career and seeing first-hand how bureaucracy works . He noted that bureaucracy is a byproduct of our culture and human make-up , our egos and laziness .
Hence , Parkinson ’ s original intent was not to take aim at old ladies writing postcards , but rather at the inefficiencies introduced by the bureaucratisation of the British civil service . In his essay , he pointed out that although the number of British navy ships decreased by two thirds and sailors by a third between 1914 and 1928 , the number of bureaucrats had still ballooned by almost 6 % a year .
“ There were fewer people and less work to manage — but management expanded .
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Parkinson argued that if you have a 6 % annual growth rate of any administrative body , then sooner or later that business will die . It would have most of its workforce in bureaucracy and almost none in production and sales .
But it is not only in time management and productivity that Parkinson ’ s Law has applications . It can be generalised as : “ The demand upon a resource tends to expand to match the supply of the resource , especially if the price of that resource approaches zero ”.
There are many corollaries to Parkinson ’ s Law . Here are a few :
• Work will become as complicated as necessary to fill the available time ( this is known as the Stock – Sanford corollary to Parkinson ’ s Law );
• Quantity in the wardrobe will expand to fill the cupboard ;
• Scope contracts to fit the time we give it ( the Horstman ’ s corollary );
• If you have twice the time in a day , you have time to fall twice as far behind your commitments as when you only have half the hours in a day ( the cynical Asimov corollary );
• Data expands to fill the space available for storage ( which means that Moore ’ s law in computers does not help much , the demand for data storage and bandwidth will keep outpacing supply );
• Cars on a new road or lane , built to lower congestion , will fill it to capacity ; and
• Expenses will rise to meet income ( also known as Parkinson ’ s Second Law ).
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