To most companies, efficiency means profits and growth. But what if your efficient company -- the one with the reduced headcount and the stretch goals -- is actually slowing down and losing money? What if your employees are burning out doing the work of two or more people? What if your super-efficient company is suddenly falling behind?
If your real organizational goal is to become fast (responsive and agile), Tom DeMarco proposes that what you need is not more efficiency but more slack.
What is slack ? Slack is the degree of freedom in a company that allows it to change. It could be something as simple as adding an assistant to a department, or letting high-priced talent spend less time at the photocopier and more time making key decisions. Slack could also appear in the way a company treats employees: Instead of loading them up with overwork, a company designed with slack allows its people room to breathe, increase effectiveness, and reinvent themselves.
In thirty-three chapters filled with creative learning tools and charts, you and your company can learn to make sense of the Efficiency/Flexibility quandary run directly toward risk instead of away from it strengthen the creative role of middle management make change and growth work together for even greater profits.
Originally published by Broadway Books and available from Dorset House for the first time, this revolutionary handbook will debunk commonly held assumptions about real-world management. You and your company will find a brand-new model for achieving and maintaining true effectiveness -- and a healthier bottom line.
Tom DeMarco is the author of fourteen published books, including novels, business books and a collection of short stories. His most recent work is a pair of speculative novels,
A Ruby Beam of Light and
Airship Nation. Together they make up part of his series
Dark World Chronicles.
In his technical life he is a Principal of the Atlantic Systems Guild, a New York--and London-based consulting practice. His clients include Hewlett Packard, Apple, IBM, Bell Laboratories, and many others. He is also the author of seven books on management and technical development methods, including The Deadline, a business novel, and Peopleware. In 1999, Tom was awarded the Wayne Stevens Prize for lifetime contribution to software engineering methods, and he continues to work in areas of organizational change, project management, and litigation. He lives with his wife Sally O. Smyth in the coastal village of Camden, Maine.
