Why your big ideas should be in a box

Michael Porter is famous. Never heard of him? If you’re a strategy wonk you have — likewise an entrepreneur, a business school grad, or a business leader. Ohh, that Michael Porter.  The Michael Porter who is most cited author in business and economics. The Bishop William Lawrence Harvard University Professor Porter. The father of modern strategy. He published his seminal work, Competitive Strategy, when he was 33 years old in 1980. It’s now in its 60th printing in English and translated into nineteen languages.

His real genius was that he was able to reduce the concepts and ideas contained in his 397 page, 2lb, 1200 plus word tome into one simple picture, with 5 boxes, 5 arrows and a few words. It’s on page 4, blandly titled Figure 1.1, Forces Driving Industry Competition.

Porter’s Five Forces Model

I wonder if he hadn’t drawn those boxes and arrows if we would have ever heard of Michael Porter? It’s one thing to come up with a brilliant idea or a great new concept. It’s entirely another for people to grok it. There’s a name for this ability — to sum up a complex, abstract idea and let people see and grasp it, to ‘containerize’ it in a picture that can be scribbled on the back of a napkin and be recognized instantly. I’m just not sure what it is. It goes beyond visual literacy, it’s visual brilliance. It doesn’t need to be beautifully rendered (as you can see from Porter’s example) so it probably doesn’t have the word design in it. If you know, please tell me.*

Other examples come to mind. I wonder how much you could knock off the $5billion market cap of my Alma Mater Gartner without Magic Quadrants and Hype Cycles. Would Simon Sinek be as highly reviewed as he is without his sketch of the golden circle? Would Republican tax policy be different without the Laffer Curve?

The food pyramid is a shaped guide of healthy foods divided into sections to show the recommended intake for each food group. The first was published in Sweden in 1974. The most widely known food pyramid was introduced by the United States Department of Agriculture in 1992.

Simon Sinek is an author best known for popularizing the concept of “the golden circle”, described by TED as “a simple but powerful model for inspirational leadership”. The premise is simple, all communication should start with “Why?”

Psychology’s Rorschach test records subjects’ perceptions of inkblots and analyzed them using psychological interpretation, complex algorithms, or both. Some psychologists use this test to examine a person’s personality characteristics and emotional functioning.

Gartner’s branded Magic Quadrant (MQ) is a visual representation of the U.S. based research and advisory firms research. It summarizes their qualitative analysis into a market and its direction, maturity and participants, typically of information technology firms, products and services.

The Hype Cycle is a branded graphical tool developed and used by IT research and advisory firm, Gartner for representing the maturity, adoption and social application of specific technologies.

Chris Anderson didn’t invent the chart, but he did coin the term as he argued that products in low demand or that have a low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, if the store or distribution channel is large enough.

A model for understanding the patterns in graphic language. Graphic language includes the frameworks and formats that help facilitators organize text and images in the act of visualizing. These repeating, general patterns are illustrated in The Grove’s Group Graphics® Keyboard.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a theory in psychology proposed by Abraham Maslowd to describe human motivation. Maslow used the terms Physiological, Safety, Belongingness and Love, Esteem, Self-Actualization and Self-Transcendence needs to describe the pattern that human motivations generally move through.

Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas is a strategic management template for developing new or documenting existing business models. It describes a firm’s value proposition, infrastructure, customers, and finances. It assists firms in aligning their activities by illustrating potential trade-offs.

In economics, the Laffer curve is a representation of the relationship between possible rates of taxation and resulting levels of government revenue. It illustrates the concept of taxable income elasticity—i.e., taxable income will change in response to changes in the rate of taxation.

*To be clear, I’m not talking about visual graphing or charting techniques like Playfair’s trade-balance time-series chart, or Pie charts or Tufte’s sparklines. They’re a different category of genius, different in that they can be more universally applied. The shape is of the data, not the concept itself.

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Gavin is a founding partner at fassforward consulting group.
He blogs about PowerPoint, Presenting, Communication and Message Discipline at makeapowerfulpoint.com.

You can follow him on twitter @powerfulpoint.

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