Parkinson's Flaw

              It is not surprising that C. Northcote Parkinson and his ''Parkinson's laws'' enjoy such an admiring following among teacher, wrires, consultans, and professional social critic. Most of these people have carefully chosen as their own professions work that keeps them as far as modern society lets anyone get from the rigorous taskmaster of the organization. Most of them lead a more-or-less one-man, self-employed existence in which there are few make-or-break postmortems of their activities. They live in autonomous isolation. Many of them have avoided life in the organization because they are incapable of submitting to its rigid discipline. Parkinson has provided them a way to laugh at the majority, at those who do submit to the organization, and at the same time to feel superior rather than oppressed, as minorities usually do.
              It is not suprising (indeed it is quite expected) that Parkinson himself was anything but an organization man-that he was a teacher of history, a painter, and, of allthings, a historian on warfare in the Eastern seas. This is about as far as you can get from the modern land-bound organization.
              Parkinson's writings finally brought him into such continuing contact with business that he finally decided to go into business himself. In doing so he proved thetruth of all that I have been saying: The business his notoriety ultimately led him to eter was, of course, the consulting business!
               Parkinson is very entertaining. The executive who cannot laugh along with him is probably too paranoid to be trusted with a responsible job. But most of today's blithe cartoonist of the organization would be improverished for material were they not blessed with an enormous ignorance of the fact of organizational life. Let me put it as emphatically as possible. A company cannot function as an anarchy. It must be organized, it must be routinized, it must be planned in  some way in the various phases of its operations. That is why we have so many organizations of so many different kids. And to the extent that planning and control are needed, we get rigidty, order, and therefore some amount of conformity. No organization cam have everybody running  off uncoordinated in several different directions at once. There must be rules, standards, and directions
                Where there are enough rules, there will be damn fool rules. These can be mercilessly cartooned. But some rules that look foolish to an expert on ancient naval history would seem far from foolish him if he bothered to understand the problems of the business, or the government, or whatever group the particulan organization is designed to deal with.