Praise for  A PERFECT MESS    


  "A meandering, engaging tour of beneficial mess and the systems and individuals reaping those benefits....A fine time tipping over orthodoxies and poking fun at clutter busters and their ilk, and at the self-help tips they live or die by."
-- The New York Times

A Perfect Mess is an engaging polemic against the neat-police who hold so much sway over our lives. For all too many people, neatness is a virtue in and of itself. The CEOs who appear on the cover of business magazines inevitably gaze out at their conquered worlds from perfectly neat offices with perfectly tidy desks. Americans pay millions of dollars every year to neatness experts....There is more than a touch of Calvinist severity about office managers everywhere, as they cast a cold eye of suspicion on the untidy workers in their charge.  Eric Abrahamson and David Freedman note in "A Perfect Mess" that the costs of being neat and well-organized frequently outweigh the benefits. If this is true for mundane things like tidy desks, it is even truer with big things like organizations. Businesses can become so focused on transforming their internal processes into studies in neatness -- setting crystal-clear objectives (strategic planning) or removing organizational clutter (re-engineering) -- that they forget to focus on their real business.  But Messrs. (as it is especially pleasing to call them) Abrahamson and Freedman go on to make a larger claim: that mess actually has its uses...."A Perfect Mess" is a godsend to anybody who has a cleanliness fanatic for a boss....[and] for anyone who is already finding it hard to keep a New Year's resolution about being tidier.
-- The Wall Street Journal

"Combine the 'world-is-not-as-it-seems' mind-set 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

"Written in the style of counterintuitive classics like The Tipping Point and Freakonomics , A Perfect Mess amounts to a big messy pile of evidence that in the grand scheme of things, the advantages of neatness are often outweighed by the costs....Citing case studies and entertaining anecdotes, the authors [show] that a slightly messy way of doing things is more flexible, efficient and likely to succeed in the real world than a tightly regimented one."
-- Forbes FYI

A treasure trove of stories and anecdotes about fascinating people who have made their mark in business, science, medicine, technology, urban planning, art and music in part by being what I'd call idiosyncratically organized. From Alexander Fleming's fabled accidental discovery of penicillin in his cluttered lab to J.S. Bach's little-known propensity for rampant improvisation, the book overflows with interesting details.... Abrahamson and Freedman are promoting the concept that being flexibly organized is often more effective than being rigidly organized in the linear, highly structured manner that many people seem to believe is the “right” way to be organized.  Well, amen to that....The parts at which I laughed most uncontrollably were their descriptions of what it was like hanging out with professional organizers on the job and at a National Association of Professional Organizers conference.
-- Professional Organizer Harriet Schechter, The San Diego Union-Tribune

Given the subject matter, it's appropriate that their investigation is -- ahem -- a mess. Luckily, as with  Freakonomics and Gladwell's books, the attempt is both thought-provoking and fun....For those whose eyes glaze over at management treatises, fortunately  A Perfect Mess unleashes, rather pell-mell, a muddle of other examples ranging far beyond your cubicle -- freewheeling landscape design, electric shock therapy treatments, noisy cell phone signals, tangled traffic patterns, random urban planning, chaotic terrorist tactics and Surrealist art movements....The book's peripatetic path eventually proves that despite what your mother, your boss or your girlfriend tells you, a certain amount of disorder is a good thing.
-- The San Francisco Chronicle

As a devoted neatnik leading a scheduled and color-coded life, I expected to be annoyed by A Perfect Mess .  By the end of the book, I not only had new respect for the rewards of mess but also realized I could use a little more of it in my own life....Makes for a fun read full of unexpected surprises.
-- The Richmond Times-Dispatch

Maybe your mother was wrong to make you clean up your room?  A Perfect Mess deflates the conventional wisdom that highly ordered systems are automatically better....The bottom line of this highly engaging, often funny book is that most of us have brains that are wired to react most fruitfully to a certain degree of disorder—which explains why some of us react so badly to people like Martha Stewart.
-- The Very Short List

Eye-opening stories that challenge our obsession with an idealized version of home.
-- The Dallas Morning News

It's always nice to see one's pet theories confirmed by rigorous analysis, and a subject close to this writer's heart is encapsulated in the title of A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder ....I would say more on the subject, but I seem to have lost my notes somewhere in the piles of detritus towering around me.
-- The (U.K.) Guardian

A cross between Blink and Getting Things Done ....A great, provocative, counter-intuitive, and really enjoyable argument about the benefits of mess and the costs of organization.
-- 800 CEO READ