(Unless You Want the Power to Change the World)

Frankly, I am not sure I want everyone to know about Resonate, a book authored by Nancy Duarte. That is because it deals with something very powerful: the use of a story structure within a presentation to connect with an audience, engage them, and get them to think, feel, and act the way you want them to.

Consider of the meaning of that. If you can get people to think, feel, and act as you want them to — simply by talking to them! — that is real power. And if you can do those things to bring about something better in this world, that is leadership. And Resonate shows you how to gain this capability.

What if you could do that? If you could generate that power, if you could project that leadership, what could you achieve? Imagine what you could accomplish, what your organization could accomplish. This is heady stuff.

Now of course there will be the skeptics. They will query, “What does ‘story’ have to do with anything? Why can’t I just lay out the facts and be done with it?”

Why? Because we are not robots. We are human beings, and stories take advantage of the way our minds and bodies function. Yes, bodies. Nancy points out in Resonate that effective presentations create physical responses.

Does the typical, fact-driven, corporate presentation create a physical response? Um, yes; it puts you to sleep — or, more accurately, makes your eyes glaze over, causes you to disengage from the speaker and your mind to wander to places it would rather be.

Pure rationality does not generate power; it is not leadership; it does not engender communication. And if you’re not going communicate with the audience (or in my field, the readers), why bother? You’re just wasting everybody’s time.

Nancy Duarte is the CEO of a graphic design firm in Silicon Valley in California. Every page of Resonate shows hands of some exceptionally good designers, with headlines and graphics working magnificently to convey the points of Nancy’s message. Even the acknowledgements (in most books a number of pages of dense prose fawning over those who contributed to the project) are rendered graphically to wonderful effect.

A key element throughout the book is what she calls a “sparkline,” which is a graphic depiction of the narrative voice of the presentation as it weaves back and forth between what is and what could be. Great speeches do this; they establish a base — the ordinary world — then invoke tension that causes the emotional level to rise into a new world, a special world, the world the speaker would like to take us to.

Using these sparklines, Nancy analyzes a number of high-profile presentations, one of them being by Steve Jobs to introduce the Apple iPhone in 2007. In the Jobs sparkline, she not only analyzes the weave of the words and phrases delivered by Jobs, she includes the audience reactions. When do they spontaneously clap? When do they laugh? When do they “ooo-and-ahh!”? Those are the physical reactions mentioned earlier, laughing and clapping being among such responses.

Resonate focuses on live presentations, but the same principles it deals with apply to writing and other types of communication. Indeed, Resonate explains why the kind of writing that I do — writing stories about business concepts — has the potential to work so well, to be remembered and to have impact. It is humbling to admit that Ms. Duarte makes this explanation better than I ever have.

This is an amazing book, a special book. Which is why I am not sure I want everyone to know about it. If something becomes overused and too formulaic it loses its vitality. (I can imagine, if Resonate ever becomes a mega-bestseller, corporate policies mandating all executive presentations be subjected to sparkline analysis.)

But I suppose in the long run, there is little chance of that. The jaded, the know-it-alls, the uber-geeks, the trend followers, the perma-pessimists will forever hide in the perceived safety of non-emotive dullness. Boring presentations will continue to be the norm. Which means that if you really want to change something, Resonate is your secret weapon.