Management gimmick: your corporate mission on a paper napkin

This month's Fast Company magazine has a piece about the new fashion amongst some managers for distilling a company's business model into a couple of stick figures, some buzzwords and a series of arrows scrawled onto a paper napkin. My first thought was, obviously, "oh look, it's another another management gimmick". (Though in my head there was more swearing and less punctuation).

Then I wondered how anyone had persuaded managers to leave their PowerPoint programmes shut for long enough to use a pen and paper rather than a wizzy logo and laser pointer. Then, weirdly, I began to wonder whether it's actually quite a good idea.

Consider this:

1. It's not a PowerPoint presentation.

2. Napkins are commonly found in bars, so drawing your corporate mission statement involves several shots of tequila rather than stale biscuits and flavourless corporate coffee.

3. If you're the chief executive, you can throw rough drafts at your finance director.

There are other, more serious reasons, but there's no need for me to go into them here given that Dan Roam has gone to all the trouble of writing a book about it. He's called it The Back of The Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures but, sadly, seems to have written it on normal paper.