Book Notes - The Back Of The Napkin

The Back Of The Napkin by Dan Roam [2008]

Summary:
A book promoting the use of pictures and diagrams as a communication medium. It outlines why visual communication is effective and how to make your visual communications more effective. It contains a framework for selecting the most appropriate diagrams for certain situations as well as a framework for problem solving.

Notes:
Page 4: Reminder, develop an 'elevator pitch' for every project or idea.
Page 15: Six Problem Clumps:
1) Who/What
2) How Much/Many
3) When
4) Where
5) How
6) Why
Page 37: Process Of Visual Thinking:
1) Look - Collecting and screening
2) See - Selecting and clumping
3) Imagine - Seeing what isn't there
4) Show - Making it all clear
Page 57: Rules For Better Looking:
1) Collect everything you can
2) Lay it all out where you can look at it (literally lay it out)
3) Establish fundamental coordinates (use; Who/What, How Much/Many, When, Where, Why, How, as axes)
4) Practice visual triage
Page 72: Common Precognitive Visual Attributes:
1) Proximity - close things are related
2) Colour - hints at groupings
3) Size
4) Orientation - perpendicular angles are best
5) Direction - perceived movement (arrows etc)
6) Shape
7) Shading
Page 84: How = Who + How Much/Many + Where + When
Page 94: You can use the 6w's in order to Show as well as See.
Page 107: SQVID Visualisation breakdown:
1) Simple Vs Elaborate
2) Quality Vs Quantity
3) Vision Vs Execution
4) Individual Attributes Vs Comparison
5) Delta (change) Vs Status Quo
Page 108: You can either progressively go through all of the SQVID steps (idea focusing) or you can work out what balance of each extreme is the most important for the audience (audience focusing).
Page 131: The Three Steps of Showing:
1) Select the right framework
2) Use the framework to create the picture
3) Explain the picture to someone else
Page 134: The links between seeing and showing:
1) Who/What - Picture/Portrait
2) How Much/Many - Chart
3) Where - Map
4) When - Timeline
5) How - Flow Chart
6) Why - Multivari Plot
Page 141: Diagram linking the ways of showing with SQVID.

Quotes:
Page 13: "Any problem can be made clearer with a picture, and any picture can be created with the same set of tools and rules."
Page 133: "For each of the six ways of seeing there is one corresponding way of showing. For each one of these six ways of showing, there is a single visual framework that serves as a starting point."

Thought of the Day - Theory X Vs Theory Y

In management there are two theories of employee motivation; Theory X posits that employees don't like work, will avoid it where possible and must be driven to it. Theory Y on the other hand is based on the assumption that work can be satisfying and employees will be self-motivated to work. While it initially appears that these theories are all to do with employees internal motivation, it has also been suggested that whether a boss manages to Theory X or Theory Y determines how the employees behave. I tend to subscribe to the latter idea, if you manage your employees as if they will do everything in their power to avoid work that is how they will behave. If on the other hand you manage your employees by giving them responsibility and trusting them that is how they will behave.

It is interesting to see how people behave when managers aren't around, while not being able to control for things like; workload, task allocation and clarity of goals, how employees behave in a management vacuum should indicate whether the culture of a company is Theory X or Y. If the employees have a; "while they cat's away" attitude and avoid work you can safely guess that there is a Theory X culture. If on the other hand the employees treat it as; "business as usual" and work as they would if the manager was there you can assume it is a Theory Y workplace.

This is another reason that i think ROWE (Results Only Work Environment) is the way forward. Under that culture it doesn't matter where the manager (or infact the employee) physically is, there is work to be done and it either gets done or it doesn't. People won't come into the office just to show up, they aren't just there to look busy while the manager is there and slack off when he/she isn't. In ROWE on the other hand there are specific tasks that get done, the manager can monitor them in or out of the office, the employee can complete them in or out of the office.

In the end, i think seeing how employees behave when they aren't around is an interesting insight that most managers are unlikely to see. Unless of course they resort to spying, in which case it would be safe to assume they are Theory X.

Thought of the Day - Economics Books

I was at the airport last Friday and i noticed in the business section there were a glut of new economics books which i would suggest are probably a result of the success of Freakonomics. Whether these are new books written because of Freakonomics or whether they are old and have just been made more popular by the success of Freakonomics i'm not sure.

Within these books there seemed to be 3 distinct categories:
1 – Economics can predict the future well – I did have an example however i can't remember the title or author, just that the cover was orange.
2 – Economics can explain the past (in an interesting way) – Freakonomics by Stephen J Dubner or The Economic Naturalist by Robert H Frank
3 – Economics can't predict anything well – Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

To be honest i am rather cynical about the first group, they argue that if you have a good enough model and enough computing power you can predict anything. I would argue that there is far to much randomness to come up with anything better than a guess. The only situation where these models are likely to be accurate are when they are self-fulfilling prophecies; i.e. the models predict a recession, the economists preach a recession, so sure enough there is a recession when there might not have been one otherwise.

For the second group, just about anyone can explain things retroactively, but i will admit that economists do have some interesting explanations.

The third group on the other hand have a lot of valid points, no matter how good the model is you can never be certain. We live in a Quantum not Newtonian world, everything in life is probabilities.

Thought of the Day - Metrics

I read an interesting article about metrics, specifically it was about metrics for software projects but the main rules are applicable to all projects.

A metric should be:
1) Informative (and ideally Predictive) - It should give relevant useful information.
2) Objective - It should not matter who is determining the metric.
3) Automated - The more work it takes to generate the metric the less likely it is to get used or recorded accurately.

Idea From: http://www.baselinemag.com/c/a/IT-Management/Lies-Damned-Lies-and-Project-Metrics-Part-1/

Thought of the Day - MBA's

I know next to nothing about MBA's, might be an idea to learn something so i don't end up looking very foolish when/if i apply.