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We’ve all been victims of bad slideware. Hit-and-run presentations that leave us staggering from a maelstrom of fonts, colors, bullets, and highlights. Infographics that fail to be informative and are only graphic in the same sense that violence can be graphic. Charts and tables in the press that mislead and confuse.

It’s too easy today to generate tables, charts, graphs. I can imagine some old-timer (maybe it’s me?) harrumphing over my shoulder that in his day they’d do illustrations by hand, which meant you had to think before committing pen to paper.

Having all the information in the world at our fingertips doesn’t make it easier to communicate: it makes it harder. The more information you’re dealing with, the more difficult it is to filter down to the most important bits.

Enter Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic.

I met Cole in late 2007. I’d been recruited by Google the year before to create the “People Operations” team, responsible for finding, keeping, and delighting the folks at Google. Shortly after joining I decided we needed a People Analytics team, with a mandate to make sure we innovated as much on the people side as we did on the product side. Cole became an early and critical member of that team, acting as a conduit between the Analytics team and other parts of Google.

Cole always had a knack for clarity.

She was given some of our messiest messages – such as what exactly makes one manager great and another crummy – and distilled them into crisp, pleasing imagery that told an irrefutable story. Her messages of “don’t be a data fashion victim” (i.e., lose the fancy clipart, graphics and fonts – focus on the message) and “simple beats sexy” (i.e., the point is to clearly tell a story, not to make a pretty chart) were powerful guides.

We put Cole on the road, teaching her own data visualization course over 50 times in the ensuing six years, before she decided to strike out on her own on a self-proclaimed mission to “rid the world of bad PowerPoint slides.” And if you think that’s not a big issue, a Google search of “powerpoint kills” returns almost half a million hits!

In Storytelling with Data, Cole has created an of-the-moment complement to the work of data visualization pioneers like Edward Tufte. She’s worked at and with some of the most data-driven organizations on the planet as well as some of the most mission-driven, data-free institutions. In both cases, she’s helped sharpen their messages, and their thinking.

She’s written a fun, accessible, and eminently practical guide to extracting the signal from the noise, and for making all of us better at getting our voices heard.

And that’s kind of the whole point, isn’t it?

Laszlo Bock

SVP of People Operations, Google, Inc.

and author of Work Rules!

May 2015