Review: Draw to Win by Dan Roam
Draw to Win: A Crash Course on How to Lead, Sell, and Innovate With Your Visual Mind by Dan Roam
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
We have been visual creatures since our inception. Our oldest ancestors told visual stories by drawing – this has endured for thousands of years. Today in the business world we stick to powerpoint presentation and dull our audience to sleep bullet after bullet! We even have a name for it …. “death by powerpoint”!
From the beginning of this book Dan Roam’s challenges this status quo and proposes an alternative: drawing to win. In my opinion a book, like a presentation, should answer the question of “so what”. If Roam’s first book (Back of the Napkin) was the “how”, then his second (Draw to Win) is the “so what”.
Draw to Win delves into the key aspects of why you should draw a certain way. For example, starting with the who, leading with the eye and the mind will follow, drawing the world upside down are some of the concepts Roam outlines in his book. Draw to Win was one of my favourite reads of 2016. If you work in the business world or better yet have to communicate with people (who doesn’t) then pick this book up and learn!
Three key takeaways from the book:
1. From Cisco, 90% of all data transmitted on the Internet is visual! This was a 2015 statistic
2. Writing is the recording mechanism of verbal thinking. Drawing is the recording mechanism of visual thinking.
3. Roughly 1/3 of the brain’s neurons are dedicated to visual processing and another third are occupied by vision combined with other sensory processing