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A review by xaviershay
Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency by Tom DeMarco
5.0
I'm stereotyping, but I feel like America needs to read this book. This book would be a hard one to read without generating any new thought about your team or organisation.
"The principal resource needed for invention is slack. When companies can’t invent, it’s usually because their people are too damn busy."
"Even companies that didn’t fire their change centers have hurt themselves by encouraging their middle managers to stay extremely busy. In order to enable change, companies have to learn that keeping managers busy is a blunder. If you have busy managers working under you, they are an indictment of your vision and your capacity to transform that vision into reality."
"A side effect of this optimally efficient scheme is that the net time for work to pass through the organization must necessarily increase. Think of it from the work’s point of view: The time it takes to move entirely through the network is increased by each pause it has to make in someone’s in-basket. If workers were available when the work arrived at their desks, there would be no wait and the total transit time would be reduced. But availability implies at least some inefficiency, and that’s what our efficiency program has drummed out of the organization."
"The principal resource needed for invention is slack. When companies can’t invent, it’s usually because their people are too damn busy."
"Even companies that didn’t fire their change centers have hurt themselves by encouraging their middle managers to stay extremely busy. In order to enable change, companies have to learn that keeping managers busy is a blunder. If you have busy managers working under you, they are an indictment of your vision and your capacity to transform that vision into reality."
"A side effect of this optimally efficient scheme is that the net time for work to pass through the organization must necessarily increase. Think of it from the work’s point of view: The time it takes to move entirely through the network is increased by each pause it has to make in someone’s in-basket. If workers were available when the work arrived at their desks, there would be no wait and the total transit time would be reduced. But availability implies at least some inefficiency, and that’s what our efficiency program has drummed out of the organization."