Dan Roam > Quotes

“Any problem can be made clearer with a picture, and any picture can be created using the same set of tools and rules.”
― Dan Roam, The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures

“The single greatest challenge to leaders today (and that includes thinkers, teachers, managers, presidents, parents, CEOs, designers, salespeople, students—all of us) is this: We have to make more increasingly complex ideas more clear, more quickly and more persuasively than ever, to more audiences who are more informed and have more access to more information than ever.”
― Dan Roam, Blah Blah Blah: What To Do When Words Don't Work

“The Cat in the Hat was so successful for Random House that Bennett Cerf decided to raise the stakes. He bet Dr. Seuss fifty dollars that Seuss couldn’t pull off the feat again using only fifty words. This time the list contained “ham,” “am,” and “Sam.” And this time it took Dr. Seuss just five months to write Green Eggs and Ham.”
― Dan Roam, Blah Blah Blah: What To Do When Words Don't Work

“Whoever draws the best picture wins”
― Dan Roam, Draw to Win: A Crash Course on How to Lead, Sell, and Innovate With Your Visual Mind

“The enemy of art is the absence of limitations. —ORSON WELLES”
― Dan Roam, Draw to Win: A Crash Course on How to Lead, Sell, and Innovate With Your Visual Mind

“We don’t need more words. We need more ideas. We need them fast, and we need them to be good—and to know that they’re good, we need them to be clear.”
― Dan Roam, Blah Blah Blah: What To Do When Words Don't Work

“Stop thinking about drawing as an artistic process. Drawing is a thinking process. If”
― Dan Roam, Draw to Win: A Crash Course on How to Lead, Sell, and Innovate With Your Visual Mind

“Drawing isn't an artistic process; drawing is a thinking process.”
― Dan Roam, Draw to Win: A Crash Course on How to Lead, Sell, and Innovate With Your Visual Mind

“I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. —JOHN STEINBECK”
― Dan Roam, Draw to Win: A Crash Course on How to Lead, Sell, and Innovate With Your Visual Mind

“To be useful, any map must show three things: where we are now (in enough detail to decide whether that’s a good place for us to stay), a better place to go (in enough detail to decide whether that place really does look more inviting), and a clearly marked path between the two (in enough detail to make sure we won’t get lost along the way).”
― Dan Roam, Blah Blah Blah: What To Do When Words Don't Work

“Better presenting isn’t about understanding better technology; it’s about better understanding humanity.”
― Dan Roam, The Pop-up Pitch: The Two-Hour Creative Sprint to the Most Persuasive Presentation of Your Life

“So if you want to engage your audience’s heart, first show them where they fit into your idea. When people see where your idea impacts them, they will pay rapt attention to the what, where, when, how, and why.”
― Dan Roam, Draw to Win: A Crash Course on How to Lead, Sell, and Innovate With Your Visual Mind

“Those who can’t do, teach. Those who can’t teach, consult. And those who can’t consult, have to get back to work.”
― Dan Roam, Draw to Win: A Crash Course on How to Lead, Sell, and Innovate With Your Visual Mind

“We discovered that education is not something which the teacher does, but that it is a natural process which develops spontaneously in the human being. —MARIA MONTESSORI”
― Dan Roam, Draw to Win: A Crash Course on How to Lead, Sell, and Innovate With Your Visual Mind

“Perhaps you’ve been in a similar situation: Asked at the last moment to cover for a colleague, you say yes only to realize that you’ve stepped into your worst nightmare. In this case, my colleague had to leave the office on a medical emergency and pleaded with me to cover for a speech he had to deliver the following day. I said yes, only to learn later that the speech was to take place in Sheffield, England (we were in New York), to an audience of educational experts appointed by the then-new British prime minister, Tony Blair. My colleague hadn’t told me what the topic was—something about the Internet—or where his materials (if there were any) were buried.”
― Dan Roam, The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures