A Must Read For Every Executive Presenter:
RESONATE: Present Visual Stories That Transform Audiences, Nancy Duarte
Presentations are undoubtedly my favourite business topic. We all need to get better at giving them. Even with the most adept of communicators there’s always room for improvement. It’s not about slides, oration, tonality, body postures or any of that introspective stuff, it’s about the audience – and how we resonate with them.
Resonate by Nancy Duarte is quite simply the best guide to creating engaging presentations that I have ever read. Written as a sequel to her best-selling Slide:ology, which explains how to visually display your ideas, Resonate is in fact the essential pre-requisite which teaches you how to refine and focus your ideas to just those things that will transform your audience, amplifying the signal and minimising the noise.
Whilst I’ve consumed countless guides and courses, most of which have been full of good advice and useful pointers, not until I read Resonate had I seen the complete answer in one place, explained as a system we can really use. At last a complete set of ingredients with cooking instructions: this book should be every executive’s presentation bible. It contains a lifetime’s work, hundreds of gems of advice and covers all of the things we need to turn our presentations into visual stories that will, if we commit to preparing well, transform audiences and serve us brilliantly throughout our careers.
As a visual learner myself, it particularly helps that this book has been so immaculately produced. The hard work involved in creating a book of this quality transforms it from a just good read into an invaluable reference source – with examples, notes and graphics that precisely illustrate the point.
In fact, using the story-telling frameworks will serve you in all forms of business communication, whether you’re in conversation, writing web pages, letters or designing the world’s next big innovation.
Put a couple of zeroes on the end of the price tag and I think we’re getting closer to its true value. There’s nothing more powerful to inspire positive change than a great idea shared with resonance and transparency. Nancy cracks the code and shows us how.
