Power and organisation
C. Northcote Parkinson
Expansion
C. Northcote Parkinson (United Kingdom · 1909-1993) — Expansion.
What actually happened?
Singapore, 1955. Parkinson is forty-six and his working material is stacks of old establishment tables: how many ships in a given year, how many officers, how many men behind desks. To a historian they are sources. To him they read as a joke - fewer ships every year, more administrators every year, and the increase suspiciously regular. He posted under two thousand sardonic words to The Economist, unsigned. Two years later it was a book selling in the millions, and he spent the rest of his life insisting it had been a joke.
A task takes the time you give it
His famous line is not a claim that people are lazy. It is a claim that the duration of a job is not a fixed quantity: it grows to the size of the container. So saving time starts with the container, not with hurrying.
The same document, due tonight or due next Wednesday, comes back at two completely different thicknesses.
An office grows on its own schedule
Between 1914 and 1928 the Royal Navy's capital ships fell from sixty-two to twenty while Admiralty officials rose from two thousand to 3,569. His conclusion was awkward: the growth rate is steady and has nothing to do with the workload.
Cut a product line and the standing meeting built around it often survives it.
Subordinates, not rivals
The mechanism is two sentences: an official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals, and those subordinates then make work for one another. An overloaded manager almost never asks for a peer to take half. He asks for two people of his own.
A new role's first month of output is mostly process and reporting aimed inward.
The smallest number gets the longest debate
In one committee a ten-million-pound reactor went through in two and a half minutes, a bicycle shed costing three hundred and fifty took forty-five, and twenty-one pounds of refreshments took longer again and was deferred. Nobody feels competent about the large number.
Look at the largest sum on the agenda. It will probably be waved through first.
He wrote satire and was read as doctrine
The book is a joke throughout and the formulas are half serious. It has lasted seventy years because its target has not moved: wherever people prove their worth by managing others rather than by producing anything, both laws still run.
Judge a new process by asking whether it adds output, or adds things that must be managed.
How do I use it today?
Take one thing you have been busy with all week and cannot say what moved on. Do two things. First, resize it: if it were due at three tomorrow, which steps would you cut? Write them down, then ask of each who originally required it - half will have no answer. Second, recall your last meeting and pair each item with the money it involved and the minutes it took. If those two run opposite, you have just watched the law of triviality happen in front of you.
Deep read
Read alongside
Further
Lines to keep
Headcount climbs every year whatever the work happens to be.
What he wants is subordinates, never a rival.