Product Description

A bold new way to tackle tough business problems—even 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 can’t 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 everyone’s 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #206 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

From Publishers Weekly
The premise behind Roam's book is simple: anybody with a pen and a scrap of paper can use visual thinking to work through complex business ideas. Management consultant and lecturer Roam begins with a watershed moment: asked, at the last minute, to give a talk to top government officials, he sketched a diagram on a napkin. The clarity and power of that image allowed him to communicate directly with his audience. From this starting point, Roam has developed a remarkably comprehensive system of ideas. Everything in the book is broken down into steps, providing the reader with tools and rules to facilitate picture making. There are the four steps of visual thinking, the six ways of seeing and the SQVID– a clumsy acronym for a full brain visual work out designed to focus ideas. Roam occasionally overcomplicates; an extended case study takes up a full third of the book and contains an overload of images that belie the book's central message of simplicity. Nonetheless, for forward-thinking management types, there is enough content in these pages to drive many a brainstorming session. Illus. (Mar 13)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
“The premise behind Roam's book is simple: anybody with a pen and a scrap of paper can use visual thinking to work through complex business ideas. Management consultant and lecturer Roam begins with a “watershed moment”: asked, at the last minute, to give a talk to top government officials, he sketched a diagram on a napkin. The clarity and power of that image allowed him to communicate directly with his audience. From this starting point, Roam has developed a remarkably comprehensive system of ideas. Everything in the book is broken down into steps, providing the reader with “tools and rules” to facilitate picture making. There are the four steps of visual thinking, the six ways of seeing and the “SQVID”– a clumsy acronym for a “full brain visual work out” designed to focus ideas. Roam occasionally overcomplicates; an extended case study takes up a full third of the book and contains an overload of images that belie the book's central message of simplicity. Nonetheless, for forward-thinking management types, there is enough content in these pages to drive many a brainstorming session. Illus.”
—Publisher’s Weekly

“As painful as it is for any writer to admit, a picture *is* sometimes worth a thousand words. That's why I learned so much from this book. With style and wit, Dan Roam has provided a smart, practical primer on the power of visual thinking.”
—Daniel H. Pink, author of A Whole New Mind

“Inspiring! It teaches you a new way of thinking in a few hours -- what more could you ask from a book?”
—Dan Heath, author of Made to Stick

“This book is a must read for managers and business leaders. Visual thinking frees your mind to solve problems in unique and effective ways.”
—Temple Grandin, author of Thinking in Pictures

“If you observe the way people read or listen to things in the early 21st century, you realize that there aren't many of us left with a linear attention span. Visual information is much more interesting than verbal information. So if you want to make a point, do it with images, pictures or graphics. . . . Dan Roam is the first visual consultant for businesses that I've worked with. His approach is faster for the customer. And the message sticks.”
—Roger Black, Media design leader, Author of Websites That Work

“Simplicity. This is Dan Roam's message in The Back Of The Napkin. We all dread business meetings with their mountains of documents and the endless bulleted power points. Roam cuts through all that to demonstrate how the use of simple drawings -- executed while the audience watches -- communicate infinitely better than those complex presentations. Is a picture truly worth a thousand words? Having told us how to communicate with pictures, Roam rounds out his message by explaining that “We don't show an insight-inspiring picture because it saves a thousand words; we show it because it elicits the thousand words that make the greatest difference.” And that is communication that works.”
—Bill Yenne, author of Guinness: The 250 Year Quest for the Perfect Pint

About the Author
Dan Roam is the founder and president of Digital Roam Inc., a management- consulting firm that helps business executives solve complex problems through visual thinking. He has brought his unique approach to clients such as General Electric, Wal-Mart, Wells Fargo Bank, the U.S. Navy, HBO, News Corporation, and Sun Microsystems, among many others. He lectures around the country for clients and at business conferences.

Customer Reviews

Learn the process of visualizing information for telling your story
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.

Drawing is better
The premise of the book is that any problem, idea, or presentation can be solved using pictures - hand drawn pictures. Roam argues that everyone is visual, even those who say they aren't. He gives a few frameworks to work from as you prepare to draw out maps, charts, and pictures to present your ideas. I found them very helpful and refreshing. Roam also uses pictures significantly throughout the book which are also helpful.

In addition to Dan Roam saying that hand drawn pictures are more powerful than PowerPoint, Stephanie Palmer in her book Good in a Room: How to Sell Yourself (and Your Ideas) and Win Over Any Audience, also argues the same thing. My experience has been that they are both right. It really is much more captivating and easier to remember when I watch people draw out ideas in front of me rather than looking at a pretty computer generated graphic.

All sizzle, no steak
Dan Roam's "Back of the Napkin" is an important first step in teaching business people how to compose problems visually. However, it's definitely a rookie effort, heavy on sizzle but light on steak.

Roam spends nearly half the book explaining how our minds process information. Okay, fine. Kind of like a book on how to build a house explaining what is a hammer, a saw, a drill. Then Roam proposes some different ways to draw the different ways the brain processes information. Kind of like showing that a hammer is good for nailing wood together, a saw is good for dividing wood in half, and a drill is good for drywall and screws. The reader cannot wait to see how this will all fit together - "This is going to be good!". Finally, Roam throws out an example of how to pull it all together to solve a problem.

Unfortunately, the example is overly-easy, explores many blind alleys, and finally arrives at a solution that is fundamentally flawed. Roam's case study shows flat sales for a proprietary software company for two years. Roam's analysis shows $78 million in proprietary software will be purchased next year vs. $48 million in open source. The solution - convert their software into open source. Huh? Leave a $78 million industry to a single competitor to compete with two other open-source vendors for a $48 million industry? What kind of solution is that? Will you fire all your developers and hire open source developers? Will you force your existing customers to move to open source too, or just abandon them?

In the end, after many chapters of "wait till you see this" type posturing, Dan Roam never delivers the goods. I don't doubt Roam's sincerity, and hope he will continue to iterate on his models until he comes back with something that actually works.