In my daily work life as an IT-Management consultant (specialised in Enterprise Architecture – EAM) and as a product manager for the first open-source EA Tool iteraplan I have to do quite a few workshops with clients, prospects and users, as well as selling ideas about the tool to our management, prospects, developers.
It all went fine so far, but I was always driving to get better at this and was looking for ways to become a better consultant and a better presenter. Besides the social skills – I do like to enhance my methodical skills as well.
And just recently – after reading some books about presentations (like slide-ology) and design thinking (like Change by design) I learned about Dan Roam’s “The Back of the Napkin” in a great training about sales and marketing. A highly recommended reading, since it provides a very strong and very generic tool for problem solving as well as approaching, structuring and designing presentations.
There is also a Back of the Napkin blog with some videos for a quick start.
I think the German translation is also very good, if you prefer German.
If you need further help there is also a hands-on working book available (German edition), which I also bought – but haven’t read yet.

I hope you enjoy this read as much as I do. Now there are two other books on my ToRead-List:

1. Seth Godin: Linchpin
2. Lisa Gansky: The Mesh

If there just would be a faster way to insert knowledge into the brain than reading!