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| The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures | 
 enlarge | Author: Dan Roam
Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $6.97
You Save: $17.98 (72%)
Buy New/Used from $6.97
Avg. Customer Rating:  (53 reviews)
Sales Rank: 307
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 7.2 x 7.2 x 0.7
ISBN: 1591841992
Dewey Decimal Number: 658.403
EAN: 9781591841999
ASIN: 1591841992
Publication Date: March 13, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 Learn the process of visualizing information for telling your story August 30, 2008
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 August 29, 2008
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 August 27, 2008
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
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.
Get Out of Linear Box August 20, 2008
Terrific! Anything that gets us out of our linear box is worth trying and doing again and again. As I say in my own book, "The Expert's Edge," to succeed and practice thoughtleading, you've got to "develop leading-edge ideas." The "Back of the Napkin" can teach you how to do so.
A Good Introduction For Data Visualization August 9, 2008
Typically I don't buy many books-- we have a good local library, so I buy only those that are 1) very interesting and 2) worth referring to later. This book is both. It is marketed as a book that shows how to develop business presentations by drawing the charts in front of the audience rather than relying on pre-made PowerPoint slides. Anyone, however, who needs to learn how to display data to convince others (data visualization) will find this book useful.
The good: it is an easy and fast read, with little jargon, and with good explanations of the various ways to display data. The chapter, "Frameworks For Showing," alone makes the book worthwhile to purchase. When do you use a timeline, or a flowchart, or a multivariable plot? This chapter explains all.
The bad: the drawings, while clever and creative, are at the lower end of my ability to read the writing. (And I have very good eyes.) A paperback version with the drawings much larger would be very helpful.
Very worthwhile.
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