asafono's Full Review: Parkinson Jr. - Parkinson's Law
When Parkinson's Law was published almost half a century ago in 1957, it took the world by storm. Today, it is largely forgotten; in my opinion, unfairly so. In this book, the first of a number he wrote, Professor Cyril Northcote Parkinson mixed a penetrating intelligence, a clear and measured writing style, and a healthy doze of irreverence to deliver damning deconstructions of many institutions underlying modern First World democracies. These institutions and concepts include government and corporate bureaucracies, popular elections, rule by committee, principles of personnel selection etc. Each of these, and more, is discussed in a separate chapter, of which there are ten.
The law that Parkinson has articulated in this book, later known as his First Law when his other books were published, states that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." The first example given is that "...an elderly lady of leisure can spend the entire day in writing and dispatching a postcard to her niece at Bognor Regis. An hour will be spent in finding the postcard, another in hunting for spectacles, half an hour in a search for the address, an hour and a quarter in composition, and twenty minutes in deciding whether or not to take an umbrella when going to the mailbox in the next street. The total effort that would occupy a busy man for three minutes all told may in this fashion leave another person prostrate after a day of doubt, anxiety, and toil."
The corollary to the First Law is that "there need be little or no relationship between the work to be done and the size of the staff to which it may be assigned." Based on this corollary, Parkinson rejects both the optimistic popular view - that a rising total in the number of civil servants must reflect a growing volume of work to be done - and the cynical view - that the multiplication of officials must have left some or all of them idle. The truth of the matter is that "the number of the officials and the quantity of the work are not related to each other at all."
Parkinson goes on to demonstrate the work of his First Law on examples from the British civil and military administration. For the British Navy between WWI and WWII, he shows the declines in the number of ships in commission (-67%) and the number of officers and men, paralleled by the growth of the cadre of dockyard and Admiralty officials (+78%), that growth being unrelated to any possible increase in their work and producing "a magnificent navy on land." For the Colonial Office between 1935 and 1954, the period in which British colonies have shrunk considerably, he lists the increase from 372 to 1661 officials. Using these examples, Parkinson comes up with an expected growth number of between 5% and 6% per annum, no matter what the actual volume of work to be done.
The author concludes the chapter on the First Law on a rather dry and sarcastic note, pointing out that "...the discovery of this formula and of the general principles upon which it is based has, of course, no political value." Though he tries to pass of as an impartial researcher, his sympathies towards limiting bureaucratic growth at all costs are rather clear when he mentions "...the stability of an economy based upon reading each other's minutes."
The truth on this matter probably lies somewhere between the author's views and the opinions of "those who hold that this growth [in administrative staff] is essential to gain full employment". Parkinson's arguments are persuasive, but one can easily find some flaws in them. In particular, the author, deliberately or otherwise, ignores changes that occur in any environment and its complexity with time. For instance, the Admiralty may very well have needed more officials in 1928 than in 1914, even with the smaller number of ships in 1928, because the ships were bigger, more complex, carried out more tasks etc. Similarly, the complexity of administering colonies may have increased during the decades with more enlightened approaches, necessitating more workers - an Assyrian or Ottoman ruler could have gotten by with even fewer assistants per unit of population. In other words, Parkinson disregards the internal complexity of social and economic systems and the systemic approach in general.
Nevertheless, Parkinson's astute criticism of civil and corporate bureaucracies should be studied and used today, in these times of shrinking tax bases and growing deficits. Whenever a corporate department or a government entity requests additional funding beyond the rate of inflation, the funding agency may well remember Parkinson's satirical treatment of the subject and question whether the increase is truly warranted by the growing complexity of work, or is merely caused by the Parkinson's Law.
Having dealt with administrative growth in Chapter 1, Parkinson turns to other subjects we hold dear, starting with representative democracy in Chapter 2. His main thesis on this is that most elections are decided by the undecided votes, or, politely speaking, the center bloc [sic], "...the members of which divide into those who cannot hear what is being said and those who would not understand it even if they did."
The practical advice drawn from this observation on the importance of the center bloc, is that almost any vote can be decided favourably by surrounding each undecided voter by two or more stalwarts, who strike up a conversation amongst themselves as if they are not acquainted, and try to create an impression that the matter is already decided. "When the crucial moment comes, the raising of a hand on either side will practically compel the waverer to follow suit."
While this ingenious and cynical approach is not directly applicable to the secret vote, it can be emulated by surrounding a waverer by "virtual stalwarts" supplied by the media. While in the United States a more straightforward method of trying to actually persuade the centrists and the undecided to join one of the two sides has been prevalent so far, with the electorate's loss of interest in the political and social process, Parkinson's advice may start to sound more and more practical.
In the subsequent chapters, Parkinson deconstructs the budgeting process, collaborative decision-making by committees, various approaches to personnel selection and so on. For example, in Chapter 4 entitled Directors and Councils, or Coefficient of Inefficiency he demonstrates how any committee, such as a Cabinet of Ministers, loses its power and becomes primarily a decorative establishment when it exceeds 20 members or so. As many factions are typically trying to get their members represented on a powerful committee, its growth appears almost unavoidable unless carefully checked.
Parkinson carefully explains the reasons why a large committee can not, by definition, be efficient. The most obvious disadvantage is the difficulty of assembling people at the same place, date, and time; then, "once most of them are collected, there is a far greater chance of members proving to be elderly, tiresome, inaudible, and deaf. [...] A majority perhaps were brought in merely to conciliate some outside group. Their tendency is therefore to report what happens to the group they represent. All secrecy is lost and, worst of all, members begin to prepare their speeches."
The rather hilarious example of this committee lifecycle given by the author is the evolution of the British government. The English Council of the Crown, now called the House of Lords may have initially had a membership as small as five. In the middle of the 13th century, an "inner committee appear[ed] in the womb of the peerage.". It was called the Lords of the King's Council and numbered less than 10; when the total reached 172 it finally ceased to meet. Within it, "there developed the cabinet's third incarnation - the Privy Council - with an original membership of nine." In turn, it gave birth to the current Cabinet Council which managed to save itself from irrelevancy by reducing its number to below 20 in the 20th century. As Parkinson wryly observes, "It is just possible that the British cabinet is still an important body."
Table II in this chapter lists the Cabinet sizes for several countries at the time of writing (mid-1950s.) The sizes range from 6 (Honduras, Luxembourg), to over 20 in the former communist countries, topping at 32 in Czechoslovakia, 35 in Yugoslavia, and 38 in the USSR. These numbers do not indicate that the latter countries were ungovernable; rather, the obvious conclusion is that the real power was concentrated in different, and smaller, entities.
While Chapter 3 considers the lifecycle of committees, Chapter 8, Injelititis, or Palsied Paralysis recounts the life and death of corporate and government institutions. Injelititis is a word that Parkinson made up from Inferiority and Jealousy; it is a character deficiency in people that can bring about the decay and death of organizations they work for. The basic mechanism is that the carrier of Injelititis would try to move himself or herself into a position of authority (because of the inferiority complex), having obtained which he or she would try to surround oneself with individuals non-threatening intellectually or professionally (because of jealousy.) Parkinson thus formulates it succinctly, "If the head of the organization is second-rate, he will see to it that his immediate staff are all third-rate; and they will, in turn, see to it that their subordinates are fourth-rate." Parkinson describes the stages of the organizational disease, the symptoms from which they can be deduced, and the possible approaches to cure. These include medicinal (injecting people into the organization which possess qualities such as Intolerance, "... obtainable from the bloodstream of regimental sergeant majors and is found to comprise two chemical elements, namely: (a) the best is scarcely good enough (GGnth) and (b) there is no excuse for anything (NEnth)."; and surgical means. The last stage of the disease is terminal: "Infected personnel should be dispatched with a warm testimonial to such rival institutions as are regarded with particular hostility. All equipment and files should be destroyed without hesitation. [...] As for the buildings, the best plan is to insure them heavily and then set them alight."
The full table of contents for Parkinson's Law is as follows:
1. Parkinson's Law, or The Rising Pyramid
2. The Will of the People, or Annual General Meeting
3. High Finance, or The Point of Vanishing Interest
4. Directors and Councils, or Coefficient of Inefficiency
5. The Short List, or Principles of Selection
6. Plans and Plants, or The Administration Block
7. Personality Screen, or The Cocktail Formula
8. Injelititis, or Palsied Paralysis
9. Palm Thatch to Packard, or A Formula for Success
10. Pension Point, or The Age of Retirement
About the author: Cyril Northcote Parkinson (1909-1993) started his career as a colonial and military bureaucrat (and perhaps a spy), and later a scholar and lecturer in various universities in South East Asia, Europe and North America. At the time this book was published, he was a Professor of History at the University of Malaya. It is said that his work in the War Office and the RAF during World War II lead him to articulate his First Law. Parkinson's Law was followed by many non-fiction books in the same satirical and quasi-scientific vein, including The law and the Profits, In-laws and Outlaws, Mrs. Parkinson's Law, The Fur-lined Mousetrap etc. In his later years, he switched to writing fiction, namely accounts of the 19th century British Navy in the The Richard Delancey novels.
[Update 07/18/2005] Full text of Parkinson's Law is available (sans Osborne's illustrations) at http://ruslib.com/DPEOPLE/PARKINSON/parkinson.txt
[Update 07/25/2005] Parkinson's Law Revisited: Bob Herbold, a recently retired executive vice president and chief operating officer of Microsoft, wrote a book with the intriguing title of The Fiefdom Syndrome - "...about how business groups grow and then stifle progress by continuing to produce work and process to justify their ranks... his book does cover how you have to look out for parts of your organization that grow and then put intensive effort in to justify their current size and even try to grow more. Much like a zealous GM or VP out to create busy features or absorb other teams when the right thing to do is actually downsize their team to something manageable" (http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2005/06/bob-herbold-fiefdom-syndrome-and-bobs.html)
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