Unfolding the Napkin by Roam Dan

Author:Roam, Dan [Roam, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Portfolio
Published: 2009-12-29T08:00:00+00:00

Seeing beyond the numbers

As we’ve discussed, charts are a really big deal in business.21 Since businesses measure success and failure almost entirely (and exclusively) by numbers, it’s not surprising that when a business presentation contains any pictures at all, they’re charts. There’s nothing wrong with that: the more pictures of any sort, the better. But what is wrong is that our reliance on charts alone to explain business eventually skews what “business” means and severely limits, if not outright warps, our ability to see the bigger picture.

We spent our entire morning showing that there are six ways we see the world, and that they combine in various ways to give us the big picture. If the only pictures we see in business are charts, that’s telling us that the only way we see that means anything in business is “how much.” Yes, numbers represent money, and money is important, but there’s a whole lot more going on in business than how much money is changing hands—like where the money is coming from, for example. To see that, we need an entirely new kind of picture: we need a map.

Before we go there, let’s close this slice with a note on our “problem pizza” napkin: when we face a “how much” problem, the picture we draw is a chart.

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