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The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures | |||||||
 
| 80% Recommended by our customers. Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover Catalog: Book Release date: 2008-03-13 Media: Hardcover Number of pages: 288 Ean: 9781591841999 Book Isbn: 1591841992  Tip: compare prices with similar booksAuthor:
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| Professional Review: |
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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. |
| User Reviews: |
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Written on December 6, 2008 Summary: Good General Coverage of Solving Problems Visually "The Back of the Napkin" is a well-written (and illustrated) book on how to solve problems visually. Dan Roam covers a lot of important ground in a small book...there is a high density of useful information in this book. Through a liberal use of examples, a linear and easy-to-follow narrative style and extensive pictures found across sections of the book, Roam offers readers a unique set of problem-solving tools. I especially like the various frameworks that Roam utilizes over the course of the book. I recommend this as a good source for problem-solving tools and approaches.  Written on December 3, 2008 Summary: 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.  Written on December 3, 2008 Summary: 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. Written on November 25, 2008 Summary: 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 end. There are a couple of highlights, including the discussion of simple versus elaborate (i.e., the opposite of simple is not complex). As the author says, "the real goal of visual thinking is to make the complex understandable by making it visible, not by making it simple." Then he proves the point with a story about Jeff Hawkins, who uses two versions of a diagram to show how the brain works, a simple and a complex. He typically shows both versions of the brain to both newbie and scientific audiences, but what's cool is that the order of presentation matters, depending on the audience! The case study at the end, to pull everything together, falls flat. If client problem were addressed this way, precious time would be wasted, er, doodling. It looks fun, don't get me wrong. Each challenge is reflexively met with the question, what picture can we draw? This turns out to be its own kind of error. With most examples, the case tends to either (i) over-reach in almost comical proportions; e.g., using a single bubble chart to set an entire strategy or (ii) pictorally trite; e.g., building an org chart is unnecessary graphical overkill to remind ourselves that we sell to different buyers within the client. Perversely, then, the case study, by insisting that every step (even the obvious) be met with a picture, manages to undermine the valid premise of the book. It proves: not all problems should be, or need to be, met with pictures. The book does not succeed because it really never gets much beyond a "see Jane run" sort of metaphor; it never uses pictures for an adult challenge. It is much nearer to an introductory tutorial on basic chart types than insight into information design. One irony of the book is that it is filled with Tufte's chartjunk: visual elements that do not add information. Two stars because (i) the degree of difficulty is really high (solving problems with pictures is a big hairy audacious goal, a goal with solutions far beyond this book) and (ii) one star feels impolite to the fun vibe of the happy face stick people.  Written on November 19, 2008 Summary: 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. |
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| Our price | $15.64 | $19.79 | $23.09 | - | $19.77 | $16.50 |
| List price | $24.95 | $29.99 | $34.99 | $11.00 | $29.95 | $25.00 |
| Lowest used price | $12.99 | $19.11 | $23.60 | $7.70 | $9.95 | $12.95 |
| Lowest new price | $12.99 | $17.50 | $21.19 | $20.21 | $17.54 | $13.00 |
| Collectible price | - | - | - | - | - | $25.00 |
| Catalog | Book | Book | Book | Book | Book | Book |
| Release date | 2008-03-13 | 2008-01-04 | 2008-08-12 | 2008-02-28 | 2008-03 | 2007-01-02 |
| Media | Hardcover | Paperback | Paperback | Paperback | Hardcover | Hardcover |
| Format | - | - | Illustrated | Bargain Price | - | - |
| Number of pages | 288 | 240 | 294 | 96 | 301 | 336 |
| Ean | 9781591841999 | 9780321525659 | 9780596522346 | - | 9780979777707 | 9781400064281 |
| Book Isbn | 1591841992 | 0321525655 | 0596522347 | - | 0979777704 | 1400064287 |
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