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Summary
Summary
"Utterly fascinating. Tim Harford shows that if you want to be creative and resilient, you need a little more disorder in your world." --Adam Grant, New York Times -bestselling author of Originals and Give and Take
"Engrossing." -- New York Times
From the award-winning columnist and author of the national bestseller The Undercover Economist comes a provocative big idea book about the genuine benefits of being messy: at home, at work, in the classroom, and beyond.
Look out for Tim's next book, Fifty Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy.
Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives celebrates the benefits that messiness has in our lives: why it's important, why we resist it, and why we should embrace it instead. Using research from neuroscience, psychology, social science, as well as captivating examples of real people doing extraordinary things, Tim Harford explains that the human qualities we value - creativity, responsiveness, resilience - are integral to the disorder, confusion, and disarray that produce them.
From the music studio of Brian Eno to the Lincoln Memorial with Martin Luther King, Jr., from the board room to the classroom, messiness lies at the core of how we innovate, how we achieve, how we reach each other - in short, how we succeed.
In Messy , you'll learn about the unexpected connections between creativity and mess; understand why unexpected changes of plans, unfamiliar people, and unforeseen events can help generate new ideas and opportunities as they make you anxious and angry; and come to appreciate that the human inclination for tidiness - in our personal and professional lives, online, even in children's play - can mask deep and debilitating fragility that keep us from innovation.
Stimulating and readable as it points exciting ways forward, Messy is an insightful exploration of the real advantages of mess in our lives.
Author Notes
Tim Harford is an award-winning journalist, economist and broadcaster. He's the author of the bestselling The Undercover Economist , The Undercover Economist Strikes Back, Adapt , and The Logic of Life . Harford is currently a senior columnist at the Financial Times and host of the BBC Radio 4 program More or Less . He has been named Economics Commentator of the Year (2014), won the Rybczynski Prize (2014-15) for the best business-relevant economics writing, and won the Bastiat Prize for economic journalism (2006). He's a visiting fellow of Nuffield College at Oxford University and lives in Oxford with his family.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Journalist Harford (The Undercover Economist) explores the counterintuitive theory that disorder is at the heart of innovation. His evidence includes the creative genius inspired by the randomness of record producer Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies and the rich history of MIT's hastily assembled Building 20. In the business world, Amazon's Jeff Bezos is extolled for the risk taking that carried the company through the dot-com bust. The book also examines what goes wrong in a system that is too organized. Examples include time-wasting email folders, misconceived methods for evaluating physicians' competence, and the horrifying results of "the paradox of automation" when a pilot can't remember how to respond in an emergency due to overreliance on automated operating systems. The book takes readers to some unexpected and entertaining places, including sarcastic corporate social-media accounts, chess strategy, and online-dating algorithms. Harford provides useful and specific instructions on putting his thesis to work, with tips on organizing projects, building an effective team, and honing improvisational skills. Weaving together lessons from history, art, technology, and social and scientific research, Harford's theories have many potential benefits for individuals and businesses seeking to remain on the creative cutting edge, as well as profound implications for society. Agent: Zoë Pagnamenta, Zoë Pagnamenta Agency. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
The author calls them arbitrary shocks to a project. We might call them hiccups, snafus, or in worst-case scenarios catastrophes. Harford, an economist, says we shouldn't fear messiness (conceptual as well as physical). Rather, we should embrace it. Producer Brian Eno made unique music by randomly assigning musicians to unexpected roles, like having Phil Collins hurl beer cans; a company removed all furniture from its offices, forcing its people to literally think on their feet, and gained a lot of publicity and some new business. Messiness unexpected disruptions to routine forces us to be collaborative, to improvise, to think laterally; and, as with the furniture-less company, sometimes planned messiness, deliberately introducing chaos into a situation, can reap rewards. Harford talks about numerous notable people who embraced the opportunities created by disruptive events, such as Steve Jobs, David Bowie, Martin Luther King, Jr., and even Erwin Rommel. Making his points with vivid examples allows readers to see how, maybe, in similar situations, we, too, could react creatively. Not quite a self-help book, but a sharp reader can definitely glean some useful self-improvement ideas from it.--Pitt, David Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN 1993, A few years after the success of his firm's ad campaign that introduced the Apple Mac, the head of the Chiat/Day agency, Jay Chiat, decided that it was time to have a workplace that matched the verve of the agency's advertising. In Los Angeles, he commissioned Frank Gehry to create a place that was "playful, zany and stylish": no cubicles, no offices, no traditional desks. Space was filled with a four-story statue of a pair of binoculars and pods from old fairground rides where "people would sit together ... and think creative thoughts." In New York, Chiat tasked Gaetano Pesce with much the same vision, resulting in murals of red lips, chairs with springs for feet and a floor in front of a bathroom that would raise many an eyebrow in today's trigger-warning culture (a picture of a man urinating). When Frank Duffy, an architect who is no stranger to innovation in office design himself (he is credited as a founder of Bürolandschaft, the office-landscaping movement), saw the project, he said, "Perhaps its gravest weakness is that it is a place where 'play' is enforced on everyone, all the time." That statement is at the heart of "Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives," the latest book from the economist-turned-journalist Tim Harford. At first, it seems an odd comment to include. After all, isn't the Chiat/Day approach the quintessence of mess - disrupting the staid old office style, pivoting in a new creative direction, or any of those other business clichés? But it's actually perfect. Because the mess Harford has in mind is less physical than psychical. It's not that disruption is inherently good, or that we should strive actually to be messy - unconstrained by desks or real work spaces, free to roam and think, surrounded by playful towers of stuff in stubborn defiance of Kondo-ization. It's that rigid rules are bad, whether they err on the side of too much mess or too little. Rigidity disempowers people. In telling us to be messy, Harford urges us to recapture our autonomy. A less catchy, but perhaps more accurate, title for the book would be "Control: The Power of Autonomy and Flexibility." Take the architectural example that is Chiat/Day's near opposite, M.I.T.'s Building 20. Harford describes in fascinating detail how this ugly construction gave rise to some of the best ideas of the 20th century. But it wasn't because the building was messy as such (though it was). It was because there was no bureaucracy to get through: If you wanted something done, be it tearing down a wall or mounting a new device, you simply did it. One lab that needed to build an atomic clock too tall for its space simply removed a few floors to accommodate its height. Chiat/Day, Harford writes, had a philosophy of "this place should look the way the boss wants it to look," while Building 20 operated under the "it doesn't matter how this place looks" approach. (The second - surprise, surprise - was the far more productive one.) Harford's argument goes beyond aesthetics, resurfacing over and over in his engrossing narrative, from music (Brian Eno's oblique strategies defying all convention, which resulted in David Bowie's album "Heroes") to tweeting (the non-prescriptivist response of the British telecom company O2 to a power outage). During World War II, Gen. Erwin Rommel's messy autonomy allowed him to succeed against great odds: Even when the British had broken Germany's codes, they couldn't predict his actions. They had no idea that he would disobey direct orders; neither, of course, did his superiors. "Life cannot be controlled. Life itself is messy," Harford writes. When we try to be rigid in response, the result is a messy failure. Still, the most powerful part of the book isn't in the examples of corporate or creative success, but in the realization that mess - the autonomy that comes from discarding inflexible rules and neat labels - is important even when we don't actually want it. The mess with the greatest transformative edge may be the one that forces you out of your routine despite your certainty that what you're doing works just fine already, thank you very much. When it comes to that most basic of human processes - thought - we often stick with what we know. Simply put, rules are easier than exceptions: People themselves are messy, but heuristics and labels are often easier than nuanced analysis. The result can be a disconcerting like-mindedness, an invisible bubble of opinions that reinforces our own. Harford describes a study that analyzed tweets in the wake of the Ferguson shooting of Michael Brown - the group that was pro-Brown (the "blue tweets," as the statistician Emma Pierson called them) and the group that was pro-police (the "red tweets"). The two sets of posters hardly interacted. "Given a larger social map to explore, we pick the tidiest corner we can find," Harford writes. And this is why, despite lofty goals of freethinking, mess often fails in the moments it most needs to succeed. "We have to believe the ultimate goal of the collaboration is something worth achieving," Harford writes. In our heart of hearts, we don't like to be challenged about our dearly held beliefs. The end result of that collaboration simply isn't worth it. That's the true push "Messy" gives us - not for autonomy when we want it, but autonomy even when we are more comfortable without it. MARIA KONNIKOVA is the author, most recently, of "The Confidence Game." She is a contributing writer for The New Yorker.
Kirkus Review
An award-winning economist celebrates the myriad advantages of clutter and disarray.Economist and journalist Harford (The Undercover Economist Strikes Back, 2014, etc.) is an unabashed supporter of messiness, and his book, a clear-eyed defense, explains and supports the many situations in which surrounding oneself with clutter and chaos can actually boost creativity, production, innovation, and even quality of life. Its a tough sellmessiness has an inherent negative connotation attached to it, along with the stigma of lazinessbut the author gets to work quickly, citing the careers of music icons David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Brian Eno, who all benefited from their strange chaotic working process (which involved drawing random, gnomic instructional cards) to produce several critically acclaimed studio albums in the late 1970s. Commercially successful novelist Michael Crichton has also been well-served by project-juggling behavior, as have certain workplace departmental team collaborations which, Harford writes, have found success with a willingness to allow a degree of messiness into a tidy team. This is especially evident in MITs hurriedly, haphazardly designed Building 20 and Steve Jobs serendipity-inspired office layouts at Pixar Studios. The whirling dervish of spontaneity also historically benefited Martin Luther King Jr.s infamous, extemporaneous 1963 speech. Harford also examines Jeff Bezos slyly effective scramble to prevent Amazon from buckling beneath the dot-com bust and Donald Trumps slapdash presidential bid. The author believes that there are dangers in rigidly overorganized, structured systems, as in the example of an out-of-practice airplane pilot whose overreliance on autopilot navigation proved disastrous. From diversified neighborhood communities and school playgrounds to messy desks [and algorithmic dating websites, Harford presents the strategies of disorganization as unique and enlightening and convincingly offers reinforced encouragement to those who may find themselves tempted by tidiness to instead embrace some mess instead. Though not all readers will find this unconventional perspective on disorder particularly sage, Harfords exploration is entertaining and, despite the topic, well constructed. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Is a tidy and sterile environment truly ideal? Journalist and economist Harford (The Undercover Economist) explores the concept of messiness, referring to more than physical disarray. Using real-life examples from businesses such as Google and famous figures such as Martin Luther King Jr., as well as citing scientific studies, Harford suggests that messiness has its own value. Organization doesn't necessarily increase production; disruption can inspire creativity. Diversity is strength, as seen in thriving ecosystems and cities. In short, life is messy. In a chapter about winning, Harford describes how Amazon's hasty and experimental workings helped make it the company it is today. When discussing automation, he details how a plane crashed because people passively trust automatic systems that attempt to be orderly in a chaotic world. Regarding incentives, Harford exemplifies how quantifiable targets can negatively impact what they intend to improve. Other topics include collaboration, workplaces, improvisation, and resilience. VERDICT For general readers of popular psychology, sociology, or business, this absorbing book offers a different approach from instructional decluttering manuals by celebrating the successes derived from the unplanned, unscripted, and unknown. [See Prepub Alert, 4/25/16.]-Janet Clapp, N. Clarendon, VT © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Introduction: "It was unplayable." | p. 1 |
| 1 Creativity: "You're asking the blood in your brain to flow in another direction." | p. 7 |
| Bowie, Eno, and Darwin: How Frustration and Distraction Help Us Solve | |
| Problems in Art, Science, and Life | |
| 2 Collaboration: "My brain is open!" | p. 33 |
| Paul Erdos and the Robbers Cave: Why Tidy Teams Have More Fun but Messy Teamwork Gets More Done | |
| 3 Workplaces: "Nobody cares what you do in there." | p. 61 |
| Where Steve Jobs Went Wrong, and Why It's Nobody Else's Business Whether You Tidy Your Desk | |
| 4 Improvisation: "You ain't got much lime to think, 'cause you in the chair from now on." | |
| Martin Luther King, the Help Desk, and the Unexpected Benefits of Letting Go of the Script | |
| 5 Winning: "What else matters but beating him?" | p. 117 |
| Bezos, Rommel, Trump: How to Use Mess as a Weapon in Business, Politics, and War | |
| 6 Incentives: "You wouldn't need a large army. You'd need a small SWAT team." | |
| The Prime Minister and the Paramedic: The Pitfalls of Imposing Tidy Targets on a Messy World | |
| 7 Automation: "But what's happening?" | p. 177 |
| Flight 447 and the Jennifer Unit: When Human Messiness Protects Us from Computerized Disaster | |
| 8 Resilience: "Everything had to be neat and orderly. No mess." | p. 205 |
| Broken Windows. Stomach Ulcers, and the Dangerous Belief That Cleanliness Is Next to Godliness | |
| 9 Life: "Appointments are always a no-no, Planning ahead is a no-no." | |
| Franklin, Schwarzenegger, and the Genius Who Hacked OkCupid: Why We Should Value Mess in Our Inbox, Our Conversations, and Our Children's Play | |
| Acknowledgments | p. 267 |
| Notes | p. 269 |
| Index | p. 287 |