Doodling for Profits

A simple drawing can communicate complex ideas quickly and almost effortlessly. It can even be the basis of a successful business plan

Whiteboard doodles allow UPS to express "very complex messaging very quickly" in its current ad campaign.

by Douglas MacMillan

A doodle created by blogger Hugh Macleod became an unofficial Microsoft mascot. gapingvoid.com

Southwest Airlines was conceived with a simple drawing on the back of a napkin.

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In the fall of 2006, a group of senior European executives at Microsoft (MSFT) entered a meeting expecting to see a PowerPoint presentation. Instead, Steve Clayton—then the chief technology officer for Microsoft's U.K. Partner Group—showed them a hand-drawn image of an impish blue creature bearing gnarled fangs and sporting the provocative caption "Microsoft: Change the world or go home." After a few initial gasps, recalls Clayton, the attendees engaged in a lively discussion around the current direction of the company and the brand. "People liked the way it changed the angle of conversation," Clayton says.

The image was not the product of Microsoft's marketing department or an ad agency, but of cartoonist, writer, and marketing strategist Hugh MacLeod—a friend of Clayton. Ever since MacLeod sent the cartoon to Clayton and posted it on his blog, gapingvoid (www.gapingvoid.com) more than a year ago, the "blue monster" character has become an unofficial corporate mascot among many Microsoft employees, posted in cubicles, printed on business cards and T-shirts, and added to e-mail signatures. "I'm told it always leads to an interesting, atypical Microsoft conversation," says MacLeod—the result he had hoped for.

Visual Thinking Solves Problems

In a corporate landscape awash with slick computer presentations, charts, graphs, and logos, some managers still utilize an age-old tool for business problem solving: the hand-drawn doodle. Whether sketched on a legal pad or drawn on a whiteboard, a doodle has the power to humanize the abstract and simplify the complex. It's a way to add humor into a dry topic. And, when doodles are used in meetings with colleagues and clients, it's a way to pull people into the process of solving a problem. "The reaction that you get from an audience is like magic, because they are with you, seeing the idea being built as opposed to coming in with a set of charts already prepared," says Dan Roam, author of the upcoming book The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures (Penguin Portfolio, March, 2008). Roam is a visual thinking consultant who teaches doodle techniques to executives at such companies as Microsoft, Wal-Mart (WMT), and Sun Microsystems (JAVA).

Case in point: The doodle drawn in 1967 by Texas entrepreneur Rollin King. During a dinner with his lawyer Herb Kelleher, King jotted down the names of three cities on a napkin—San Antonio, Houston, and Dallas—and connected them to form a triangle. A small airline that offered nonstop flights between these hot spots, he explained, would have an edge over big airlines like American and Continental, which forced travelers in the region to fly through expensive and time-consuming hubs. In 1971, King and Kelleher founded Southwest Airlines (LUV) (one of the world's most profitable airlines), thanks in no small part to the perspective the pair gained from a doodle.

Stephen Pratt, chief executive of Infosys Consulting, understands the power of the pen; he rarely walks into a meeting with a formal presentation. "People tend to fall asleep when they see very long PowerPoint presentations full of text," Pratt says. "But if you start drawing on the board, people sit up in their chairs."

And Pratt loves that doodling is a universal language.