Digital Roam

A portrait of the artist as a book buyer

This modern world our ours works in mysterious ways.

The Guardian newspaper (the London one, not the San Francisco Bay Guardian one where I started my career twenty years ago, nor the Moscow Guardian one where I served as Art Director fifteen years ago) asked me last week to write an article about my book and visual thinking. The article ran in Saturday's paper across the UK, and I received several complimentary notes from readers, which was great.

Then today I got a Google Alert about a blog mentioning me and that article, so I clicked through to Andrew Smith's blog "In Front of Your Nose".

There I saw Andrew's napkin sketch about how he had come to decide to buy my book. It's a great picture, and the accompanying article serves all authors (or hopeful authors) on how complex the process can be by which a potential reader becomes an actual book buyer.

Thank you Andrew for the blog, the sketch, the insight, and above all for the purchase. You'll be happy to know I sent your link through to everyone I know in publishing as a reminder of all the eggs we need to keep up in the air: books, websites, links, blogs, tools, downloads. It all matters and it all adds up.

Thanks again!

Napkin tools: now downloadable!

Ever since The Back of the Napkin appeared, people have been asking me for download-friendly versions of the key visual thinking tools I introduce. So due to popular request, here they are; high-resolution PDF files for:

The Visual Thinking Toolkit. (A visual summary of all the lessons in the book.)

The Visual Thinking Codex. (The master checklist for creating any problem-solving picture; a combination of the SQVID and the <6><6> Rule.)

The SQVID. (The five questions that get your mind's eye kicked into gear.)

The <6><6> Rule. (The six ways we see mapped to the only six pictures we need to be able to draw.)

For anyone who asked for these -- THANKS. I hope they're useful for you.

If you don't know what these charts mean, let me tell you about this book I wrote... :-)

UPDATE: These tools can now be downloaded at my website: www.thebackofthenapkin.com

BusinessWeek's summer reading list

BusinessWeek just published their summer reading list for MBA students. The ten books include titles by Malcolm Gladwell, Thomas Friedman, Michael Porter, and James Joyce (!). Number ten? The Back of the Napkin.

Wow.

BNET videos the napkin

Thanks to the amazing editors, producers, and animators at BNET, here's a video showing many ideas from my book.

(Can't see the video? Click here.)

Miami Herald follow-up: "Potent and Effective" :-)

Richard Pachter of the Miami Herald offered his readers an early chance to read and review The Back of the Napkin.

Back in mid February, he put my book on his reader's list, and his review just went live. I'm happy to say that Richard "got it":

That's where Dan Roam comes in.

His book does three big things really well. First, it presents a persuasive argument for employing simple iconography as a means of communicating and persuading. Next, he provides some important and powerful examples. Finally, he tells and shows how to do it.

One hour soapbox

Tom Crawford is a classy guy. Not only is he the CEO of VizThink, he also asked me to do a podcast with him about my book. But on top of all that, he then gave me *all the time I needed* to go into real detail on many of the big ideas in my book.

Thanks to Tom (and VizThink CTO Chris) you can now watch an animated version of an hour's worth of live  "solving problems with pictures" as a podcast on the VizThink Blog.

Thanks Tom!

Post2Post Virtual Book Tour

Paul Williams is an interesting guy. After leading marketing efforts at Starbucks and Disney, he headed to Amsterdam to found his own innovation lab, and Idea Sandbox was born. Among other ideas, every month Paul sponsors a virtual book tour where bloggers and authors meet.

This month, I'm honored that Paul selected The Back of the Napkin as the book in the spotlight.

Jeff De Cagna kicks off the tour on his Principled Innovation blog with a podcast we recorded yesterday.

Talking with Jeff was great. Among other things, he let me really go into detail on several of the aspects of visual thinking that I find most compelling. I appreciate all the time Jeff spent, and I hope you find the interview interesting.

When Tom Peters calls...

I'm honored to be featured this week as Tom Peters' newest "cool friend". Several days ago, I had a wonderful interview with Erik Hansen of the Tom Peters company. It was supposed to last 30 minutes but instead we ended up talking for an hour and a half.

(On that note, thanks especially to Shelley Dolley and Cathy Mosca for an amazing editing job!)

It was such a pleasure to be included in Tom's list of "good idea people". Tom's book "Re-Imagine" was a huge inspiration for me a couple years ago when I embarked on the task of writing my own book. To now appear on Tom's site brings things nicely full circle.

Doodling for Dollars

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.

SXSW on the book stage

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)