A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder - How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and on-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place [Hardcover]

Eric Abrahamson (Author), David H. Freedman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 3, 2007

Ever since Einstein's study of Brownian Motion, scientists have understood that a little disorder can actually make systems more effective. But most people still shun disorder-or suffer guilt over the mess they can't avoid. No longer!With a spectacular array of true stories and case studies of the hidden benefits of mess,A Perfect Mess overturns the accepted wisdom that tight schedules, organization, neatness, and consistency are the keys to success. Drawing on examples from business, parenting, cooking, the war on terrorism, retail, and even the meteoric career of Arnold Schwarzenegger, coauthors Abrahmson and Freedman demonstrate that moderately messy systems use resources more efficiently, yield better solutions, and are harder to break than neat ones.Applying this idea on scales both large (government, society) and small (desktops, garages), A Perfect Mess uncovers all the ways messiness can trump neatness, and will help you assess the right amount of disorder for any system. Whether it's your company's management plan or your hallway closet that bedevils you, this book will show you why to say yes to mess.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The premise of this pop business book should generate reader goodwill—who won't appreciate being told that her messy desk is "perfect"? But despite their convincing defense of sloppy workstations, Columbia management professor Abrahamson (Change Without Pain) and author Freedman (Corps Business, etc.) squander their reader's indulgence by the end. Their thesis is solid enough: that organizational efforts tend to close off systems to random, unplanned influences that might lead to breakthroughs. But too many of the book's vaguely counterintuitive examples—to cite just one, that Ultimate Fighting is actually less injurious than boxing—stray from the central theme, giving their argument a shapeless, meandering feel. The authors prefer sprawling Los Angeles to fastidiously designed Paris and natural landscaping to lawns, decry clutter consultants, tight scheduling and "the bias towards neatness programmed into most of us." Noting that "organizations can be messy in highly useful ways," they urge companies to scrap long-term strategic planning, make contracts flexible and relinquish control over some processes. The advice is good and the arguments intriguing, and the book will probably be widely cited by those who have always resented neatniks. Too bad it's, well, such a mess. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Flying utterly in the face of conventional wisdom, the authors turn the world of organization on its head to examine how messy systems can be more effective than highly organized ones. Neatness for its own sake, they say, not only has hidden costs in terms of man-hours that could be spent doing other work but it turns out that the highly touted advantages may not even exist. More loosely defined, moderately disorganized people and businesses seem to be more efficient, more robust, and more creative than the obsessively neat. As examples, the authors cite a hardware store crammed to the gills with every sort of product in seemingly disorganized fashion that does twice the business of the "neat" one down the block; a grade school where the students are allowed random access to learning materials with no structured lessons, and no discipline problems; and the seemingly chaotic life of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who refuses to make appointments and sees everyone on the fly. The chronically messy will revel in the anecdotes but may need to skip the terminology. David Siegfried
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; First edition (January 3, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316114758
• ISBN-13: 978-0316114752
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (43 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #419,576 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

71 of 79 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best Organization Training Book Ever, January 30, 2007

By 

Tom Carpenter "- www.sysedco.com" (Marysville, OH) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder - How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and on-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place (Hardcover)

I'm not kidding. It is not even intended to be such a book, but the research that proves that over-organizing is a costly endeavour and of very little profit is priceless. If you believe that being very organized is always best, you will be shocked when you read this book. You'll discover that there is little to no research proving that you save time by plannig your day, but that there is extensive research showing that you can lose a lot of time by over-planning your day.

That's not all, but I'm actually getting ready to read through the book again with a highlighter. I read it on the plane last time. Or maybe I'll read something else instead so I can get the great benefit of creativity that comes partially from disorganization. I just can't decide! Hmmm....

I think you'll really like this little book. It's an eye opener.

Tom Carpenter, Senior Consultant - SYSEDCO
Helping IT Professionals Succeed

62 of 69 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Sometimes a mess is okay, January 29, 2007

By 

Debra Hamel (North Haven, CT) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder - How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and on-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place (Hardcover)

In their book A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder authors Eric Abrahamson (a professor of management at Columbia Business School) and David H. Freedman (a contributing editor at Inc. magazine) question the widespread assumption that organization and neatness are inherently better than disorder and clutter. They argue that in fact some degree of messiness is very often to be preferred to strict order--because the cost of maintaining order can be higher than the benefits accrued from it, for example, because disorder can be the mother of invention, because messy systems can be more efficient and robust than perfectly neat ones. In making their case Abrahamson and Freedman do not confine themselves to domestic mess--the topic that leapt to my mind when I first saw the book's title. Clutter is just one of twelves types into which they categorize messiness. Others include "time sprawl," as when tasks are left unprioritized, and "convolution," which occurs when organizational schemes are illogical. Accordingly, the authors discuss not only messy homes and offices but messy leadership and messy organizations, pathological messiness and artistic messiness.

The topics covered in A Perfect Mess are far reaching--from the suspect claims of professional organizers (for example, that the average person wastes an hour a day looking for things) to Arnold Schwarzenegger's "improvisational lifestyle" (incredibly enough, he doesn't keep a schedule, or didn't, at least, when he was first running for governor), from the Noguchi filing system to natural landscaping to cell phone noise and compulsive hoarding. Throughout, the authors profile people and businesses and systems that have profited from the introduction of some degree of some type of messiness.

"...we argue that there is an optimal level of mess for every aspect of every system. That is in, in any situation there is a type and level of mess at which effectiveness is maximized, and our assertion is that people and organizations frequently err on the side of overorganization. In many cases, they can improve by increasing mess, if it's done in the right way. At a minimum, recognizing the benefits of mess can be a major stress reducer--many of us are already operating at a more-or-less appropriate level of mess but labor under the mistaken belief that we're failing in some way because of it."

A Perfect Mess is an interesting book, written for the general reader in perfectly comprehensible prose. The authors' thesis won't necessarily surprise readers. If you think about it, it's obvious enough that there must be some optimal level of order for every situation. But it's not so much the conclusion that matters here as the guided tour through the messy worlds of city planning and hardware stores and trombone tuning and so on: you'll almost certainly learn something along the way, and in the end you may feel a little better about letting the dishes pile up.

34 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I liked it--and it's surprising, January 9, 2007

By 

Empark (Alexandria, VA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder - How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and on-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place (Hardcover)

I had read the mixed reviews (the Wall Street Journal wrote one also) so I didn't know what to expect. I was first attracted because, yes, I have a messy home and office. But I was pleasantly surprised to not only read many ways that messiness may help (on a personal level and an organizational level) but also a lot about organizational consultants and "psychological mess" (it turns out that my mess is only Level II on a scale of I to V). I also may have found an organizational scheme that works for me: a Japanese guy recently developed a system where he puts things that come to his desk in a large envelope, writes a label on the end and then stands the envelopes on their sides on a bookshelf. You put new and used items on the left so that new/important items end up on the left and older on the right. The book authors argue that this is very-similar to a pile on your desk where the less-used items gravitate to the bottom, but maybe this will work for me. There are a lot of anecdotes (most reviews are annoyed by this), but I found many to apply to my work (transportation, web searches, need for system engineering (not explicitly labeled as such) in software projects). I also learned a lot about nuclear energy and radioactivity among other surprising topics. One of the Amazon reviews mentions Freakonomics and I wonder if this may be similarly quoted--I'm glad to have read this.