- living the dash (this blog has moved to livingthedash.tv)

I just finished reading a book called Simplicity: The New Competitive Advantage in a World of More, Better, Faster by Bill Jensen.

The layout and overall flow of the book was a little complex for a book titled Simplicity, but the book contained tons of great information and ideas.

The book had my mind racing…..identifying areas where we have unnecessary complexity at work………thinking of ways to organize, simplify, and work smarter.

One idea that came up throughout the book was this…..

- Knowledge workers in most companies are bombarded with, overwhelmed with, and drowning in information, data, meetings, and requests for their time.

- Making sense of it all becomes job #1.

- Turning all that information into action falls a distant second.

The author found that simple companies and organizations provide tools and organize information in a way so that employees are able to spend less time on making sense of everything and more time on taking action.

To the whiteboard…..

I ran across what looks like an interesting book.

The Back of The Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures by Dan Roam (website, blog)

Kind of reminds me of those cool UPS commercials where the guy draws on the whiteboard

Question -

Can you draw….

- your organizational model

- your business model

- a product idea

- a solution to a problem

- your sales pitch

using a few pictures on the back of a napkin?

And if you can’t, could that mean that your organizational model, business model, product idea, solution, sales pitch is too complicated? Is there room for simplification? Are your employees, teammates, customers going to get it?

So I gave it a try…..on a virtual napkin (really just wanted a reason to try out Twiddla)

I took a few minutes to draw a map of the teams at my work that I interact with to get things done

What did I learn?

- I need a really big napkin

- Lots of handoffs (if you have lots of handoffs, they better be clean and well-defined)

- Lots of different groups that roll up to different managers