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

**Nancy Duarte** (0:00)
A lot of people think that the only time you really need to present well is when you have a big stage talk, and you make the big investment in the script, the big investment in the contrast in story. But to you dirty little secret, I can get my husband to do chores for me on the weekends with a real quick, what is what could be new bliss. So the ability to just have that contrast as a framework in your brain during a meeting, on a phone call, any moment of influence, that really it works, it works in any format.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:29)
Welcome to Lenny's podcast where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today, my guest is Nancy Duarte. Nancy is the type of guest that I never imagined being able to get on this podcast, but I'm so happy that it happened. Nancy is a best-selling author, speaker, and CEO of Duarte Inc, which has helped create over 250,000 presentations for the world's most influential business leaders, brands, and institutions, including Apple, TED, Google, the World Bank, and famously Al Gore on his Inconvenient Truth presentation. In our conversation, Nancy shares a ton of tactical advice for how to improve your own presentations, how to tell better stories, how to lay out convincing arguments, how to reduce your nerves when you present, and even a simple communication framework to improve your relationship dynamics. I had such a good time chatting with Nancy, and I'm sure you will love this episode. With that, I bring you Nancy Duarte, after a short word from our sponsors.
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Nancy, welcome to the podcast.

**Nancy Duarte** (3:31)
Thank you for having me, Lenny.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:33)
How many presentations have you helped craft at this point, both directly and indirectly?

**Nancy Duarte** (3:38)
That's a great question. People know I'll take a swag at data and pretend it's real.
So I had a president who took a whack at that number in 2014 And he said at that time it was 225,000, and that was like almost 10 years ago. So I can't even tell you. I mean, we stopped tracking. But it's a lot. I mean, in 35 years, we have thousands of projects we open, and each sometimes has 200 presentations in it. So it'd be hard to tell.
He said 250,000, but that was 10 years ago, and I didn't do the math. So when my team questioned it, I'm like, oh, Dan did the math. They're like, oh, then it's accurate. Because they thought I was just making up this number. I'm like, no, no, we actually went in and looked.