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The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures
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Sales rank 37,902
Customers rating (based on 118 reviews)
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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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| Publisher | Portfolio Hardcover | | Release date | 03/2008 | | Availability | | | Edition | Hardcover |
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 Don't like it
I bought the book, thinking that I'll get some guidelines on how to use drawings to help understand complex problems, or a) I don't understand the book or b)the book fails to do that....
dm
 Worth checking out, a little short of the hype
As someone who has long made a practice of drawing and/or gesturing while talking (talking with your hands, some people call it), I felt drawn to this book (no pun intended). I agree with most of the author's general comments, and I admire him for coming up with a symbol/drawing system that is logical and, if used properly, powerful.
I think if your job or pastime requires you to play the persuasion game, it's worthwhile to learn some kind of system that allows you to draw quickly and efficiently. Roam has such a system.
This book consists of four parts. If you read just the first part, you get that warm feeling that comes from having grasped some pretty useful concepts. The other three parts show the techniques Roam uses, and these can make you feel a little lost. Unless you intend to study and learn his specific techniques, these last three parts are better skimmed than read.
He uses a specific case history, and you watch this evolve from very simple through various stages to the final step. This case history makes up, by far, the bulk of the book.
Once you understand the basic concept, you could stop reading as you finish Part 1 (it ends on page 45). The rest of the book walks you through a long example of how to use the concept.
Personally, I find this system to be too complicated to adopt for my own use. I have better uses for the time it would require to learn and practice, as it doesn't solve a problem I have. But that is only my situation; yours may be entirely different. For the small price of this book, you may want to buy a copy and judge for yourself.
The book's cover is 49 square inches in area (7H x 7W) and 260 pages long (278 pages, if you count the appendices and index). There is a newer, expanded version out now. I don't see the purpose of it, unless you want to study and adopt Roam's system as your own.
This brings us to my statement that I agree with most of the author's general comments. Where I disagree is his opinion that you have to draw pictures to communicate effectively (that, at least, seems to be what he's saying--repeatedly). I think if you hone your verbal, written, and composition skills to such a level that you can score 90% or higher on a test of Standard Written English, you will have the ability to effectively communicate.
All investments of time and money have opportunity costs. If you can't score highly on a test of SWE (few Americans can), then you should first learn English well enough to do that. Only then should you enhance your communication skills by adding the pictorial method. Then again, it may be that using a pared-down version of Roam's method could help anyone be a better student of English.
Great ideas, but not quite sure what to do with them
I think this methodology would be extremely helpful in a lot of situations - I'm looking forward to making use of it. However, I'm not sure the author did a great job of stating how to apply it (besides implying always). I felt the problem solving examples in the book were pretty contrived.
 The Back of the Napkin
Great book, especially for communications professionals who are always searching to deliver a message with few words.
Author does not follow his own directions
The text is awesome, and the explanations are very clear. However, there too many letters and too few graphics to support the "visual thinking" issue, which is supposed to be the "soul" of the book.
Another little "complaint": the main part of the drawings and graphics are too small. It is sometimes very difficult to see them without phisically getting nearer to the pages.
As a final comment: the idea is fantastic, and the development the author carries out is simply REMARKABLE. In my opinion, if the author raises the number of drawings/graphics and makes them bigger, the book would be sincerely UNBEATABLE (I would buy the new and augmented edition ¡¡¡)
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