Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

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

June 1, 2023

AI Summary

5 min read

Nancy Duarte, a presentation expert who has shaped over 200,000 decks for clients like Al Gore and Apple, explains how to craft influential communication by prioritizing empathy, story contrast, and clear visuals. Drawing from decades of analyzing speeches and company pitches, she shares psychological mechanisms like brain alignment through stories and the power of longing created by alternating current realities with aspirational futures.

Empathy as the foundation

Duarte stresses starting every presentation with empathy, positioning the audience as the hero and the presenter as a mentor who helps them overcome internal doubts and external obstacles. This mirrors myths where mentors like Obi-Wan provide inner resolve (e.g., "use the Force") and outer tools (e.g., lightsaber) to enable action. In practice, she conducts listening tours via surveys and interviews to map audience gaps against proposed changes, testing rough message drafts for resonance before polishing. This works best for high-stakes talks, like internal vision updates, where skepticism is high, ensuring the audience feels understood and equipped rather than dictated to.

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What you'll learn

1 `* (03:31) **Intro and Career Highlights**`
2 `* (09:22) **Apple Lessons on Visual Innovation**`
3 `* (16:22) **3 Core Tips for Any Deck**`
4 `* (17:33) **Tip 1: Make Audience the Hero (Empathy)**`
5 `* (23:31) **Tip 2: Infuse Story (What Is/What Could Be)**`
6 `* (36:09) **Tip 3: Visuals to "See What You're Saying"**`
7 `* (50:00) **Crafting Process, Remote, and Nerves**`

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

Brought to you by Microsoft Clarity—See how people actually use your product | Lenny’s Job Board—Hire the best product people. Find the best product gigs | Eppo—Run reliable, impactful experiments

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Nancy Duarte is the CEO of Duarte Inc. and has helped create over 250,000 presentations for influential business leaders across the globe, including Apple, TED, the World Bank, and Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. She’s also written six best-selling books, and her TED talk has garnered over 3 million views. She regularly contributes to HBR, MIT-Sloan, and Forbes, and her books are essential reading in leading business schools worldwide. In today’s episode, we discuss:

• Why empathy is at the heart of everything Nancy does

• Why you’re presenting more often than you think

• Tactics for creating interesting presentations and telling better stories

• The concept of a “torchbearer leader” and why it’s important

• Strategies for overcoming stage fright and nerves

• Tips for communicating and presenting remotely

• How Nancy landed Apple as a client and what she learned

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Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/storytelling-with-nancy-duarte-how

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Where to find Nancy Duarte:

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/nancyduarte