how do you cure injelitance_ parkinsons law

8/12/2019 How Do You Cure Injelitance_ PARKINSONS LAW

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/how-do-you-cure-injelitance-parkinsons-law 1/5

vdare.com http://www.vdare.com/articles/how-do-you-cure-injelitance

How Do You Cure Injelitance?

Republished on VDARE.COM on March 28, 2003

(C. Northcote Parkinson, the father of Parkinson`sLaw)

Forbes, August 7, 1989 v144 n3 p42(3)

LIKE A SWARM of locusts in the desert sky, myriads of

management books are on the move, all heading

remorselessly for your free time. Some, polysyllabic and

obscure, are in essence the oversize business cards of

management consultants who nominally teach at Harvard

Business School. Others, slick and simple, are the

creations of hungry journalists.

(And then there`s mystical money management; see p. 52.[

Note:This was Crystal clear . (New Age financial

guides) Joe Queenan.])

Once upon a time, however, there was a very different

sort of management sage. He wrote not in jargon or

algebra but in a brilliantly readable English. He

published not in tomes but in terse essays, the most

famous less than nine pages long. He used historical andmilitary analogies, but then he had actually been a

historian and a soldier. He was scathingly witty, so

much so that some readers wrongly assumed that his

purpose was satirical.

And, wonder of wonders, when he had finished what he

had to say about management, he stopped writing about it

and went on to other things. Which may be why he is

almost forgotten, except for Parkinson`s Law.

C. (for Cyril) Northcote Parkinson, father of Parkinson`s Law, turned 80 on July 30. He is a short,

stocky Englishman with a formal manner and a steady

gaze. he moves rather deliberately nowadays and,

although still answering questions with the academic

precision that befits a former Cambridge don, often

contents himself with a single word.

Recently, after many years in the British offshore

tax havens of Guernsey and the Isle of Man, he has

transplanted himself to the cathedral city of

Canterbury, home of his third wife, whom he married in1985. And he is at work on his autobiography, writing,

as always, in longhand.

"I think Parkinson`s Law came to me, or is based

w Do You Cure Injelitance? | VDARE.COM http://www.vdare.com/articles/how-do-you-cure-injelitance

5 13-May-14 12:14 PM



upon, experiencing the armed forces," Parkinson says. "I

was serving in a joint headquarters, that is to say army

and Royal Air Force [military intelligence, he

reluctantly admits], and the headquarters was headed by

an air vice marshal, who was assisted, or possibly

impeded, by a colonel in the army, who was impeded, or

possibly assisted, by a wing commander in the air force,

and then all three of them were assisted (but definitelyassisted!) by me. I was then a major in the army, and we

were all very busy winning the war.

"But the day came when the air vice marshal went on

leave. Shortly afterwards, as it happened, the colonel

fell sick. The wing commander was attending a course,

and I found I was the group. And I also found that,

while the work had lessened as each of my superiors had

disappeared, by the time it came to me, there was

nothing to do at all. There never had been anything to

do. We`d been making work for each other."

* PARKINSON`S LAW: Work

expands so as to fill the time available for its

completion.

In his great first essay, Parkinson displayed his

fundamental method: He reasoned from the behavior of

individuals–the different times a busy man and "an

elderly lady of leisure" might take to write a

postcard–to the behavior of organizations, in this

instance their inexorable tendency to grow regardless of the amount of work to be done. Two axioms governed the

process, he noted: "(1) an official wants to multiply

subordinates, not rivals; and (2) officials make work

for each other"–supervising each other`s efforts,

holding meetings and so on.

Cynics were wrong, Parkinson pointed out, to suppose

that the expanding organization meant that its

individual members were getting lazy or more idle. The

awful truth was that they were honestly working harder

than ever.

Then, incredibly, Parkinson proved his case. he

examined the British Admiralty, the civil service

department responsible for the Royal Navy. (This came

naturally to him: He was a naval historian who had

already published several books and who was ultimately

to teach at Harvard, Berkeley and the University of

Illinois.)

The numbers were astonishing. In 1914 Britain had the

largest navy in the world, with 542 ships in commission,

and the Admiralty had a staff of 4,366. At various

points as the century wore on, the ships decreased in

number and the staff expanded. By 1967, he later found,


5 13-May-14 12:14 PM



the Royal Navy had only 114 ships, most not truly

capital, and had ceased to be a world force. But

Admiralty staff had reached 33,574. This vast increase

in staff was not the product of more complex technology:

The technical staff had increased much more slowly than

the clerical staff.

Parkinson`s Law was first unveiled in the

Economist magazine in 1955, when Parkinson was

professor of history at the new University of Malaya in

Singapore. It caused a stir that attracted the American

publisher Houghton Mifflin, which published a collection

of the original and some other Parkinson essays under

the title Parkinson`s law: The Pursuit of Progress

in 1957.

The success of this book was so enormous that it

changed Parkinson`s life. For years he spent every

summer on the lecture circuit in the U.S. Eventually, heabandoned academic life ("It can be a cutthroat kind of

a business") for independent writing. However, he still

retains a sentimental link with Alabama`s Troy State

University, which has been enterprising enough to make

him Honorary President.

It`s common to depreciate Parkinson`s later essays in

comparison with his first. A rereading suggests this is

a mistake. For example:

* PARKINSON`S SECOND LAW:Expenditure rises to meet income.

Parkinson`s discussion of the dynamics underlying the

historic expansionary tendencies of government budgets,

reasoning as always from the stoutly self-interested

behavior of individuals, concluded that programs cannot

be reduced piecemeal. Only across-the-board cuts will

work. This was in 1960–almost 25 years before

Gramm-Rudman.

* PARKINSON`S THIRD LAW:Expansion means complexity, and complexity decay.

Formulated in 1962, this law defied the consensus of

the day to an extent that is easily forgotten.

Economists believed in economies of scale. Capitalists

believed in conglomeration, synergy (remember synergy?)

and General Motors. Politicians believed in planning and

large units–bigger school districts and "multiversities"

in the U.S., more nationalization in Britain.

Today the advantages of restructuring,entrepreneurship and decentralization are generally

acknowledged, even if not always applied. But

Parkinson`s attitude still places him athwart the tide.


5 13-May-14 12:14 PM



He is opposed, for example, to Britain`s membership in

the European Community, very much an article of faith

with Britain`s political establishment. "It`s basically

my preference for the smaller unit rather than the

larger one," he says.

* THE LAW OF DELAY: Delay

is the deadliest form of denial.

Parkinson`s analysis of the incentives that inspire

negativism in officials ("abominable no-men")

anticipated the Public Choice school`s "economic theory

of politics" (see FORBES, Nov. 17, 1986).

* THE LAW OF TRIVIALITY:

The time spent on any item of a committee`s agenda will

be in inverse proportion to the sum of money involved.

Parkinson was deeply interested in committee behavior

("comitology"). Citing the history of the BritishCabinet and its predecessors back to the Middle Ages, he

argued the most effective size for any meeting is five.

But interest groups pressing for representation

inevitably expand a committee in stages to 20, at which

point ("the Coefficient of Inefficiency") conversation

will break out at either end of the table, members will

stand to make themselves heard and then start giving

speeches, and the useful members will be making plans to

settle outstanding issues later on over lunch.

The Law of Triviality focused on another consequence

of individuals` self-regard: Expensive decisions are

reviewed less thoroughly than small ones because they

tend to be embarrassingly technical.

* INJELITANCE: A vital

Parkinson contribution was his diagnosis of why certain

organizations suddenly deteriorate: the rise to

authority of individuals with unusually high

combinations of incompetence and jealousy ("injelitance").

"The injelitant individual is easily recognizable

from the persistence with which he struggles to eject

all those abler than himself. He dare not say, `Mr.

Asterisk is too able,` so he says, `Asterisk? Clever

perhaps–but is he sound?` The [organization]

gradually fills up with people more stupid than the

chairman."

Organizations can be cured of injelititis

spontaneously, when an individual conditioned to hide

his intelligence penetrates to the top post and"suddenly throws off the mask and appears like the demon

king among a crowd of pantomime fairies." Or sometimes a

massive amputation and simultaneous transfusion of new


5 13-May-14 12:14 PM



blood will work–but not always. Ultimately, however,

the only course is to eliminate the organization

completely. "Infected personnel should be dispatched

with a warm testimonial to such rival institutions as

are regarded with particular hostility. As for the

[office] buildings, the best plan is to insure them

heavily and then set them alight."

Among other Parkinson gems: essays (understandably

heartfelt) on the disincentive effects of taxation,

anticipating supply-side economics; and on the peculiar

tendency (with historical examples] of organizations to

build perfect headquarters for themselves just as they

go into decline.

"When I`d said my say, I`d said it I moved on to

study other things," says Parkinson. In the late 1960s

and 1970s he increasingly turned away from business,

writing plays, political essays, mock biographies of P.G.Wodehouse`s Jeeves and C.S. Forester`s Horatio

Hornblower, popular histories and eventually a series of

novels about the Royal Navy in the Napoleonic era. He

says casually that he has produced "about 60 books" in

all.

Parkinson is not a complete guide to management. His

primary focus was bureaucratic rather than commercial.

But what he has to say is applicable to any business, in

fact any kind of organization. So forget about Attila

the One Minute Manager. Go to your bookshop and order acopy of one of the remaining Parkinson books still in

print, Parkinson: The Law Complete (from

Ballantine, $2.95).


how do you cure injelitance_ parkinsons law

Documents