The Back of the Napkin (Expanded Edition): Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures Kindle Edition

I use the practical tips from the book in my workplace. After I retired, I passed it to a young colleague, telling her this was my secret weapon in career advancement. In my work as content manager and editor, I seldom used PowerPoint; instead I found it quicker and easier to draw visuals on a whiteboard, using thick marker pens of various colours. This kind of visual illustration skill is precisely what the Napkin book teaches.Almost every page is presented with drawings. You can see some random examples that I scanned from the book.

I recently read a book (The three value conversations) that outlined approaches to showing people/organisations (your customers) value by creating, elevating and then capturing it. It delved into the world of powerpoint presentations and how we cannot have effective conversations. Our audience essentially takes in the start of the presentation and some part of the end; the middle is essentially forgotten.Back of the Napkin is the "how" and "why" of communicating with your customer, team or prospect. As the title suggests it is a very visual book with many images, acronyms and approaches on how to draw and have a conversation versus death by powerpoint. By traversing through the 6 "W" questions (i.e. What, Who, When, Why, Where and How), Dan Roam provides a stock set of templates on how to visualise this to provide impact in your conversation. Very well worth a read!Three key takeaways from the book:1. People like seeing other people’s pictures. In most presentation situations, audiences respond better to hand-drawn images (however crudely drawn) than to polished graphics; as long as you're credible that is2. Look, see, imagine and show is the four step process to getting visual. You don't need to be a phenomenal drawer because there are templated approaches for any situation3. Visual thinking is where it is at. We need to take advantage of our innate ability to see both with our eyes and our mind's eyes.

DON’T GET THIS KINDLE “VERSION”! The drawings, which are essential to understanding the text, are completely disconnected with the text. And I don’t mean, out of sync, as in a few pages before or after the relevant text. No, many of the essential explanatory drawings are just not there, replaced by drawings duplicated from previous chapters. I know this because I had to go out and buy the print edition, and then everything started to make sense. This book is basically useless without the relevant drawings in the right places. I got this book as a required reading for a course, and it took me a while (hours and hours of wasted study time, thinking that something was wrong with me for not “getting it”). I don’t see an obvious way to demand a refund, but I will persist. Complete waste money, and even worse.

Like many books, "Back of the Napkin" seems to have begun with a brilliant very short concept that someone (correctly) thought would sell like hotcakes if padded out into a full-length book. The author really does present significant insights, but the irony is that they would have been best summarized literally on the back of a napkin, rather than dragging them out into full book form. So it reads like a 300-slide PowerPoint presentation advocating brevity.The sequel, "Unfolding the Napkin" (which I also read) is better thought out, serves more as a method, and contains more visual examples - but it still rehashes pretty much the same material as the first book in order to make its point, so reading both books was redundant in my opinion.

Love the book, but the Kindle experience is awful. The book is about drawing, but the assets for all the drawings are pathetic, low-resolution, awful renditions of the author’s wonderful work. Makes this Kindle book mostly useless, a waste of money, and very disappointing.

I took about a month and a half to convert a PowerPoint presentation into hand-drawn, anthropomorphized illustrations using "Back of the Napkin" (BOTN) tools.Fair amount of work, but wonderful, wonderful insights into how to "say" what I was trying to "say" in my slick PowerPoint slides. The book and tools hold your hand into much greater understanding and appreciation of how people think and receive information - and how thinking through the situation/opportunity/challenge using the BOTN methodology makes things clearer to both presenter and presentee.

This is a great little book. A bit too wordy in places, but the ideas are in the right place. It's about sketches and visual note taking. As the title suggests, these are often more productive when done on less than perfect media. After reading this I did a test with a large group of students. I gave them all a napkin and told them to come up with ideas for a project. It was gratifying to see how well that worked and how some of them went on to read the book and keep using grotty sheets of paper to work out ideas.Recommended.

I communicate with pictures (black pen person) - so this book provided me with both a structure and a framework to use when facilitating workshops. I think the closing chapters could be expanded to bring everything together better and expalin how you would run a workshop using this technique. It would also expalin better what the final result would look like and how you might use it.

This was not at all what I expected after reading many reviews. Perhaps it is as good as others say. I never read it even though I opened it several times to start. The pages full of small text plus some small drawings that often did not make sense without reading the page of text, seemed much to big of an investment for my needs which is to learn some general drawing skills to graphically record at business workshops. I did not keep the book.

muy buen libro, trae muchas cosas en las que se puede empezar a trabajar para todo lo de pensamiento visual, pero también tiene conceptos que ayudan a entender que no toda la gente es visual y tiene ayudas que colaboran a llegar a un punto en el que puedes hacer que la mayor parte de la gente entienda lo que quieres decirles de una manera visual

This book shares recent discoveries in vision science and shows that everyone can use visual thinking to discover new ideas and share insights. I was expecting it to be about doodling, but it's actually a more methodical framework for drawing graphs and flowcharts to see patterns.