I confess I’m a little late to this party…..Eric Abrahamson and David Freedman, authors of A Perfect Mess, launched their book in mid December 2006 but as a testament to a core argument of theirs, I came across it a few days ago by not looking for it and discovered for me at least right now, A Perfect Mess is in fact my perfect answer.

In a previous post on Trendbites, I confessed to being a clutterphile and thus a pile person. By Abrahamson and Freedman’s standard that puts me on the creative edge of things. While I know that, the rest of the world doesn’t necessarily function by that criteria. In fact, in researching the net about the book, it caused quite a stir for the wrong reasons to my mind when in fact it hit a nerve for the neatniks of the world. Take for instance this interview (if you didn’t see it) by Matt Lauer on the Today Show in January 07 ….he had a noticeable reaction to the images of the clutter and is a self professed clutterbuster. But he isn’t the only one; it seemed to bring out a true confessions moment (read the comments section if you visit this link) for those on both sides of the neat vs messy fence.

The essence of the book lay more with management systems than with clean desks per se, but if I may, the messy desk was/is just a great introduction to the theory that having a more messy (read not so tightly controlled) management organization will lead to greater creativity and then they proceed to show nothing but example after example of how this theory is borne out.

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