Nancy Duarte: The Storyteller's Guide to Remarkable Presentations

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0:49We 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? Yeah, we've been dracalacan 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 stage to talk. Or you could learn from us how to do it for yourself. So you can work with us or learn from us.

1:25Now, I don't know if you can publicly admit this, But 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? That may or may not be how we met, Guy. So, yeah, the rumor is true. So whether that client is Apple or not, you are an observer in Silicon Valley. So can you just explain to us from a pro standpoint, what were the elements that made Steve Jobs so effective as a speaker and presenter? Oh, that's amazing. I made a Steve Jobs bot just for fun, put all of the transcripts of all of his talks and I ask questions sometimes.

2:11I 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 30 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.

2:52So he'd 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. 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? 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.

3:32So I think that Apple knows the power of a presentation. Now, millions and millions of people stand in the, 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. 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.

4:11I 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? 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.

4:52And 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. Well, someone was at Starbucks ready to answer that call. Like every single person that was, as they flipped through the, scrolled through anything, the names chosen and curated, like every single detail is cared about almost in a literary way. Like 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.

5:36Like he's opposite of Steve and just as thoughtful in what he's delivering and how it's shaped. I would make the case that as you just described, Tim Cook, it means that you don't have to be, quote, a Steve. You can be something else and still be a good presenter. Exactly. Be your true self. Be empathetic to the audience and show up as your true self. 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? Most of our customer base on the consulting, the agency side, they know what it takes to put the work in.

6:15We 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, practices, practices, 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 like DubDub starts almost three months ahead of time.

6:51And 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. 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? No. You know, 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.

7:31It'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 peaks again. So there's like 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. I can't talk a lot about this supposed brand that we supposedly really do work with. I can't share too much. So tell us, obviously Steve is gone. So who else is in the Nancy Duarte Hall of Fame for presentations? Yeah, I would love to say all my customers, the ones that care. I think that Benioff is really strong.

8:13I 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 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.

8:49Do 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 gal is full of shit and thinks he or she is a natural and this is uncoachable. Does that ever happen? Usually who we hear from isn't them. They wouldn't be calling us if they're blind as a bat. Sometimes it's usually, 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.

9:29So it's really interesting. I wrote a book with Patty Sanchez, who's been on your show about, 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 scales didn't fall off the ice 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.

10:06And we're starting to see, I think, from my perspective, the companies who are really strong, strong, strong communicators are the ones that's going to win. And they are the ones that do win. And it is modeled from the exact 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 like stamp on a company, it means everyone from the CEO to the individual contributor needs the CEO needs to be modeling storytelling and the individual contributor needs to understand the mechanics of storytelling.

10:40And 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. 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. Well, my coaches. 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.

11:18And 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 that whole session, 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 to do that. 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?

12:03What do you do? 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.

12:38And 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, 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 your product is what is the customer is always the hero and the product has to help them get unstuck or has to help them have human flourishing.

13:17It 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.

13:40Okay, 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, if by 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? We stay massively apolitical. I think what's happening is the way people communicate has changed massively.

14:26The expectation of CEOs and politicians. I'm seeing that when CEOs show up too polished, too teleprompted, like 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.

15:04Those are actually my experts. 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.

15:42I know you didn't. I didn't answer a little bit about Apple. So it's very interesting. Backtracking a little bit, can you explain specifically what is the Duarte method? Yes. So the Duarte method is 100 % grounded in empathy with the kind of mechanism to it being story and storytelling. And so that's 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.

16:23So 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. 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? 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?

17:06So 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, right? He turned blue and he's like, wait a minute, now that I empathetically understand them, the Na 'vi are not our enemy, right? 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, like really understanding, does this meet something that's causing them pain? Will this get them unstuck? Will this create human flourishing?

17:42And 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. I 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? I think so. So empathy is, 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.

18:20She was missing the empathy gene. So she didn't know when I was in a room. She didn't know what I did, never really learned the names of my kids or their spouses. And 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, like before this talk, I spend 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 can already have my heart warm towards you.

19:02So 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 100 leaders and make them more empathetic in my lifetime, all of the suffering I went through would have been worth it. So mom was a mess and it's what made my body of work mostly powerful. Okay, 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.

19:42So that's why you're Nancy Duarte and I'm Guy Kawasaki. I know. But you get to get away with it. So you've said the S word several times. So give us the gist of how you become a great storyteller. 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.

20:24So again, there's this likable hero, they go through these hardships and they emerge transformed. That's the nature of a story. Well, if people and or leaders aren't willing to say, life was kind of 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, but 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.

21:07And 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 eight 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 Brene Brown, different people, they're like, hey, telling stories makes you come across as transparent and authentic. And it's because of the messy middle. It's because you have to go there and say, hey, mess this up.

21:38Messed it up real bad. I'm changed. I'm better for it. 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 pissed 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? 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.

22:12We 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, it's not quite as, 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 they did this thing. But yeah, telling stories that you did are more persuasive than stories someone else did, but they're both effective. 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.

22:59Let me give you an example. My uncle smoked a pack a day every day for 60 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? I think that gets into like how you can manipulate through the spoken word, right? 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.

23:38You probably don't even remember this. It was years ago. It's one of my biggest mistakes I've ever made. And I 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 about, 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, 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 women, as women, we were communal. So she was going to fully come down and not reach her dream just because I had altitude sickness.

24:14And 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 I bought myself a larger monitor or whatever, right? And it was so funny. Well, 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. Like if I'd gotten a memo that people outside of the room were going to hear that story, I never, ever would have told that story because it was so raw. And it was just, I don't know.

24:49I just, it was, it was just so raw for me. And you had, like when I was done, you had to add levity at the end because everyone's like, what the heck just happened? She just told this crazy, amazing story that overwhelmed me. Wait, wait, wait. Why was that a mistake? Because it put the other person in a bad light? No, it, 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. Okay, what's wrong? coming back. But I thought it was just for the women in the room, but it was actually being broadcast to the public. And I would have picked something different knowing it was a broad audience and not that it was a small room full of women.

25:30Wait, wait, I still don't understand what's the story. So what if everybody heard that story? I don't know. A couple of people at my company got some calls and they were like, I don't know. I saw Nancy tell some story about climbing the face a half dome i don't know why i just think of that as it just it was a mismatch just for the record i don't see a mismatch at all at all that that would be like simone biles telling sunny lee go for it i hope you get the gold in the you know the floor exercises what's wrong with that oh that's the moral of the story nothing was wrong with that but i mean you don't recall the intensity like the story has like 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 is a great story if that's one of your worst experiences one of your biggest mistakes you're doing all right my god that went close at least you didn't say she was a childless catless woman who went to the top without me no she likes dogs okay