The Art of Visual Thinking

In the venture capital business, many people think that a short pitch is thirty slides and a short business plan is fifty pages. My how they are mistaken.

The more slides and pages that you need to explain your business, the less likely you will succeed. Truly, the best pitches and plans require nothing more than one page or a picture to explain them. Do you recognize this picture? It's how Southwest Airlines was pitched.

To provide more insight into the process of visual thinking, I tapped Dan Roam. He is the author of The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures . In a previous interview with him he explained why and how to use visual thinking in your business. Click here to read it. To learn even more about visual thinking, be sure to read his book.

Incidentally, my momma didn't raise a fool, so as soon as I figured out what he does, I asked him to apply his skills to a real-world task of mine: explaining Alltop to people. These are the pictures he came up with. I like them! (Larger version here.)