"A common mistake in problem solving is to encompass too much territory, which dilutes any solutions chance of success. [...] However, the opposite error occurs more frequently." (Terry Richey, "The Marketer's Visual Tool Kit", 1994)
"But business fosters a particular fondness for tactics. That emphasis can lead to an imbalance that reduces the opportunities for success. We get so wrapped up in tactics - doing things to meet a quota or deadline, executing someone else's orders - that we miss the reason behind the tactics. Eventually the purpose of the tactic fades away, but the rules, quotas, deadlines, forms, and frustration remain." (Terry Richey, "The Marketer's Visual Tool Kit", 1994)
"One of the issues involved in moving strategy making down into the business organization concerns common understanding or focus. To carry out tactics, we do not need to share common objectives. But with strategy, we must interpret conditions, events, and actions in a similar manner to have any hope of creating a successful plan." (Terry Richey, "The Marketer's Visual Tool Kit", 1994)
"One proven way to share a common understanding of your market and your position in it is to create a Strategic Map. You build the map by searching for the two most critical variables that separate how you and your competitors differ and then plotting these variables in a box divided into quadrants. Building a Strategic Map of your business and creating consensus on the accuracy of that model can dramatically enhance the process of defining strategy and constructing results-driven marketing programs. The visual nature of your model keeps it top of mind and in clearer focus than words on paper can do alone." (Terry Richey, "The Marketer's Visual Tool Kit", 1994)
"Segmenting a market requires information, intuition, and imagination. No right answer exists in segmentation. You need to find a breakdown of the market based on hard data. You can obtain this demographic and psychographic data from your own customers, from published research, or from new research. But of all the ways to break down the market, you'll end up needing a good measure of intuition, placing your feel for the market into the process. Finally, segmentation means little without the imagination of how to use it to its fullest potential." (Terry Richey, "The Marketer's Visual Tool Kit", 1994)
"Strategy and tactics. Thinking and doing. Vision and execution. Whatever you call it, finding a balance between these two powerful forces of success remains a lifelong search for the best in any field: military leader, artist, baseball coach, or marketing manager." (Terry Richey, "The Marketer's Visual Tool Kit", 1994)
"The key to strategy is the ability to think forward and reason backward. We imagine where the future will take us and then build a pathway back to today. The problem lies in not knowing which of many possible futures will unfold. A Decision Tree allows you to visualize these futures and evaluate their potential impact from the future, rather than from today." (Terry Richey, "The Marketer's Visual Tool Kit", 1994)
"The key to successful brainstorming lies in the team's willingness to suspend disbelief and experiment with new ways of looking at opportunities - something that can be done with a Morpho Box. At this point, concentrating on only the positive possibilities without reference to the inherent problems makes the process work." (Terry Richey, "The Marketer's Visual Tool Kit", 1994)
"The square has always had a no-nonsense sort of image. Stable, solid, and - well - square. Perhaps that's why it is the shape used in business visuals in those rare cases where a visual is even bothered with. Flip through most business books and you'll find precious few places for your eye to stop and your visual brain to engage. But when you do, the shape of the graphic, chart, matrix, table, or diagram is certainly square. It's a comfortable shape, which makes it a valuable implement in your kit of visual communication tools." (Terry Richey, "The Marketer's Visual Tool Kit", 1994)
"The triangle is one of the best tools for visualizing a problem. Every difficult problem I've encountered in business breaks down into pieces, which carry different weight and importance. The pieces with the most importance sit at the top of the triangle, which progresses down to the sometimes thorny but less important piece at the base." (Terry Richey, "The Marketer's Visual Tool Kit", 1994)
"Visual thinking can begin with the three basic shapes we all learned to draw before kindergarten: the triangle, the circle, and the square. The triangle encourages you to rank parts of a problem by priority. When drawn into a triangle, these parts are less likely to get out of order and take on more importance than they should. While the triangle ranks, the circle encloses and can be used to include and/or exclude. Some problems have to be enclosed to be managed. Finally, the square serves as a versatile problem-solving tool. By assigning it attributes along its sides or corners, we can suddenly give a vague issue a specific place to live and to move about." (Terry Richey, "The Marketer's Visual Tool Kit", 1994)
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