Some current reading
A "perfect" mess is not too messy and not too orderly. The examples so far (50 pages into it) include overplanning and excessive orderliness that were too costly and irrelevant to adapt to everchanging situations.
The first comparison given is of two magazine stores in New York City. One is very organized and the other is somewhat messy. The surprise is that it's the better organized store that went out of business, because the other one could find and keep track of its magazines well enough without the added costs of a computerized inventory system and maintaining better order of the racks.
A perfect mess : the hidden benefits of disorder / Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman. New York, NY : Little, Brown and Company, c2006. 327 pages. Eric Abrahamson is a professor of management at Columbia Business School, Columbia University.
Some current reading
A "perfect" mess is not too messy and not too orderly. The examples so far (50 pages into it) include overplanning and excessive orderliness that were too costly and irrelevant to adapt to everchanging situations.
The first comparison given is of two magazine stores in New York City. One is very organized and the other is somewhat messy. The surprise is that it's the better organized store that went out of business, because the other one could find and keep track of its magazines well enough without the added costs of a computerized inventory system and maintaining better order of the racks.
A perfect mess : the hidden benefits of disorder / Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman. New York, NY : Little, Brown and Company, c2006. 327 pages. Eric Abrahamson is a professor of management at Columbia Business School, Columbia University.