Critical Success Factors for a Web Startup (Diagram) (creately.com)

One of the numerous geeky hobbies I have is thinking how to present things to people in a convincing, effective manner. This visualization conveys information through size, relative position, and color. Unfortunately, size, relative position, and color do not support the story that they want the information to tell. For example, if you're working in 2D, things close to each other should be related to each other. However, "keep costs low" is not related with "continuously grow product" -- that is a spurious bit of information carried by placing them a few millimeters apart. Additionally, you would assume the critical stuff is in the center and less important stuff is in the periphery. Unfortunately, again, this is spurious, which is why they're overloading color to convey levels of importance.

If I were going to tell this story, I would collapse it into an outline. An outline is close to linear, so you can put important part up at the top. It is quickly scannable and impressively comprehensible. It does hierarchical relationships very well and doesn't imply relationships where none exist.

Here is the same graph expressed as an outline: http://www.pastie.org/786194

I think it gets a bit clearer. (I have left errors and questionable relationships as is so that it doesn't get clearer just by having me copy edit it... although since you can whip out an outline in a fraction of the time it takes to do a visualization like the original, you might have extra time to squash the typos.)

In fact I found the chart really hard to understand. As Patrick pointed out, I think human brain is better at grasping linear outlines rather than graph based information.