How To Deliver Great Presentations
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Nancy Duarte’s new book “Resonate” is technically about how to give great presentations, written by a designer whose firm makes great presentations. But the book is really about communicating, and is one of the best on the topic you’ll ever read. It is simple (deceptively so), clear and tells great stories. It takes you places where you want your head to be. This, it turns out, is the point of her book. Great presentations work on you like great stories: They carry you away for a little while in a well-crafted net of structure, contrast, emotion, suspense. Then you’re returned to your old self, utterly convinced what the speaker said is true. That’s how it’s supposed to work. Many books about public speaking or communicating are themselves failures at communicating effectively. Duarte’s book is a highly effective presentation.
The best part of the book are the diagrams called “sparklines” (an Edward Tufte-ism) that Duarte uses to deconstruct into small elements key speeches or talks by Martin Luther King, Steve Jobs, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley pastor John Ortberg and Boston Philharmonic conductor Benjamin Zander. Each sparkline shows changes in emotion and delivery, shows where and how the audience reacted and shows when and for how long the speaker ferried the audience between a state of understanding “What is” (or where their heads are probably at) and “What could be” (or where you want them to go). It’s highly instructive to follow Duarte’s sparkline of Steve Jobs’ 2007 iPhone launch presentation while watching the video. Duarte says she used three reams of paper to annotate Jobs’ presentation. In his sparkline, Jobs spends most of his time in the realm of “What could be” and only comes down to the realm of “What is” to show how his products are superior to those of his rivals. He repeats the word “cool” so often it begins to color the audience’s perceptions (as if they needed any assistance there).
Duarte said she spent two years working nights and weekends on the book, synthesizing the work of all the usual sources in storytelling and narrative structures: Aristotle, Robert McKee, Syd Field and Joseph Campbell. Duarte puts the ideas to work in her day job, running the firm Duarte Design in California, which produces presentations for the likes of Cisco, Twitter, Google, Nokia and General Electric as well as politicians and pundits. Duarte Design worked with Al Gore on the “Inconvenient Truth” presentation and is a go-to advisor for several of the presenters at the annual TED conferences.
Duarte calls “resonate” a prequel to her last book “slide:ology,” which tackled the craft of visual presentations. The new book is engaged more with theory. The points she makes about emotion and structure would be obvious to a (decent) Hollywood screenwriter or (serious) second-year M.F.A. student, but they’re not well-known to a regional vice president for sales. The conclusions are: Don’t be too cerebral. Tell stories. Figure out what the audience cares about. Create common ground with them. Move back and forth between opposing ideas to create energy. Deliver facts but put them in context and make them shocking if possible. Find inspiration anywhere you can.
If you have 18 minutes to spare, you absolutely must watch Benjamin Zander’s 2008 TED talk on the joys of classical music. Duarte analyzes it in her book. Even if you hate classical music–especially if you hate it–you cannot help but be persuaded to love it after Zander is done weaving story and emotion into his talk.
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