Nancy Duarte

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• x.com @nancyduarte Her posts on storytelling and presentations

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  • Before you decide what to say in a high-stakes moment, you need to think through how you want your audience to believe and do differently after that moment. Because if you don’t know how you want them to change, you won’t know what your message needs to say. That’s where mapping your audience’s journey comes in. Start with where they are now: What do they believe? How do they feel? What are they doing? Then define where you want them to end up: What should they believe? How should they feel? What should they be ready to do? Once you know what you want them to move from and what you want them… 27 Oct 2026
  • It’s common knowledge now that you shouldn’t have dense slides…but the reality is, there’s a density spectrum. And figuring out the right balance of density for your specific context goes a long way in determining whether you can actually inspire your audience to act. Most meetings are what I call “read then discussed”. Those are often things like proposals, strategies, exec briefings, OKR reviews, etc. These need enough slide density that your deck can be read and understood before you walk through it. You obviously don’t want to cram your slides in these situations, but making them too spar… 20 Oct 2026
  • Leaders have strong intuitions about the future and the direction we should go. In January 2008, I sensed a crash was coming, and at our kickoff, I wanted to convey that the team to be prepared for a rainy day. But I also wanted them to deliver on our promise to customers, which was to create " The Greatest Show on Earth”. So, at the kickoff, I handed out umbrellas to my employees with “the show must go on” printed on them. I came in hot with a ton of urgency, and my company was shell-shocked by it. Afterward, people told me that I’d lost credibility because of it. Then the crash came…and I w… 15 Oct 2026

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  • When the Mac first came out, big design firms thought it was a joke. They were EXTREMELY slow to adopt the new technology (and many of them fell behind because of it). Because the Mac’s fonts were jaggy, it couldn’t kern properly, and it didn’t do leading, many of the established firms figured their existing equipment would outlast it. But this created a gap in the market. Many companies in the Bay Area wanted work produced digitally, but many of the big firms wouldn’t touch that kind of work. So, many of these design firms stuck with what was working at the time and dismissed digital because… 13 Oct 2026
  • What communication skills become more valuable in a world where AI can generate your slide deck, write your content, and even create visuals? I’ve been thinking through and researching that exact question for months. Because the reality is, AI is making it dramatically easier to produce the assets we use to communicate. But that doesn’t mean it’s getting any easier to communicate effectively (I would actually argue the opposite is often true!) For L&D leaders specifically, that’s making it harder to know which skills they should actually be training their teams on right now. That’s why I crea… 9 Oct 2026 surveymonkey.com
  • There’s one moment in your high-stakes presentation where your audience decides whether they’ll commit to your idea. If you miss it, you can give a “great” presentation that doesn’t change anyone’s mind. This moment is called “crossing the threshold”, and it happens in every single presentation you’ll ever give. It’s the stage in Campbell’s Hero’s Journey where your audience has been given a unique idea that shows them the problems with their ordinary world, and they’re faced with a decision: Will they adopt your idea…or will they stick with the status quo? Your presentation takes them to the… 25 Sept 2026
  • Many leaders know how to visualize data, some know how to analyze data, but few know how to communicate data well. That gap is why I wrote DataStory. It was obvious at the time I wrote it that the world was drowning in data (and now it’s grown exponentially). I’d been building models to explain what I was seeing, but I didn’t have a clear plan of what to do with them. Then I got a call from one of our largest clients asking whether I had anything I could say about data. I curated everything I’d built into a story and gave a keynote. When I finished, the executive who had hired me jumped out o… 21 Sept 2026 duarte.com
  • At our annual kickoff, I told my team that they needed to take AI seriously or they might not be a fit here anymore. This left some people feeling overwhelmed and wondering whether they still belonged (where most of our kickoffs leave them feeling energized). I had been convinced that we should be an AI-first company for two years. I even restructured things so that I could step away from the day-to-day and immerse myself in AI. But for most of my team, the morning of the kickoff was the first time they heard about any of that. I came in excited and laid out the vision, but it didn’t land the… 16 Sept 2026 forbes.com
  • There was a moment when I almost killed my company before it ever started, which would’ve been one of the worst mistakes of my life. When Duarte first started, it was my husband Mark’s thing. He was really into the desktop publishing industry and was “that guy” who would read all the manuals. The company was making very little money writing resumes and newsletters, but it was nowhere near enough to live on. And I was working 13 hours a day at a “real” job (while also raising a toddler). This was fine for a couple of years because small projects were trickling in, but when I got pregnant with… 9 Sept 2026
  • Should your presentation be data-driven or emotionally story-driven? Getting this right can determine whether your presentation succeeds. Your presentation shouldn’t rely on just one or the other…it needs a good balance in order to persuade your audience. We learned from Aristotle that every presentation needs three ingredients to persuade. - Solid evidence and data - An emotional connection that makes people care - Enough understanding of your audience to be credible The ratio of these ingredients is dependent on who’s in the room. Are they data-driven decision-makers who thrive on statistic… 3 Sept 2026 sloanreview.mit.edu
  • Today is @tim_cook's final day as CEO of @Apple . I wonder if building something from nothing is just as hard as inheriting something iconic. When Cook became CEO, he stepped into the shadow of one of history’s most mythic founders. He could have tried to imitate Steve Jobs but led as Tim Cook instead. He brought operational rigor to a company known for creative magic by protecting what made Apple Apple. In his farewell message to employees, he pointed to the culture, shared purpose, and people who brought out the best in one another. <-- that's what's lasting Thank you, Tim, for driving Appl… 31 Aug 2026
  • People often ask me what the biggest mistake I’ve ever made is… We’d worked with the honorable Al Gore for five years. We built presentations around the concepts in An Inconvenient Truth long before it was a documentary. We refined the messages and built the slides to support his roadshow. Then the producers called asking if we would donate our time to convert the deck to make it movie-ready. It was a lot of work. In exchange, they would put our name in every press release for the film. I said no. We would have to charge for it. We’d already given. We’d made sacrifices. We’d stretched. And I… 31 Aug 2026
  • In 2009, @danielpink gave a groundbreaking TED Talk called The Puzzle of Motivation. His goal was to show everyone that the ways we used to motivate employees simply wouldn’t work anymore. We needed to adapt to a new model…one built on intrinsic motivators like autonomy, mastery, and purpose instead of only offering rewards for good performance. So, how did he convince leaders to adopt this new paradigm? A huge part of it had to do with how he structured his TED Talk. Daniel’s presentation closely resembled what we call the Presentation Sparkline™ at Duarte. It toggled between “what is” (thei… 25 Aug 2026 youtube.com
  • You will not have every answer in every meeting. Your instinct may be to guess your way through or to piece something together on the spot. But you should actually do the opposite. When you speculate on an important question and the room senses it, you lose credibility with stakeholders. But if you can say “I don’t know” tactfully, you gain credibility instead. Here are 3 phrases you can borrow to do that: 1. “I don’t want to speculate here. Let me confirm that and follow up with you.” 2. “That’s a valid question, and I want to double-check before I give you a half-right answer.” 3. “That's n… 21 Aug 2026
  • Guaranteed way to get an audience to stop listening to you? Put a dense chart on a slide. You’ll get tuned out for at least 30 seconds while they process your visual. People can’t read and listen at the same time. You think you can. I think I can too. We can’t. So the moment a busy slide goes up, every head in the room drops into it to try to decipher what’s on it. They resurface half a minute later, having missed everything you said while they were down there. Here’s a better approach: Find the one thing that matters and make it obvious. If you have a bar graph where one data point is 25% hi… 18 Aug 2026 youtube.com
  • I got a C-minus in speech. And a D in English. That one year in college was pretty much the whole of my higher education for a long time. Two grades I was ashamed of, and then I was done. For years, that felt like a Scarlet Letter. I’d built a company that tells the world’s best communicators how to communicate. And the whole time, there was a voice in the back of my head: “You’re a poser. You’re going toe-to-toe with Stanford MBAs and Harvard MBAs in the Silicon Valley, and you’re just posing.” The funny thing is that, in 20 years of walking into rooms and telling powerful CEOs what to say,… 13 Aug 2026
  • When a change initiative starts to lose steam, many leaders look to the team first. They might think the team doesn’t “get it.” But what’s actually happening is usually upstream. The leader stopped retelling the story. The contrast between where they are and where they’re going has faded. The future they’re chasing stopped feeling real. At the organizational level, change works like a fire, not a “launch”. The announcement sparks the dream. But the fires die without stoking them. And most of us underestimate what it takes to keep it going. We hand the team a vision and assume it’ll carry itse… 11 Aug 2026
  • As leaders, we feel constant urgency to move faster with AI. But we lose something critical if we keep moving at a frantic pace trying to keep up… Over the past two years, I’ve been working almost exclusively in AI. I’ve poured my heart and soul into building tools, workflows, automating processes, and trying to make sense of what the future looks like. Then a few months ago, I came to a realization: AI runs at such an urgent pace; trying to keep up with all the models and changes happening in the industry is h-a-r-d. So, I intentionally slowed down. Each day, I spend a couple hours in “slow… 10 Aug 2026
  • Being a good leader means adapting your communication style to suit the situation you’re in. Over the years, I’ve noticed there are 4 key moments when leaders need to communicate differently: 1. The Dream moment This moment is the beginning of the company, a new endeavor, or an ambitious goal. People don’t need all the details yet, but they need to believe in the future you’re pointing to. Your job here is to create longing, to help them see a more ideal future and feel pulled toward it. If people can’t imagine it, they won’t move toward it. 2. The Resistance moment This moment is when a pers… 4 Aug 2026

  Link verified 31 Oct 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.