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

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: Review

Slack: Getting Past the Busywork, Burnout and the Myth of Total Efficiency. By Tom DeMarco. Broadway Books, 226 pages. $23.

There's something very refreshing about Slack, which offers a conversational, irreverent counterpoint to treatises about corporate efficiency. DeMarco finds this mindset destructive, and serves up "slack" as an answer to the organization that finds itself so wound up in process that it is all but impossible to effect change.

DeMarco variously defines slack as the natural enemy of efficiency, the lubricant of change, "a prescription for building a capacity to change into the modern enterprise" and "the time when reinvention happens." A major casualty of modern corporate policy, he writes, is the removal of...