Dan Roam’s Book Is As Good As Ours
Our book: 
Dan’s book: 
Dan’s photo: 
There really are other great books out there besides Stopwatch Marketing. In particular, there is Dan Roam’s The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures.
The basic premise of Dan’s book is truly marvelous, as it says on the book jacket: “Used properly, a simple drawing on a humble napkin is more powerful than Excel or PowerPoint. It can help us crystallize ideas, think outside the box, and communicate in a way that other people simply ‘get.’”
I met Dan at the 800CEO conference in December – back when both of our books were in the final stages of editing and production – and I have to admit that, at first, my reaction was, “What’s the big deal? Everyone scratches out a flowchart, or a sketch, or schematic, or something to outline their ideas and sell them to others before investing tons of time and money in actually doing the work, don’t they?” One of Dan’s central insights is that NO, they don’t! As he puts it in the book, no scientist (or consultant, I would add) would think of actually starting up a project without first doing a handwritten, easy-to-follow schematic. But – and here’s the real insight – lots of people are uncomfortable with that approach, feel they “can’t really draw,” or that scribbling & sketching is somehow unprofessional…or at least not thorough.
Dan’s advice: Get over it! sketching out your ideas is the very best way to clarify them for yourself and, more important SELL them to others…like a boss, for instance, or a potential client.
In the book, of course, Dan follows his own advice. Virtually every page includes one those beautiful little hand-drawn images just like the one used on the book cover:
And, the book is chock-full of easy to remember – and execute – “to do” lists like “The four steps of visual thinking,” “The six ways of seeing,” and my personal favorite, “The SQVID: A practical lesson in applied imagination.” What’s a SQVID? (Simple, Quality, Vision, Individual attributes, and Delta, for change). Imaginatively, he demonstrates this particular principle with a set of drawings of an apple – the Vision part is an apple pie.
Make no mistake, while the book is a lot of fun, it does, indeed have a lot of practical and serious business advice: The Table of Contents for Part III sounds as if it could have been in our book…or one written by a McKinsey or Deloitte & Touche consultant: It includes chapters with titles like “Who are our customers?” “How many are buying?” “Where is our business?” and so forth. Dan’s distinct take on answering these questions is to first address the issue and the presumed answer VISUALLY. The sub-title to the “How many are buying?” chapter is “Pictures that solve a How Much problem.” The fact that people can react to and understand visuals so much easier than they can, for example, spreadsheets is Dan’s central insight and, incidentally, the insight that has driven so much of Apple Computer’s success over the years. I, for one, am old enough to remember what a breakthrough it seemed to be to point and click at a folder on the first Macintosh screen rather than to type in a string of endless text Commands.
The book, to repeat, is both fun and serious. Dan’s consulting practice, which, of course, pre-dates his publishing career, skews to the serious but highlights his emphasis on the VISUAL. The consulting offerings include “Strategic Business Visuals and Presentations,” described as “Compelling business visuals that clarify an idea, tell a story, make a point, incite an insight, and draw a conclusion,” and “Visual Thinking Seminars and Training.”
I assume that Dan’s intent, like ours, was twofold: 1) to codify, document, and publish his unique take on business as a way of publicizing his consulting practice and 2) to get his message across to millions of people who otherwise might never have heard of him or his consulting. It would be nice, of course, if objective number 2 resulted in a best seller. Regarding that objective, I can offer this: Stopwatch Marketing is published by and publicized by the same great team as is The Back of the Napkin. Why is that important? I probably could have browbeat either Dan, the publisher, or the publicist for a free copy by promising to write this review. However, I was so excited with the final product when I saw it near my book in a bookstore in the Los Angeles airport that I did, indeed, pay retail for my own personal copy of The Back of the Napkin, so that I could read, or rather, devour, it right away. It even kept me awake on the red eye.
Herewith, my own back of the napkin summary:
