Parkinson’s law

The design of organisations and products →Go uptown Index: Click ᐅ to expand: Design Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”

“For this real or imagined overwork, there are, broadly speaking, three possible remedies. He may resign; he may ask to halve the work with a colleague called B; he may demand the assistance of two subordinates, to be called C and D. There is probably no instance, however, in history, of A choosing any but the third alternative.”

Has the information revolution falsified Parkinson's law? If not yet, then when will it? Or has it supercharged it? Would a thought leader, of failing one of those, a chatbot mind getting in touch to let us know?

In the meantime, Otto Büchstein has his own ideas. The JC’s eighteenth law of worker entropy, also known as Büchstein’s special theory of Parkinson’s Law, states that:

“work does not expand to fit the time available, but the amount of money available.”

Since, as Benjamin Franklin told us, “time is money” this is no more than a restatement of Parkinson’s law: there is a steady relationship —“commercialogical constant” — between the amount of money at stake and the amount of money agents will be able to extract, risk-free, from the principals by convincing them they can help ensure its safe conveyance.

See also

• Contractual risk and the airbag - steering-wheel continuum
• Time is money
• E-discovery
• Human, all too human
• Reg tech
• Chatbot