Has anyone here read Parkinson's original book? I'd be interested in comments about it. It's been on my radar for a long time but I haven't got to it yet.
Incidentally, the article is wrong to date Parkinson's Law to the 1960s. It was very much a creature of the 1950s. That maybe isn't as trivial as it sounds; IIRC the book was part of the wave of post-WWII systems thinking that really got going in the 50s. A lot of that stuff remains pretty interesting. It certainly fed into the cultural explosion that happened later, and was an early sign of disaffection with 50s rigidity, but is a different sort of critique.
I read it, a long time ago. I remember feeling that it had lots of interesting stuff in it, but that it suffered from the problem of being something that should have been just an essay, expanded into a book. (Practically 100% of books on "business" have this problem.) So it's the kind of book that's worth browsing through, reading bits that catch your attention, but not worth reading every word of.
The only one that seems to be available is "The Law Complete" which is worth reading. A couple of his key laws/observations:
Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
Expenditure rises to meet income.
Expansion means complexity, and complexity decay.
Delay is the deadliest form of denial.
The time spent on any item of a committee's agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum of money involved. [often short-handed as the "bike shed" problem]
Injelitance: mangers with incompetence mixed with jealousy ruin many organizations.
I have always wondered what I should do with this piece of information. Does it mean that every proposal I want to have passed by people should be extremely large and complex? Conversely, if I want to engage people, should is be over something simple?
Or is it just, take simple decisions yourself and try hard to get input on the complex ones?
I have always wondered what I should do with this piece of information.
All it means is that if you want people to implement your idea in an open source project, send a patch. Ideas don't get the project anywhere, nor does endless discussion. Shut the fuck up and write some code.
The admonishment here is to the managers, not the people writing the proposals. The point is to let go and let your people do the simple stuff on their own.
If you're stuck proposing a bike shed to people you know are going to muck with it, I think you're pretty much stuck. Short of deception, you can't stop them from doing what they want.
When presenting designs to clients some firms add a "pink rabbit" to it, i.e. something that's just too obvious to be ignored by the client. The discussion will then be steered to what to do about it, how to change it, what color it should have, etc.
This is a way of deflecting the client's need to "contribute". If there are other issues with the design those will come up as well, but that initial itch will be lessened.
I've found this to be true. The solution is to propose every single color that you DON'T want the shed to be painted, so the only option anyone has to make a helpful suggestion as to the color is the ONE color you didn't pick...and the one you wanted in the first place :-D
Incidentally, the article is wrong to date Parkinson's Law to the 1960s. It was very much a creature of the 1950s. That maybe isn't as trivial as it sounds; IIRC the book was part of the wave of post-WWII systems thinking that really got going in the 50s. A lot of that stuff remains pretty interesting. It certainly fed into the cultural explosion that happened later, and was an early sign of disaffection with 50s rigidity, but is a different sort of critique.