Nancy Duarte: evaluation

Transcript context

…Okay, well this next question's going to be extra hard then. Of all the presentations you've worked on, which one stands out to you as the most memorable or most impactful? I mean, it has to be Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth. It kind of hit the world in a season where nobody really knew or had an example of a really well done presentation. So, it came out before TED Talks were even out on the web, and so people had never seen someone tell a data story and stand in front of data and the scale in 90 foot screen, but we had worked with him for five years before an Inconvenient Truth. People think he went from vice president to this presenter and I didn't work with him. I let my team work with him. So, they were the ones jetting around jumping backstage at Oprah. They loved it. It was a real peak season. But the thing actually that was most memorable is we work with these 20 some year old CEOs here in the Valley and they tend to show up and act like they know better than someone who's been doing this for so long. And what was so interesting about this large figure politician communicator is the team would sit in a room and say, "Hey, we think you need to do this way. We think you needed to convey it this way. We think it should be visualized this way." Or whatever it was we were proposing. And he would literally pause and touch his chin and really think, and really consider that we might actually be experts. And more times than not he would adopt the way we said it should be done. And so I think as the customer who actually probably had some of the most power in the whole world to thoughtfully defer to us as experts was delightful customer and consulting experience. I mean, I remember when they called me to say it was going to become a movie and that it had gotten funded and I started to get the information. They wanted us to do a lot of work to get it movie ready. And I'll never forget, I said, "Wow, that's going to be a lot of work we'd have to do for free, and who's going to go see a movie about a slideshow anyway?" That's literally what I said. So, yeah, I just didn't believe it would become what it became. So, the whole process was amazing. Did you expect the impact of what happened after that presentation or was it just like, oh, we got this one job we got to do, let's just get through it and then move on?…

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