Dan Roam

managing businesses in San Francisco, Moscow, Zurich, and New York

you were able to walk into this room this morning without falling down, I guarantee that you’re enough of a visual person to understand everything that we’re going to talk about and to get something useful out of it.”

Back of the Napkin is divided into four parts—this introduction and then one part each for discovering ideas, developing ideas, and selling ideas, all using nothing but our eyes, our mind’s eye, our hands, a pen, and a scrap of paper. (

typical MBA progra

by the then-new British prime minister, Tony Blair.

London’s St. Pancras Station for Sheffield,

I turned to the window and contemplated how best to jump off the train

What people want to DO (or what we want them to do) determines function; what people want to KNOW (or what we want them to know) determines content; and what we want them to REMEMBER determines the brand.

We don’t have to know all these answers today; the point of this picture is that it gives us a good starting point for knowing who and what we should be looking for.”