm so happy to be here," which is total bullshit. So what do you say when you open up a presentation or a speech?
Nancy Duarte:
Yeah, first it has to be empathetic, it has to be about the audience. So that classic slide we always used to have at the beginning that was about us. We have twenty-two offices, 100 locations, 10,000 employees. It used to be a statistical way to give someone a reason to believe that you were credible and that you should be delivering the talk. And it has to be about the audience. And there's multiple ways.
So there's different parts that happen in the front of a talk and what you're referring to is the hook or the opening gambit the way, but there's a handful of things that have to happen. You have to establish common ground and that is by really clearly understanding them and the context that you fit into their world, the audience's world.
You have to make really clear what the point of your presentation is. You can turn that into a soundbite or something memorable, but then you also have to be prepared to have some sort of hook. And there's multiple ways that you can have a hook.
And AI can help if you have a really awesome prompt that we will be publishing for you. But it could be a scary statistic, it could be a story, it could be an emotive visual. There's all kinds of ways to hook and lure the audience in. But if you don't pretty quickly say at least what the presentation's going to be about, like if it's at a conference, this happened to me at South by Southwest.
I was partway through the first section of my talk, and it was about ten minutes in and about fifty people, the doors swung open, and people ran in and I'm like, "What just happened?"
And they're like, "Oh, someone tweeted that you're interesting because clearly all the other people at the same slot weren't." And I was just like, "Oh my gosh, that happens." So in the first part of your talk, you have to give them a reason to stay and then you have to pick these moments throughout your talk where you re-engage.
So one of the things CEOs are doing really well, Tim Cook does really well, is you bring different presenters up on the stage with you. What that does is when an audience member hears a new sound or there's a new something novel happening, it re-engages them.
So if you're speaking by yourself, you have to keep re-engaging them yourself and starting with a bang, starting with a way that keeps them be like, "Oh, I think I'm going to stay for this" while they still have that window of time where they could leave. But also you have to do that multiple times.
We call it a S.T.A.R. moment. It's just something they'll always remember is the acronym for S.T.A.R. and you got to have some of those throughout the whole talk. Some of them could be dramatic like letting mosquitoes out in a room like Bill Gates did, but other times it's just sometimes how you transition.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wait. Pull up. Bill Gates let mosquitoes out in a speech?
Nancy Duarte:
Yeah, during his TED Talk about malaria. I was there with Garr Reynolds at that TED and we're sitting about ten rows back. He lets mosquitoes out while he is talking about malaria. I mean I'm watching and Garr's like freaking out. He's got a mosquito biting his arm. He's said, "Should I be scared?"
It was super powerful releasing it in a room where malaria is not a threat for anyone in that room. And that was his S.T.A.R. moment in that talk as he released a bunch of mosquitoes running around biting people that don't normally aren't exposed to malaria. Now the mosquitoes did not have malaria, just saying. We don't think.
Guy Kawasaki:
I have never heard that story. I'm going to have to use that story. My God.
Nancy Duarte:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
Probably why Melinda left him. Oh my God.
Nancy Duarte:
God. I don't know if that's the reason why.
Guy Kawasaki:
I got to tell you. I listened to what you just said about opening gambits and I flunked your tests. I flunked your tests. Oh my God.
Nancy Duarte:
You know what though? You're a funny guy. That's why I was glad you did a little comedic relief on the fly. You probably naturally are doing a lot of these things. I think you're a really strong communicator.
Guy Kawasaki:
One of the things that I am proud to say I ripped off from you and I use all the time.
Nancy Duarte:
What’s that?
Guy Kawasaki:
And most of the time I attribute to you, but I confess I don't always attribute to you is the Nancy Duarte Glance Test, G-L-A-N-C-E, not G-L-A-N-S, okay, just to be clear, so will you explain the Nancy Duarte Glance Test for a slide?
Nancy Duarte:
Glad you spelled that because people might think it's G-L-A-N-D-S. It's not glands either. When I wrote Slide:ology I realized that slides can't be dense. So people can only process one stream of information. They will either process your slides or they will listen to you speak. So if your slides have a ton of on it, they will read everything while you're talking and they can't do both.
And I realize that slides are a lot like a billboard in a way, while you're driving seventy miles an hour down the freeway, if there was a super dense billboard that took you about five to eight seconds to process, that means your eyes are not on the car in front of you.
You should be able to listen to the presenter glance at their slides. That shouldn't take more than three seconds or you'll miss their verbal stream. So if you did a Duarte and the words Glance Test, there's actually a little form you can pull down. And you can actually grade each one of your slides for the signal-to-noise ratio and try to figure out how to tighten it down.
Now slides are free, so maybe you wanted to make five points on one slide and you keep it up there forever. We'll break those five points into five slides. They're free. There's nothing that's stopping you from clicking more rapidly through five slides than just holding one slide that's making five points. And so you've got to make it so a process.
And by process it should amplify what you're saying. Maybe it's a diagram that's explaining what's coming out of your mouth, maybe it's an emotive photo of this child that's getting clean water. Whatever it is you're trying to convey, the visual should amplify the spoken word.
Guy Kawasaki:
Nancy, I got to tell you that if you somehow were able to look at all the PowerPoint slides that are presented in the world, probably about one-tenth of 1 percent past the Duarte Glance Test. There's no freaking way. And I'll tell you a story. About a month ago I was invited to speak to the cabinet of Gavin Newsom. So every department secretary and undersecretary all in this room I couldn't pass this up.
And the example I used of a bad thing that I think the state should change is on Highway 101 where you're in your car and one side is HOV only, three plus. You see another side that says, "Fast track necessary." You see another one that says, "Flex track is necessary." You see another one that says, "five o’clock to nine o’clock PM only."
And I said to that, "You tell me I'm in my car. It's a plug in hybrid, I'm alone. I got flex track, I got flash, I got every freaking thing I can. I don't know, is it going to cost me two dollars and fifty cents to get to Marsh Road or am I going to get a 500 dollar ticket?" I don't understand that system on Highway 101.
Nancy Duarte:
That's overwhelming. Yeah, that's visual. It's so funny that you're saying that because sometimes I'll be like, "Oh my gosh, we have a massive information problem with our signs." What's interesting though is when I came up with the slide test about everything needing to be cinematic and simple, about 95 percent or more of slideshows to your point, don't need to be cinematic.
They're not standing on a stage with a verbal narrative. A lot of times they're reviewing them together in a meeting or they're just distributing it as a document.
So after I pushed the world toward The Glance Test, I then pushed the world another way, which is toward a slidedoc. And you have Slidedoc or slidedocs.com if your listeners want to see it, and you can make these beautiful documents that look like magazine spreads in presentation tools. And so I trying to push it, look, either be cinematic or just call it a document and tell everyone you're just reviewing a document. It just happens to be a visual document.
Because when presentations float around an organization, if they're too sparse, nobody knows. It's not conveying information. So you either have to put your pretty heavy notes in the notes field or just put everything on the slide. Don't call it a presentation, call it a slidedoc and distribute that. And then it's a self-contained. It travels without the help of the spoken word.
Guy Kawasaki:
I see.
Nancy Duarte:
You put your spoken word on the slide itself. I'd rather read a slidedoc than a word doc to be honest.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah, is it not an infographic as opposed to a speech slide? The two things are very different. They should not be used interchangeably.
Nancy Duarte:
Yeah, I agree. The advantage of a slide is you get to put a lot of visual hierarchy even to the text. You get to type it in a much better way and then add graphics and words on the same page. So it is a very powerful way. So I contend. I know Bezos says they don't use presentations. They have the six-minute memo and I still think that a six-page slide doc is probably more effective than just the six-page memo by itself without the visuals, without the context, without the chart, all those things need to be in there.
Guy Kawasaki:
You gave me an idea, Nancy. I'm going to send an email to Melanie Perkins of Canva right after this and say, "We ought to add a type of document called a slidedoc." Because we have presentation sixteen by nine, we have infographics, but we should add a new kind of category called slidedoc with attribution to Nancy Duarte to help communication in the world.
Nancy Duarte:
I'm happy to help make some of those templates for her. I love her. She's remarkable. She came through our company back when she was trying to raise money in the Silicon Valley. And wish I'd made a big old bet on her way back then. She's great.
Guy Kawasaki:
So do I, Nancy. I love tactics. Can we stick to the discussion of slides for speeches and presentations? And I have some very tactical questions such as, for let's say a forty-five minute slot, how many slides should be in my slide presentation?
Nancy Duarte:
That's interesting. It all depends on how long the script is per slide. There isn't a formulaic way. Years ago it used to say two minutes per slide. That means you're making a lot of points on one slide. To go for two minutes to one slide I think is a little bit long. I had a talk that was forty minutes. It was 300 slides.
Guy Kawasaki:
What?
Nancy Duarte:
But people didn't know it because it was building. It would build and I would make a point of build. The one I build with the spark lines on it, each attribute that pulls in based on how PowerPoint works, some of them are builds, but some of them are actual fresh slides. So I remember one time I was given a forty minute slot, and I sent my slides ahead.
I think this one had 180 slides in it, and they called and they're like, "Oh, we just reduced your time slot to twenty minutes." And I'm like, "Okay, I'm the presentation lady, I can't mess that up." So I rehearse, rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. I send a new deck and it's nailed right at twenty minutes because I have to stick to the time slot.
That would be a terrible representation. And then I get there, they're like, "Oh, we can't wait. You'll go from whatever start time of ten o’clock until ten forty-five o’clock." And I'm like, "No, I'm going to ten twenty o’clock." They're like, "No, you have forty-five minutes." I said, "No, you told me twenty." Oh, we only told you that because you had way too many slides and never stick with it."
And so I was like, "Wow." I said, "I'm sorry." I said, "I'm only prepared for twenty minutes." I said, "So I'll do twenty minute talk and twenty minute question and answer." I was just like, "Wow, they actually penalized me for having too many slides." So I nailed it.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, so we got the quantity. Now another tactical question, what color should the background be? Dark or light?
Nancy Duarte:
I actually have a strong opinion about that. If you are in a dark room and you're trying to create a mood, I would say a dark background.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yay.
Nancy Duarte:
If you're in a dark room and you want to have the whole audience see each other and that's okay, then you can have a light background. So it's purpose built. I think when you're in a bright conference room and I think your slides need to be bright, I think they need to be white. I wrote about that in the HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations. But you do light the room.
And if you're invited and it's a dark room and you're doing a lot of interactive stuff and you want the audience to talk to each other, I would say bring on the white background. But otherwise, if you want to keep the mood focused on you and you're on a spotlight, if it's a really official stage, I go dark.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. What is the minimum size font?
Nancy Duarte:
It's so funny. In the olden days back when things were a little bit more pixeled, before they could perfectly rasterize on almost like a plasma quality, so we used to have a twenty-four font, but my team has been squeaking it down to eighteen. It all depends on the size of the hall. So there's actually a little known test you could do.
So if you have a fifteen-inch monitor or an eighteen-inch monitor, you can step back eighteen feet or step back fifteen feet depending on how big your monitor is, and then put it in slideshow mode and step back that many feet. So literally, if it's eighteen-inch monitor, step back eighteen feet. And if you could see it, that would be what it's like for someone in the back of the room to see your slides. So it's a way to test it.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wait, but what if I'm in a hall that holds 5,000 people?
Nancy Duarte:
I don't like going that small. So picture if you have a diagram up and you have the major labels and the major labels might be thirty-six point, and then you wanted to put bodies of text just under that. Those could be twenty-four, twenty-eight. I personally don't go under twenty-eight, but we can't convince every exec that's a great idea.
So picture what happens when an exec, they're so busy. They have to step in and they have to have little mnemonic devices on their slides to remember what to say. Basically, most use their slides as their teleprompter. They don't use the comfort monitor.
And if you pull too much off that slide, they'll forget what they're saying. In fact, we worked with a public CEO for a long time who was dyslexic, and we kept trying to change the colors, change the placement of different things to tidy it up and he's just, "I can't follow when you do that. You're just going to have to accommodate my need to have certain things in each corner" because he could process them.
It was just he had his way and then we mapped to that so that he could be successful. And he had every element on the slide that he needed to remember what to say.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wait, but if we back up a few minutes, you just said there's text in twenty-four, twenty-eight point, text, obviously more than one or two words. Well, how does that slide now going to pass The Glance Test if there's anything in twenty-four points?
Nancy Duarte:
Yeah, what's happening is there's a difference. Some of what we're doing is we will skin the whole room of some of these big conferences, the big global conferences with the deck looks like the backdrop. It just looks like one big seamless surface.
When you're putting that kind of money in and we're building your slides as video almost everything's animated, it's so cinematic and so immersive, usually the presenter actually has a deck they're clicking that nobody sees, and it's literally just a bunch of bullet points.
If it's a little bit of a smaller lower stakes venue where the room is more like a seminar size or something like that, I really don't care if they have things on their slide that help them remember. What I do with mine is I'll have a phrase and I'll just put another phrase on the next slide.
So instead of having them scattered around, I choose to just have the big phrase there because as I rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. Sometimes I'll be like, "Why do I keep forgetting this thing?" And I'll just insert a slide with that one word on it. So I just remember to say that one thing. So when it's really high stakes, some executives put the time in and some don't.
And I'd rather, if I had to pick, is the slide more important than the narrative? I'll pick the narrative and let them put stuff on the slide. If that's what they need to feel comfortable, then I'll do it. Not every venue can split. Not every venue can have a complicated slide. We've done that where just their fugly slide they love to present internally; they're looking at it and unpacking and the people behind them are clicking.
So something's going on completely different behind them than this pet slide they present to all the time that they're comfortable presenting with. But not every venue has it so it's splits it like that for the presenter.
Guy Kawasaki:
And what about the fact that PowerPoint has the notes view? Doesn't that take care of this problem?
Nancy Duarte:
Yeah, it does. For some people that are comfortable presenting that way. The execs that present a lot are used to using notes view. Ones that don't present as often as just part of their regular day. Some execs present one to three times a day moving from an internal employee meeting that might take one emotional energy and then they're running out to speak to investors, and then that night they have to give a gig up at Yerba Buena or whatever.
Getting each set up done the way that they like to present is work for their teams. Yeah, it's a lot of work, especially leading now how I have to modulate how I show up and the different methods I use to be prepared. I think being prepared is the most important thing. What I was saying about people that are too heavily teleprompted, it's just not as real as conversations are like this.
Guy Kawasaki:
So now from time to time, I encounter people who they use something called slide:ology which is it's not linear. It's flowing all over the place and stuff. And what's your thoughts about slide:ology and things that are not just pure linear click change, click change, click change?
Nancy Duarte:
Yeah. I have a book called Slide:ology that came out in 2008 and that has a different meaning for me. Slide:ology is about how to use color systems. What is a diagram? How do you plan out your talk? How do you plan out a narrative across multiple slides?
We call what you're talking about cinematic presentations where it's immersive and things are sliding around and moving around. And you can push Keynote and PowerPoint to do a really beautiful job. Some of the features that we used to push about six years ago made it so the slide was so messy.
Things are piled on top of each other that when it's not in slideshow mode, it made no sense and customers were like, "Ah." So then we had to start to split some of these cinematic moments across lots of slides. We do that all the time.
Almost every staged event we have these seamless transitions and moments that are just stunning, just absolutely stunning. And the wizardry, a lot of people think we're actually working in video and actually it's all built in Keynote or PowerPoint.
We even put video in there with the text in motion on top of video, and it's all in presentation tools. The power of doing it in a presentation tool instead of video, it lives on. You can keep changing the text, you can keep rearranging it. And they're very beautiful.
I think those are most appropriate for staged events. I think if you showed up to your product up update meeting and had swooshy slides, I think people would be like, "Wow, you have too much time on your hands." I had a client who banned those types of presentations. And the CEO, he was so fun.
He was like, "Yeah, I told everyone to just stop skinny jeansing all their slides." Because he thought people were sending everything out to designers that were skinny jeans all the time. And so he's "No more skinny jeansing our slides." So he banned anything that was attractive internally because he's like "What a waste of time and money to make anything attractive internally." So yeah, he banned all the skinny jeansing of slides. I thought that was hysterical. I actually support that.
Guy Kawasaki:
Now this is a risky question. I don't know. Do you have grandchildren or children?
Nancy Duarte:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
How old are your children?
Nancy Duarte:
My daughter's thirty-nine and my son is turning thirty-four in a week or two. And I have two grandsons, two boys, eight and five.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. Let's say that your children, not your grandchildren, but they say, "Mom, can you just give me the gist? I just started a new job." It's like, "Mom, how do I be a remarkable presenter? Just give me the gist, mom. I don't want to read your books. I don't want to watch your videos. Just tell me what to do, mom."
Nancy Duarte:
I would say start with empathy. Understand who you're talking to. Map it out, chunk it out into really clear structure. Have it be logical. Pick the most important thing they need to walk away with and turn that into some remarkable moment. We call them S.T.A.R. moments. And then obviously depends on what they're trying to do, but I think the empathy and the structure are so important and I'll stand by that. And then the slides are a nice to have.
My daughter actually won an international teaching award because she was one of the first to flip her classroom. And she learned how to do magic moves in Keynote and she's got millions of viewers on her YouTube channel.
And she never wanted to be me. She's always like, "I don't want to be you." After she started thinking about it, she goes, "Oh my mom, I'm you, but for educators." So she put together really great narrative for these students and then visualized a microbe and explained how it worked.
And how she did it was so well done that she wins awards for it. She never wanted to be me. They've not read my books. Everything you said is true. But now both my kids, because they're in business, they do what I do and they may have cracked open books now, just saying.
Guy Kawasaki:
Nancy Duarte, I must say that this has been a remarkable episode.
Nancy Duarte:
You’re remarkable.
Guy Kawasaki:
I kind of feel bad for your kids. You have some pretty big shoes to fill.
Nancy Duarte:
Yeah, it's hard. It's hard to be the presentation lady presenting to my own team or to my children because they have such high expectations for the presentation lady, but we've made it through that.
Guy Kawasaki:
Maybe my kids will ask me how to be an evangelist and I'll face the same challenges as you. And I'll tell them, "Read my books," and they'll say, "I don't want to read your books, dad. Just tell me what to do." And if you're wondering the answer to that question, I'll tell you the key to being a great evangelist is you evangelize a great product.
Nancy Duarte:
Yeah, that's true. You have to really believe it. Just that word. I know you coined it.
Guy Kawasaki:
Jesus was before me.
Nancy Duarte:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
All right, Nancy, thank you so much. This has been so fun. And I hope we've helped people become better presenters. I'm sure we have, actually. Thank you so much.
Nancy Duarte:
Thank you. Thanks for your remarkable work too, Guy.
Guy Kawasaki:
All the best to you. Bye.