Back of the Napkin Plan to Turn This Country Around
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Ever heard of Dan Roam? He’s the best selling author of The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures. The basic thesis of Roam’s book is simple: anybody with a pen and a scrap of paper (or, my favorite, a whiteboard) can use “visual thinking” to communicate complex ideas and concepts. I’ve been a technical trainer for nearly 15 years and I’ve always relied on pictures to get my point across. The power of visual thinking is that sometimes you don’t even need a pen and paper. Sometimes, depending on the audience and the idea your trying to communicate, you can draw the picture in mid-air with nothing but your hands. It works.
Anyway — surprise! — he’s got a blog. It pops up in my feedreader and today I saw one of his posts from mid-December and it was pretty brilliant:
Okay, I’m officially fed up, so this may be my first blog rant. I’m on vacation and can’t sleep because the pieces of the total economic meltdown keep spinning around in my head… and no matter what anyone in DC does, it only gets worse. (And if you can’t sleep on vacation, something really must be off.) What I’m really fed up with is the piecemeal approach…
He then proceeds to sketch out the problem and then, in a very elegant way, he sketches out strategic and tactical solutions. All on the back of a napkin. And, of course, he explains it all with an easy-to-follow narrative.
The problem:
The solution:
He refines the solution some more, and continues the narrative as well, but I’ll leave that part for you to read on your own.
Anyway, if this is your style, you should read his blog or even better yet, buy his book.
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I find it impossible to comment on the substance of your fellow blogger’s post without coming across as condescending and abusive towards his/your position. I am actually amazed that his ideas are not completely dismissed out of hand as wholly and comprehensively offensive to the people that pioneered the solar and wind turbine industries and continue to advance them to this day.
You lost me on that.
Are you referring to his reference to Don Quixote?
Because, speaking as someone who spent nearly 10 years in that business, I wasn’t offended at all.
Fact is, his analysis is spot-on.