

Parkinson's Law (1955) - mobitar
http://www.economist.com/node/14116121

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cannam
Is there an online anthology of C Northcote Parkinson's essays?

My battered 1961 copy contains 10 essays of which the preface says 3 appeared
in the Economist and "certain of the others" in Harper's and The Reporter.

My favourites are:

The essay on how to word a job advert: "the perfect advertisement would
attract only one reply". Examples are given of job ads that hope to prove
sufficiently offputting to the wrong candidates.

The piece about councils. Ideal number of members: 5; any council with more
than 20 members is an ineffective showpiece. Illustrated with a historical
look at the Privy Council and the size of Cabinets in countries around the
world.

The piece on time spent per item in financial meetings, which introduced us to
the bike shed. (In the original essay, the bike shed is not the most trivial
item on the agenda -- that is the question of whether to serve coffee at
meetings, which gets an hour and a quarter's debate, to the bike shed's mere
45 minutes.)

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xhrpost
Just recently ran across Parkinson's Law when looking up Bikeshedding on
Wikipedia (which redirects to "Parkinson's law of triviality"). Found some
copies of his book on Amazon which I'd like to read through some time.

