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Dan Roam

The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures Hardcover – March 13, 2008

by Dan Roam (Author)

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Explaining how everybody is born with an innate talent for visual thinking, a guide to enhancing analytical skills by building up one's intrinsic abilities is a primer for business leaders on how to develop ideas and enable faster results using to-the-point visual methods. 30,000 first printing.

Print length

278 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Portfolio Hardcover
Publication date

March 13, 2008
Reading age

18 years and up
Dimensions

7.22 x 1.05 x 7.36 inches
ISBN-10

1591841992
ISBN-13

978-1591841999
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Editorial Reviews

From 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. (Mar 13)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

“As painful as it is for any writer to admit, a picture *is* sometimes worth a thousand words. That's why I learned so much from this book. With style and wit, Dan Roam has provided a smart, practical primer on the power of visual thinking.”
—Daniel H. Pink, author of A Whole New Mind

“Inspiring! It teaches you a new way of thinking in a few hours -- what more could you ask from a book?”
—Dan Heath, author of Made to Stick

“This book is a must read for managers and business leaders. Visual thinking frees your mind to solve problems in unique and effective ways.”
—Temple Grandin, author of Thinking in Pictures

“If you observe the way people read or listen to things in the early 21st century, you realize that there aren't many of us left with a linear attention span. Visual information is much more interesting than verbal information. So if you want to make a point, do it with images, pictures or graphics. . . . Dan Roam is the first visual consultant for businesses that I've worked with. His approach is faster for the customer. And the message sticks.”
—Roger Black, Media design leader, Author of Websites That Work

“Simplicity. This is Dan Roam's message in The Back Of The Napkin. We all dread business meetings with their mountains of documents and the endless bulleted power points. Roam cuts through all that to demonstrate how the use of simple drawings -- executed while the audience watches -- communicate infinitely better than those complex presentations. Is a picture truly worth a thousand words? Having told us how to communicate with pictures, Roam rounds out his message by explaining that “We don't show an insight-inspiring picture because it saves a thousand words; we show it because it elicits the thousand words that make the greatest difference.” And that is communication that works.”
—Bill Yenne, author of Guinness: The 250 Year Quest for the Perfect Pint

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Portfolio Hardcover; 1st edition (March 13, 2008)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 278 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1591841992
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1591841999
Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.06 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.22 x 1.05 x 7.36 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #658,828 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,355 in Decision-Making & Problem Solving
- #2,759 in Communication Skills
- #10,777 in Economics (Books)

Customer Reviews:
213 ratings

About the author

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Dan Roam

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Dan Roam is the author of five international bestselling books on business-visualization and communication clarity. "The Back of the Napkin" was named by Fast Company, The London Times, and BusinessWeek as the 'Creativity Book of the Year.'

Dan is a business leader, entrepreneur, creative director, author, painter, and model-builder. His purpose in life is to make complex things clear by drawing them and to help others do the same.

Dan has helped leaders at Google, Microsoft, Allbirds, Boeing, Gap, IBM, the US Navy, and the Obama White House solve complex problems with simple pictures. Dan and his whiteboard have appeared on CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, and NPR. Dan's newest book, "The Pop-Up Pitch" will be published by Hachette Public Affairs on Nov. 9.

Dan's "American Health Care on the Back of a Napkin" was voted by Business Week as the world's best presentation of 2009.

Customer reviews

5 star		62%
4 star		19%
3 star		10%
2 star		6%
1 star		2%

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Top reviews from the United States

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R. Blanchard

Tiny illustrations in a book about illustrations (?!?)

Reviewed in the United States on November 12, 2013

Verified Purchase

This is a book about using graphic illustrations to communicate. It has scores of illustrations, most of them simple, many of them cute, all of them hand-drawn. The author wants to teach us how to use graphics and his copious use of graphics helps make the point. Unfortunately, however, the illustrations are printed in a book format that is too small. The physical size of the printed pages is 6 1/2 x 7 with wide margins whereas a more typical page size (a book grabbed at random from a stack on my desk) is 6 x 9. Everything about this book is too small, including the type font. The difficulty in reading the illustrations, many of which have short words and/or numbers packed into a small area around the graphic elements, distracts greatly from the flow of information. It actually had the effect on me of undermining the core idea of the book, that I should be communicating more through graphics. I propose rule #1 for graphic communications; graphics have to be easy to see and read if they are to have impact. The publisher (Penguin Group) and the author should be ashamed of themselves. The physical format they chose is oxymoronic relative to the subject matter and greatly diminishes the value of this book as a learning tool.

5 people found this helpful

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Nils Valentin

Proposal: Business Book of the year 2008 !!

Reviewed in the United States on July 12, 2008

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Executive summary: This book opens up a completely new marcet for career minded people. See details below .

---

Dan Roam is visually summarizing in four sections how to step through problem solving tasks.

Part I is a general introduction into problem solving.
Part II is about discovering the ideas.
Part III is developing the ideas to a business plan and
Part IV is about how to showcase your presentation and sell the idea.

What makes this book different is the fact that Dan is using visual clues to solve the problems.

In all parts of the book he is vigorously running through each of the below questions

Who/What ...
How many ...
Where ...
When ...
How ...
Why ...

and emphasizes the importance and the impact of the answers to it.

He is using the "Look,see, imagine and show" steps to explain whats is actually happening when a problem is analyzed, defined, a solution prepared and it must be "sold" to the upper management to get the go ahead.

I can easily see how this book opens up a completely new marcet f.e. for
instructors and junior business consultants.

Instructors for teaching those people that want to understand what they have missed so far and junior consultants because it visually combines their analytical skills, selective filtering skills and presentational skills and makes them explicitely aware of them and how to apply them.

It is interesting to see how Dan is able in Part III to "simplify" and demystify the open source <--> closed source issue any software company is facing.

That alone must be worth the book for any software company.

What Dan is really show casing is what good analysts already call their own:

- analytical skills
- context sensitive expertise
- selective filtering skills
- experience

Explicitly visualizing the problem solving steps in slow motion is a powerful weapon that will give you an edge over your competition.

I suggest you read the book three times.

First to get an overview.
Second to let it sink in and
Third to finetune.

Its one of those books that will give you new aspects everytime you read it.

5 people found this helpful

Helpful

Mitchel Martin

Great book for Process Modelers...

Reviewed in the United States on November 10, 2008

Verified Purchase

Business diagrams are too often complex, difficult to understand and even harder to explain. The Back of the Napkin contains instruction and useful examples of how to get your message across simply and effectively.

As a Business Process and Management Reporting Consultant, I have been recommending this book this year to the business modelers that I train. Business people love to "show their stuff" by displaying complicated process models and business diagrams, sometimes spending as long as an hour explaining what it means.

BIG MISTAKE!!! If you can't get people to understand your model or picture in the first glance or two, your point will lose impact and you could miss getting your message across.

Almost every page contains simple diagrams to bring each and every point across to the reader. I would have given this book 5 stars, except the author tried to create a methodology and acronym SQVID that missed the mark by being too complex. Also, the "how to" example could have been better - and given the author an opportunity to really showcase his methodology's effectiveness.

Read this book - and after you finish, read "Make it Stick." These two books together will help you become more effective with business communications.

3 people found this helpful

Helpful

Claire Jones

The Back of the Napkin

Reviewed in the United States on January 3, 2009

Verified Purchase

The book was not what I expected. I was thinking quick and dirty simple math formulae but what I found was something more robust and comprehensive. The book began with the 5 W's (Who, What, When, Where, Why...) and finished with process flow diagrams and XY charts. Examples of effective, simple, basic shapes are introduced at the beginning. Four steps of visual thinking are presented with examples. The thinking process of Looking vs. Seeing are presented in three separate chapters. These chapters show how to layout the most effective visual diagram tailored for the audience. The SQVID (Simple, Quality, Vision, Individual, Delta) method is presented enlarging the visual content methods.
The book is a concise course in data presentation/analysis. The chapters can be read at once or as needed. I suggest scanning the book for familiarization with the contents. Then cherry-pick or smorgasbord what you need, when you need it, for who you need it...
If you work in this kind of business situation or are a student with term papers and theses ahead then this book is for you.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Jo Throckmorton

Good Reference

Reviewed in the United States on January 19, 2020

Verified Purchase

Nice and concise in telling the story of how to take inspiration to actionable steps. I found a lot to use here for motivational reference. I like the directness of the writing instead of long and extensive "over explaining"

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Sherlock

A Good Concept, but . . .

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 29, 2019

Verified Purchase

The concept of using visuals to solve problems/ convey ideas is great, but the book under-utilised it.
Could have been more succinct.

5 people found this helpful

J. Rincon

More than just graphs

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 25, 2009

Verified Purchase

This book is not just about creating graphs or using graphs to simplify the way you communicate the ideas, it's defining a complete methodology to analyze projects and problems using graphs to document that in the process.
So it's not just graphs it's more than that and there are some very good model to apply. It's also very interesting what kind of graph is better to talk about "what", "when", "where", "how", "why"...
Personally I think that the methodology is quite good, but for me is not easy to remember, so you have to come back to the book frequently.

I would not say this a methodology to apply for any project or workshop, but I really think it can complement other better know approaches in some cases.

I found the book interesting and easy to read.

2 people found this helpful

Mr. P. J. Howe

I couldn't wait to try it out

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 24, 2013

Verified Purchase

It's a great concept and the book explains everything you need to know about what it is but I felt it lacked a bit on the how to to achieve it. I suppose that is the unfolding the napkin book. The first half of this book deals with the whole concept and the second have walks through an example case so it shows examples of some parts of the framework but does not have examples for them all.

Shortly after starting to read this book, I managed to sketch out a solution to a client issue and everyone understood what I wanted them to. That was just because the book encouraged me to try it out and it was before I really understood the framework and toolkit.

It's written well and now I've finished it, I cannot wait for a new problem to arise that I can solve with pictures.

2 people found this helpful

Brian Allan

Nearly...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 25, 2015

Verified Purchase

There's something really useful in here but the authors proficiency with pictures is let down by his written explanations.
Scenarios where various approaches should be used aren't well enough explained, particularly the nuances of which variety of his varIous SQVIDs should be used.
Frustrating as it does feel like there is something useful that I'm missing out on.

3 people found this helpful

Mrs. K. O'RAFFERTY

Back to the drawing board

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 1, 2009

Verified Purchase

I use a lot of training techniques as part of my role. this book starts off very simply and in fact I nearly gave up because it all seemed very obvious. I kept going back to it to consolidate and develop my understanding and found it to be a very powerful tool for focussing and developing ideas.
I am going to use it on some of my clients to see if it makes a difference to my own delivery and support. Great book.

9 people found this helpful

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