Going Visual:

Using Images to Enhance Productivity, Decision Making, and Profits

Copyright ©2005 by Alexis Gerard and Bob Goldstein.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
ISBN 0-471-71025-3

Harness the power of images to drastically improve your every-day business performance.

Foreword by Guy Kawasaki

When I was first asked to write a foreword for this book, I declined because I was very busy with the tour for my own book, The Art of the Start. However, after I read the manuscript, I found I liked the book very much and quickly agreed to write the foreword after all. I decided that since the book evangelizes visual communication, I should “write” a visual foreword. This is the first pictorial foreword in history—at least as far as I know. It depicts how I predict the book will affect you: It will give you tactical, actionable ideas about how to use digital photography to improve your business. My business is venture capital, so I meet with hundreds of entrepreneurs, listen to their pitches, and get back to them later. My problem is that it’s hard for me to remember their names and to recall their whiteboard diagrams.

Guy Kawasaki
Managing Director
Garage Technology Ventures

Going Visual is the first book to make the crucial link between images and business productivity, decision-making, profitability and competitive edge. It describes the profound changes and improvements to interpersonal communications that occur when businesspeople make everyday use of simple imaging devices such as digital cameras or camera-phones to create and communicate with information-rich images. This book educates the business reader to the enormous power of using pictures in ways they've never imagined and change they way they communicate. Going Visual puts the adage "a picture is worth a thousand words" to work with startlingly effective results.

The book is based on real-world success stories of businesses, large and small, that are using imaging technology to turbo-charge their business communications. Each company had a unique Going Visual strategy and we asked them: How did the idea of come about?  What was your process of implementing it?  What benefits did you get? What obstacles did you find? What do have planned for the future?

In every case we found that in everyday practical business circumstances—visual tools that capture the full richness of the information you wish to convey, enable you to communicate

• more completely
• more efficiently
• in greater detail
• and with greater power of conviction

than through words alone.

We carefully guide you down the path to Going Visual, by analyzing these successes and distilling the lessons into:

The Five Action Steps that serve as guiding principles for planning and implementing a Going Visual strategy

The Four Essential Requirements with which a business can set goals and measure the effectiveness of deploying a Going Visual strategy

We also look forward and provide expert analysis of future directions for implementing imaging technology derived from our in-depth research at the some of the world’s leading corporate and academic R&D labs.

Now, for the first time in history we have capability to carry on a visual conversation.  Most of us have grown up and built our methods of communication in the days when this wasn't possible because the required technology is very recent.  However, as business people, we need to change our expectations and change our standards to recognize that we are now living in the Visual Age. Going Visual is aimed at giving the reader a “light bulb moment” of realization that a new, powerful form of communication easily, inexpensively, available to them.

Industry experts and business consultants have hailed the book as the new ‘best practices’ manual for companies of all sizes to drastically improve project team efficiency, decision making, and customer, partner and supplier interactions. Guy Kawasaki, the noted business book author and Founder and Managing Director of Garage Technology Ventures, provided a preface for Going Visual in a unique visual format and commented: “I predict Going Visual will do for businesspeople everywhere what it did for me: Deliver tactical, actionable ideas about using digital photography to improve the way I run my business.”

Table of Contents
Introduction:
Chapter 1		Visual Communication: A Short History
Chapter 2		The Five Action Steps and Four Essential Requirements of a Going Visual Strategy
Chapter 3		Putting Going Visual into Practice
Chapter 4		Solopreneurs: How a Small-Office or Home-Office (SOHO) Business Grows by Going VisualChapter
Chapter 5		Imaging Every Day and Everywhere: How a Midsized Business Wins by Going from Text to Image
Chapter 6		Smart Images: Making Images Work Systemically Over Time, Throughout a Larger Company
Chapter 7		Being There by Going Visual
Chapter 8		Going Further Visual: Five Future Steps
Afterword		New Challenges Ahead
Mobile Imaging Appendix		A Glimpse of the Industry Insider’s View

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