The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures | 
 enlarge | Author: Dan Roam
Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $11.13
You Save: $13.82 (55%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  43 reviews
Sales Rank: 181
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 7.4 x 7.1 x 1.2
ISBN: 1591841992
Dewey Decimal Number: 658.403
EAN: 9781591841999
ASIN: 1591841992
Publication Date: March 13, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Condition: SATISFACTION GUARANTEED! NEW Book! May have remainder mark. Most orders ship within 1 BUSINESS DAY with ORDER CONFIRMATION.
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Product Description
A bold new way to tackle tough business problemseven 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 cant 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 everyones 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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| Customer Reviews: Read 38 more reviews...
 I thought this book would help me draw July 25, 2008
Dan Roam writes a fun book. I thought I would learn how to draw better when drawing business ideas. This book goes through the business plan on napkins - but after practicing drawing like Dan Roam in the book, it looks nothing like the book. Bummer. I would of loved a chapter on how to draw better.
 Great book July 21, 2008
If you have to get complex points across to people as part of your job, this book will help you do a better job. Great for technical sales or product management.
 Needs more drawings, less chatter July 20, 2008
I also wanted to like this book. And, to be fair, I didn't read the entire book. I just couldn't. It goes on and on about how important visual thinking is. Okay, okay, I get it. Now what? Well, the author then--as others have pointed out--paradoxically proceeds to bore us with chatter about how to proceed with using drawing and visual thinking instead of sticking to his guns and using more drawings! ATTENTION KINDLE USERS: The Kindle version's drawings of this book are barely perceptible; it's quite a chore to squint and figure out what they are supposed to be. Adjusting the font size of the text does nothing for the illustrations.
 Geared more to sales than sharing ideas July 18, 2008
I bought this book because the idea of improving my visual thinking skills was intriguing. The first half of the book was more helpful to me than the second (the case study).
The main thing I was looking for help improving was my public speaking and teaching skills. It was moderately helpful in this area. The main audience I think that would be interested in this book is salespeople or consultants. It spends a lot of time convincing the reader to use hand drawn graphs instead of PowerPoint or Excel created ones.
a big disappointment July 17, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
i was really disappointed with this book. i tend to be a visual guy, and had a high level of expectancy about how fun this book would be to read, and how helpful it would be. but i was bored -- crazy bored. i could barely finish it.
there are some good ideas in the book, to be sure. but i found it horribly paradoxical that a book about using drawings would be so pickin' linear. there were three steps for this, and 6 rules for that. i felt like i was reading a john maxwell leadership book! the cute little drawings on every page even got really old. tons of repeated info, and `no duh' stuff also.
sorry, not a helpful book.
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