Parkinson Law

Parkinson is a personal hero of mine. He formulated the famous Parkinson Law in 1955 in The Economist magazine - the article can be found here. It essentially states that:

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

This apparently simple rule, can be generalized into: available resources will consumed up until their full capacity. Notice the importance of that! It means that the consumption of time, money (budgets), memory/CPU, employees, etc. will tend to match their availability, whether they are necessary or not!

It's important to notice that this conclusion was reached during the study of the British Colonial Office where the number of officers increased continuously even as the number and size of the Great Britain colonies declined. This is explained by two factors:

Factor I: An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals and
Factor II: Officials make work for each other

This can be observed in practice in big organizations and companies as well as in the public governments. The sheer size of an organization can hide and accommodate all sorts of inefficiency, waste and unnecessary spending. When the bad times hit, everybody looks surprised at the impact on the organization and at the amount of "fat" that has grown steadily over time and that suddenly has to be cut.

In my opinions, organizations (specially governmental ones) need to shuffle their middle-top management structure every one to two years because of the following:

• Time silently will creep in habits, complacency, policies, politics, personal interests and even some form of corruption
  
• Small kingdoms will arise where the king tries to expand his influence (usually through an increased budget or personnel) and also tacit agreements emerge among the different kingdoms as to have every kingdom not attacking another and to protect each other
• The organization becomes more bureaucratic, bigger (fatter), slower, resistant to change and to new ideas and becomes a consumer of more and more resources