The Back of the Napkin, by Dan Roam

I first came across a pre-programmed whiteboard process as a tool at Borland; the sales department there had a start-to-finish agenda that took a customer through the value proposition of the product line. While the tools weren’t great, the pitch itself was very effective. The Back of the Napkin shows not only how effective visual storytelling can be, but describes a framework for creating your own show-and-tell projects.

The basic tenet of the book is that any problem can be made clearer with a picture. “The real goal of visual thinking is to make the complex understandable by making it visible—not by making it simple.” Roam then proceeds to prove his thesis, demonstrate how to distill ideas into a simple set of pictures, show how different types of pictures are effective for different types of questions, and how to bring it all together into an effective persuasive pitch. Early on there is a short quiz to help determine if you are already a visual person or not (I’m in the middle) and then suggestions about in what order to read the book accordingly. “If you’re a Red Pen person (not visual) and not convinced of the analytic power of pictures, you might want to start with part III )The Visual Thinking MBA) in order to see pictures at work in solving a business problem. If you’re a Yellow Pen person...” I quite liked this as it recognizes that different people learn in different ways, which also happens to echo the lessons in creating a visual framework as well.

The most valuable lesson for me was discovering the template for focusing an idea: SQVID. SQVID stands for Simple, Quality, Vision, Individual attributes, and Delta (change). Dividing a problem into these areas and creating a simple set of sketches for each category helps “force your mind’s eye to look at your idea from many sides in a structured and repeatable way.” I’ve used this a few times since finding this book and it is extremely useful. This idea of forced focus reminds me a lot of Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats, a technique I use in many agile retrospectives, which is probably why it resonated so strongly.

Simple to follow and easy to read, The Back of the Napkin is an effective book that does an excellent job not only explaining why visual thinking is so powerful, but how it can be used in everyday life.

First Sentence:

What’s the most daunting business problem you can picture?

The Magician’s Apprentice, by Trudi Canavan

I first found Trudi Canavan with the publication of The Black Magician Trilogy and was hooked. This book, The Magician’s Apprentice is a prequel set hundreds of years before the original three novels and just as enthralling. The plot revolves around Tessia, a healer’s assistant and budding magician, and her involvement in the war between the neighboring countries of Kyralia and Sachaka. It also tells the history of the wasteland that featured largely in the first books, as well as the foundation of the Magician’s Guild. About two-thirds of the way through we start to get the story of the Ancient magic as well, although I thought this felt a bit forced; I think this part of the novel would have worked better as a short story. Overall, though, an enjoyable story in an interesting world.

First Sentence:

There was no fast and painless way to perform an amputation, Tessia knew.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, by N.K. Jemisin

After her mother is murdered, Yeine, our young heroine, is forced to move to the capital city with her estranged grandfather, the king. The reader is then taken on a magical ride through a land where gods are held captive and used as weapons in political intrigue and social manipulation. As Yeine progresses from an unwitting pawn to a willing one she solves her mother’s death and unhinges a country. Jemisin surrounds a fascinatingly original tale with memorable imagery: a palace balanced on an impossibly thin column thousands of feet in the sky, gods enslaved to humans, suns and planets reduced to playthings and experiments. The book felt overly long to me, the plot meandering a bit much at times, but kept my interest throughout. Fantasy stories often are predictable and mimic each other, but The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is nothing if not unique.

First Sentence:

I am not as I once was.

The Art of Community, by Jono Bacon

During my recent job search, one of the positions for which I interviewed was an Agile Community Leader. I firmly believe that agile techniques give us the best path to developing quality software, so when this opportunity came along I was very interested. My professional career has been all about building software, so moving to a community leadership position provided something entirely different and I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect. I met with a friend that was already in the community business and among other things he recommended The Art of Community. Great advice; even though I ended up not getting the job, I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

The author, Jono Bacon, is a longtime open source advocate and the current Ubuntu community manager. He put together this excellent discussion on not only how to go about building and maintaining a collaborative organization, but how to keep it fresh and fun at the same time. A lot of what Bacon believes hit close to home with me; what it takes to make a community work sounds quite similar to what makes agile work. Defined milestones in a community are similar to an agile release plan. Milestones are reached by defining smaller objectives each with success criteria and an implementation plan, analogous to stories, acceptance criteria, and tasks. And in both arenas regular reflection to enact changes in process and tools are considered critical. Seeing as how in agile building teams is just as important as building software I guess this shouldn’t be that surprising, but I am continually pleased to find new ways of applying trusted techniques in new ways and in different domains.

One sentence that stuck with me was about honesty: “If your product sucks, you don’t cover it up but instead try to fix it.” This sort of transparency is exactly how I think we should approach most things, but is sadly rare. And not only in software development and community building; imagine if politicians tried harder to solve the countries problems instead of simply getting reelected! Another bit I liked was a great idea for brainstorming: figure out how to make things suck instead of making them great. Not only is this a fun ice breaker, it really gets people talking. After collecting approaches, examine the inverse of the terrible ideas for some truly interesting approaches! I look forward to trying this out sometime soon. Useful, funny, and informative, I enjoyed every page of this book.

First Sentence:

As my watch ticked over to 6 p.m., I knew I was in trouble.

61 Hours, by Lee Child

This Reacher novel has a new gimmick, but one that doesn’t work all that well. An omnipotent countdown runs throughout the novel (hence the title), with most chapters ending on a sentence like, “Thirty-seven hours to go.” I think the idea was to build suspense, but it felt artificial and forced to me. I also thought the identity of the inevitable traitor was entirely too obvious—usually Child does a much better job of obscuring this sort of thing.

That said, I quite enjoyed it. The main puzzle was interesting and the long-distance relationship Reacher builds with the new commander of his former unit hinted at a fascinating new ally in future books. The ending brought another first to the Reacher novels: a cliffhanger. Considering the next book has already been released the fate of Reacher isn’t in doubt, but how he escapes...

First Sentence:

Five minutes to three in the afternoon.