Transcript of a conversation (YouTube video) between Nancy Duarte and Ramit Sethi discussing the role of storytelling in presentations. Nancy recounts how a trip to India inspired her to shift Duarte, Inc. from visualization-focused work toward building an explicit storytelling practice that adds content value clients cannot outsource.
Hi, I'm Nancy Duarte and I run a firm called Duarte, Inc. And we write and produce presentations for the greatest brands and thought leaders in the world today.
I'd love to talk about the process of storytelling and why is it so important and why don't we tell more stories as a quick background? We were just speaking before we started shooting, and. And I told you that was raised a very logical way, and you said, oh, I should be a software engineer. You're right. I should be wearing a Cisco polo shirt right now. But I was raised very logical. Show people the logic and the truth will come. And I think we both realized that's not really the way the world works. So I wonder if you can just take us to the background of your firm. And actually, before that, why did you get interested in. In storytelling and in particular, presentation design?
Well, it's interesting because I got interested in storytelling from a trip to India. So there was a group of executive women that were invited to come to India, and it was this amazing. They were all so much more qualified to be there. General counsel at Apple, board of directors at Adobe, all these venture capitalists, and I was the token bootstrap entrepreneur. And the country just opened its doors to us. We were at the Maharaja. We had dinner with a princess, met top executives. Woman who runs the stock exchange was this crazy trip. And I was on that trip kind of as a journey of my soul. I wanted to figure out the next phase of what Duarte needed to be, because I kept hearing stories of work being outsourced and work is getting outsourced to India. And I wanted to see how relevant is this threat to my firm. And at that point, we were doing the visualization. We did a lot of visual thinking. So we could take all your thinking, take, deconstruct it, reconstruct it, but we didn't add any story to it. And I thought, you know, if all this is going to get outsourced. I went on this trip to figure out what I felt we needed to do next. And I came back saying, we need to build a storytelling organization. And that's what we did. I knew that they could outsource the pictures, but they couldn't outsource the content. And so that's what we did. I started to hire a team, and we built a storytelling practice.
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