Word: messing
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...time might be ripe for Cameron. Blair has said he'll step down before the fall. His presumptive successor, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, is saddled by a more leaden style, a darker visage and a government that is losing popularity, largely because of the mess in Iraq. But Brown does not have to call an election until 2010, so Cameron can't rely on the war to deliver 10 Downing Street to him. Every second week he makes a foray from what he calls "the Westminster bubble" to some farther-flung outpost of the kingdom, meeting as many...
...feeble rationale ("We're curious.") Presumably, it's because the second group would have felt foolish to have suffered for no good reason. Yet when these people were asked why they agreed to be shocked, they offered bogus reasons of their own in all sincerity, like "I used to mess around with radios and got used to electric shocks...
...Moderately messy systems outperform extremely orderly systems," says Eric Abrahamson, Columbia University professor of management and co-author of A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder (Little, Brown). Abrahamson, a scholar of organizational behavior who admits to being a bit of a mess, says the costs of maintaining order are often overlooked. He and co-author David Freedman make the case that Americans' obsession with neatness has got us so frazzled about the slightest clutter that we're needlessly draining time, money and emotion from our lives in the hapless pursuit of order. Don't spend two hours...
...often hard to find once secluded in a complex filing system, but they're also out of sight and therefore out of mind. Those with messy desks often stumble upon serendipitous connections between disparate documents. Don't believe there's a benefit? According to Abrahamson and Freedman, desk-paper mess helped Nobel-prizewinning scientist Earl Sutherland discover how hormones regulate cells...
...message at the heart of A Perfect Mess is not that neatness is by definition bad, but that a moderate amount of messiness isn't a terrible thing. For those obsessed with order, though, Abrahamson and Freedman have several suggestions...