by Dan Roam
39 By the time Apple discontinued the campaign four years later, there was no longer any need to compare the names “Mac” and “PC”: Apple had successfully launched the iPhone and iPad, seen its stock price rise by a factor of six, and become the largest technology company on earth. Apple even dropped the w {drohe iPhone ord “computer” from the company name.
40 Careful: What we’re really talking about here is “profiling.” The visual image of a name or idea is so powerful that when we draw a portrait, we should remain mindful of our own intent and what we choose to represent.
41 This is why so many of us leave our fiscal decisions to other people: The way most numbers are taught and presented simply doesn’t make sense. Bank accounts, investments, taxes, accounting, financial planning: These are the most important long-term decisions of our lives, and yet most of us glaze over within minutes when we have to think them through.
42 Wouldn’t it be great if we could convert the disparaging comment “His idea is so convoluted we need a playbook to understand it!” into the compliment “He knew that what he wanted to explain was so convoluted that he gave us a playbook to follow along!”
43 At this point there is no way I can follow the action without a list of the players—so I stop reading for meaning and skim ahead just to take down the names of this expanding Shakespearian drama. Creating a cast list (more on this later) is the best way to get ahead of the blah-blah-blah that comes with a long list of names.
44 This is typical of how history is taught: a verbally delivered linear progression of names, dates, and events, inherently limited to one-at-a-time presentation. Not only does this approach make it nearly impossible to detect parallel events; it makes the underlying form invisible. No wonder so few people find history engaging. It’s not that the stories are boring—we just can’t see how they connect.
45 Although initially similar to a history (which is a sequence of events), a flowchart shows more than a linear progression. Where a history can go in only one direction (and is easily misinterpreted to show causation), a flowchart can loop back on itself, run in many directions at the same time, and overtly show cause and effect. If we want to know “what steps took place,” we create a history; if we want to know how one thing directly caused another and another, we create a flowchart.
46 Like a stew, cooking up a multivariable plot can be tricky. Since we’re searching for a “form” that isn’t immediately obvious, we can expect a lot of trial and error as we combine variables in new and unexpected ways.
47 For that we can thank Dr. Tatsu Takeuchi, assistant professor of physics at Virginia Tech and the author {nd otnote- of the breakthrough physics book An Illustrated Guide to Relativity. Takeuchi calls his multivariable plots “time-space diagrams” and uses them to introduce nonphysics students to the mind-stretching realities of relativity. Dr. Takeuchi generously gave me permission to reproduce his drawings here, with some modifications.
48 The constancy of the speed of light is why it is given the symbol c in Einstein’s famous equation . Energy = mass x the speed of light squared.
49 Literally: The floor of the Naval War College dining hall is alternating gray and white tiles. During World War II, some sailor thought the floor looked like the world’s biggest chessboard, the ideal place to war-game. Thus it was, by moving model ships around on that cafeteria floor, that the admirals planned the U.S. Navy’s World War II island-hopping campaign.
50 It’s a sad fact of nature, but nobody will ever be as interested in our great new idea as we are—at least until we’ve hooked them on the essentials. It’s safe to assume that any new idea we want to convey is going to demand a large initial investment of effort on our part as we make it inspiring or interesting for someone else. By limiting our idea to only the essentials, Vivid Thinking takes much of the risk out of that investment.
51 Or notebook or whiteboard or collaborative workspace or napkin, etc.
52 It’s been said many times before and is worth saying again: The best way to prove we know something is to be able to explain it to somebody else. If the idea has been distilled down to its essence, that should be a no-brainer.
53 Remember that a map—a visual display of the spatial relationships of many items—is the Vivid Grammar response to a list. The Peet’s map here is just like the late-night-comedy map of the previous chapter, only this one shows the relationships of ideas rather than people. Same kind of map, though.
54 Peet’s leadership was kind enough to let me share their ROP process and results, although to protect their business interests I have changed certain aspects and details.
55 It doesn’t matter whether our reaction to the familiar is positive or negative; either way, our mind takes some comfort in at least knowing what it is looking at.
56 The dementias that affect our minds as we age have this trait in common: As our minds lose the ability to recognize (whether faces, places, images, or text), we gradually lose our ability to live.
57 If we want our idea to be grasped by others in the way we hope, we’re often better off providing the “I’ve seen this before” metaphor right away, rather than have them make up their own.
58 There is no mention of “pyramid” (and no drawings at all) in Maslow’s defining work Motivation and Personality, in which he detailed the Hierarchy of Needs. My search through all his works currently available came up with no results for the word pyramid and not a single drawing of a pyramid.
59 Maslow was a master of coming up with ideas that others made vivid. He is also credited with inventing the Law of the Instrument, otherwise known as the “if I have a hammer, everything looks like a nail” rule. It appears in his last book, The Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissance, published in 1970. Where “his” pyramid became the patron icon of marketing strategy, his hammer became the patron icon of technology sales.
60 Powerful as these words are for people already steeped in business jargon, none of them are particularly vivid. Just ask a business professional to describe any of them—What is “value”? What makes “innovation” important? What does “strategy” really mean? You’ll rarely get a memorable answer. It’s not that these words are bad; they just come packaged with a lot of blah-blah-blah. We’d all be better off drawing a picture of them—exactly like Michael Porter did back in Chapter 3.
61 Leonardo lived in a time of near-constant civil war in his native Italy and was frequently tasked with designing offensive and defensive weaponry.
62 It wasn’t until 525 years later that anybody jumped using Leonardo’s actual design and rode it all the way down. On April 26, 2008, Swiss parachutist Olivier Vietti-Teppa was the first to succeed.
63 Remember: “Complete” does not mean polished to perfection. There’s a reason “unplugged” versions of songs are so popular: Because we hear them as evolving works in progress, we often believe in them more than the perfectly produced studio versions.
64 Land became so involved in his work that he had to be reminded to eat. While solving a problem involving polarization, Land once worked for eighteen days straight without stopping to even change his clothes. (Yeah, I know . . . )
65 This case study is loosely based on a real company I worked with. Since the company is developing a game-changing social business model, I can’t mention their name or actual strategy. Instead let’s look at “Clara,” a completely fictitious organization with some parallels.
66 To the best of my knowledge, there is no “Clean Living and Responsible Action” Clara out there. If you do happen to run such an organization, please consider this a free marketing lesson.
67 If this was a face-to-face meeting (unlikely for a social networking site, but you never know), we would simply hand our potential member a printout that she could fill in. Online, this would be a digital file she could print or electronically complete.
68 I Ching translates approximately as “Book of Changes” and introduces the concept that a balance of simplicity, variability, and per
sistency underlie the universe. Tao Te Ching translates approximately as “The Classic Way of Virtue” and describes the necessary balance of yin (female) and yang (male) in all things.
69 It might have been fourteen. Records in early-nineteenth-century Siberia weren’t known for being the most accurate. Either way, his mom was a wonder. To make sure her youngest got the best education possible, she hitchhiked a thousand miles across nineteenth-century Siberia to get Dmitri to school on time in St. Petersburg.
70 There were about fifty elements known at the time Mendeleyev began looking for patterns.
71 A simple single number that roughly approximated the unwieldy digits of atomic weight and was much easier to count.
72 In the 1970s, the Hershey Company famously advertised Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups candy by having two people—one eating chocolate, the other eating peanut butter—bump into each other. The product slogan was “Two great tastes that taste great together.”
73 It is the way the financial-meltdown story was described while it was happening that was the biggest problem. The { prpos=00005re was nothing especially complex in what occurred. But since financial institutions have always thrived on obscuring what they do, it was the intentional opacity of their language that made it difficult to see what was going on. As Lewis points out, “The subprime-mortgage market had a special talent for obscuring what needed to be clarified.”
74 It was also a bet against any homeowner who had been overenthusiastic about his buying power, customers dazzled by the bank hype of zero-interest loans, and most anyone who had succumbed to good old greed.
75 CDOs are “collateralized debt obligations,” huge piles of good and bad mortgages that can be traded as one bundle. While not necessarily dangerous by themselves, the problem was that CDOs were rated as a better credit risk than they actually were. Since these bundles contained some good mortgages, they were rated as a “solid” investment, in spite of containing billions more dollars of potentially bad mortgages—those that would later be called “toxic assets.”
76 A CDO-mortgage-bond-credit-default swap? See what I mean about the blah-blah-blah language of finance?
77 Altshuller was born to a Jewish family in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, which actually makes him a Jewish Uzbek Soviet. His work is known today primarily by engineering students in Russia and Europe, although in recent years TRIZ-style thinking has begun to spread in American engineering schools.
78 Ironically, this is the same job (albeit in a different country and during a different war) that Einstein occupied when he collected the notes that would soon become the special theory of relativity.
79 For a complete list of Genrich’s 40 Principles, visit the Web site triz-journal.com.
80 TRIZ is a Russian acronym for “The Theory of Inventive Problem Solving.” The formal application of TRIZ to a problem demands a highly structured approach and a dogmatically rigorous adherence to process, making it challenging to apply in a nonengineering setting.
81* Unfortunately for Altshuller (and the Soviet Union), when he and his colleagues proposed using his ideas to help rebuild the devastated postwar Soviet infrastructure, he was thrown into the Arctic gulag at Vorkuta for four years. So much for “spanning differences” in the Soviet Union.
82 If this was a real test, it might make sense to continue the next step with all the opposites. Why not? Even a brief glance at each reveals a whole slew of new possibilities for GPS-enabled phones.
83 Just ask Foursquare. Foursquare is a socially networked GPS-based friend finder that launched in 2009 and within a year was awarded the Tech Leader of the Year award by the World Economic Forum.
84 For students, substitute “how everyone is going to be graded.”
85 A dramatis personae is precisely the list we prepared when mapping out Bill Carter’s late-night-comedy book.
86 While these lists reflect a “formal” presentation, we should go through the same exercise whenever we hope we might one day share our idea. Knowing our potential audience in advance always pays off down the line.
87 Like all portraits, we don’t need much detail, just enough to trigger our mind to see her: How does she keep her hair? Does she wear glasses? How does she dress? Recalling even just the basics brings her to life in a way a name alone does not.
88 This is an old trick from public speaking. Although we may be presenting to a room of thousands, we never really speak to everybody. In reality, we pick just a few faces and talk directly to them. This is the same drill, only done vividly.
89 There are certainly many more audience criteria worth considering—and myriad combinations of just these four are possible—but for a rapid-fire “I’ve got to get onstage in fifteen minutes” checklist, this Vivid LENS is pretty unbeatable.
90 This is the one exception to the “distillation curve” model. When we face an expert who initially questions our competence, we need to quickly establish that we do know and respect the nuances of his world. After establishing our street cred, we can quickly fall back on the simple to get the real essence of our idea across.
91 Dozens and dozens of books and videos are available with helpful strategies. Let us focus only on the one that takes the most advantage of Vivid Thinking.
8892 There was one passenger aboard who was an “expert” in surviving emergencies. Before boarding Flight 1549, Maryann Bruce had lived through a tsunami, an earthquake, an avalanche, a hurricane, and the first World Trade Center bombing. Maryann was one of the few on the plane who knew she was going to live.
93 The full Vivid Checklist complete with all questions and actions is included as Appendix C at the back of the book.
94 Remember Oog and Aag from Chapter 3? Here we get to meet them again, a million years later. To be fair, we have no idea whether it was Oog or Aag (or both) who walked into the cave, but for me it’s a nicer image to think that they were working together.
95 Many people are familiar with the cave drawings found at Lascaux, France. Oog’s drawings are found on the walls of another cave not far away on a map but twenty thousand years away on a timeline. The Chauvet Cave was discovered in 1993, and its earliest drawings have proven to be more than twice as old as Lascaux’s.
96 The name is fake, but his gender is real: We do know that the scribes of ancient Egypt were mostly men.
97 Cuneiform, the written language of ancient Mesopotamia, was first by a whisker—but frankly, who cares? Although written cuneiform predates full hieroglyphics by maybe a hundred years, in both cases the writing started with pictures. But because the pictorial elements of cuneiform quickly fell away, to be replaced by chicken scratches, cuneiform lost any hold on our cultural imagination. When we look at it, we see nothing our modern mind can grab on to. On the contrary, the visual splendor of hieroglyphics to this day stimulates endless fascination.
98 Discovered by Napoleon’s troops during their 1799 conquest of Egypt, the Rosetta Stone is a yard-square block of granite into which was carved the same inscription in three different scripts: Greek, demotic, and hieroglyphic. By comparing the three side by side, Champollion and his contemporaries ultimately decoded ancient Egyptian.
99 Phoenicians weren’t the first to purge pictographic imagery from writing. Although the Mesopotamians’ cuneiform began as a pictographic language, the pictures quickly became so abstracted that any semblance to the original image was lost. Even the Egyptians, recognizing that their increasingly cryptic hieroglyphics were tricky for anyone but the most educated scribe to write and read, developed a simplified “phonetic” form for use in day-to-day writing, called “demotic.” This was the third script found on the Rosetta Stone.
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100 There is a second tool in The Back of the Napkin called the SQVID, a mnemonic device that helps us remember the five essential questions to ask when creating a picture: simple versus elaborate, qualitative versus quantitative, vision versus execution, individual versus comparison, and difference versus status quo. Since the SQVID doe
s not play any direct role in this book, that’s enough said. For more details, please take a look at Napkin.