Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

DeMarco is back again, with another good book in the spirit of Controlling Software Projects and Peopleware. Those books, written in the 1980s, still have a lot to say about software and people today -- read them too. But here in Slack, DeMarco updates his message specifically for the super-efficient, online, always busy 21st century. As companies streamline to make sure that they're mostly workers (less middle management) and that everyone is always busy, DeMarco suggests that thinking time can get cut out. And that thinking, to be done in the "slack" time that gets cut, is essential for keeping a company agile and inventive. DeMarco still manages to get many of his basic ideas in, which gives the book variety. Just a sample here. On schedules: "A bad schedule is [simply] one that sets a date that is subsequently missed .... When the schedule is wrong, the work goes on anyway, proceeding in some way other than as planned. The result is that the effort is necessarily hurt." On leadership: "Leadership is not restricted to acting only downward along the lines of organizational authority. The bread-and-butter acts of leadership that make companies healthy involve people leading their bosses, leading their peers ... all without ever being granted the official power to do what they're doing. It's enrolling someone who is distinctly outside the scope of your offical power base that constitutes real leadership." Back on the main topic of the book, time and what to do with it: "People under time pressure don't think faster." So find a little slack time and read this book.

It's about 100 years since Frederick Winslow Taylor introduced the philosophy of "scientific management", with its offspring such as the time-and-motion study and the mythical man-month. That's about how long it takes for a big idea to soak into the awareness of managers everywhere - especially those who are more committed to looking good than to managing well. Tom DeMarco, co-author (with Tim Lister) of the magnificent "Peopleware", has done it again. Although "Slack" runs a little over 200 pages, you will probably read it in less than four hours because it is actually quite hard to put down. You will keep on thinking, "Yes, I've seen that!" and "Those words ring a bell". In the course of his consultancy practice, which has taken him into many organizations including Apple, HP, Lucent and IBM, DeMarco has noticed a lot of counterproductive management behaviour. Many acts and policies that look good in the short term lead to corporate death in the longer term. More specifically, it is always possible to squeeze out a few more percentage points of "efficiency" - but only at the cost of damaging morale, precipitating burnout and losing the flexibility without which sensible decisions cannot be made. Faster isn't always better. Effectiveness matters more than efficiency. People are not interchangeable "resources". Without challenge and growth, the best employees soon leave. Overheads are not necessarily bad. Consciously or subconsciously, we already know these things. DeMarco just hammers them home so we will never forget them again. I really have only one quibble with "Slack". DeMarco has no business criticising Dilbert and his fellow engineers for "giving up" on their pointy-haired bosses. Sure, employees have a responsibility to make allowances and go the extra mile - but the PHBs systematically abuse every extra bit of slack that anyone cuts them. That's part of the joke, of course. This is not just a book that will confirm your suspicions, and reassure you that you are not the one who is going mad. It's a simple, easily-understood message that everyone in business needs to hear. Most of all those right at the top - DeMarco says that many employees have told him, "I wish my boss could be here now to hear you say that".

Somehow I managed to give this book only three stars...I couldn't have been more wrong. Over the past several years this is the single management book I keep rereading. This is a brilliantly rationalist book arguing that maximizing the busyness of individual knowledge workers minimizes the effectiveness and productivity of the organization as a whole. This concept is promoted by Eliyahu Goldratt and his Theory of Constraints and in his books like The Goal. Goldratt argued that in in the case of discrete manufacturing-where individual goods are produced in a continual but not continuous process through the discrete application of heterogeneous transformations-as the utilization (or efficiency) of the individual steps approaches their maximum, the productivity (or throughput) of the system as a whole approaches a minimum. Now, knowledge work (like software development - my industry) looks a lot like discrete manufacturing. You have a set of inputs of varying quality: requirements, best practice documents, etc. In a factory, the machines that perform a step in the manufacturing process often differ - they could be different models, have different maintenance histories, have different tolerances with regards to inputs or throughput, or produce at different levels of quality. Tom DeMarco reminds us that knowledge workers are similarly not fungible. Not only does each individual have their own specialties and deficits but people have task switching costs analogous to the set up costs with factory machines. Anyway, this is my desert island management book - the one that's all depth with none of the fluff, and the one that I study for guidance with each management challenge.

Author Tom DeMarco presents a compelling case against total efficiency, which - he explains convincingly - can actually slow down work processes, undermine office morale and corrupt positive change. Leave some slack in your system, he says, so people have a chance to do their best and grow, which will result in a more effective organization. He includes some simple flow charts to help illustrate these ideas, along with examples of management methods that work and some that don't. We [...] particularly like his details about managing knowledge workers. The book is divided into almost three dozen short, to-the-point chapters. Each one highlights a different problem caused by lack of slack time, and suggests a solution. This pleasant read will intrigue both executives and managers. If you don't have time to read it, maybe you're being too efficient.

About time someone wrote about human nature and the fact that people are not machines. The myth of "total efficiency" still persists in the workplace. This book is in sharp contrast to practices that have plagued the workers for decades; women who sewed in sweatshop factories in the early 1900's were carefully monitored on how long they took to make bathroom breaks. Even now software is available that can count every keystroke a worker makes (to check on their efficiency.) The dream that careful monitoring and structuring of the workplace to get the maximum "juice" out of workers is disproved in this book.This isn't even totally new information; a very old study found that brightening the lights in a factory improved performance. Then another study found that DIMMING the lights also improved performance. In other words, people are not machines. They need downtime, change, meaningful work and mental breaks or they burn out. A very timely and helpful book.