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.
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.