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Businessweek.com this week features "The Back of the Napkin" as the basis for their slide show on the rise of quick sketching as a business tool.
Online editor Douglas MacMillan interviewed me in NY last week where we had a great time swapping napkin stories. I may be biased, but I think his article makes a great case for why my own clients (Wal-Mart, Infosys Consulting, Microsoft) and others (UPS) are turning to simple drawings as effective problem-solving tools.
It's about time that network TV got what everybody else has known since Kindergarten: simple pictures make complex concepts easy to understand. Thank you Katie Couric and CBS news for bringing the whiteboard into the news room, and bringing Josh Landis and Mitch Butler along with it.
In CBS News new "Fast Draw" segment (which appears to be in test flight mode for now) Landis and Butler (who met at ABC news) share the whiteboard as they explain concepts everybody "knows" about, but that nobody REALLY gets. Like superdelegates, for example.
In their first 3-minute clip with Katie, they seemed to impress even her with their quick visual explanation about how sometimes a democracy isn't very democratic. Like Katie said, "That was fun".
Good for you, CBS!
(Enjoy the praise, because next time I'm going to critique what's *not* perfect about the session.)
It's official: on Saturday, March 8th the team at SXSW has given me the stage to talk about The Back of the Napkin.
If you're in Austin, drop by the 'room day stage' in the main hall at 1:30 for a quick lesson on solving problems with pictures.
BYON. (Bring Your Own Napkin)
I got the exciting news today that the Miami Herald Business Monday Book Club is going to feature THE BACK OF THE NAPKIN as their selection next month.
How it works
Business books columnist Richard Pachter selects a new book for the club every month. On a first-come, first-served basis, a limited number of members can get a free copy by e-mailing [email protected] with the member's name, address and phone number. Readers who do not get a free book in the mail are invited to buy their own copies and send their reviews to the same e-mail address.
What does the club do?
Review books! When you receive your book, you have approximately three weeks to read and review it. Simply send your review back by e-mail and Pachter will run excerpts of selected club members' reviews alongside his own.
The FedEx stork came early this month. My book -- 18 months in concept, 12 months in writing, 9 months in production -- arrived today.
Let's take a look...
We know three things about Murphy:
Case in point:
There I was at VizThink, thirty minutes before my talk, happy that I had so much time to set up my fancy new tablet PC, connect it to the projector, and test out a few quick sketches. (With the tablet, I can draw directly on the PC's screen and everything is projected for all to see, just like a huge whiteboard.)
Of course, since Murphy was in the room, neither I nor the harried A/V guy could get the screen to 'mirror' on both the tablet and the projector. It had worked before, and it would work later, but it was not going to work that day with 60 people watching.
The problem was this: I had left many of the pages of my PowerPoint blank, intending to use the tablet pen to draw in the pertinent details before the audience. Cool. Except that now I could choose either to see the pages on my little PC screen only, OR have everyone see them up on the big screen -- leaving my PC screen dark.
Remember how I said I has thirty minutes? Not anymore. The room was full, the crowd was getting agitated, and I was getting ready to sweat big-time. The PC-projector combo was having none of it: nothing worked. Finally I had to make a decision: leave the room and never return, entertain the audience for my ninety minutes by slowly strangling the A/V guy, or believe my own rule:
"If you've got a good idea and a good whiteboard, you've got a great presentation."
I went for it. Balanced between half a PowerPoint and a whiteboard, the wonderful audience and I kept each other laughing (and learning) beyond our alloted time. If you were in that audience that day: THANK YOU!
What else did Murphy say: "The show must go on?" Had to be Murphy. That guy knew his stuff.
Sometimes when you sit down at a rubber chicken conference lunch, you get rubber chicken. Sometimes you get a real meal and nice chat with interesting people. And SOMETIMES you get a great lunch and a conversation with people so interesting that before you know it the waiters are setting up for dinner.
And so it was at VizThink last week. Late to lunch from closing out my own workshop, I sat down at the first available seat, and started talking with Scott and Rebecca from Maga Design in DC. Within minutes we were sharing stories about crazy clients, how to market a book, back-of-the-napkin sketches, the role of "design" in "business", and a whole slew of other topics that were fascinating, but that I -- being in conference mode -- promptly forgot.
But not Rebecca. When I logged on to email an hour later, she sent through her lunch napkin. Wow: it works.
The only question we didn't all agree on was whether it's ok to play Led Zeppelin on your iPhone loud in an airport -- without the earbuds.
I'm not much of a database person myself. I bought a copy of FileMaker in the dark ages and managed to run a small business with it, but as I say, even that was pre-bubble one.
But when I ran across Kem Meyer's diagram explaining why a single DB-guy is bad for ones' health (especially the DB-guy), I got it immediately. Talk about a nice "napkin sketch".
See: this is why I'm not a database person.
At the end of my VizThink workshop on Monday, a bunch of people came up afterwards to talk about solving problems with pictures. The funniest was Richard Mulholland, the certifiable lunatic who runs the South African presentation consultancy Missing Link.
(Richard is the less photogenic one on the right. Managing Director Sam is on the left.)
Starting out with the obligatory, "I can't draw, but..." (actually, it was more, "I draw like a $#@&-ing idiot, but...), Richard then proceeded to draw for me the best napkin sketch I've seen in months.
Richard, who as a presentation pro makes a living making first impressions, has come to the realization that first impressions don't mean a %$@! thing. (And he takes himself -- tattoos, silly hats, loud manner -- as his test case.) What *does* matter is LAST impressions.
And here's why (I'm channeling Richard now):
'Imagine that two people are competing for a consulting gig at a bank. One is a certifiable lunatic with tattoos, the other a nice looking chap with a tie and a briefcase. When they first meet the client, the former makes a terrible first impression (the client actually laughed when I walked in), and the latter makes a great first impression.' Like this:
'By the end of the meeting, Mr. Tie has said all the right things and proven his competence in completing the job, leaving an even higher last impression. But Mr. Tattoos has also said all the right things and impressed the client with his energy and competence. He leaves behind a lower overall impression, but one so far above where he began that the client is truly impressed.'
'So looking at the total impression -- comparing the difference between first and last impressions, who do you think gets remembered and gets the gig?'
Richard calls this the "sailboat' chart, for obvious reasons. He drew it on stage at TED Global, hoping to take Malcolm Gladwell out at the knees.
Malcolm apparently had made a pretty remarkable first impression.