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The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures
by: Dan Roam

List Price: $24.95

Off The Bookshelf's Price: $15.64

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Used Price: $12.95
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Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 658.403
EAN: 9781591841999
ISBN: 1591841992
Label: Portfolio Hardcover
Manufacturer: Portfolio Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 288
Publication Date: March 13, 2008
Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover
Studio: Portfolio Hardcover
Sales Rank: 535

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Editorial Review:

Product Description:
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.

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- Really Boring
When I bought this book I thought it was going to be enlightening. Instead I found this book to be very dry and very boring.

The tone and pace of the book is all wrong. The explanations are too drawn out. I believe 20-30% of the book could be culled out and it would not lose any of its value.

In the end the biggest problem is how hard it is to take something away from this book. I want to feel like I learned something and I don't feel that way with this book.

Rating:

- Boils down things to a napkin
This book is not like any other one out there. By grouping visual thinking and communication into several distinct groups, it will give you a new much simpler way to do think, capture and communicate things that once were much more complex.

Rating:

- Stick figures can't quite sell it (insert sad face here)
It's a cute book with a heart. Its novelty is eschewing computer-generated graphs in favor of good old fashioned stick figures. At one point, this nostalgia goes too far: the multivariate plot of the accounting software landscape needs visualization software. In fact, often. The book's case study unwittingly makes the anti-case for pictures; for several business challenges, a simple picture belies a situation that, in real life, would demand a deeper analysis.

Does the book give "a new, better way to solve problems and sell ideas?" Nope, sad to say. Few usable takeways. Instead, a painstaking parsing of the *very* familiar. The anchor is the journalistic six ways of seeing: who and what, where, why, when, how, and how much. I did enjoy being reminded, but still felt empty at the ... Read More

Rating:

- Good if you are new to this thinking
Being a visual learner, this was preaching to the choir with little new to offer. A few good points. Not enough to purchase an entire book on. Although, if visual expression and explanation style is not your forte, it is a book that could be useful.
Ergo, the rating of 3 falls between. A higher rank if you are new or relatively inexperienced. A lower rank if you are regular utilizers of visual mapping.

Rating:

- The book should have been napkin sized
OK, I'll admit it. I use the white board a lot. I thought this book would be a quick hit group of hints to make my life/verbiage/ideas more simple and clear. I found the book full of lists, like I'm going to be doing some free flowing idea presenting at a whiteboard and still remember some arcane 12 point list. I'd actually would have given it a 1 star rating, but I know there are some people this would be good for, someone possibly who isn't already jumping out of there chair and fighting for the whiteboard. If this describes you, my suggestion is skip this book.

Books : The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures