San Andreas Chapter

Book Review: The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures, by Dan Roam

By Karen Takle Quinn, Ph.D.

Roam, Dan. The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures.  New York: Portfolio, 2007. (ISBN 978-1-59184-199-9)

Dan Roam is the founder and president of Digital Roam Inc., a management-consulting firm that helps business executives solve complex problems through visual thinking.  His 2007 book, The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures, was published by Portfolio.  Its goal is to teach readers how to solve problems with pictures using visual thinking.  Every chapter supports and illustrates Roam’s central idea that "Visual thinking is an extraordinarily powerful way to solve problems and though it may appear to be something new, the fact is that we already know how to do it." (page 31).  According to another visual thinking advocate, Robert E. Horn, words and pictures have been combined to improve human communication since the invention of written language.  This was especially "notable in the culture of Ancient Egypt." (Horn, Visual Language, 1998, pp.25-26).

We all have problems when communicating with someone who does not speak or understand our language.  Roam found that even when you learn to speak their language, as he did with Russian, visual thinking pictures are still especially useful when trying to share ideas with clients.

Book Review: More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places, by Michael J. Mauboussin

By Karen Takle Quinn, Ph.D.

Michael J. Mauboussin has a reputation for being especially good at explaining difficult concepts and showing the links between diverse ideas and fields.  His 2006 book More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places (New York: Columbia University Press ISBN 0-231-13870-9) has been selected both as the best book in Economics for 2006 and by Business Week as one of the top 2006 business books.  He is currently Chief Investment Strategist at Legg Mason Capital Management and also an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s Business School.  Originally, many of these essays were written when Mauboussin was Chief US Investment Strategist for Credit Suisse First Boston. These essays now have been updated, revised and published by Columbia University Press within 30 brief chapters divided among following four sections: "Investment Philosophy," "Psychology of Investing," "Innovation and Competitive Strategy," and "Science and Complexity Theory."  In fifty short essays, Mauboussin explains many abstract and complex financial or economic concepts.  Frequently he uses observations from nature, for example, the feeding patterns of ants, the strange behavior of slime mold, or the fast evolution of fruit flies to illustrate a point or to help the reader to think about a topic from a different perspective.  He cites and relates ideas, illustrations and concepts from a wide range of interesting books and published papers.

Book Review: The Box - by Marc Levinson

By Karen Takle Quinn, Ph.D.

With his book The Box (Princeton University Press, 2006), Marc Levinson delivers an engrossing account of how the modern shipping container has revolutionized the flow of goods around the world. As Levinson notes, people now take for granted their access to an enormous selection of goods from all over the world. This unglamorous, little-noticed, and some call “ugly” shipping container has changed the world in more ways than most of us realize. I might never have read this fascinating story, if it had not been for its inclusion in Business Week best 2006 list.

Levinson delivers a detailed and engaging account of how this box came to be. Of particular note is his chronicle of Malcolm P. McLean, a North Carolina truck driver, who 50 years ago, after building a freight empire, gambled everything to create the first company with containerized ships. Levinson explains that today on the wharfs across the world rows of enormous cranes go into action almost as soon as an arriving ship ties up. These cranes are huge steel structures, some more than 200 feet high and often weighing millions pounds. They are positioned so that several truck lanes and even trains can pass underneath. These cranes move forward riding on rails that run parallel to the sides of the ships. Each crane extends above the dock far enough to span the width of the ship. It is said that some of these ships may be wider than the Panama Canal. The trucks, trains, and other vehicles with incoming containers are driven underneath the appropriate stacking crane. The crane picks up containers and moves them to their appropriate destination.

Book Review: The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More – by Chris Anderson

By Karen Takle Quinn, Ph.D.

Chris Anderson shows in The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (NY: Hyperion Press, 2006. ISBN 1-4013-0237-8) how the Internet is changing the way everyone does business. He suggests that the future of commerce and culture isn’t in high volume hits but in what used to be regarded as misses—the endless long tail of that same curve. Many years of research have gone into this book. It is partly an economics research project. Economics seeks to find neat, easily understood frameworks that describe real world phenomena. Anderson, as editor-in-chief of Wired, first published his “tail” ideas in an article in the October 2004 issue. This article became the most citied article Wired had ever run. In statistics, curves like those described are called “long-tail distributions.” Anderson coined the term “The Long Tail” to help to explain how our culture and economy is shifting focus away from the head, “mainstream products and markets,” toward the tail, the “ever-expanding universe of niche products and businesses.” Many suggest that The Long Tail is the most important business book since The Tipping Point. It was selected by Business Week as one of the best 2006 business books. It reveals that companies are seeing demands in categories that had previously been dismissed, and it reports that everything a company puts out finds a demand of some sort. The economics of ”online” keeps going while the traditional retailer is influenced and limited by shelf space and the cost of maintaining inventories. The infrequent sellers have value in the online market even though they are only selling in small numbers because their aggregates add up to big business. Anderson suggests that letting people choose for themselves will create new opportunities for consumers and businesses.

Image from jacket cover of The Long Tail.