Cut me some

Book review: When 'Slack' is good

"Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork and the Myth of Total Efficiency"
By Tom DeMarco
Broadway Books (Bantam Dell Publishing), 226 pages, April
April 23, 2001

By Porter Anderson
CNN Career

(CNN) -- You start to wonder if you can't divide all the gall in the
employee-employer arena today into two parts. One group reads "Creative
Destruction" or Al Gini's "My Job, My Self" or Joanne B. Ciulla's "The
Working Life: The Promise and Betrayal of Modern Work".

The other group isn't so likely to have those books -- or Tom DeMarco's
new "Slack" -- under their arms as they dash onto the executive elevators.

"The very improvements that the Hurry Up organization has made to go
faster and cheaper," writes DeMarco, "have undermined its capacity to make
any other kind of change. An organization that can accelerate but not
change direction is like a car that can speed up but not steer. In the
short run, it makes a lot of progress in whatever direction it happened to
be going. In the long run, it's just another road wreck."
The root discussion going on here -- as in so many other books and break
rooms and parking lots and gyms -- is about the wisdom or folly of the
approach that says you get richer faster if you hire fewer people to
produce more in a shorter time. What gets lost in that keyed-up operation,
DeMarco says, is management's ability to assess, evaluate, plan -- think.
So a distinction here is that "Slack" looks at the issue more from the
corporate-logic standpoint (like "Creative Destruction" authors Richard
Foster and Sarah Kaplan) than from the human-toll perspective (Gini and
Ciulla).

"Slack," writes DeMarco, "is the way you invest in change." And, of
course, change is something disliked by many people at both management and
subordinate levels. Slack, in DeMarco's lexicon, is your company's
"catalytic ingredient of all change," he writes.

"Slack is the time when you're not 100-percent busy doing the operational
business of your firm. Slack is the time when you are zero-percent busy."
If DeMarco's emphasis is on corporate considerations, he hardly ignores
the human side. "It's worth going through the exercise," he writes, "to
quantify the human capital represented by the people who work for you. ...
The loss of even nonstar performers can be a serious burden on
effectiveness. Companies within a single industry often have variations of
turnover rate as much as three or four times. Those with the higher
turnovers are laboring under a huge penalty."

On the issue of getting productive creativity from your people: "What I
call bankruptcy of inventiveness is often the result of a failure to set
aside the resources necessary to let invention happen. The principle
resource needed for invention is slack. When companies can't invent, it's
usually because their people are too damn busy."

Tom DeMarco: "When companies can't invent, it's usually because
their people are too damn busy."

DeMarco is a principal with Atlantic Systems Guild, a consulting firm
based in London and New York. A fellow with the Cutter Consortium, his
clients -- presumably "slack" all over the place -- include IBM,
Microsoft, Apple, Lucent and Hewlett-Packard. His book "Peopleware," now
in a second edition from Dorset House, is on management and technical
development methods. And he's a novelist, author of "The Deadline: A Novel
About Project Management" (Dorset House, 1997).

The benefits of what DeMarco calls slack, he writes, are
ï Increased organizational agility
ï Better retention of key personnel
ï An improved ability to invest in the future and
ï A capacity for sensible risk instead of risk avoidance.

One of DeMarco's best moments is his argument for slack as something
needed by middle management. "The companies who today find themselves in
stasis," he writes, "are that way because they fired the very people who
were capable of helping them get through necessary change. They flattened
themselves by getting rid of their change centers. ... The key role role
of middle management is reinvention."

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.

"It's possible," DeMarco writes, "to make an organization more efficient
without making it better. That's what happens when you drive out slack."

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Original file name: CNN_com - Career - Book review - converted on Friday, 20 September 2002, 16:07