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

Scott Brick (Narrator) Eric Abrahamson And David Freedman (Author)

ISBN 10: 1415936277 ISBN 13: 9781415936276

Publisher: Books On Tape, 2007

Synopsis

"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

About this title

About the Author

Eric Abrahamson is a professor of management at Columbia University's School of Business, and author of Change Without Pain. David H. Freedman is the author of three books, and is a business and science journalist who has written for The Atlantic Monthly, Newsweek, and Wired, among others. Abrahamson lives in New York, and Freedman in Massachusetts.

From AudioFile

Is your workspace a complex but personal jumble of information, data, and stuff? Is your home a comfortable space that has some black holes of organization? Then you may be on the track to greater productivity, creativity, and happiness, according to the authors. Reader David Freedman makes this a friendly listen as the authors reveal such details as the possibility that the discovery of penicillin would not have occurred if the lab had not been a mess. The authors find an order in apparent chaos that they believe is efficient in its own right. This is a good audiobook to listen to when driving or working around the mess, er, house. D.J.B. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Edition details

• Publisher: Books On Tape
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1415936277
• ISBN 13: 9781415936276
• Binding: Audio CD