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

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

Customer Rating:
Summary: more like back of the table napkin
Comment: for a book that pleads complex business problems can be condensed to a simple diagram, this book is wordy, overly complex and, frankly, kind of boring. This whole book could have easily been condensed into a a couple of chapters, and I found myself skipping whole parts that were simplistic and, again, not enough intrigue to get through the chapter. Ironically, the imagery throughout the book is distracting. Also, the author is constantly trying to convince us the value in using images to communicate, but I think that we can assume that if you are buying this book you have already drank the kool-aid of his message. Too much preaching to the choir.

The good parts of the book are when the author talks about specific business problems he helped to solve. Those kept me interested.

The main point of the book is a good one -- use simple images to communicate -- and learn how to distill information to get your message across. However the author would have been well served to take his own advice and shrink the this table napkin to a cocktail napkin.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: very nice
Comment: What a surprising book this is! It's easy to read, very inspiring and just fun to try it yourself. If you visit his website, you get a pdf doc with the basics; simply great.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Very Useful
Comment: As a graphic designer by training, i was skeptical about the value this book would bring to my table. I picked it up on a whim in barnes and noble. I learned a lot of really useful tips though for quickly identifying and expressing problem and solution spaces. I would recommend this book to just about anyone.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Great set of tools - not a standard approach to business problem solving
Comment: This book was an interesting read for me not only because of the presentation concepts discussed, but also because The back of the napkin aims to provide a complete framework to solve business problems.

I think the book did really well on the presentation front, the goal of a generic strategic problem solving kit is not really reached.

Dan does a great job convincing us that we should use our drawing/visual thinking skills that most of us have been neglecting since we started formal education. On top of that he provides practical guidelines to get going

Have the courage to use a more informal drawing style (away from the computer) to get to the essence of problems, focus not on form but on content

Help us think about what type of drawings are best to be used in which situations (who, what, when, why, etc.) and to what audiences (the visionary CEO, the detailed operations manager)

As a problem solving tool kit, he provides useful tools but falls short of providing a generic solution framework for all business problems (which impossible anyway I think).

Dan takes the "S-type"/"sensing" approach to problem solving, spread out all data, put in on the walls, digest it all to see the bigger picture. A way of data processing very similar to the human brain sizing up a new environment. This is actually a useful and fresh approach compared to for example strategy firms such as McKinsey, that apply a very targeted data gathering approach focussed on key questions/issues that have been identified earlier.

Another take away for me were diagrams that try to summarize all relationships in a problem. Plot a variable on the x axis, one on the y axis, start adding bubbles in different sizes and different colors to analyze 5-6 dimensions in one diagram. Useful for solving problems, less for communicating results to a "cold" audience that is confronted with the material for the first time.

I do think however that the book does not provide a simple step-by-step guide to solve problems, you need guidance for this. Running problem solving brainstormings around a white board requires a strong moderator, and picking the right diagrams requires experience. Hiring Dan's firm would probably do the trick, but the novice will find it difficult to apply the techniques after having read the just the book.

As a presentation tool, Dan's ideas are highly valuable in a smaller group setting, where everyone can gather around a white board while the presentor draws the story "live" in front of the audience without any help of PowerPoint. For the big audience however, this approach is high risk.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Where's the Editor
Comment: I struggled with this book. It has some great ideas, but it reminds me of the last hour of the film version of The Return of the King or the entire King Kong by Peter Jackson. Where's the editor?

The good and the bad:
1. He gives concrete examples of how to use visual thinking and gives you tools to figure out what to do.
2.It's a 300 pages book talking about visual thinking. Okay. I read it on the Kindle, so I don't know really how big the pictures are. But the point remains - it is overly long. A full third of the book is taken up by a case study on selling B2B software.
3. Which, by the way, made no sense whatsoever. He starts by saying, "Let's map our customers." And then proceeds to put them all in a single company. It's quite possibly the worst case of profiling a customer base I've seen.

All in all, it's a good book. But focus on the SKIMMING, not the reading.

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