The Back of The Napkin
Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
Description
This original book provides a whole new way of looking at business problems and ideas. Dan Roam demonstrates how thinking with pictures can help you discover and develop new ideas, solve problems in unexpected ways, and dramatically improve your ability to share your insights with others.
Used properly, a simple drawing on a humble napkin is more powerful than Excel or PowerPoint. It can help us crystallise ideas, think outside of the box, and communicate in a way that other people simply “get”. Drawing on 20 years of visual problem solving combined with recent discoveries in vision science, Roam shows us how to clarify a problem or sell an idea by visually breaking it down using a simple set of visualisation tools. His strategies take advantage of everyone’s innate ability to look,
see, imagine and show.
About the author
Dan Roam is the president of Digital Roam Inc., a consultancy firm that helps businesses solve complex problems. His clients include Google, eBay, HBO, and News Corp. He lectures around the world and lives in San Francisco.
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.
