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.
The text of the book is great, but the pictures just don't come across on the Kindle, even enlarged. The text is blurry and the image is grayed out and faint.
Have you ever been in a meeting where people just talk past each other?
They are not really speaking the same language. They could be talking about a bus but one person is talking about the front of the bus and the other person is talking about the back of the bus. If you could just draw a picture to anchor everyone's attention on the same thing can be very useful.
Back of the Nakpin helps to provide a framework to be able to do that. Calling out what types of images to create, and the various forms those images can take as to denote the most meaning.
I use the framework presented in the book all the time, and when people who just moments before were not describing the same thing have an "Oh" the cost of the book and the time invested is paid for again many times over.
This book is certainly overhyped. It's fun for a while to read the author's success stories, how he used simple diagrams to overcome obstacles, but I was hoping for more. Contrary to its subtitle, this book is unlikely to either help you to solve problems or sell ideas.
If you're really interested in the best ways to design persuasive graphics, read Edward Tufte's design tetralogy, particularly Visual Explanations.
