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Parkinson's Law (1955)
- cannam 12y agoIs 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.)
- xhrpost 12y agoJust 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.