Dear Reader,
I’m familiar enough with the demographics of my audience to know that most of you will be aware of Moore’s Law, the observation that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles roughly every two years. This insight, from Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, has served us well during the expansion of computing power over the last several decades.
You will also no doubt be aware of Murphy’s Law, the observation that anything that can go wrong, will; and perhaps its stronger British formulation, Sod’s Law, which adds the specification that it will go wrong at the worst possible moment.
But I’m not so sure how many of you will be familiar with Parkinson’s Law, an idea that at one point was common knowledge and which retains much explanatory power, but which nevertheless has fallen into disuse.
The only reason I know what it is is because an uncle bought me the book when I was a kid – the same uncle, incidentally but not at all coincidentally, who bought me my copy of Machiavelli’s The Prince.
I know he gave me The Prince in 1991 because he inscribed the book in his blocky calligraphy, but he dared not make a mark on my copy of Parkinson’s Law because he had gone to the trouble of finding a vintage copy because the book was by then out of print. What he paid for my 1962 paperback edition I do not know, but the original price was three shillings and sixpence, just to put the whole thing in context.
The book was something of a mystery to me. On the one hand, the language was somewhat fusty and officious, implying that the insights contained therein were of the utmost gravity. On the other hand, the ideas being discussed seemed at times so preposterous as to imply that the book was a work of bone-dry satire.
In those pre-internet days, I had simply to live with the mystery. The combination of humor, seriousness and semi-seriousness nevertheless proved to be an effective delivery mechanism for some exceedingly practical advice on how to operate in the business world.
I later discovered that the made-up sounding author was in fact a real person, a naval historian and intellectual gadfly whose career in academia and the military had exposed him to an enormous amount of bureaucratic nonsense. The theses of the book were entirely sincere, and the absurd illustrations were intended to capture the imagination so that the points could be hammered home, which in my case they were.
The book was an international bestseller and translated into several languages. It was a big hit in the Soviet Union – Mikhail Gorbachev was quoted as saying “Parkinson’s Law works everywhere.”
The back cover copy reads in part, “The famous book that is quoted by everybody. Do you know what the Law is?”
Well, do you?
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