Eric Abrahamson (2)Rezensionen

i think i will finish the book today or be finished with it or whatever. i read a well-written book today--natalie robin's Savage Grace--that was so unrelentingly sordid that i just have to think of something besides the ugly dissolute stupid foul ways of careless rich people and the nasty appetites of readers like me, ugh.

anyhow, i am glad i have continued because of the neat take-down of New Urbanism between pages 202 and 206.

"What a dense, stylish urban environment and its predominantly residential outer rings do not provide...are what most of the 36 percent of Americans who are currently raising children...want"

'They're building ephermeral cities for the nomadic rich'

.....

why this book has inspired current reading notes and others have not, i do not know.

.....

page 159 reminds me that sarbanes-oxley required precise tracking of financial documents and that when i lived in nyc i was, for the most part, a sarbanes-oxley temp. pretty much every job i had was for a company that had been in the news for being bad.

......

---oh my gosh, not a review, just stuff i want to think about. is very messy...is not meant to be clever, like here is a book about mess and here is my messy mess. i hope no one could even consider that i would do such a george herbert-ass thing! here is a poem about an altar; i have made the words look like an altar! or whatever.----


i started reading this book when it came out, but it is so very, very *2oo6* that i couldn't take it. it's 2021 now, so back at it.

i need some help figuring out this 2006-iness quality. is this a publishing trend? the dubner&levitt gotcha! school of writing: "we know you think you know that [whatever] is true, but allow us to present very specific small sets of numbers that will reveal your idiot ways." the gladwell-inspired self help from sociologists for professional professionals. like, they arent jared diamond but aspire to the diamondesque and in the more peripheral texts (this one!) are sure to quote him.

was all this the efflourescence of the Fast Company era? a repudiation of it? both?

i really don't and really didn't dislike Freakonomics as much as it may seem. d&l relied overmuch on a narrative formula, but that was ok...it is just that the book was so popular that it seemed like everyone started relying on that same formula (the jonah whoever boston globe guy who was always writing those "you no doubt think people in cities are smart but ACTUALLY cities make you dumb because you never have to look down and wade through a creek to get somewhere"

2006 was about the time i decided to focus on just a few authors instead of the whole hot wide world of new nonfiction. just for a little while, i thought, i will only pay attention to new releases from thomas frank, paul krugman, sarah vowell, chuck klosterman, jon krakauer. david brooks was on the list, but his interests diverged from mine (no hard feelings, go with god etc). at any rate, it was a good decision because i'm not not enjoying this book.

A good book which develops the good idea of finding value into mess, in different areas of our life. Unfortunately, the book suffers from the typical "American business-oriented essay" approach: so it talks about disorder but it ends up being too much ordered and predictable in its own structure.

I like this book because it speaks to me! I am - can be - messy at times, and it seems like my desk is in a state of clutter. But there is a method to this madness. I always move from item to item and seem to find what I want. It's when everything is in perfect order that I get lost.

This book is very good in helping us understand the importance of a slight amount of mess in our lives - as long as it is not completely chaotic. A bit of mess helps us all become explorers.

Towards the end, the book becomes a bit repetitive. But, the last two chapters are important - they warn us of excessive disorder.

The chapters and sections on the kinds of people is delightful.

This book probably wouldn't rate "amazing" for most. However, at the time that I read it, I was in the greatest state of obsessive compulsiveness with regard to cleanliness, organization and planning in my life. Reading this book showed me that it might be time to lighten up and that sometimes, a little last minute change or a book left on the table rather than the shelf wouldn't kill anyone.

I'm still not ready to leave my house w/o making my bed though. That still bothers me all day long.

This book starts with the premise that messiness or disorder is good and then proceeds to demonstrate with many examples spread across several chapters. He comes down hard on professional organizers.

The first premise is that the cost of ordering stuff may exceed the benefit. Another premise is that order stifles innovation, and that disorder may be conducive to greater creativity.

A few interesting things:

Cell phone providers managed to annoy users by eliminating noise. (We need the noise to know that someone is still on the other end.) The book seemed to say to reduce bandwidth consumption, they take out the real noise and put in fake noise at the other end.

The 1948 book [b:Cheaper by the Dozen|764903|Cheaper by the Dozen|Frank B. Gilbreth|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348220916s/764903.jpg|1925199] is based on an actual family where the father indeed strove to impose a high level of order or discipline on his family.

There were examples of many unknown and small companies reputed to have success through disorder and lack of planning. Risk takers and non-conformists seems like a pretty good description of most of them. One recognizable name was mentioned, Novel Corporation. Not exactly a sterling model of a successful strategy, however, they still exist as a company.

It mentioned some examples where noise is useful in decoding information, both in biological and man-made systems, but didn't mention one that I am familiar with, which is delta-sigma analog to digital converters.

An interesting read that will probably make little difference in my life. On second though, perhaps I will do a little less planning. The book said that planning doesn't improve outcome.

Still relevant despite being over a decade old. For those of us without super tidy desks will find vindication in this book.

Très intéressée par l'idée au départ, je n'ai finalement pas accroché au style, à la fois trop "sérieux" et pas assez, dans le sens où j'ai un peu l'impression qu'on passe du coq à l'âne. Une fois l'idée cernée, j'ai perdu le fil. Finalement, je ne l'ai pas lu jusqu'à la fin alors ma critique n'est peut-être pas tout à fait recevable. ;-)½

Audiobook narrated by Scott Brick. I didn't think this was the right voice for this book, but in any case my brand of messiness has been validated! What I got out of it: messiness is flexible; it reflects the organizational structures of individual minds; constant organizing and cleaning can be inefficient; messiness can lead to creative breakthroughs and discoveries.

At first, I didn't think I was going to like this book. The author seemed to be reaching with a lot of his examples of the advantages of disorder. But over time, the examples mounted and he shifted his focus on finding a balance or order to disorder. I really enjoyed his analysis and I appreciated that this book made me think outside the box.

Couldn't finish it (made it to page 84). I was looking forward to some good argumentative discourse but this book really let me down. While I do believe that sometimes the cost of organising something is much greater than what you get in return, the way the authors try to prove their point leaves the impression of deceit.
They use quirky anecdotes for proof that messy systems sometimes work only to constantly repeat that it's better to be somewhere in the middle.
The anecdotes aren't the annoying part, the argumentation and classification is. The way they "scientifically" try to differentiate mess from chaos is this: they won't use chaos because chaos, in modern sciences as chaos theory, implies that there's a hidden order; this differs from the common utilisation of the word chaos by us common people, so they thought they'll use mess as expressing exactly what common people understand by mess... Why not use chaos then if you'll go with what most people understand by it? Maybe because 'mess' is mild in comparison to 'chaos' thus making their point of view easier to agree with.

A book of case studies, from homes to business organizations, arguing that “mess” is not inherently bad and in many cases is actually beneficial. The authors’ point is very valid; American ideals of “neat” and “organized” do tend to be at levels that take far more time to maintain than they give back in efficiency. But after a while I found the book’s evangelization annoying. The authors do acknowledge that there are particular situations where neatness indeed pays off, and levels of messiness that do indeed reach the pathological; however, it reads more like a token “yeah, a sloppy operating room is bad” than a real acknowledgement that there is still such thing as inappropriately messy. (As for the final section on smells, I invite them to ride around in my ex’s car on a hot day sometime.)

My chief disagreement with the book (and it’s possible that they do address this and I overlooked it) is that the authors don’t address situations where your individual messiness affects other people — not aesthetically (the authors make it quite clear that they’re on the side of “none of your business what someone else’s desk/yard/business plan looks like”), but functionally or financially. Asking “Does this level of mess help or harm my overall functioning?” is a necessary question, but so is “Does this level of mess help or harm the functioning of people who I have obligations toward — my spouse, my family, my coworkers?”

Emmbrace your inner 'slob'!


Great book! Throughout the first chapter I found myself practically yelling 'YES!' outloud, I could relate so well. I love his explanation of organizing chronologically, in a stack (or 2...or 3...or....) on your desk, as it is me and it works. The stuff you really need will end up on top of the pile and the stuff that shifts to the bottom can be tossed later as it will either prove to have been unimportant or accomplished without the paper. So toss it now. See, it's not that we are DISorganized as much as organized DIFFERENTLY.
I'm pretty sure the authors would understand the quote I heard on Nickoledeon years ago by a little boy who stated that most people think of a floor as a means of transportation, when the truth is the floor is the largest shelf in the house!

A string of interesting anecdotes, mostly on the theme that a little unstructured disorder fosters creativity and innovation. And then the book just stops, as though the authors had run out of things to say.½

I really liked this one, more for some of the sparks it set off in my head than some of the actual content. This explores the phenomenon of professional Organisers and how they try to impose a rigid structure of order on people's lives. What isn't often explored in the quick TV show is the fact that a lot of these people find it almost impossible to maintain this order. Without some form of fludity in the choice many people find order a difficult prospect, and many find that it really doesn't quite work, both on a professional and personal level.

Personally I'm in a bit too much of a mess but rigid order doesn't really work all that well for me either (yes I'm a librarian, yes some parts of my life are well-organised)

While complete chaos isn't ideal, people in general are messy and systems have to reflect this. This is a look at humanising systems and instead of everyone being the same, that we all chose a system that works (and complete chaos doesn't tend to be a workable system) for us and that we all should allow for the fact that other people's mileage may vary.

It does display a certain amount of bias towards a more chaotic feel but that's slightly refreshing (for me at least) in a sea of books about rigid order.

Over de ondergewaardeerde kant van de wereld van rommel en chaos met Einstein als godfather (vanwege zijn inzicht dat volslagen willekeurige activiteiten van kleine dingen opvallend en belangrijk gedrag van grotere dingen kunnen voortbrengen): "Als een rommelig bureau staat voor een rommelige geest, waar staat een leeg bureau dan voor?"

The first half of A Perfect Mess is charming and informative. At the midpoint, I dreaded picking it back up. Every one of my reader friends told me to skim it, but I slogged on. And what a slog it was. Someone else took over the helm at the midpoint, and A Perfect Mess became a doctoral thesis. I'm glad I did hang on until the end, however, because the final two chapters had quite a bit to say about creativity and "mess" that I found worth reading. It took me a month of picking it up and putting it back down to finish this one, and I believe i should have listened to my friends. I could have skimmed it.

I listened to this while (you've gotta love this) deep-cleaning and organizing my house. The author uses many of the same techniques to exlpain why a little mess is good for you that Malcolm Gladwell uses to explain why snap thinking is a good thing (See: Blink). State a thesis, throw in some facts, throw in some anecdotes, and throw in some interesting conjecture and you've got a book! Abrahamson doesn't have quite the finesse of Gladwell, but that still makes this an interesting read (or listen). It's really funny in some parts and makes me glad I have a little bit of a mess on my desk and in my home (I have a four year old, and to me, if you can't tell a child lives in a home where the child lives, you're doing something very wrong). However, while making statements about how the mind is evolutionarily set up to handle mess, he ignores the great stress that many people feel when confronted with the messiness of others. Maybe we can handle clutter well, but there is something to be said for laying out the outfit you're going to wear the next day or letting your employees know what is expected of them in the long term.

On the whole, this book was entertaining and informative and certainly gives the reader a number of great excuses to NOT file, sort, arange, or organize. I think his editor may have taken this lesson too much to heart, though-it tends to hop around a lot and many of the stories are very non sequiter.½

A real eye opener. When is the last time someone defended being messy? Such a wake up call for a culture obsessed with organizing shows, magazines, stores! The author backs up his claims with studies and statistics but more importantly raises the point that maybe your messy desk works just fine even if it doesn't look like a picture from the Container Store catalog.

If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, what then is an empty desk? this was a question asked by Albert Einstein in response to criticism of his messy desk.

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.)