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

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 layers of middle management where reinvention is most likely to occur.

Drawing from personal experiences and from work with clients, DeMarco -- a consultant working in New York and London -- is like a good raconteur determined to entertain first, then enlighten. He confesses in the forward that he hopes the book can be read cover-to-cover during a flight between New York and Chicago -- hardly a goal many authors would choose. But Slack thrives on its nonconformity. It's brisk, compelling and hard to put down.