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Unfolding the Napkin: The Hands-On Method for Solving Complex Problems with Simple Pictures
An original workbook companion to the acclaimed business bestseller The Back of the Napkin
Dan Roam's The Back of the Napkin , a BusinessWeek bestseller, taught readers the power of brainstorming and communicating with pictures. It presented a new and exciting way to solve all kinds of problems-from the boardroom to the sales floor to the cubicle jungle.
The companion workbook, Unfolding the Napkin , helps readers put Roam's principles into practice with step-by-step guidelines. It's filled with detailed case studies, guided do-it-yourself exercises, and plenty of blank space for drawing. Roam structured the book as a complete four-day visual-thinking seminar, taking readers step-by-step from "I can't draw" to "Here is the picture I drew that I think will save the world."
The workbook teaches readers how to:
•Improve their three "built-in" visual problem solving tools.
•Apply the four-step visual thinking process (look-see-imagine-show) in any business situation.
•Instantly improve their visual imaginations.
•Learn how to recognize the type of problem to choose the best visual solution.
If The Back of the Napkin was a guide to fine dining, Unfolding the Napkin is the cookbook that will soon be heavily marked up and dogeared.
Dan Roam's The Back of the Napkin , a BusinessWeek bestseller, taught readers the power of brainstorming and communicating with pictures. It presented a new and exciting way to solve all kinds of problems-from the boardroom to the sales floor to the cubicle jungle.
The companion workbook, Unfolding the Napkin , helps readers put Roam's principles into practice with step-by-step guidelines. It's filled with detailed case studies, guided do-it-yourself exercises, and plenty of blank space for drawing. Roam structured the book as a complete four-day visual-thinking seminar, taking readers step-by-step from "I can't draw" to "Here is the picture I drew that I think will save the world."
The workbook teaches readers how to:
•Improve their three "built-in" visual problem solving tools.
•Apply the four-step visual thinking process (look-see-imagine-show) in any business situation.
•Instantly improve their visual imaginations.
•Learn how to recognize the type of problem to choose the best visual solution.
If The Back of the Napkin was a guide to fine dining, Unfolding the Napkin is the cookbook that will soon be heavily marked up and dogeared.
286 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
112 people are currently reading
1755 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 46 reviews
July 24, 2011
READ DEC 2010
Excellent approach to visual thinking and visual problem solving. This book is a follow-up to the original book and is set up as more of a workbook.
Best ideas are the four "unwritten rules" including: (a) whoever is best able to describe the problem is the person most likely to solve it, (b) we can't solve problems that overwhelm us. To understand what we're seeing, we need to break it into bite-size pieces, (c) problems don't get solved by the smartest, fastest, or strongest; they get solved by the one who sees the possibilities; and (d) the more human your picture, the more human the response.
Excellent approach to visual thinking and visual problem solving. This book is a follow-up to the original book and is set up as more of a workbook.
Best ideas are the four "unwritten rules" including: (a) whoever is best able to describe the problem is the person most likely to solve it, (b) we can't solve problems that overwhelm us. To understand what we're seeing, we need to break it into bite-size pieces, (c) problems don't get solved by the smartest, fastest, or strongest; they get solved by the one who sees the possibilities; and (d) the more human your picture, the more human the response.
October 24, 2016
Đọc xong mới biết là 75% neuron của não được dùng để xử lí hình ảnh.
Sách đẹp và dễ hiểu nhờ có nhiều hình minh họa. Nếu không tiện mua sách thì có thể đọc bài của tác giả trên page: http://www.danroam.com/
Thích nhất là phong cách vẽ minh họa rất đơn giản mà dễ thương, mình sẽ thử sử dụng kiểu vẽ này cho một vài sô chậu của mình
Sách đẹp và dễ hiểu nhờ có nhiều hình minh họa. Nếu không tiện mua sách thì có thể đọc bài của tác giả trên page: http://www.danroam.com/
Thích nhất là phong cách vẽ minh họa rất đơn giản mà dễ thương, mình sẽ thử sử dụng kiểu vẽ này cho một vài sô chậu của mình
November 14, 2013
Hi. So for all those out there who gaze at their laptops and computer screen for long number of hours each day, to figure out what those bulk charts, dashboards and tables say about your company profits and losses, this book is your knight in the shining armor! :) All post grads doing MBA,please go through this book and learn better visualization and presentation aspects for your projects and models. Ben Fry sure is the most renowned author for data visualization practices in the world but Dan Roam has done an amazing work with this second book of his. His style is frank, simple, approachable, funny and gripping! It almost feels like a fiction novel as you turn pages and glance at hi text and pictures. I would recommend this to corporate world and anybody who is into a lot of presentations and data interpretation.
Have a humorous and informative read! :)
Have a humorous and informative read! :)
May 23, 2022
Một cách tiếp cận khác để lên ý tưởng, giải quyết vấn đề
May 9, 2019
2019年4月29日读完。看完需要2h，整理内容花了半小时。主要内容是围绕“瑞士军刀”展开的，“看、观察、想象、展示”，“六六法则”、“SQVID”是本书的核心。可以说是抓住了描述问题、解决问题角度的本质了。这种思维过程、表现的手段可以用在多种问题中。 另外，汤普森公司咨询的案例很有意思。 值得一读！
June 16, 2015
Any problem can be solved with simple illustrations, no matter your level of artistic ability (or lack thereof), and this book explains how with real-world applications and plenty of exercises.
Dan Roam apparently has taken his philosophies on the road with great results, revolutionizing how businesses relate sometimes complex ideas in very simple ways, while at the same time using basic and timeless methods. This is a handbook, like a do-it-yourself workshop, that takes you through the four days of his presentation, including examples and outlining his methods and philosophies, as well as exercises to help illustrate and cement what you learn along the way. I thought this book was even more valuable than The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures, if only because it was briefer in text and denser in exercise. It was helpful to have read (or to read alongside) his first book, but to actually have the chance to put these things into use and practice them right then and there, and see how he would do them too, was pretty interesting and insightful. I tried to keep my drawings pretty rudimentary so I wouldn't be distracted by trying to make them look too beautiful and therefore not as spontaneous and inspired (which is exactly the point of his process -- rough drawings that very quickly illustrate something that might otherwise be complex and forgettable), and it was a really useful exercise. My office team worked through this workshop together and were all able to learn a lot of different things based on their respective background, perspective and actual work.
Dan Roam's Back of the Napkin process is put to the test here as a four-day workshop that you can do right at home with this companion book. He includes the basic information from his draw-to-teach philosophy, exercises to demonstrate and cement what he teaches, and even some examples to get you started and to compare to your own results. I liked how he kept the text to a minimum and just the relevant stuff, and I enjoyed going back to basics and trying to visually think like other people might. I tried to keep things basic and I think it was a really useful little series of exercises, whatever your work might be.
Dan Roam apparently has taken his philosophies on the road with great results, revolutionizing how businesses relate sometimes complex ideas in very simple ways, while at the same time using basic and timeless methods. This is a handbook, like a do-it-yourself workshop, that takes you through the four days of his presentation, including examples and outlining his methods and philosophies, as well as exercises to help illustrate and cement what you learn along the way. I thought this book was even more valuable than The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures, if only because it was briefer in text and denser in exercise. It was helpful to have read (or to read alongside) his first book, but to actually have the chance to put these things into use and practice them right then and there, and see how he would do them too, was pretty interesting and insightful. I tried to keep my drawings pretty rudimentary so I wouldn't be distracted by trying to make them look too beautiful and therefore not as spontaneous and inspired (which is exactly the point of his process -- rough drawings that very quickly illustrate something that might otherwise be complex and forgettable), and it was a really useful exercise. My office team worked through this workshop together and were all able to learn a lot of different things based on their respective background, perspective and actual work.
Dan Roam's Back of the Napkin process is put to the test here as a four-day workshop that you can do right at home with this companion book. He includes the basic information from his draw-to-teach philosophy, exercises to demonstrate and cement what he teaches, and even some examples to get you started and to compare to your own results. I liked how he kept the text to a minimum and just the relevant stuff, and I enjoyed going back to basics and trying to visually think like other people might. I tried to keep things basic and I think it was a really useful little series of exercises, whatever your work might be.
June 11, 2012
Dan Roam is really cool; I really enjoyed this book. Yes, the pictures are kind of corny. Yes, the examples are kind of cartoonish. Yes, the exercises seem like they are from kindergarten. But somehow Roam has taken corny, cartoonish, kindergarten tasks and turned them into something really useful.
I read this book and enjoyed it, but I didn't get the full value of the content until I went back and worked the exercises. Though I don't remember what SQVID stands for or any of the other organizing schemes that Roam uses, I really did learn something from his very original presentation of simple visual thinking tools.
In the process of working through the exercises in the book, I distilled the complexities of my work into four intuitive pictographs. My boss at the time hated these pictographs for some reason, but the value of the pictographs was demonstrated conclusively a few weeks later. I was presenting an overview of our processes and methods to a group of visitors from Turkey. Although they all spoke English as a second language, all of the text-based materials fell flat. The lightbulbs of understanding lit up all around the room when the discussion turned to those four silly pictographs though.
Unfolding the Napkin is a quick, fun, and useful read.
I read this book and enjoyed it, but I didn't get the full value of the content until I went back and worked the exercises. Though I don't remember what SQVID stands for or any of the other organizing schemes that Roam uses, I really did learn something from his very original presentation of simple visual thinking tools.
In the process of working through the exercises in the book, I distilled the complexities of my work into four intuitive pictographs. My boss at the time hated these pictographs for some reason, but the value of the pictographs was demonstrated conclusively a few weeks later. I was presenting an overview of our processes and methods to a group of visitors from Turkey. Although they all spoke English as a second language, all of the text-based materials fell flat. The lightbulbs of understanding lit up all around the room when the discussion turned to those four silly pictographs though.
Unfolding the Napkin is a quick, fun, and useful read.
February 16, 2010
The author spends the first 100 pages expaining why pictures are a good idea. He could have made his point much quicker and spent more time explaining his frameworks for drawing pictures, of which there are very many. He makes an analogy with a swiss army knife: his has 18 tools on it, culminating in a 6x5x2 = 60-picture grid of the different drawings you can make, which he calls the "visual thinking codex". The types of pictures he is talking about are: who/what, how much, where, when, how and why for the 6, and simple/elaborate, quality/quantity, vision/execution, individual/comparison and change/as-is for the 5x2.
On a side note, the book contains a "how to lie with statistics" error on pages 92-103, where he uses the area of an equilateral triangle to represent size. The area does not scale linearly with the sides, so a triangle that should be twice as large is now four times as large. He might have scaled the triangles to fit, but neither the sides nor the areas of the triangles scale with the numbers he's representing. Here's where I would keep it simple (and correct!) and go with bar charts.
On a side note, the book contains a "how to lie with statistics" error on pages 92-103, where he uses the area of an equilateral triangle to represent size. The area does not scale linearly with the sides, so a triangle that should be twice as large is now four times as large. He might have scaled the triangles to fit, but neither the sides nor the areas of the triangles scale with the numbers he's representing. Here's where I would keep it simple (and correct!) and go with bar charts.
March 20, 2012
I picked up this book--and in particular the "hands-on" workbook instead of the original The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures--because I am not particularly visual person, but I want to learn to communicate better visually and practice it, too. As such, I found the book quite helpful, but it took me *forever* to get through because, well, it was like "work". (This is quite ironic since I regularly read technical books that are very much related to my job and frequently pertinent to a project I am working on, but I don't find most of them to be "work".) But I can't complain because the author does a fine job of helping the reader think through problems by describing their features in a visual manner.
October 24, 2016
Such an amazing book. It enlightens me with a new approach to the problem-solving skill. I immediately apply the tools to my writing skill, my daily job as a Software Architect. It helps me better explaining the boring topic or hard to understand. You know the software stuff are not that fun.
If you are struggling with understanding complex stuff, this book is for you. You will see things in totally different perspective.
If you are struggling with understanding complex stuff, this book is for you. You will see things in totally different perspective.
August 7, 2018
I found the first half of the book more helpful and easier to follow than the second half, but I still think this is more useful for how you communicate visually than how you actually do the solving -- my brain did not understand a lot of this naturally. (Red pen!) Still, it helped me get out of my comfort zone by exploring some different ways to show rather than tell concepts I'm trying to convey.
December 13, 2011
It's a 4-day workshop on how to make the steps your own. This one's for everyone who's ever been asked "Can you show me what it looks like?" I find the book especially helpful for presenting stuff in a brown bag lunch session and any other discussions over coffee & without a laptop computer, a white board or one of those blasted tablets.
April 28, 2012
This book provides a simple approach to become a more effective communicator.
It was interesting to recognize tactics that were already being implemented at my office. (I am guessing someone from our corporate, if not our office leader, has read this.)
None the less, I found it a valuable read and already find myself using some of its methods.
August 6, 2014
Loved it! Highly recommend it for anyone who is tired of boring Powerpoints, or consultants who want to understand complex concepts and requirements with a simple model.
Also- it will give you a tool to present to any group and ensure they GET what you're saying. Loved it, excited to implement this every day.
Also- it will give you a tool to present to any group and ensure they GET what you're saying. Loved it, excited to implement this every day.
October 1, 2016
Break the problem into 50 visual pieces is a good way to see the problems from different points of view. Its an exercise worth doing when you are stuck on ideas. Another method to generate 5*5*2 possibilities .
July 26, 2020
Sách viết hơi dài dòng nhưng nội dung truyền tải thì hay khỏi phải bàn, đọc tới lần thứ 3 mình mới viết review. Với một đứa thích nói như mình thì đây là một cuốn sách thay đổi tư duy hoàn toàn về cách trình bày vấn đề với người khác. Highly recommend cho tất cả mọi người.
February 22, 2010
Better than Back of the Napkin because of the detail and number of examples. Otherwise nothing new. Still, absolutely worth reading and trying to apply to your work.
July 21, 2010
A must read for communicators, teachers, pastors, and leaders. Invaluable tools.
September 23, 2010
More detailed than the Back of the Napkin but a lot of the same material.
December 30, 2010
Nice system. I will try and incorporate drawing into my briefs. Should come in very handy for teaching.
July 12, 2011
We are not talking about great literature here but set of ideas/techniques on how to present your ideas based on the theory that we are born with the ability to draw but not to write and read.
August 31, 2017
Started 9/5/2011
November 18, 2011
This book was a harder read for me than The Back of the Napkin. I appreciated the exercises, and did force myself to complete them. I think it's a nice companion to The Back of the Napkin.
December 11, 2011
Simple, yet brilliant. I use the principles from this book all the time.
May 29, 2012
Visual Thibkers of all stripes will love Dan Roam.
August 2, 2012
Somewhat of a companion book to "The Back of the Napkin". Shows how effective simple symbols are in communicating complex ideas especially for your whiteboard explanations.
September 5, 2012
The only slight drawback to this book is that it is too much like The Back of the Napkin. Still, of you only read this one it is still a book full of five-star ideas and insights.
September 8, 2012
A great workbook for helping teachers sort through visual thinking, representing. I love VR!!
December 9, 2015
Excellent complement to "The Back of the Napkin". Deeper explanations about the 6x6 method and SQVID with examples and exercises.
February 13, 2013
Great supplement to Back of the Napkin. You, too, can doodle with purpose.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 46 reviews