Digital Roam

First "The Back of the Napkin" review

The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures
Dan Roam. Penguin/Portfolio, $24.95 (270p) ISBN 978-1-59184-199-9

"The premise behind Roam's book is simple: anybody with a pen and a scrap of paper can use visual thinking to work through complex business ideas. Management consultant and lecturer Roam begins with a “watershed moment”: asked, at the last minute, to give a talk to top government officials, he sketched a diagram on a napkin. The clarity and power of that image allowed him to communicate directly with his audience. From this starting point, Roam has developed a remarkably comprehensive system of ideas. Everything in the book is broken down into steps, providing the reader with “tools and rules” to facilitate picture making. For forward-thinking management types, there is enough content in these pages to drive many a brainstorming session. Illus. (Mar 13)"

The conference sweet spot

On the plane home from the business writers' conference in Chicago, I tried to write an appropriate thank-you note to the folks at 800-CEO-READ who had put it all together.

Words failed me. Pictures didn't.

Here's what I thought of the small (40 people) short (1.5 days) conference:

What fantastic group of people attended:

Erika Andersen
Greg Alexander
Jose Castillo
Kevin Eikenberry
Phil Gerbyshak
Joanne Gordon
Jackie Huba
Joe Heuer
Alexander Kjerulf
Steve Little
Ben McConnell
Robert Mintz
Jack Mitchell
Susan Quandt
David Meerman Scott
Michael Stallard
Dan Roam
John Rosen
Rajesh Setty
AnnaMaria Turano
Bill Welter
Steve Yastrow
Mike Kanazawa

Ray Bard  - Bard Press
Mark Bloomfield - Harvard Business School Press
Shelley Dolley - Leap7
Barbara Cave Henricks - Cave Henricks Communications
Mark Fortier - Fortier Public Relations
Nick Morgan - Public Words
Gerry Sindell - ThoughtLeaders INTL
Les Tuerk - BrightSight Group
Dennis Welch - Cave Henricks Communications
Susan Williams - Jossey-Bass

And the folks at 800 CEO Read:

Jack Covert
Melinda Cross - Concepts Content Copy
Sally Haldorson
Jon Mueller
Kate Mytty
Joy Panos Stauber - Stauber Design Studio
Todd Sattersten
Aaron Schleicher
Dylan Schleicher
Rebecca Schlei

Square Ocean Strategy

I'm in Chicago attending the second annual 800-CEO-READ business writer's Pow-Wow, an event that brings together authors (established and emerging), publishers (big and small), book PR leaders (Barbara and Mark, to be precise),  and the book sales professionals from 8CR. It's a small group and the event is just two days long, which means I'm learning a lot from an amazing group of people in a perfectly short period of time.

A highlight for me yesterday was Ray Bard from Bard Press. Known as the company that publishes just one book per year, Bard has scored 14 bestsellers out of just 27 books published. When Ray talks, people listen.

Happily, when Ray talks, people also LOOK. Uniquely for a "word-book" publisher, Ray likes charts... which means I liked Ray's presentation (everybody else did too -- and I'm convinced that's because he was the only presenter to hand out a piece of paper to each audience member to look at while he talked).

Here is what he handed out: the wonderful "Size and depth of your book's market" chart.

Ray uses this chart to help plot where he thinks the market potential is for any given book proposal, and to help determine whether or not he wants to publish it.

If a book falls into the "puddle" category (small market, small need) or the "bayou" category (big market, small need), he'll give it a pass. If it falls into the "well" category (small market, big need) he'll take a second look. If it falls into the "ocean" category (big market, big need), he'll take it on right then and there.

Nice chart, nice concept, nice model. Everybody got it.

Then I asked Ray if I could take a shot at adding a couple things that I thought might make it even more powerful. He happily agreed, and here's my modified version:

I flopped the axes for "depth" and "width" so that they would be more intuitively visual ("depth" being a vertical idea, and "width" being horizontal). Then I shifted the size of the boxes to more accurately reflect their actual dimensions (a puddle being small, and ocean being big).

It's the same chart, but contains a bit more visceral information. Better than the previous? Maybe. Ray liked the modifications and will test it out.

I'm anxious to see how it goes.