Nancy Duarte, Slide:ology

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. Nancy Duarte 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 Nancy and I 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 Duarte on Twitter at @NancyDuarte and on Duarte Design’s blog.

Listen to my interview with Nancy Duarte

0:16    Michael introduces Nancy Duarte
0:50    Nancy Duarte’s book Slide:ology
4:06    Why the recession has helped as much as hindered Duarte Design’s success
11:24   The power of “the controlling idea”
22:14   Why you need to consider the S.T.A.R. moment
24:31   Why “Best In Show” is a modern movie masterpiece
25:07   Nancy’s new book Resonate
27:27   How to learn more about Nancy Duarte
27:52   Michael closes the interview

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