- Virpi Oinonen
A visual guide to business concepts everyone uses but no-one can explain
Have you ever struggled to understand - or explain to others - what buzzwords like “agile”, “lean” or “design thinking” actually mean? Or what seemingly simple concepts like organisational culture or innovation actually entail?
Well struggle no more. This collection of tongue in cheek cartoon explanations will help you understand the core concept and easily explain it to your colleagues, clients, employees, boss or your estranged spouse who still doesn’t understand what you do for a living.
You can download the explanations as PowerPoint files and individual cartoons for your own use.
Your guide is a CEO of a shipping company who shares how he, slowly and painfully, understands what makes a 21st century organisation different from a tayloristic, 20th century factory he has modelled his business after. Hilarity ensues.
These explanations tap into new (or some very old) ways of thinking about organisations and human beings. We are currently standing very close to a paradigm shift - in fact some of us are already waist deep in it - that will challenge our ideas about how organisations should be run and even what constitutes an organisation. We are for example slowly letting go of the idea of the Rational Man and realising that we humans do pretty stupid stuff. And some people have even realised that organisations don’t quite fit into the machine metaphor management theories have tried to squash them into.
The book is suitable for management consultants, senior managers, intrapreneurs and children of all ages who display an interest in organisational development.
Virpi Oinonen is a business cartoonist and storyteller who finds organisations and people in them endlessly fascinating. She is on a mission to make ideas that affect us all understandable so more people can debate them and, who knows, maybe make more informed decisions about things that matter.
After meandering her way through higher education, she finally managed to graduate with a Master’s degree in Political Sociology. She then embarked on a digital communications career where a big part of her job was to make boring but important things interesting.
While doing campaign work around the slightly sleep inducing topic of taxation on major charitable donations, she discovered that drawn storytelling is actually a good tool to explain abstract concepts. She started wondering whether turning ideas into comics would be a viable career option. Turned out it was.
She now runs a small creative communications agency specialising in making abstract and complex issues understandable through comics and animations.
She is Finnish and lives in London.
A sneak peek at the interiors:
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These people are helping to fund The Confused CEO's Guide to 21st Century Organisations.
