The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures | 
 enlarge | Author: Dan Roam
Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $7.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  53 reviews
Sales Rank: 240
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 7.2 x 7.2 x 0.7
ISBN: 1591841992
Dewey Decimal Number: 658.403
EAN: 9781591841999
ASIN: 1591841992
Publication Date: March 13, 2008
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Product Description
A bold new way to tackle tough business problemseven if you draw like a second grader
When Herb Kelleher was brainstorming about how to beat the traditional hub-and- spoke airlines, he grabbed a bar napkin and a pen. Three dots to represent Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. Three arrows to show direct flights. Problem solved, and the picture made it easy to sell Southwest Airlines to investors and customers.
Used properly, a simple drawing on a humble napkin is more powerful than Excel or PowerPoint. It can help crystallize ideas, think outside the box, and communicate in a way that people simply get. In this book Dan Roam argues that everyone is born with a talent for visual thinking, even those who swear they cant draw.
Drawing on twenty years of visual problem solving combined with the recent discoveries of vision science, this book shows anyone how to clarify a problem or sell an idea by visually breaking it down using a simple set of visual thinking tools tools that take advantage of everyones innate ability to look, see, imagine, and show.
THE BACK OF THE NAPKIN proves that thinking with pictures can help anyone discover and develop new ideas, solve problems in unexpected ways, and dramatically improve their ability to share their insights. This book will help readers literally see the world in a new way.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 48 more reviews...
 very nice September 30, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
What a surprising book this is! It's easy to read, very inspiring and just fun to try it yourself. If you visit his website, you get a pdf doc with the basics; simply great.
Very Useful September 25, 2008
As a graphic designer by training, i was skeptical about the value this book would bring to my table. I picked it up on a whim in barnes and noble. I learned a lot of really useful tips though for quickly identifying and expressing problem and solution spaces. I would recommend this book to just about anyone.
 Great set of tools - not a standard approach to business problem solving September 16, 2008
This book was an interesting read for me not only because of the presentation concepts discussed, but also because The back of the napkin aims to provide a complete framework to solve business problems.
I think the book did really well on the presentation front, the goal of a generic strategic problem solving kit is not really reached.
Dan does a great job convincing us that we should use our drawing/visual thinking skills that most of us have been neglecting since we started formal education. On top of that he provides practical guidelines to get going
Have the courage to use a more informal drawing style (away from the computer) to get to the essence of problems, focus not on form but on content
Help us think about what type of drawings are best to be used in which situations (who, what, when, why, etc.) and to what audiences (the visionary CEO, the detailed operations manager)
As a problem solving tool kit, he provides useful tools but falls short of providing a generic solution framework for all business problems (which impossible anyway I think).
Dan takes the "S-type"/"sensing" approach to problem solving, spread out all data, put in on the walls, digest it all to see the bigger picture. A way of data processing very similar to the human brain sizing up a new environment. This is actually a useful and fresh approach compared to for example strategy firms such as McKinsey, that apply a very targeted data gathering approach focussed on key questions/issues that have been identified earlier.
Another take away for me were diagrams that try to summarize all relationships in a problem. Plot a variable on the x axis, one on the y axis, start adding bubbles in different sizes and different colors to analyze 5-6 dimensions in one diagram. Useful for solving problems, less for communicating results to a "cold" audience that is confronted with the material for the first time.
I do think however that the book does not provide a simple step-by-step guide to solve problems, you need guidance for this. Running problem solving brainstormings around a white board requires a strong moderator, and picking the right diagrams requires experience. Hiring Dan's firm would probably do the trick, but the novice will find it difficult to apply the techniques after having read the just the book.
As a presentation tool, Dan's ideas are highly valuable in a smaller group setting, where everyone can gather around a white board while the presentor draws the story "live" in front of the audience without any help of PowerPoint. For the big audience however, this approach is high risk.
 Where's the Editor September 6, 2008
I struggled with this book. It has some great ideas, but it reminds me of the last hour of the film version of The Return of the King or the entire King Kong by Peter Jackson. Where's the editor?
The good and the bad:
1. He gives concrete examples of how to use visual thinking and gives you tools to figure out what to do.
2.It's a 300 pages book talking about visual thinking. Okay. I read it on the Kindle, so I don't know really how big the pictures are. But the point remains - it is overly long. A full third of the book is taken up by a case study on selling B2B software.
3. Which, by the way, made no sense whatsoever. He starts by saying, "Let's map our customers." And then proceeds to put them all in a single company. It's quite possibly the worst case of profiling a customer base I've seen.
All in all, it's a good book. But focus on the SKIMMING, not the reading.
Learn the process of visualizing information for telling your story August 30, 2008
I'm not good at drawing, but that doesn't stop me from occasionally using a whiteboard to visually communicate ideas. Communicating ideas isn't about creating a Picasso or a Rembrandt. Stick figures are welcome!
The visual process contains four phases:
* Look: Orient yourself and know which way is up, where you are, and identify.
* See: Explore the five W's (who, what, when, where, and why) plus how many.
* Imagine: No SQUIDS here (it's SQVID (simple, quality, vision, individual attributes, delta (change)).
* Show: Telling the story with visuals.
Roam takes you through complicated examples -- typical business problems. For example, a training department had hundreds of documents and couldn't see anything anymore. After analyzing all of their work, the team created a visual process to break it down. The story becomes clearer.
I appreciate that Roam provides many examples. He also walks through several case studies of putting visual process to work. It may take some time to get the hang of the process and turning complicated ideas into visuals the audience can absorb with little thought.
This isn't the kind of book where you can scan a few pages and suddenly come up with a way to explain that doo-dad. I think the book could stand an appendix or chapter on how to draw basic figures. I couldn't even copy some of the simple drawings. Also, the software information needs to include Smartdraw. Although, not as powerful as Visio, it's more affordable.
Sales people can use the book to learn how to communicate their complicated products or services to prospects. Web design agencies can communicate their solutions for a Web site's architecture. Presenters can stop posting busy charts and use these drawings to quickly get a point across. The visual process comes in handy for many situations and I believe it's a good skill to have.
I also learned something else while attempting my first drawings after reading the book. I tried to use Visio to create them, but it didn't have what I wanted and it took too much time. Two drawings took about 10 to 20 minutes.
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