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A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder--How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place By Eric AbrahamsonDavid H. Freedman ( Back Bay Books )
Release Date: 2008-01-08
Average Customer Rating:
List Price: $14.99
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Product Description
"An engaging polemic against the neat-police who hold so much sway over our lives." -The Wall Street Journal
Enthusiastically embraced by readers everywhere, this groundbreaking book is an antidote to the accepted wisdom that tight schedules, neatness, and consistency are the keys to success.
With an astounding array of anecdotes and case studies of the useful role mess can play in business, parenting, cooking, the war on terrorism, hardware stores, and even the meteoric career of Arnold Schwarzenegger, coauthors Abrahamson and Freedman demonstrate that moderately messy systems use resources more efficiently, yield better solutions, and are harder to break than neat ones. From clutter to time sprawl to blurring of categories, A PERFECT MESS will forever change the way we think about disorder.
"A compelling and comical tour of humanity's guilt-ridden love affair with accidents, messes, and randomness... Combine the world-is-not-as-it-seems mindset of Freakonomics with the delicious celebration of popular culture found in Everything Bad Is Good for You to get the cocktail-party-chatter-ready anecdotes of 'messiness leading to genius' in A PERFECT MESS." -Fast Company
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 Will reduce your sense of guilt of being messy, and help little ( narcicheng )
I applaud the authors/editors/publishers' promotion tactics of packaging this book as a serious and scholarly work. I dislike its heavy appeal to equivocation (a logical fallacy) upon the term mess, the absence of statistical support for their claim (the same fault of those professional organizers), and the manipulative bias of buzz/form (the title) over substance (plenty of individual stories do not make it a good theory), despite a subtle shift to the discussion of the achievement of "modest" or "optimal" level of messiness in the latter part of the book. If you want to read a book of a variety of stories or to rid some sense of guilt, it's okay. If your objective is to take advantage of your various degree of "messiness", please give this a pass.
p.s. This book reminds me of why many people despise those scholars who regard management as social science. BTW, the only point I like about this book may be the quote in the opening of Chapter 1, "If a cluttered desk is a sign ofa cluttered mind, of what then, is an empty desk? - Albert Einsten". What a great but misleading consolation to the target readers!
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 A New Perspective on Mess ( fran@grammarandmore.com )
_A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder_ provides vindication for those of us who never seem to attain the level of orderliness we feel our lives "should" contain.
Authors Eric Abrahamson (professor of management at Columbia Business School) and David H. Freedman (a contributing editor and the technology columnist at _Inc._ magazine) label a system "messy" "if its elements are scattered, mixed up, or varied due to some measure of randomness, or if for all practical purposes it appears random from someone's point of view." Thus, what may be orderly to one person may appear messy to another -- if, for example, the system of order cannot be discerned. While "messiness" may be due to an absence of order, it is more often due to a system of order that isn't working properly.
"Messy" can describe not only living quarters and workspaces, but also lawns, schedules, traffic patterns, company policies and procedures, leadership styles, thought processes, and a host of other things. The authors contrast "messiness" and "neatness" in these various contexts, and they describe individuals, businesses, and organizations that have achieved phenomenal success despite -- or, more accurately, because of -- their unconventional organizational structures.
While Abrahamson and Freedman concede that messiness is not always superior to neatness, they point out the benefits of messiness because of our society's general bias toward neatness. They demonstrate how moderate disorganization often leads to greater flexibility, efficiency, and effectiveness than do more highly organized systems. In addition, the unusual juxtapositions that may occur in a messy environment can spark creativity or suggest solutions to problems.
_A Perfect Mess_ may inspire us to reconsider the optimal level of neatness or messiness in various areas of our lives. Doing so may free up hours of our time, unleash our creativity, and allay our guilt.
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my messiness is finally in style!!!!!
I can't believe that my messiness has finally become a positive trait. I love itĦĦĦĦĦ
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The Benefits of "some"mess
Some years ago I discovered that almost half of world population was not as organized as I thought they might be, I discovered I was normal!!! and without any guilt.
This book reframes mess into new perspective. Some chapters called my attention, Ch 1 - The Cost of Neatness; Ch 3 - Types of Mess; Ch 4 - The benefits of mess and Ch 12 - Pathological Mess.
I am a firm believer that some mess is normal and sometimes necessary to enhance creativeness and you may read this book and Time Management for Unmanageable People and, for sure you will reframe your thoughts: "Mess is Often in the Eyes of the BEHOLDER"
Humberto Souza - Brazil
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 Lighthearted and Engaging ( inboxonmars )
Breaks mess into several categories and uses scientific studies, examples from successful businesses, and anecdotal stories to illustrate the benefits of some disorder at work and home.
Mess provides numerous advantages, including: 1. Things are close at hand, 2. no rigid plan means flexibility, and 3. serendipitous usefulness is created when you stumble upon one thing while looking for another in all the mess. The value of organization is questioned and some balance of both is recommended in the end.
I found the description of the Japanese filing system interesting and useful.
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Addiction
