How to Become a Better Manager … By Thinking Like a Designer
Interview by Jimmy Guterman
July 1, 2009
Presentation experts Nancy Duarte and Garr Reynolds help world-renowned executives, politicians and thought leaders deliver stronger presentations. Here they reveal how to influence and persuade in a different way, regardless of whether you ever have to communicate via PowerPoint.
The leading question
What can managers learn from designers?
Findings
- Managers and designers have to do the same things: Embrace restraints, take risks, question everything and make sure that tools don’t get in the way of ideas.
- Design concepts such as hierarchy, balance, contrast, clear space and harmony are just as relevant to managers.
Few people are more dedicated to making sure your presentations are clear and persuasive than Nancy Duarte and Garr Reynolds. Duarte, as CEO of Duarte Design Inc., has helped shape some of the best-known recent presentations, among them Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth talk. Reynolds, an associate professor of management at Kansai Gaidai University in Japan, is the author of a popular and influential blog on presentation design and used to work at Apple Inc. MIT Sloan Management Review met Duarte and Reynolds at the most recent TED conference, where we started a conversation not about how to make better presentations — Duarte’s slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations (O’Reilly) and Reynolds’s Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery (New Riders) do that expertly — but rather about how managers without any design responsibilities can do a better job if they understand how designers think.
What can managers learn from designers about how to attack a problem?
Reynolds: Solving problems is what designers do. They solve... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.
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