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 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 am so happy that it happened Nancy is a best-selling 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 head 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 will love this episode with that I
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you looking for a new opportunity well either way check out lennysjobs.com Talent if you're a hiring manager you can sign up and get access to hundreds of hand created people who are open to New Opportunities thousands of people apply to join this Collective and I personally review and accept just about 10 of them
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from specific companies you can also leave anytime and you'll only hear from companies that you want to hear from check out lennysjobs.com Talent Nancy welcome to the podcast thank you for having me Lenny how many presentations have you helped craft at this point both directly and indirectly
that's a great question i i 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 like almost 10 years ago so I don't even I can't even I can't even tell you I mean it's
we stopped tracking so but it's a lot I mean in 35 years we have thousands of projects we open and each sometimes has two to 100 presentations in it so it'd be hard to tell 200 000. he said 250 000 but that was 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 so okay I was not expecting it to be that large that's insane it's so funny because I have the whole history of the Silicon Valley in a way right 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 it's it's uh I could actually verify that number exactly okay well this next question is 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 I mean it has to be Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth right and it kind of Hit the world in a season where uh nobody really knew or had an example of a really well done presentation so it
came out before TED Talks were even out um 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 like people think he went from you know 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 like they they loved it like it was a real peak season but the thing actually that was most memorable is you know we work with these you know 20-some-year-old CEOs here in the valley
and and they tend to show up and act like they know better you know than someone who's been doing this for so so long and what was so interesting about this large figure politician you know Communicator is we the team would sit in a room and say hey we think you need to do this 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 like touch his chin and really think and really consider that we might actually be experts and more times than not he would adopt the way we said it should be done and so I think as like the 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 you know 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 I said wow that's going to be a lot work we'd have to do for free and who's gonna go see a movie about a slideshow anyway literally what I said and so yeah I just didn't believe it would become what it became so the whole process was amazing
did you expect the impact of what happened after that presentation or is that was it just like oh we got this one job we got to do let's just get through it and then well we've been doing it for five years I think the strategy whether it was intentional or a lot or not I don't know so he would go City to City
to City to see he was traveling for five years seating like planting seeds for a Groundswell and he went into the you know he would go to the Stanford campus invite you know the Bay Area Elite and it was always private and it was always VIP and so he he did a really good job for five years traveling traveling
traveling traveling and and really really delivering that talk and I think that created a desire I don't know that it would have gotten that much traction I don't know if he hadn't 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 pick picture at least that part happening 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 I mean and paid you know mostly paid for what we did
that we did you know give a lot of our own time but yeah super generous and and yeah a movie became what it was it was a surprise a bit of a surprise but it was good the movie was good so it was good it also makes me uh think about a pattern that I often see of it wasn't just like one presentation that
changed everything it was you said five years of kind of prep ahead of that and it's you always see these like wow overnight success stories and you always find okay it wasn't actually that yeah and he did a good job after once it got traction we built like a whole training program where I could fly people out to
his place in Tennessee and start to train people so it almost became like a train the trainer and he could sanction you as a Ambassador for it so this is the way the whole thing kind of unfolded and scaled and then got traction was lovely 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 yeah it was yeah 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 and how you work with clients I love
that question so yeah I had like 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 uh 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 like bit Mappy because
look I could draw lines in here and he's a like 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 gonna go get yourself a real job you know I don't want you playing around with this little mac thing he begged me like twice in our marriage he like 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 oh wow I know I know right and and we slipped in like when you talk about a product life cycle very early like everything was still bit Mappy was not attractive you know most people as users didn't know how to type set 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 ugly it's bitmabbed nobody would do a font like that we use Lino type like it was very the snobby kind of we won't
touch it and that's right when we entered like right then went and checked out books at the library on type setting we tried to figure out what we could do how we could you know what could we do with this tool and then the rest was was kind of history and so that's how it started and and the timing and just kind
of pushing the tool that nobody was that interested in that were in the design community of a small adoption that's interesting that it was like old emails basically are called reach out just like hey we want to work with you yeah that's an awesome calling cold calling yeah okay what what did you take away from
that experience that kind of informed what works and doesn't work in presentations presentations used to be 35 millimeter slides in an old Carousel in fact that's what Al Gore had when he showed I was like here's my slide Carousel from the 70s like it was just how it was done but Apple was the first
company to hook up 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 kind of we were first in they pushed us to start to do the presentations in this tool and it was black and white like 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 clipart packages just came out they're like hey grab these colorize them and and so it was a really uh 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 gonna do it but I want you to take the whole slide like 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 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 and it was like I
didn't know how to like we couldn't do that we had to go into freehand convert it to this do this do these six steps and then we came up with a small jpeg at the time or ping 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 a couple people squealed they're like who did this how did what is I mean it was just the word big in magenta pink and and I just remember thinking this is how it's supposed to be done like the putting the tool in the hands of the masses kind of destroyed the medium itself and I feel
like the first 10 or so years I was in business it was reshaping this medium that ran a muck when it got into the hands of the users it just went completely the opposite way that it was supposed to so that it's weird to say that was a real difference moment for me to say wait 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 and then I think we're very good at mapping to the brand the brand requirements so we take this tool whatever the tool we have all the brand all our brands use different ones they use slides keynote uh they use PowerPoint like we use whatever tool the
brand wants and we push it in each medium and but we 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 like the visuals can become an experience it in itself and I just I remember when Apple came up with the think different campaign Steve
Jobs was just back and my designer everyone you know Photoshop was new and everyone's doing these beveled backgrounds with tons of crap on the background like it you know and I walk by I'm like no oh we can't have a blue frame looking photo frame to for the think different campaign it's not going
to work and so I just I remember looking at all the posters and remembering the Alfred Hitchcock ones that had his particulates like these particulates and it was just shadows 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's 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 I think those are just a couple's stories of how how to really push the medium in a way that is more pleasing to the audience like 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 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 watched videos of like how to give a great presentation uh but myself and I feel like most people sit down at a deck when they are about to present two in all hands say a week later or are you going to do a meeting and I'm always just like what okay what do I do if
let's 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 gonna write a Post-It to myself of three bullet points of things that I should remember when I'm starting a deck what
would those three bullet points 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 but let's dive into these then so and I was actually going to ask around empathy and it feels like that comes up a lot in your in your recommendations to people's empathy is kind of the heart of your methodology of telling great stories telling great presentations so it's been
a little time there why why is that so important and what does that actually look like in practice 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 narcissists 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 or because you have to have to have to think about who am I speaking with specially 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 is the hero they're the central figure they're talking the most they're well lit they're up on a stage so when I started to look at all the archetypes that's where I landed and then I was like oh my God you know 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 like the audience gets to make a choice if they accept or reject your idea so the 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 like I think Obi-Wan Kenobi is a great example he did two things for Luke Skywalker he gave them a lightsaber
which was for his outer Journey the physical Journey he was doing now 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 have an empathetically thought about how hard what you're asking them is going to be for them to
do and so it just 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 that's just a super foundational principle in everything we do what is an example that in practice as we go through these because this is really great
um of that uh implemented like that we know about maybe yours oh that we know about so I could talk about our own internal ones most of most of what we do is under msas because they're Fantastical Brands so in our in my own company we 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 like we literally there's some uh 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 exact 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 like we don't spend time on the slides 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 the it's hard it's hard to go from like rough cut here's what we're going to say to making it absolutely resonate and then 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 like 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 so when I travel and
speak they're like oh my God I love your models oh my gosh can I can get a picture with you right 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 right there they come in more
skeptical and we we definitely have nailed the annual kickoff meeting definitely have nailed that and then we do quarterly quarterly updates to that annual kickoff meeting and it's a Cadence and people get enthused and and we're kind of killing it right now yeah that's what it feels like from the outside I'm just
thinking about uh the pressure to create presentations within Duarte design yeah uh if it's like if you think about your job as hard uh creating a deck for your company yeah presentations in front of presentation experts is like oh my God and I get nervous like 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 you know they're such experts so it's hard 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 like signs that you're doing it well or not well like is there like the way the flow of the story start is it like here's the way it starts or like what should people identify like I'm doing this well or I'm not doing this well if the audience is the hero you would see visible signs
that they get it people would come like before I did a really good talk and people were tweeting saying hey come to this talk it's really good so there's you'd see a reaction you know you've done it well uh 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 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 is being told and
the science is beautiful like 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 and so by by implementing attributes of story like a beginning a middle and an end and we have a method for that and then and also
incorporating the rise and fall like the story kind of builds tension and releases it and that's why we love it so much as we escape through kind of someone else's messy metal and conflict and problems like it's messy and then it resolves like you build the tension and resolve it and that's what a really well
structured presentation can do it can can pull on that rise and fall in a way that creates longing so story story creates longing it 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 like so many people
escape through sci-fi they escape through movie making into these future worlds right 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 kind of this Cadence of Rise and Fall that's how
you that's how you can incorporate story into a presentation where you need to influence others it's it's actually really can be beautiful when it's done well and so you gave a tedx talk on this exact topic and so I want to go deeper here and you kind of share this very um visual way of thinking about a great
story where it kind of goes up and down and up and down like these teeth uh almost I can actually talk about yeah it does can you um share with 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 value so impactful and
important yeah I love that I so I went on a three-year journey through story and I knew that the greatest speeches over all time did have that rise and fall and rise and fall but it wasn't one single story it it had a whole lot of other very important information but it still did this rise and fall and Rise
and Fall so I am not a digital native I took a quarter inch graph paper and I would listen to all kinds of 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 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 you can't you can't map something over time and have it be a zigzag zigzag there was too much data loss so to verbally describe it you could picture a line at the bottom of your screen and that line uh going left to right 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 uh 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 the last one 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 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 or our current reality and makes them long for this future state by using contrast so
that rise and fall of hey here's our current problem here is a solution or here's the State of the Union but we imagine it could look like this like there's so many different ways to build that Cadence of of contrast that's so lovely and it it I mean it really works I I think the top came out in 2011 and
and the amounts of notes and emails of things people have accomplished by changing the structure of their presentation has been really astounding the state of the union is a really interesting example because I'm trying to imagine this in uh presentations I've seen and that totally resonates of just like here's the problem we're having and
here's where we're gonna go here's another problem we're having here's what I'm going to change Dave Jones was great at that like when he launched the iPhone speech like he always did like 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 you
know you always did a setup of 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 like the Blackberry you know it's like look how much it sucks now that you've seen what we're doing like it's just as what is what could be what is what could be
and so I took all the classic speeches historical speeches uh everything presidential speeches and knew that if I could 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
I had solved it using story it was it was a really great moment to to finally draw that out on my quarter inch graph paper I love that it was awesome I feel like there's just so much opportunity for primary research like that still like I feel like that's why my newsletter does well is I just spend the time doing that work that you're
describing and watching a thousand interviews and then just distilling here's a takeaway here and so um pattern finding that's an interesting point I I worry sometimes you know with the emergence of new technologies and stuff the ability to be able to sit and think synthesize and all of that is because
you don't you 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 that you do that so well and it really shows that wow yeah yeah you're really putting your mind and heart into it all enough about me um 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 like is this when you have like an epic important presentation you think
about a story structure like this or is there always a way you should do kind of you know put this into your presentations of like some kind of story with this contrast interesting question and I 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 quick with a real quick what is what could be new Bliss kind of just that first bit like what is
what could be new Bliss it's like even uh the very very short short talk that Abraham Lincoln gave in the Gettysburg address those 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 they 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 and getting the husband to do some chores for me like it
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 know you add the visuals you really hire the speaker coaches you really make that moment 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 you should if if you practice it enough it'll live in your head as a mental model for when you know you're in a situation where where there's influence in the air that you could do what is uh how do you actually do it with your husband if you
could share for helping him well I won't get graphic about what the new Bliss might be but you know early in our marriage we figured out that when we not early I actually spent almost only the last 10 years we've been married for 40. and and we realized that when we tangle it's it's usually only about process so the
gaps are when I if I ask or he asked 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 he'll you know why are you chopping onions like that he'll say to
me and now I'm like oh we have a process Gap you want to chop the onions or do you want me to chop them my way you know and so for the what is what could be a new Bliss it happens all the time 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 could you take the dog over to the 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 back meetings in fact I'm gonna 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 gonna have to reschedule next week and next week is just load it up and I you know how it is when I'm stressed out at the end of the day and it's really I'm kind of hard to deal with you know and I'm saying well
what could be you know what the doggy place you know she was loved it last time she was spooning with a red Cavalier King Spaniel and loved it you know 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 uh us like 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 like 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 and everyone knows that so that's just baked into our
our marriage our company just how it rolls I imagine people listening to this podcast we're not expecting marriage advice and so I love that you can scrap that if it doesn't work the process tip that was good it's gonna be the best part this is going to be the whole podcast is just a second just joking but
this is this is really good advice I'm gonna try to use it myself so the structure is I think it's even easier to think about this less as like story infused story like for me it's more this what is what could be what is the ideal Bliss like that's almost a simpler way to think about it the story is this like
oh my God I gotta think of a story it has a beginning middle and an end so the first what is is the beginning the 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 you know in Western cultures
where is like a happy ending so the new Bliss is just imagine a world with your idea adopted just and then you paint a picture of that world poetically or pragmatically and it works it definitely works okay this is really great right 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 thing different campaign is an excellent example that because it's about you thinking differently and being this incredible exactly creative okay and then item two is Infuse your presentation with story and this what is what could be you Bliss and then okay
and number three what was number three again oh it was ask yourself if they can see what you're saying can they see what I'm saying would be what would be written on the note I love this okay let's talk about that what does that mean and how do you do it 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 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 a 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 like when 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 like especially architecture slides or or just how technology works as something flows through a complex
system when people can see that and it accompanies your verbal narrative that you can actually understand what you're conveying and 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 an 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 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 and then 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 what is this what are we all fighting for what do we all living for what are we all working for and those moments of alignment are so so important
and I'm 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 right I can 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 I see the final beautiful picture but I've only served up a you know a little tiny mosaic tile you know 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 a powerful CEO and as she was talking it's like I could see her I was watching her hand motions too and she was like in this thing and this and like she's moving her arms around in in a distinct way and I said I can tell you you have a
picture in your mind's eye let me draw for what I and I did the same thing walked up Drew had this had this at this and and she's like exactly and 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 to be rolled out to the
entire retail it was like 100 000 retail workers needed to understand this graphic and and 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 that reminds me of uh 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 friends like you should you should draw this on a slide yeah unless it's such a powerful
hand gesture right you could do that because your body is Visual and the other thing we try to get our customers to do is like if Dr King had slides that day of the I Have a Dream speech it just would have been as beautiful like 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 100 focused on your on your body how you're showing up and on the words coming out of your mouth is and they're verbally seeing what you're
saying versus actually pictorially saying what you're saying is it's good I like the idea that people are not staring at me and I prefer them distracted with a slide but uh but I want to talk about like nerves and stuff presenting in a bit Yeah but uh that's interesting so you're 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 like an internal meeting it's really powerful to just have uh obviously just like 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 some of you
recommend and then generally any just like very tactical advice on how to make a slide yeah the the concept that each slide should make one point so your 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 and 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 a lot of some consulting firms where the slides
are much denser because they were paid millions of dollars to make a big old deck you know some of them are like oh it always belongs in the lower right corner it always belongs 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 dock which I think your listenership is interest would be interested in presentations go from a big staged event to like in a meeting where 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 pictures 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 and you could circulate those and people read it you write full sentences you write full prose it's kind of like the six page
memo that's so popular to Amazon but we contend the DF 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 like don't make a single slide unless it supports the one big idea of your whole talk that's another principle for sly making because most people go back to like 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 and that's a cop-out like some most of the time if you really think empathetically about your audience the 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 just really got it I mean you gotta know your audience you got to know how they communicate who they talk to and and map to that this episode is brought to you by EPO EPO is a Next Generation a b testing platform built by Airbnb alums for modern growth teams companies like
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at get eppo.com that's getepo.com and 10x your experiment velocity what's your take on the Minto pyramid principle I don't know if you think about that okay yeah because yeah because there's a recommendation of just like start with the conclusion and then explain why and you're saying sometimes
that's effective sometimes not maybe in yeah and then sometimes it's effective so the mental principle is amazing like she's got the uh was it horizontal and vertical thinking so your main Segways are your main section heads should add up and then all the slides should support it and then also uh how the
construct of it is and when you're when 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 it's a certain type of an audience that that works for 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'm
gonna share you some share with you something today that and you share how your solution increases human flourishing like it needs to be tied to the humanness and the big problem you're going to solve and how human solving how humankind will benefit well that's different than just like 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 uh that's quite a bit different too but that work is solid and it was based kind of like my work her 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 and then come up with solutions that are based or in story and are based in a broader a bit of a broader application
across companies but I have tons of respect for that body of work awesome and we'll link to uh I wrote a post about this whole concept for because I want to dig deeper maybe one more question around tactical slide stuff and I know this is like 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 like what else maybe people should keep in mind to make it effective and let's say this is for like a small meeting yeah that's a good question I think that if do some thinking first if it if it's important like 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 side so just think and plan for a minute and we tend to draw like storyboards it's like okay the first point the second
point the third point or the you know just think first it could be analog or digital like put a page in front of all your decks it's just boxes just just get the narrative right and then when you actually open up the software that's where you have to think about what are this what's the slide type that will
convey this the most is it a table put it table especially for program managers you have to convey dense project information program information product information and that comes with density so if you're in a room with your peers and everyone in the room is a team and everyone has their own shorthand and way
of working put that common slide up there that common slide for that team might be dense to the outside world but 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 single meeting 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 you're just talking about process and that is a great segue to a question I wanted to ask is just what is your what does your process look like when you're working with a company to help them craft an awesome presentation yeah yeah it's funny because I I don't have to do this much
anymore I haven't done I haven't done it for about 15 years which is nice I have a gorgeous team of strategist writers conceptual thinkers beautiful coaches it's a yeah I know I get I get coached I get it's fun I I definitely my books look awesome not because of me but because I'm followed around by people
that are do really gorgeous work but you know the the phrase that we use internally and sometimes with customers is uh we 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 it's a big deal in this moment you have
to win in the moment to push things along and so we do like 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 and then we 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 model right away too and we start to circulate that around the company because every everyone has to build consensus around it so sometimes there's multiple motions happening at
the same time like 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 you know and so and then it gets reassembled yeah 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
that yes the it's the voice track that all the all that process supported and then other times we're building a report in a slide dock or uh there was a time where we had a multinational head of a multinational company that will remain nameless and and the guy that was head of all of India was going to come over
here and petition the CEO for 100 million dollar 100 million dollar budget it's not trivial and he comes it's like okay I need your help with these five slides and he just sends us the five slides and we're like well yeah 100 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 them 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 them have eye contact let me see your passion like don't be dispassionately looking at this computer and he did it and he called us and he's
like I got 100 million bucks you know so it's just those moments that there's just those moments where you have to realize wait wait wait do I need a deck who am I talking to and should I should I is this a cookie cutter thing and is 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 along the same lines a lot of presentations now are actually remote and on Zoom yeah and virtual what do you recommend to people in terms of how they present and put presentations together being remote 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 in my heartwarms like
I know you're there I feel you I can say I can get Sensations in my skin when when I know I'm talking to someone that's that that I adore or admire and that took a long time uh to get there and I was presenting remotely pre-covered so a lot of our coaching was about eye contact and doing but the
other thing that happens is people don't see our hands anymore like they're under the table they can't see much space in a room we're taking up they can't 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 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 they're not used to it it's been so long and then the other thing is you know how where do I sit in a room who's got the position of authority like just kind of some classic things that convey information in real life that 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 I was half in the office and half people are remote and the people that are remote are having a hard time hearing getting their voice is 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 while they're remote it's all changing I'm glad that uh I was not a PM in this remote world to be honest I I never experienced it so and but I have a lot of empathy for being a product manager
and yeah in this world remote work World feels like the job got a lot harder it did I think it did yeah so let's talk about nerves and Stage right so I hate public speaking I get extremely nervous people maybe not feel this when they watch me but yeah it's not my natural state
uh 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 I know who are more thoughtful and contemplative about speaking have better content like 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 like anyone who's like it 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 it's hard like my my husband is actually brilliant Communicator is just getting him to feel like he wants to take up the space he's um 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 like that's literally what's happening and so you a couple things you could do you can actually sit in one of the seats of the uh of the auditorium
and just sit there and look at the stage look at the settings 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 remember that you saw yourself sitting there
smiling and very happy you have to change your visual model that 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 the biggest battle is to get you out on the stage and and and um delivering it and those are my I asked a bunch of people once I did like 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 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 jibber 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 like if there's someone real famous in the audience I have a little list a little 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 is a it's chemical and you have to train your Chemistry a bit oh I really like that tip uh what are these funny things you watch if you it's like YouTube things Tick Tock thing like just things that I tag and I try not to watch them or things that make me laugh like there's
this dorky and low like low watched video of a a guy with tin cans wrapped around his waist and he plays him and my husband walks around the house like like him and making the noise and I could probably sing the beat if I had and so sometimes I just play that because I I it just transports me home because a lot
of times I'm presenting away from home and it just makes me laugh at my at my husband who's hysterical and so it's just random random things but if you laugh and and somehow can transport yourself outside of the fear of walking out there it it helps reset you before you walk out on stage I really like that is there anything
else just uh the diver head that just like right before you go on stage that you find to be really effective so watching funny videos I love that it's breathing music anything else oh some I breathe I think I I've learned a breathing pattern I take three I take a deep deep breath and then I take that
one while on 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 uh get over their fear by head banging 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 could
do a talk and so I literally uh didn't do that but I stretched I bounce 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 and they my assistant got a call and
they were like we're a little worried about Nancy we think she might not need to see a doctor she could never control her breathing and we're really concerned and it was just because I just pumped myself up a little bit and I so I don't do that not whatsoever anymore I went back to my calming contemplative
meditative uh pre-talk ritual so for some people literally I do encourage people to try head banging to heavy metal it might work it's just a matter of what you need and ever nobody would guess that I'm not one to to dance around or pump myself up I am not I have to calm myself down it's the opposite awesome just just a few
more questions sure 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 yeah I loved writing that book a 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 went met with Marshall Gans at Harvard to say hey could this be true because he studies movements it was so fun and then the 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 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 so you 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 like 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 it headed that's the dream phase then there's this moment where they either choose to jump in and go with you or they choose not to you can talk about Frodo like Sam and only a few Hobbits followed him you know and so it's like
people select to commit to this journey and that's the beginning of your movement uh but then the middle is the messy middle of a story it's 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 client 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 so this is It's like a fight climb fight claim fight climb and then ultimately you arrive each one of those five phases you need to use speeches stories Sarah monies 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's it literally is about fueling the right emotions the speech of story 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 that's I loved that book it people are
really feeding off of it right now because leading change has been what Non-Stop it's just been changed changed changed the last special few years change is the only constant like they say exactly I really like this metaphor of the torch giving you a sense of light 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 that you give it an interview where you share that you you had kind of two videos one where it was very informal you're just sitting standing in front of whiteboard and like jeans or something
just like talking about some but 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
I think video content production quality Now isn't the the expectation for it being high quality is 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 a Stan I'm
gonna look right I'm gonna have this eye contact I'm gonna nail it my slides are gorgeous I'm I'm driving the industry and 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 uh 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 I delivered it really well and then I thought that 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 trumpy and a little bit orange not it's not color corrected but it's super informative like really full of information and that was my highest viewed video so far and I realized that it's like you know 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 swooshy things forward and swooshing things back like that kind of nature of it was is not necessary to get the message across and so we actually have a
whole process and programmer rolling out where you're gonna 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 door day I'm
trying to make it so it's like so many experts work it towards you gotta watch any video from any of them is where we're moving it towards their their freaks of Brilliance and just experts they're world-class experts so that's what we're trying to do I feel like you have a similar challenge to me where I
named my newsletter Lenny's newsletter yeah same thing yeah anyone else it's a challenge but yeah and 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 related Stories the product management process
has multiple phase there's the creative explorative process all the way through to Getting It produced and I think this story gets you 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 we 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 pick 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 and it was just because they actually thought about okay well 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
like after all this work people put into product and the making of the product and the managing of pushing it through with a large client that makes shoes or athletic things I love telling stories but I can't say this yeah and there's there's this moment right where we get brought in and like could you please train our product
people and story like what's the big problem 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 like it's red and 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 you know it was like here's my shoe it's red and 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 reject it 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 you know what gets accepted and then the big reveal like you think about even all the Big Apple launches it's about a big product reveal it's about it's about revealing
this thing that had been hidden for so long and it's another moment you know to tell Amazing Stories so that's kind of a little bit of an Insight on the product side of how to use story the Airbnb example is an awesome example uh it's all true when I joined Airbnb is actually right there right in the
process of doing that I love that and they ended up drawing these keyframes of the journey as you described and they became 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 gonna do that's awesome looking experience awesome make the arrival experience awesome so there's a lot of Truth to that and that was visualized right the vision was visualizing is here's what we're headed in the future and it was
super clear I love that story yeah yeah so cool you were there yeah it was very cool and they actually were very mobile you could like grab one of these drawings and bring it to your desk and like how are we gonna make this moment better this is awesome yeah and um and it was actually need to fix our storyboard artists that they hired for
like a year that was his job draw these keyframes oh and that's amazing and it connects so directly with your point about empathy like this is the epitome of empathy hears with the guest and hosts are going through and and here's where we can do better yeah it's amazing yeah it does tie together if um folks
want to look this up by the way we'll look at Link in the show notes uh if you just Google Snow White Airbnb you can watch a video of how they all in a game Above This well with that we reached our very exciting lightning round I've got six questions for you if you're ready yep I'm ready
what are two or three books that you recommended most to other people 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 um Chris vogler's The Writer's Journey where he took Joseph Campbell's Heroes Journey made it 12 steps and it was Disney he was a Disney story analyst so it's it's just really classic body of work that'll really helped people get their minds around story and the archetypes what is a favorite recent movie or TV
show it's my little sinful pleasure it's I'm way into kdrama 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 is there a favorite I know we just my my husband just lost 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 it's they're just real they're just cute as button and they have a longer Arc though like an epic length tail they drop in 12 part Seasons like or one season 12 anyway don't even get me started it sounds dumb because I like the Epic Tales and The dramas but
what is a favorite interview question that you like to ask people that you're hiring oh favorite interview question and we ask a lot about um 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 if that's uncomfortable or the psychometrics are
uncomfortable it's they're not really a fit because we are a systemic story culture and uh 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 they're and and then adapt and
change under our care then we don't hire them what is a favorite product you've recently discovered that you love I'm 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 like 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 and so we put really good prompts in and we get a really good product out so I'm super excited about that I'm actually an investor in that company so this is great to hear oh yeah that's awesome writer.com yeah
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 yeah I think there's the biggest roadblock for so long that made things painful was to edit Cycles how do we do around with a client then
you have multiple versions 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 related 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 site and it's really easy like you could put it in thumbnail mode and be like we're 80 complete everyone's going to focus on just these two things so that that part of the process especially Enterprise at scale where 20 or 30 people are contributors to a deck that that little process we made is
clients are really liking it to leave people with one final tip to give better presentations what would that be 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 I you know 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 come will 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 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 as I might not be as passionate about Nancy I so appreciate you making time for this it's been an honor everything
you're amazing 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 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 at Nancy Duarte and I do connect to everyone who connects me on LinkedIn which is kind of fun so I I think uh how could they be useful to me I think 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 what a beautiful way to end it Nancy again thank you so much for being here oh you're amazing thanks for having me we're amazing we'll send it we are let's just say it bye everyone thank you so much for listening if you
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