| "In times of many layoffs, shrinking staffs, vanishing
'think time,' middle-managerial heads rolling and mounting pressure to produce
more faster, DeMarco's 'Slack' is worth consideration as a rather quick read for
large-corporate, small-business and individual workers—there are few limits
on who can get some thoughts from this one."
—Porter Anderson
CNN.com
"DeMarco offers some good ideas for making sure your organization has
the requisite slack, which he defines as time during which people are zero percent
busy."
—Mark Henricks
Entrepreneur
magazine
"DeMarco delivers, systematically defacing the ultra-efficiency
banner and constructing a new sign that says adding downtime, dream time, and
other slack will make companies more resilient and more productive."
—American Way magazine
"Tom DeMarco goes after one
of the most pervasive and pernicious myths of business—that humans are efficient
the same way machines are. This book will change the way you manage and understand
your business."
—David Weinberger
author
of The Cluetrain Manifesto
"This book is the
ideal tonic to the '90s craze of downsizing, restructuring, cost-cutting—all
in the name of efficiency and global competition. What DeMarco shows is that the
resulting costs in human capital (stress, pressure, over-commitment) may ultimately
deprive an organization of the very success it seeks. DeMarco's remedy is what
he calls 'slack.' Read this book and learn why."
—David A. Kaplan
author of The Silicon Boys
"Tom
DeMarco's insights are shockingly pragmatic. Where other writers aspire to be
Machiavellis of management, he is Montaigne: pithy, sharp, intimate, and wise."
—Michael Shrage
MIT Media Lab, author of Serious Play
"DeMarco
puts his finger on something I'd only vaguely felt during my years in Silicon
Valley. When asked to cut people some slack, I knew something was amiss, but not
exactly what. Reading this tight little book clears up the trade-offs between
efficiency and effectiveness, between doing and planning, between switching and
concentration, and shows how squeezing excess capacity out of your company can
sometimes leave it terminally unresponsive."
—Bob Metcalfe
inventor of the ethernet, founder of 3COM,
author of Internet
Collapses
"DeMarco understands the temptations
we all experience in the high-pressure management world, and is able to separate
incentives from accomplishments and process from culture in a clear and memorable
way. Buy this book for your CEO or your favorite entrepreneur, or better still,
buy a copy for yourself and profit from DeMarco's insights."
—David Liddle
general partner, U.S. Venture Partners
"During
the rise of the so-called 'New Economy,' too many business books reflected the
same crazy logic that marked countless dot-con-game business plans. In other words,
common sense disappeared. Tom DeMarco's volume is refreshing because it starts
with common sense and goes from there."
—Dan Gillmor
columnist, San Jose Mercury News
"Slack is an excellent
book that makes its points clearly and briefly,
avoiding hundreds of pages of management consultant
waffle. . . . While reading Slack I recognised
so many of the causes and consequences that Tom
DeMarco describes, from my previous employer, that
I got a lot from reading his views on less familiar
subjects. I also wish I had read the book a few
years ago."
—Peter Hilton
Lunatech
Research
"When we think of "slack," it
often has a negative connotation, such as wasted
time or work that goes too slowly. A "slacker" is
someone who actually tries to avoid work. . . .
But slack may also have a positive connotation --
providing flexibility in doing a project. . . .
"Cutting out slack does lead
to increased efficiency, but may also lead to frustration,
such as getting messages like "all of our agents
are busy servicing other customers" followed by
a long wait. While we shouldn't be slackers, we
all need some slack in our lives."
—Al Kaniss
Tester,
DCMilitary.com
". . . in an age of acceleration,
in which more work is crammed into less time, knowledge
workers need slack time for reinvention, creativity,
and growth. . . ."
—Library Journal
"DeMarco addresses and debunks
many popular myths about restructuring and downsizing
with a clearer perspective of organizational improvement.
Offering a pragmatic approach to helping managers
see their employees as humans, and not machines,
Slack provides numerous examples to back
up his ideas about efficiency, flexibility, change
and growth."
—Soundview Executive Book
Summaries
"This book is easy and enjoyable
reading. It is written for managers of all levels.
. . .
"Companies are pushing their
employees to work at a pace that is counterproductive:
the consequences are missed schedules and unhappy
employees. Taking the time and allowing for ÒslackÓ
will help organizations become more effective and
will allow employees to grow."
—Nancy Michniewicz
StickyMinds.com
"Tom DeMarcos book, Slack, could not
have come out at a better time. . . . Who could
have predicted at that time that the economy would
have taken the turn it has? Right now, executives
around the world are looking at balance sheets that
arent very pretty, and they need to trim some expenses.
The easiest unfixed expense to trim is staff/payroll.
That's the hard, cold truth. Tom DeMarco wants you
to read his book before you go too far in your cost
cutting. . . .
"As an executive in a small business that
just went through some staff changes, as well as
a time of abruptly increased sales, I can positively
vouch for DeMarcos premises. Read this book before
you make a very costly mistake."
—Jack Covert
President, 800-CEO-READ
"Every few months, I re-read Tom DeMarco's
book Slack. It's a brilliantly rationalist
book arguing that maximizing the busyness of individual
knowledge workers minimizes the effectiveness
and productivity of the organization as a whole.
". . . DeMarco reminds us that knowledge
workers -- and this includes the analysts, designers,
developers, and engineers -- are 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."
—Joshua Herzig-Marx
joshua.herzig-marx.com
". . . I like its premise:
To have a creative, changing workplace, you have
to give up total efficiency in favor of slack.
It's only when middle managers and lower-level
workers have a little free time that they can
respond to emerging issues or innovate. Conversely,
when workers are overly busy, they can only plod
along, ignoring or even missing the exciting opportunities
that cross their paths. While DeMarco is targeting
higher-ups with this message, there's much here
that ordinary worker bees can take to heart. In
a nutshell, busier isn't more efficient and energy
isn't derived from exhaustion. More of these things
are in our control than we may believe."
—Amy Lindgren
The
St. Paul Pioneer Press
". . . a great little book
about understanding how to manage knowledge workers.
DeMarco's expertise is in understanding how to
manage software developers (he has a well-regarded
book specifically on that topic, Peopleware).
. . .
"DeMarco proposes a core solution
to move your organization from a burnout-producing
factory to an effective enterprise: slack. Knowledge
workers need some free time to be creative. .
. .
"DeMarco's book is a quick
read, at 220 paperback pages split across 33 short
chapters. Highly recommended for anyone engaged
in knowledge work, or managing knowledge workers.
Knowledge workers of the world unite: Give us
some slack!
—Richard Akerman
Science
Library Pad
". . . compelling. It's aimed
primarily at managers of knowledge workers (e.g.
designers and software developers), but could
also be useful, or at least therapeutic, for folks
who've been subjected to certain kinds of work
cultures. . . .
". . . recommendations for
what to do as a manager of knowledge workers primarily
around planning for change: ways of creating flexible
groups that can adapt to changing circumstances,
building slack into schedules to manage risk,
and having trust in your team. . . . DeMarco has
a nice way of capturing the absurdities at the
heart of some cherished workplace cultural habits
simply and neatly."
—James Reffell
DesignCult
"Nearly everything Tom DeMarco
writes, I think, is delightful
. . . . The book is a magnificent, if contrarian,
read. The final essay, on finding hay in a needlestack,
is worth the price of the book all by itself!"
—Robert L. Glass
Editor/Publisher, Software
Practitioner
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