A practical guide to help freelance consultants and other service providers uncap the marker pens, start working visually and gain the business advantage.
Draw a Better Business is an illustrated practical guide for freelancers and business people who want to tap into their innate creativity, learn to use visual skills and techniques and gain the business benefits. This book will help you plan, pitch, deliver and engage with real impact. Filled with practical exercises, examples and insights across four key areas of your business - planning and problem solving, communicating, delivering workshops and meetings, and creating engaging content - this book will equip you with practical tools to help you strengthen your business, and stand out in a crowd. It gives you all the knowledge and the know how you need (even if you think you can’t draw) to start getting the benefits of working visually. After 10 years of running her own business Graphic Change, working visually with companies such as TimeWarner, Google and the NHS, Cara Holland has a lot to say about the benefits of working visually. In this book she shares tips, tools and insights that will bring the power of working visually to your business.
Kaplan's latest book combines dynamic advice, deep real-life experience, and a friendly, no-nonsense writing style to take the mystery and fear out of achieving significant business growth.
This book stitches together a complete design journey from beginning to end in a way that you’ve likely never seen before, guiding readers (you) step-by-step in a practical way from the initial spark of an idea all the way to scaling it into a better business. Design a Better Business includes a comprehensive set of tools (over 20 total!) and skills that will help you harness opportunity from uncertainty by building the right team(s) and balancing your point of view against new findings from the outside world. This book also features over 50 case studies and real life examples from large corporations such as ING Bank, Audi, Autodesk, and Toyota Financial Services, to small startups, incubators, and social impact organizations, providing a behind the scenes look at the best practices and pitfalls to avoid. Also included are personal insights from thought leaders such as Steve Blank on innovation, Alex Osterwalder on business models, Nancy Duarte on storytelling, and Rob Fitzpatrick on questioning, among others.
Get ready for the ultimate crash course in communicating and solving problems through simple pictures. Thirty-two thousand years ago, your many-times-great-grandparents Oog and Aag drew pictures on the wall of a cave. They had an innate need to communicate, but no written language. So they found an easy and natural way to share their thoughts and stories. Today, after so many years when speaking and writing dominated, we're back in another highly visual age. About 90 percent of everything shared online is now visual—selfies, GIFs, smartphone videos, and more. This explosion of communication through pictures isn't a millenial-driven fad; it's as natural as those lines first drawn by Oog and Aag. Just turbo-charged by the latest technology. And yet over the past twenty years, as I've taught people from Fortune 500 CE0s to White House staffers how to harness the power of imagery, the biggest objection I've always heard is, "But I can't draw!" Trust me, you can. You don't need to be da Vinci to be an outstanding visual thinker and communicator. The most effective drawings are the simplest, and you can get good at those in three minutes. In this little book, I'll teach you how to use seven basic shapes to explain just about anything to just about anyone. If you've read my previous books, you'll see one or two familiar tools here, along with a bunch of new tools you can start using right away. If you're new to my approach—welcome! Get ready to work smarter, communicate more clearly, and get better at whatever you do, just by picking up a pen. Get ready to draw to win.
Unlock better opportunities with a new strategy for reinventing any business model. Succeeding with a new business whether in a corporation or a venture based setting requires taking a leap of faith. But in order to grow, the business will need to morph and adjust many times before it meets the needs of a viable market. "Getting to Plan B" guides you through specific steps to effectively reinvent your entrepreneurial business model.
"If you're looking for the next tool to help you solve your hardest (and most interesting) challenges at work, try a paper and pencil. This book teaches you how to use them well - and have a bit of fun along the way."--Back cover.