How to deliver effective presentations—there's a topic that's frequently written about. And it should be! Effective communications, particularly in boardroom, client, conference, and other stakeholder presentations, is an essential component of success in business and in one's personal career development. What's new and urgent now is the need for data‐driven communications. How one presents and communicates raw numbers, derived results, and inferred actionable insights from data are essential leadership and career skills in the current data‐drenched digital era.

To be honest, my very first reaction when Bill asked me to write a foreword was “Oh, no, not another ‘How to deliver effective presentations’ book!” But then, the emphasis on live, in‐person data presentation, data communication, and data storytelling (with a sprinkling of fun examples within my favorite category, “how to lie with graphs and statistics”) made me quickly get drawn in and fully engaged with the book.

Bill's narratives are anchored solidly to specific tips with corresponding specific graphics. It quickly becomes clear that he has lived through the good and bad examples provided. I also loved the rationales Bill gives, answering the “why” when he recommends a way to do something. This makes every page a real learning experience for the reader. I ended up thinking to myself, “Here's a case where first impressions were wrong.” And it was a delightful experience to have my mind changed in such a positive direction.

Data literacy is a very commonly discussed soft skill that goes along with data storytelling for effective data communications. What is important about any communications is that its success is measured in two ways—in the one communicating and in the recipient. Simply adequate data communications could be achieved by a data‐literate speaker presenting things clearly enough but without showing empathy with the audience through good data storytelling. Conversely, good storytelling is lost on the audience if the speaker does a poor job in explaining the numbers and the insights derived therefrom. In the first case, the presenter engages with the data but not with the audience. In the latter case, the audience is engaged with the story but not with the data.

Ideal data communications therefore succeeds both ways, with the presenter and the audience in synch. In synch with what? In synch with understanding the answers to the three data‐driven questions that should be addressed in the presentation: What? So what? And now what? In other words, What did I do and what did I learn from the data? Why should you care? And what data‐driven actions should you now take?

To achieve profoundly better, even perfect, data‐driven presentations and communications, every presenter of data should study and learn from this book, and every data‐related curriculum should require this book for all their students. The book is filled with brilliant tips, spanning more than 100 nuggets of data‐driven wisdom, from a master data analytics practitioner, business consultant, storyteller, and thought leader. You will find here a well‐ordered guide through a full menu of must‐dos, don't‐dos, how‐tos, and why‐dos in data communications, data presentation, data storytelling, and presentation design.

The book's ultimate strategic goal is clearly stated in the first part of its title: Winning the Room. Backed up by years of experience and his own stories, Bill delivers a wealth of practical advice and recommendations that delightfully satisfy the tactical objectives of the book: “Creating and delivering an effective data‐driven presentation.” Proven in the hard‐won trenches of client engagement, the positive reinforcement checklist style of the book will be a refreshing departure from those preachy books that tell you what you are doing wrong in your presentations. This book delivers, page after page, on the promise of helping you to learn the how and why of Winning the Room.

Kirk Borne, PhD, Chief Science Officer, DataPrime.ai