The Back of the Napkin
A bold new way to tackle tough business problems—even if you draw like a second graderWhen 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.
Stats for nerds
6recommend
8mentions
8people
2009–2021years
75% recommend25% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- For some really great insights into drawing for business (esp. whiteboarding) see: The Back of the Napkin by Dan Roam.
There are other related books by the same author too. I especially enjoyed: Draw to Win
- It's not online, but I've been told "The Back of the Napkin: : Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures" is a good book for that kind of thing.
- A good book on sketching and it's application as a business communication tool is Dan Roam's The Back of the Napkin.
http://www.amazon.com/Back-Napkin-Expanded-Problems-Pictures...
- I've actually started regressing away from PowerPoint back into the 'chalk talk'. There's something incredibly powerful about being able to draw the idea in front of an audience which makes your presentation just that much more sticky, especially in this day of ubiquitous slides. As an additional benefit, I find that I have to put a lot more thought into what actually needs to get communicated when I have to physically write it out. Dan Roam's Back of the Napkin is a great book explaining how to communicate using a pen[1].
- The opinion of the article's author is summarized by ths paragraph:
Which started me thinking about the 5 Powerpoint slides we see in every pitch deck. Sure, the slides all look different – different colors, bar charts, pie charts, line graphs. But, basically, they tell the same story. So if and when you use these slides, use them at your own risk – because we’ve seen them before!
Incidentally a great book to teach people how to create useful pictures (both for clarifying your thinking and for presenting) is The Back of the Napkin. Be warned that it it helps you communicate your message effectively, but it does nothing to help your message be more believable.
The book contains an ironic example of this, by telling the story of a fictional company named SAX Inc. He does a very good job of communicating his thinking about this company, its problems, and what it should do. However my knowledge of software development tells me that the plan he came up with has major pitfalls he is not aware of.
- The best tip I can give non-designers or non-artists is to read Dan Roam's Back Of The Napkin. It's about how to use basic sketching skills to both capture and express your ideas.
We're holding a discussion on it on Sept 10th at our next UX Book Club, for those in the bay area:
http://groups.google.com/group/ux-book-club-san-francisco/br...
