The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures | Dan Roam

The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures | Dan Roam | Excellent and Important...

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The Back of the Na...

	The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures Dan Roam Portfolio Hardcover, 2008 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 29 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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.

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great little "how to"

For someone like me, who is non-artistic, this little gem points out the way to overcome that obstacle. It offers a nice, clear path to visual communication with just the "basics". Very worthwhile.

Excellent and Important...

This is the first book I've found with a well thought out framework for presenting complex information. It also makes a strong case for throwing away the Powerpoint slides and picking up the dry erase pen. I'm pushing this one to anyone in my company who will listen.

Refreshing

I found this book refreshing, even relaxing, and recommend it as a gift item for any student or adult. Had I been the publisher I would have made the book larger and the visuals (by definition, handwriting and sketches) consequently larger and fresher, but what is offered suffices.

I have been immersed for the past several weeks in some of the most advanced technical automated multi-media, multi-dimensional, geospatially-grounded visualizations with time lines and cross-cutting cultural dimesions, and after all of that, this book not only stands the test of holding my attention, but proves itself equal to the task of challenging what is supposed to be "state of the art."

A few other books that come to mind that complement this one:
Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving with Grace
The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business
Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing
The Design of Dissent: Socially and Politically Driven Graphics
Information Design
Visual Interfaces to Digital Libraries (Lecture Notes in Computer Science)

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Death of PowerPoint

If enough people read and use this book I have hope that 100 slide PowerPoint decks will be a thing of the past.

Great encouragement to present ideas graphically and simply

I think this is a great book for a few reasons. Firstly it is very easy to read; at the start the author proposes a simple test to determine what your visual thinking preference is. Based on this suggestions are made on what area of the book to skip and what to start with.

For me the core of the book was the Visual Thinking Codex. Understanding this one page opens up the toolbox to present ideas and solve problems visually. With this codex you can fairly easily move to creating your visuals. The last section of the book works through a case study using this Codex which I found very useful.

Bottom line this is an easily understandable and applicable book. For me the real value was the one page with the Codex, the rest either set it up or explained it. With this mind set it is easy to skim through and extract a valuable tool set.

Thanks for reminding me how powerful visuals can be and how they can perfectly summarize many pages of data.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

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