Parkinson's Laws

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The Parkinson's laws are some in the garb sociological dressed tenets ironic representations of the British sociologist C. Northcote Parkinson for management and business administration .

Parkinson's Laws

Best known is Parkinson's Law on Bureaucracy Growth , first published in 1955. It reads:

"Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion."

" Work expands to the extent that time is available to do it."

- and not to the extent of how complex it actually is. An example is given of an elderly lady who needs half a day to send her niece a postcard (postcard selection, glasses and address search, text writing, decision whether to take an umbrella with you for the way to the mailbox). The contrast is the busy man who does the same task at his desk in three minutes.

As a motivating tendency, Parkinson mentions two further tenets that are valid in many offices around the world:

  1. Every employee desires to increase the number of his subordinates but not the number of his rivals.
  2. Employees create work for each other.

Parkinson explained this using the example of the Royal British Navy from 1930 and the number of civil servants in the British Colonial Office . Thereafter, the staff in each administration develops according to the formula:

Where k is the number of employees seeking promotion by hiring new subordinates; m the number of working hours per person used to prepare memoranda in internal office traffic; L is the difference between the age of hiring and the age of retirement, and n is the number of administrative tasks actually performed by the office staff. x is the number of new employees that have to be hired from year to year.

According to Parkinson's, the annual increase in staff regardless of the variations in the amount of work is between 5.2% and 6.6%. He even goes so far as to claim that the core tasks could also be eliminated entirely without the administration shrinking as a result.

Parkinson formulated this in the 1950s. In modern administrations, new terms have been introduced, such as B. Controlling , new control models , business indicators , etc. The proportion of staff in these work areas often rises, while the staff stagnates or even falls for the actual core tasks.

Other studies on the administration

In 1957, Parkinson's Law and nine other articles appeared in book form ( Parkinson's law, and other studies in administration ; Parkinson's law and other studies on administration ).

In the post high finance or the point at which the interest will go out ( high finance, or the point of vanishing interest ) formulated the Parkinson

Law of triviality :

"The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved."

"The time spent on an agenda item is inversely proportional to the respective costs ."

Parkinson describes the meeting of a finance committee , in which the funds were approved for a nuclear reactor ($ 10 million, discussion time 2½ minutes), a bicycle shed ($ 2,350, 45 minutes) and coffee for the meetings of another committee (4, monthly) $ 75, 1¼ hours).

This means that the simplest topics are discussed in the most extensive way in discussions, since most participants understand something about them ( The matters most debated in a deliberative body tend to be the minor ones where everybody understands the issues ) - and not the topics that are are most important. Incompetence in important factual issues is compensated for by detailed requests to speak on trivial points, which repeatedly lead to devastating wrong decisions and misallocation of resources.

In directors and cabinets or the coefficient of inefficiency ( Directors and councils, or coefficient of inefficiency ) the comitology (committee theory) is justified, and it is about the number of members from which the complete legal incapacity is reached ( inability or inefficiency coefficient ; after Parkinson's 20 or 21 people).

Sequels

Form continuations u. a .:

  • Mrs Parkinson's law, and other studies in domestic science (1968; Mrs. Parkinson's law and other studies in the field of domestic science , 1969) with eleven contributions, including:
  • Mrs. Parkinson's Law to stress genesis and degradation:

"Heat produced by pressure expands to fill the mind available, from which it can pass only to a cooler mind."

"Heat generated by pressure expands and fills the existing mind, from which it can only escape by giving it to a cooler mind."

  • The law (1979; Parkinsons new law , 1982) with eight old and eight new contributions, including:
  • The Law of Waste (Parkinson's Second Law):

"Expenditures rise to meet income."

"Expenses always rise to the limit of income."

  • The law of inertia :

"Delay is the deadliest form of denial."

"Delay is the deadliest form of refusal."

  • The law of the vacuum as a generalization of the original Parkinson's law:

"Action expands to fill the void created by human failure."

"The emptiness created by human error is always filled again by new activity."

Overall, the new articles are more serious and more conservative .

literature

Web links

The original text of Parkinson's Law appeared in The Economist weekly on November 19, 1955.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The Economist . Volume 177, No. 5856, November 19, 1955, pp. 635-637.
  2. ↑ a b M. Mohrmann: Rethinking building projects with the help of lean project management. 4th edition. BoD, 2011, ISBN 978-3-8391-4949-2 , p. 55.
  3. ↑ First published in McCall's Magazine February 1966.