Books: Org’s Ogre

PARKINSON’S LAW (113 pp.)−C. Northcote Parkinson−Houghton Mifflin ($3).

In palmy days, Britain gave the world the dinner jacket, the sandwich, and the cricket bat. In this lesser epoch when a ride to the hounds has given way to the flight from the pound, the British imagination has turned wryly theoretical. From Stephen Potter issued the famed laws of lifemanship. Now, from an unlikely enclave of Empire known as the Raffles Chair of History at the University of Malaya in Singapore, Professor C. (for Cyril) Northcote Parkinson has produced a combination of Potter and the U.S.’s own William H. (The Organization Man) Whyte. Professor Parkinson’s book is a delightfully unprofessorial diagnosis of that widespread 20th century malady−galloping orgmanship.

Stripped of its complex algebraic formulas, Parkinson’s Law is this: the staff of any administrative department increases annually by 5%-6% “irrespective of any variation in the amount of work (if any) to be done.” Not one to proclaim dogma without data, Author Parkinson presents the strange case of the British Admiralty. Between 1914 and 1928, the capital ships of the British navy declined from 62 to 20, the officers and men of the fleet dropped from 146,000 to 100,000, yet Admiralty officials increased nearly 80% from 2,000 to 3,569. So absolute is the working of his law, says Parkinson, that “the officials would have multiplied at the same rate had there been no actual seamen at all.” A U.S. example of Parkinson’s Law was cited not long ago by the Wall Street Journal, which pointed out that while U.S. foreign aid has been almost halved between 1953 and 1957, the staff administering the program has nearly doubled.

Day of the Memo-Passer. Parkinson offers two reasons for the phenomenon: 1) “An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals”; 2) “Officials make work for each other.” Is Official A’s workload making him miss the commuter’s special? He will not split his functions with B, a potential rival. Instead he will create two subordinates, C and D who in a relatively short time will also accrete two subordinates apiece. Although soon seven men will do the work formerly done by one, none will be idle, for “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion” and there will be orgies of reports, conferences and initialing of each other’s papers. After a strenuous day of memo-passing, A will still miss the commuter’s special, but he will reflect with “a wry smile that late hours, like gray hairs, are among the penalties of success.”

Author Parkinson is the Darwin of the managerial evolution. Of special interest is his Law of the Decline and Fall of Institutions : “a perfection of planned layout is achieved only by institutions on the point of collapse.” Is the tourist awestruck before St. Peter’s in Rome? The Popes “lost half their authority while the work was still in progress.” The reign of Louis XIV, the “Sun King,” began to set shortly after he settled at Versailles. On the shores of Lake Geneva stands the finest mausoleum since the Taj Mahal the Palace of the Nations, which opened in 1937 when the League of Nations “had practically ceased to exist.”

“Injelitance” Quotient. An organization in incipient decay can be recognized not only through the perfection of its architecture but also from its high “injelitance” quotient. Injelitance, says Parkinson, is “a high concentration of incompetence and jealousy” typified by “any individual who. having failed to make anything of his own department, tries constantly to interfere with other departments and gain control of the central administration.” If such a man becomes boss, there soon develops “an actual competition in stupidity, people pretending to be even more brainless than they are.” The only cure for such a situation, according to Parkinson, is the old Trojan Horse ploy: “An individual of merit penetrates the outer defenses . . . babbling about golf and giggling feebly, losing documents and forgetting names . . . Only when he has reached high rank does he suddenly throw off the mask . . . With shrill screams of dismay the high executives find ability right there in the midst of them.”

Among other weighty matters probed by Parkinson are personnel-recruitment policies (first step: “Reject everyone over 50 or under 20 plus everyone called Murphy”); retirement problems (the aging top man must be made to retire “while still able to do the work better than anyone else” or his second in command will enter “the Age of Frustration [and] will never be fit for anything else”); and the high art of spotting key people at cocktail parties (“Their arrival will be at least half an hour after the party begins” and they will rotate about the room clockwise, shunning the walls where the “nobodies” are “deep in conversation with people they meet every week”).

Burbling along in his low-decibel way, Professor Parkinson slyly camouflages the fact that there is as much truth as spoof in his pseudo-scientifically stated findings. Finally, he is as difficult to laugh off as he is easy to laugh with. Author Parkinson promises to make further researches into executive manners. One project: he would like to trace the significance of “the illegibility of signatures, the attempt being made to fix the point in a successful executive career at which the handwriting becomes meaningless even to the executive himself.”