Moon - How to Make an IMPACT: Influence, inform and impress with your reports, presentations and business documents

I got a lot of help writing this book. It covers a wide range of topics and is relevant to many different types of practitioner sales, marketing, finance, HR, executives, and so on. Because of this Ive called in many favours and sent draft chapters to lots of people for their insight. So at the risk of my sounding like a long Oscar acceptance speech, I am incredibly grateful to Catherine Galvin, Joanna Green, Paul Greenhill, Izabella Grzyb, Chris Jones, Anders Kvan, Jonquil Lowe, Richard Moon (my brother), Ed Percival, Robin Williams, John Scriven and Claire Thomson. They all gave their time and knowledge unstintingly and helped refine this book by an embarrassingly large amount.

My publisher, Liz Gooster, was a constant source of ideas and support and helped keep me on the straight and narrow with the lightest of touches.

Also, Robin Wade gave me great help on the legalities of publishing deals and Judith Castle (my sister) helped me with a regular writing retreat away from distractions.

I owe a great intellectual debt to those authors who originally inspired me and made me realise these topics are more than just common sense. The first was Edward Tufte and his books The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Envisioning Information . Then there is Professor A.S.C. Ehrenbergs A Primer in Data Reduction which had 12 great pages on constructing tables and showing numbers; his ideas kickstarted many of the tips and methodologies that I developed for Chapters ). Finally, in The Non-Designers Design Book , Robin Williams set out the four design principles I mention in the chapter on document design. She was also kind enough to review that chapter.

I am also grateful to JLT Group plc where I worked for ten years in a role that was varied enough to try new ideas (fraud studies, competitor analysis, acquisitions, strategy studies and more). And it was varied enough to see how others showed information I saw work from many different continents, companies and industries.

Finally, there is my wife Joan. She has been a constant sounding board for new ideas. She has reviewed chapters. She has kept my feet on the ground when I get over-confident and, much more often, she has picked me up when doubts creep in. She has coped magnificently whenever I retreated into my study to blast out a few more pages. I owe her a huge holiday.

To everyone that helped, thank you for your time, support and wisdom.