C. Northcote Parkinson: An Appreciation
Train, John
F ew management philosophers have combined so much wit and wisdom, and none was as charming, as Professor C. Northcote Parkinson, who died last March. His friends called him Cyril. He was...
...Of course, this means that government must concentrate on its total receipts, rather than using high taxes as a tool of social engineering, which by cutting incentives may lead to economic stagnation...
...He cites Whitehall: Colonial Office Staff 1935 372 1954 (with 17 fewer colonies) 1601 He once gave me another admirable example: Ronald Reagan, when he was governor of California, asked me to address his ,cabinet...
...Employment is declining...
...Why should a 60-year-old work like a demon to save for his children when almost half his income goes in tax (including state and city), and more than half of what's left after that is taken by estate taxes...
...Parkinson observes that the peak of magnificence of an institution's physical headquarters often coincides with the start of its period of decadence...
...Daniel Seligman has noted in Fortune that according to the Statistical Abstract of the United States, the number of Department of Agriculture employees has since 1932 risen implacably by 2.7 percent per annum, while the number of farmers has declined by 2 percent per annum...
...He reconstructs the chain of command, retrains the unit, and gets the army ready to fight effectively...
...I don't doubt that they have, since crept back up to 90...
...Only after that return to the assault...
...The U.S...
...The Bulgarian refinement was "They can't pay us as little as we work...
...Perhaps the answer would be to stick such pettifoggers with the other side's costs if the judgment goes against them, as in England...
...n many countries, Parkinson observed, declining productivity arises from the twin burdens of inflation and taxes, including estate taxes, which tempt the worker to spend now rather than produce and save...
...One that he tried out on me but has not been popularized is Democracy equals inflation...
...He was a stocky, ruddy man who looked like a merchant marine captain...
...Attila the Hun had his headquarters in the saddle—no Pentagons...
...That would permit him to vote according to his best judgment, instead of responding to pressures that may be contrary to the public interest...
...People get their ideas from television, and American television now has a left-wing bias...
...In England, for example, educational standards are falling rapidly, although not yet to the degree seen in America...
...In parts of northwest England, government has essentially broken down...
...These are some of the prime concerns of a country...
...policies designed to increase employment do everything but...
...This turns unemployment into under-employment, which is typical of socialist economies and may be worse than out-and-out unemployment...
...Business should never have let that come about...
...He wrote some sixty books, including Parkinson's Law, Mrs...
...Because if an able youngster has an interest in economics, in figures, and has conservative views, he goes into business...
...Parkinson's Law, and The Law and the Profits,' and delivered countless lectures...
...The only answer is for business, in turn—having let the left wing capture the schools—to capture television...
...Whereas if he has left-wing views, he becomes a professor...
...Jerking them around," lawyers call the process...
...One of his observations to me, which must be recognized as generally true, is this: "In America all professors of economics tend to be leftists...
...Department of Agriculture...
...Parkinson (anticipating Laffer) calculates that as you cut the tax bite people work much harder—as in Hong Kong—and government revenues rise...
...It is now technically possible for a legislator to press a button and record his vote electronically...
...experience has been that higher taxes mean bigger deficits...
...Domestically, there are Donald Trump's "trophy properties:" the Trump Tower, the Trump Palace, and the other trumpery that led to Chapter 11...
...Northern England is sinking...
...Then, correct those deficiencies...
...Government that is too responsive to shifting popular enthusiasms—government by poll, or as some have urged here, "electronic town meetings"—Parkinson considered disastrous...
...I might say in passing that those are his exact spoken words...
...The only way to limit the growth of government is to starve it...
...The Russian joke used to be, "We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us...
...A corollary is Expansion means complexity, and complexity decay...
...Where the working population, through control of the electoral process, ultimately determines its conditions of employment, there will be more demand for higher pay than for increased production...
...Conversely, the League of Nations expired shortly after occupying its palace in Geneva, the Bourbons started downhill upon the completion of Versailles, and so on...
...Persons familiar with the Kafkaesque techniques of Russian and Chinese—and, alas, other—governments will recognize the grim validity of Delay is the deadliest form of denial...
...A n important suggestion that as far as I know Parkinson never published is that when something goes wrong, do not try, try again...
...You let the case go by default...
...There are many symptoms of its collapse in both our countries...
...The most famous, of course, is "Parkinson's Law," namely: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion...
...Crime rates are soaring...
...An extraordinary amount of truth lies in some of his sayings...
...Often it will be dominated by unrepresentative insiders: a politburo...
...Instead, pull back, pause, and carefully work out what organizational shortcomings produced the failure...
...I told him about the Bay Bridge, which connects San Francisco with Oakland...
...On this theme, Parkinson, visiting Sweden, once startled his hosts with a "Swedish Law:" Policies designed to increase production increase employment...
...Since then the spraying machine has been 'introduced, so that the job can be done much faster...
...It's essential that this be done...
...Parkinson thought that both the American and British legislative systems were seriously defective, and proposed a solution: secret voting...
...One sees this acutely in our big cities, which are strangled by municipal unions...
...The world as a whole has turned over enough so that this point of view is now generally accepted, even in Sweden, except in trade union circles, which often believe in make-work projects...
...He talked that way too: with confident precision...
...It's almost an echo of Talleyrand's famous advice to a young diplomat, "Surtout point de zele": very roughly, "Don't get carried away...
...Popular democracy as an experiment is dead, to my mind," he once said to me at dinner...
...Justice delayed is justice denied" was, of course, said by others, and endless stalling is now a standard litigator's trick...
...In the legislature voting remained public...
...You may be aware," he once said to me, "that until the nineteenth century, popular elections took place in public, on the 'hustings.' A man would spring up and cry, 'I vote for Sir James!' Obviously, this invited every sort of pressure and bribery, and in due course popular votes were made secret...
...A more recent instance of his First Law is the U.S...
...Television is far more important than the schools...
...Liverpool is an example...
...Fourteen painters were appointed to paint the bridge from one end to the other, and then paint their way back again...
...After my talk to his cabinet Ronald Reagan tackled this problem, and was able, I heard, to cut the staff of painters to 50-odd...
...He loved the way American companies often have autonomous divisions that may even compete with each other...
...This insight flows from another Parkinson law, that deliberative bodies become decreasingly effective after they pass five to eight members...
...Parkinson's Second Law, Expenditure rises to meet income, does not require amplification for any observer of government...
...This principle seems as immutable as Acton's "Power tends to corrupt...
...Cyril Parkinson was one of the rare individuals who could speak in a language pure enough to go directly into print...
...A more important Parkinson rule than many realize is simply, Don't take yourself too seriously...
...So academic economists tend to be left-wingers...
...When a new general takes command of a defeated army, he does not immediately launch into a series of attacks...
...He thought that devolution would be good for Scotland, and joining Europe bad for Britain...
...But if you soak up the labor pool in non-productive government jobs, as Per6n and Mitterrand did in their first incarnations, you have a drop in overall output accompanied by a rise in taxes to pay for the unneeded public sector employees...
...Yet another of Professor Parkinson's useful principles is that the matters most debated in a deliberative body tend to be the minor ones where everybody understands the issues...
...They spend years of time and millions of dollars on unnecessary discovery proceedings, drag in the opponent's friends and relations to embarrass him to the maximum extent possible, and perhaps get him to settle for much less than he should get to avoid inordinate further expense...
...Parkinson strongly favored pushing decision-making down as far down as it can go...
...For this reason, a large board usually creates an executive committee that actually does the business, and in essence becomes the real board...
...In other words, a board of fifty has little chance of making the large, often technical decisions, or even of selecting the right subjects to debate...
...And chronic inflation is a very bad sign...
...When that committee, inevitably expanding, becomes too cumbersome in turn, it should hive off a subcommittee small enough to act...
...Nevertheless, by the time Ronald Reagan had become governor, the number of men engaged in permanently painting the bridge had risen, I believe to 77...
...In the U.S., one would have to note the tremendous cost of overregulation, a variation of complexity that some economists estimate robs us of up to a third of • our GNP growth...
Vol. 26 • June 1993 • No. 6
