List Price: $25.00 Details

Save: $5.00 (20%)

Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime FREE Returns

FREE delivery Monday, February 13 if you spend $25 on items shipped by Amazon

Only 15 left in stock - order soon.

[{"displayPrice":"$20.00","priceAmount":20.00,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"20","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"00","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"JlEWW5yf67gX%2Fxgidj4YxJJjqUFssxXqeUHD6lq2FTBFSJIrgoyzQ8iOiFHn%2BmtrJnhqIO5E%2FQcff4moM2UDqnLrVCdm0ROThSN8RztC6Yii30o6ZRs%2BAfuO1ki4yQFsXQV%2BohiMZpg%3D","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"NEW"},{"displayPrice":"$10.85","priceAmount":10.85,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"10","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"85","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"y6tafDgixYSA2O72FOLpL6No2kJ3Wgk%2BN6sGpK%2B9qpxaMwq70xUPznSR%2FHB6eBB%2BWrcM6n09KApRV%2FqqNrobRDzjJHyKtkZB5sGdHKLvcUmXJcztzvdKfEO9c7t5ZdC8Tn%2Bm0ACNj%2FFl1poonSyFEDb5NkQfh4HqlarMUrz1kumyoAEvC05C5Q%3D%3D","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"USED"}]

$$20.00 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details

Secure transaction

Ships from

Amazon.com

Sold by

Amazon.com

Details

Ships from

Amazon.com

Sold by

Amazon.com

Return policy: Eligible for Return, Refund or Replacement within 30 days of receipt

Add a gift receipt for easy returns

Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime

FREE delivery Tuesday, February 14 if you spend $25 on items shipped by Amazon

Select delivery location

Used: Good | Details

Sold by BEL Books LLC

Fulfilled by Amazon

Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.

Have one to sell?

Sell on Amazon

Other Sellers on Amazon

Added

Not added

$20.00
FREE Shipping on orders over $25.00 shipped by Amazon.

Sold by: markable

Added

Not added

$20.00
& FREE Shipping

Sold by: wilbertstore

Added

Not added

$21.49
FREE Shipping on orders over $25.00 shipped by Amazon.

Sold by: bookwormmm

Flip to back Flip to front

Listen Playing... Paused You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition.
Learn more

See this image

Follow the Author

Dan Roam

Unfolding the Napkin: The Hands-On Method for Solving Complex Problems with Simple Pictures Paperback – Illustrated, December 29, 2009

by Dan Roam (Author)

96 ratings

See all formats and editions

Price

New from

Used from

Kindle

"Please retry"

$18.99

—

Paperback, Illustrated

"Please retry"

$20.00

$11.71

$1.28

Kindle
$18.99 Read with Our Free App
Paperback
$20.00

56 Used from $1.28 20 New from $11.71

Enhance your purchase

An original workbook companion to the acclaimed business bestseller The Back of the Napkin

Dan Roam's The Back of the Napkin, a BusinessWeek bestseller, taught readers the power of brainstorming and communicating with pictures. It presented a new and exciting way to solve all kinds of problems-from the boardroom to the sales floor to the cubicle jungle.

The companion workbook, Unfolding the Napkin, helps readers put Roam's principles into practice with step-by-step guidelines. It's filled with detailed case studies, guided do-it-yourself exercises, and plenty of blank space for drawing. Roam structured the book as a complete four-day visual-thinking seminar, taking readers step-by-step from "I can't draw" to "Here is the picture I drew that I think will save the world."

The workbook teaches readers how to:
•Improve their three "built-in" visual problem solving tools.

•Apply the four-step visual thinking process (look-see-imagine-show) in any business situation.

•Instantly improve their visual imaginations.

•Learn how to recognize the type of problem to choose the best visual solution.

If The Back of the Napkin was a guide to fine dining, Unfolding the Napkin is the cookbook that will soon be heavily marked up and dogeared.

Print length

320 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Portfolio
Publication date

December 29, 2009
Dimensions

7.96 x 0.68 x 9.94 inches
ISBN-10

9781591843191
ISBN-13

978-1591843191
See all details

Frequently bought together

+
+

Total price:

To see our price, add these items to your cart.

Some of these items ship sooner than the others.

Show details Hide details

Choose items to buy together.

by Dan Roam Paperback
$20.00
Only 15 left in stock - order soon.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
Get it as soon as Monday, Feb 13
by Dan Roam Paperback
$16.79
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
Get it as soon as Saturday, Feb 11
by Dan Roam Hardcover
$20.00
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
Get it as soon as Monday, Feb 13

Dan Roam
522
Paperback
90 offers from $2.42
Dan Roam
138
Hardcover
111 offers from $1.59
Dan Roam
255
Paperback
41 offers from $3.76
Dan Roam
234
Hardcover
59 offers from $3.34
Dan Roam
58
Hardcover
46 offers from $9.24
Mike Rohde
660
Paperback
59 offers from $14.70

Editorial Reviews

Review

"In 2008, Roam's The Back of the Napkin soaked up some book-of-the-year love from The Financial Times, Businessweek and Amazon.com. Roam's point was that problems can be better solved by drawing simple pictures, regardless of artistic ability. It's easier to see solutions visually, and it's also the revealing process of physically diagramming a problem, the argument goes.

To discover truly breakthrough ideas, intuitively develop those ideas and share those ideas effectively with others, we need pictures," Roam writes.

Since then, the management consultant and his Sharpies have conducted workshops at an impressive list of organizations, including Boeing, Pfizer, Google, Microsoft, Wal-mart and the U.S. Senate. Now, with Unfolding the Napkin, Roam squeezed his four-day workshop into a workbook so everyone can follow along.

It's a simple concept, but when Roam arrives at a solution for last year's economic crisis by drawing intersecting circles representing financial services, the auto industry and declining energy supplies, it's clear that Napkin is nothing to sneeze on.
-USA Today, Jan. 4, 2010

Whoever draws the best picture of a problem is the most likely to solve it.

Dan Roam offers a simple explanation about how to draw a problem/solution picture.

Draw a circle in the upper left corner of a sheet of paper and label it me. Draw a cloud-shaped circle in the lower left; label it my problem. Draw the shape of a closed Swiss army knife on the center of the page. Add and label "blades" (what you see, what to look for, what if..., how, when, where, why, how much, etc.) that deal with me and my problem. Those blades help you think of others that will help identify the problem, alternatives and solution.

What Roam drew on one page took me 90 words to describe, by the way.
-The Dallas Morning News, Dec. 26, 2009

About the Author

Dan Roam is the internationally bestselling author of five books on visual communication, including The Back of the Napkin, Blah Blah Blah, and Show and Tell, and is the founder of the Napkin Academy, the world's first online visual-thinking training program. He has helped leaders at Microsoft, Boeing, eBay, Kraft, Gap, IBM, the US Navy, the US Senate, and the White House solve complex problems with simple pictures. Dan and his whiteboard have appeared on CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, and NPR.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 1591843197
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Portfolio; Illustrated edition (December 29, 2009)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9781591843191
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1591843191
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.25 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.96 x 0.68 x 9.94 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,094,519 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #925 in Running Meetings & Presentations (Books)
- #2,577 in Decision-Making & Problem Solving
- #3,914 in Communication Skills

Customer Reviews:
96 ratings

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Videos

Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video!

Upload your video

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Dan Roam

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

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

4.3 out of 5

96 global ratings

5 star		62%
4 star		19%
3 star		7%
2 star		8%
1 star		4%

How customer reviews and ratings work

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

D. Philips

Hands-on winner!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 3, 2010

Verified Purchase

I was very glad to have been able to get this in time for the 2010 New Year holiday.
It took me about 7 hours to work through the book, split over two days.
I found the workshop-in-a-book format very appropriate to the material.
Each "day" of the workshop is split into a morning and afternoon sections and that makes for nice-sized learning chunks.

Although The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures was published first, and I read it first, I would recommend starting with this book. The Back of the Napkin goes into more depth about why the techniques work. This book's "hands on" workshop format gets you involved -doing- by having you practice the techniques. It is something you really need to do as well as read about.

If you aren't sure that simple pictures, as advocated in both of Dan's books, can be effective, take a look at his drawings explaining the current US health-care situation, linked from: [...]

While the level of drawing skill needed is very low, what you'll probably find is that you need to work through drawings as you are working through your understanding of your problems. Simple doesn't mean Easy, but the difficulty here is not the drawing, it is working through whatever your problem is.

My only complaint about the book is that it could use a few more blank pages.
I did the exercises in a separate notebook; I had a number of "do overs" and there just weren't going to be enough blank pages for that.

76 people found this helpful

Helpful

Oscar Lizarraga

90% of our communication is visual

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 12, 2010

Verified Purchase

This is a great book that may not be valued for every people.
The thing is that persons are visual, auditive or kinesic. That is, some people would prefer verbal communication, and others empirical emotions (to live things), rather than to visual communication (graphics, illustrations and presentations).

However, for our business world, where democracy is a common and difficult practice, where many people want to express their points of view, and with restrictions such as time, I think the advice given by this book is really valuable.

The main idea is to synthesize, and to achieve this, the first step is to do the effort of understand first what we want to communicate. The rest is drawing.

Either you are a consultant or a manager, communication is absolutely necessary. Therefore, findind a simple way to clarify ideas and portratit then in a compelling yet easy way, is a great added value of this book.

A NOTE: it needs a lot of practice, but you'll learn. I've been doing this for more than 10 years and many times I still find if difficult to simplify ideas, but I always use this kind of methodology. The books gives you great practical recommendations!

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

Kindle Customer

Quick, fun, and useful read

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 12, 2011

Verified Purchase

Dan Roam is really cool; I really enjoyed this book. Yes, the pictures are kind of corny. Yes, the examples are kind of cartoonish. Yes, the exercises seem like they are from kindergarten. But somehow Roam has taken corny, cartoonish, kindergarten tasks and turned them into something really useful.

I read this book and enjoyed it, but I didn't get the full value of the content until I went back and worked the exercises. Though I don't remember what SQVID stands for or any of the other organizing schemes that Roam uses, I really did learn something from his very original presentation of simple visual thinking tools.
In the process of working through the exercises in the book, I distilled the complexities of my work into four intuitive pictographs. My boss at the time hated these pictographs for some reason, but the value of the pictographs was demonstrated conclusively a few weeks later. I was presenting an overview of our processes and methods to a group of visitors from Turkey. Although they all spoke English as a second language, all of the text-based materials fell flat. The lightbulbs of understanding lit up all around the room when the discussion turned to those four silly pictographs though.

Unfolding the Napkin is a quick, fun, and useful read.

12 people found this helpful

Helpful

Life Is Good!

The 2nd Gets Lost In The Middle

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 13, 2013

Verified Purchase

I really enjoyed the authors first and third book. The ideas are simple and almost common sense. Useful for those who find it difficult to see options, sell ideas, or present data in simple form. The author provides a membership web site with videos if you find the contents of his books too complicated. For this reason alone. I am giving just 3 stars. If the author can't get his point across in a book and by using what he teaches, there is a problem. Maybe it is greed. Maybe, he needs 3 books to get the point across. Maybe what he is teaching isn't as easy, usable or workable as the author wants us to believe? The books are good, but according to the author courses, seminars and online video subscriptions are needed in order to understand how to use simple drawings.

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

GriffGraff

Are you kidding!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 29, 2010

Verified Purchase

If you don't rate this book 5-stars then I am afraid you really don't understand it. I have been waiting for Roam to write this book and it is finally here. I have obviously read his first book and I always said that I needed more examples, specifically in relation to the "look," "see," "imagine" and "show" metaphor and when I got the book and saw that he had done exactly that -- well, it was amazing. My only issue now is when and how am I going to meet this guy? I use his book (The Back of The Napkin) in my information architecture college course, it's great to get students to fall into "visual data" ala Tufte. I hope I haven't offended anyone, just my opinion.

6 people found this helpful

Helpful

Daniel Kowalski

Back of the Napkin--applied

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 27, 2010

Verified Purchase

Dan Roam has followed up his excellent book, "The Back of the Napkin" with this book. I found that the book provides great ways to apply his great ideas by using hands-on exercises. I now feel that I have internalized the ideas. Clearly Mr. Roam practices what he preaches and makes his approach very accessible. These ideas work!

I recently created a "map" to explain a highly conceptual idea. When I showed it to a friend who works in the same line of business he said that it really helped clarify things. This week he called me to say that he drew a quick version of it with a customer and the customer told him that is exactly what they needed.

3 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Joanne Whitlock

A comprehension boost

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 27, 2014

Verified Purchase

I loved this!

As someone who is interested in communication it was fascinating to see that Dan had created a system that could show so much information so clearly and what a massive impact it had on comprehension.

It gave me confidence to express myself more creatively should I wish.

MrT

Just a copy... Of the first book!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 20, 2012

Verified Purchase

I must say I loved the first book... But this book is a complete copy... 75% of this was in the first book... Just buy the first book, nothing extra worthwhile in the one!

4 people found this helpful

Paul

Useful

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 29, 2012

Verified Purchase

Arrived on time, well packed, useful book as a reference, lots of good ideas and will be a good reference for many years to come.

Buy new: $20.00$20.00 FREE delivery: Monday, Feb 13 on orders over $25.00 shipped by Amazon. Ships from: Amazon.com Sold by: Amazon.com

Buy Used: $10.85

Other Sellers on Amazon

Follow the Author

Unfolding the Napkin: The Hands-On Method for Solving Complex Problems with Simple Pictures Paperback – Illustrated, December 29, 2009

Enhance your purchase

Frequently bought together

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Editorial Reviews

Review

About the Author

Product details

Videos

About the author

Dan Roam

Customer reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Top reviews from other countries

Buy new:

$20.00

FREE delivery: Monday, Feb 13 on orders over $25.00 shipped by Amazon.

Ships from: Amazon.com

Sold by: Amazon.com

Buy Used:

$10.85