Years ago I first heard Tom Peters championing design as something that really mattered, something that was at the heart of Great Work, not just a last minute make-it-look-pretty addition. Starting the Great Work Interviews rolling with Nancy Duarte is the perfect start. She’s the CEO of Duarte Design, author of the terrific book Slide:ology and the designer behind, amongst other things, Al Gore’s presentation on An Inconvenient Truth. She and her firm have been upping the ante on presentation design in Silicon Valley and beyond for nearly twenty years. This matters. If you work in an organization, if you want to do more Great Work, you need to be able engage people with your ideas, not smother them with bad PowerPoint. That’s what Nancy stands for.

In this interview we talk about:

• Why the recession has helped as much as hindered Duarte Design’s success
• The power of “the controlling idea”
• Why you need to consider the S.T.A.R moment
• And why “Best In Show” in a modern movie masterpiece

You can follow Nancy on Twitter at @NancyDuarte and on Duarte Design’s blog.

Listen to my interview with Nancy Duarte

If you enjoyed this post, you'll also like:

1. Great Work Interview: Garr Reynolds, author of ‘Presentation Zen’
2. Great Work Interview, Matt May author of In Pursuit of Elegance
3. Great Work Interview Jason Fried of 37Signals, author of Rework
4. Three reasons why you should care about design (and five people to listen to this week)
5. Great Work Interview Dan Roam, author of ‘Back of a Napkin’

Tags: Author, Business, Choice, Design, Focus, impact

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