Laws and Rules: From A to Z
Acheson’s Rule of the Bureaucracy: A memorandum is written not to inform the reader but to protect the writer.
Berra’s Law: You can observe a lot just by watching.
Bonafede’s Revelation: The conventional wisdom is that power is an aphrodisiac. In truth, it’s exhausting.
Boren’s Laws of the Bureaucracy:
When in doubt, mumble.
When in trouble, delegate.
When in charge, ponder.
Cropp’s Law: The amount of work done varies inversely with the amount of time spent in the office.
Dave’s Law of Advice: Those with the best advice offer no advice.
Dobbins’ Law: When in doubt use a bigger hammer.
Principle of Displaced Hassle: To beat the bureaucracy, make your problem their problem.
Dow’s Law: In a hierarchical organization, the higher the level, the greater the confusion.
Epstein’s Law: If you think the problem is bad now, just wait until we’ve solved it.
Grossman’s Misquote: Complex problems have simple, easy to understand wrong answers.
Heller’s Myths of Management: The first myth of management is that it exists. The second myth of management is that success equals skill. Corollary (Johnson): Nobody really knows what is going on anywhere within your organization.
Hendrickson’s Law: If a problem causes many meetings, the meetings eventually become more important than the problem.
Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.
Kettering’s Laws: If you want to kill any idea in the world today, get a committee working on it.
The First Myth of Management: It exists.
Maugham’s Thought: Only a mediocre person is always at his best.
McGovern’s Law: The longer the title, the less important the job.
Pareto’s Law (The 20/80 Law): 20% of the customers account for 80% of the turnover, 20% of the components account for 80% of the cost, and so forth.
Parkinson’s First Law: Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.
Parkinson’s Second Law: Expenditures rise to meet income.
Parkinson’s Third Law: Expansion means complexity; and complexity decay.
Parkinson’s Fourth Law: The number of people in any working group tends to increase regardless of the amount of work to be done.
Parkinson’s Fifth Law: If there is a way to delay an important decision the good bureaucracy, public or private, will find it.
Patton’s Law: A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.
Peter Principle: In every hierarchy, whether it be government or business, each employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence; every post tends to be filled by an employee incompetent to execute its duties.
Corollaries:
Incompetence knows no barriers of time or place.
Work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence.
If at first you don’t succeed, try something else.
Peter’s Observation: Super-competence is more objectionable than incompetence.
Pierson’s Law: If you’re coasting, you’re going downhill.
Terman’s Law of Innovation: If you want a track team to win the high jump, you find one person who can jump seven feet, not seven people who can jump one foot.
Wolf’s Law (An Optimistic View of a Pessimistic World): It isn’t that things will necessarily go wrong (Murphy’s Law), but rather that they will take so much more time and effort than you think if they are not to go wrong.
Wolf’s Law of Decision-Making: Major actions are rarely decided by more than four people. If you think a larger meeting you’re attending is really ‘hammering out’ a decision, you’re probably wrong. Either the decision was agreed to by a smaller group before the meeting began, or the outcome of the larger meeting will be modified later when three or four people get together.
Wolf’s Law of Management: The tasks to do immediately are the minor ones; otherwise, you’ll forget them. The major ones are often better to defer. They usually need more time for reflection. Besides, if you forget them, they’ll remind you.
Wolf’s Law of Meetings: The only important result of a meeting is agreement about next steps.
Wolf’s Law of Planning: A good place to start from is where you are.
Zimmerman’s Law: Regardless of whether a mission expands or contracts, administrative overhead continues to grow at a steady rate.
Zimmerman’s Law of Complaints: Nobody notices when things go right.
Zusmann’s Rule: A successful symposium depends on the ratio of meeting to eating.
Source: Compiled and collected by the authors
Parkinson’s Law
by Cyril Northcote Parkinson
General recognition of this fact is shown in the proverbial phrase ‘It is the busiest man who has time to spare.’ Thus, an elderly lady of leisure can spend the entire day in writing and dispatching a postcard to her niece at Bognor Regis. An hour will be spent finding the postcard, another in hunting for spectacles, half an hour in a search for the address, an hour and a quarter in composition, and twenty minutes in deciding whether or not to take an umbrella when going to the pillar box in the next street. The total effort that would occupy a busy man for three minutes all told may in this fashion leave another person prostrate after a day of doubt, anxiety, and toil.
Granted that work (and especially paperwork) is thus elastic in its demands on time, it is manifest that there need be little or no relationship between the work to be done and the size of the staff to which it may be assigned. A lack of real activity does not, of necessity, result in leisure. A lack of occupation is not necessarily revealed by a manifest idleness. The thing to be done swells in importance and complexity in a direct ratio with the time to be spent. This fact is widely recognized, but less attention has been paid to its wider implications, more especially in the field of public administration. Politicians and taxpayers have assumed (with occasional phases of doubt) that a rising total in the number of civil servants must reflect a growing volume of work to be done. Cynics, in questioning this belief, have imagined that the multiplication of officials must have left some of them idle or all of them able to work for shorter hours. But this is a matter in which faith and doubt seem equally misplaced. The fact is that the number of the officials and the quantity of the work are not related to each other at all. The rise in the total of those employed is governed by Parkinson’s Law and would be much the same whether the volume of the work were to increase, diminish, or even disappear. The importance of Parkinson’s Law lies in the fact that it is a law of growth based upon an analysis of the factors by which that growth is controlled.
The validity of this recently discovered law must rest mainly on statistical proofs, which will follow. Of more interest to the general reader is the explanation of the factors underlying the general tendency to which this law gives definition. Omitting technicalities (which are numerous) we may distinguish at the outset two motive forces. They can be represented for the present purpose by two almost axiomatic statements, thus: (1) ‘An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals’ and (2) ‘Officials make work for each other.’
To comprehend Factor One, we must picture a civil servant, called A, who finds himself overworked. Whether this overwork is real or imaginary is immaterial, but we should observe, in passing, that A’s sensation (or illusion) might easily result from his own decreasing energy: a normal symptom of middle age. For this real or imagined overwork there are, broadly speaking, three possible remedies. He may resign; he may ask to halve the work with a colleague called B; he may demand the assistance of two subordinates, to be called C and D. There is probably no instance, however, in history of A choosing any but the third alternative. By resignation he would lose his pension rights. By having B appointed, on his own level i
n the hierarchy, he would merely bring in a rival for promotion to W’s vacancy when W (at long last) retires. So A would rather have C and D, junior men, below him. They will add to his consequence and, by dividing the work into two categories, as between C and D, he will have the merit of being the only man who comprehends them both. It is essential to realize at this point that C and D are, as it were, inseparable. To appoint C alone would have been impossible. Why? Because C, if by himself, would divide the work with A and so assume almost the equal status that has been refused in the first instance to B; a status the more emphasized if C is A’s only possible successor. Subordinates must thus number two or more, each being thus kept in order by fear of the other’s promotion. When C complains in turn of being overworked (as he certainly will) A will, with the concurrence of C, advise the appointment of two assistants to help C. But he can then avert internal friction only by advising the appointment of two more assistants to help D, whose position is much the same. With this recruitment of E, F, G and H the promotion of A is now practically certain.
Seven officials are now doing what one did before. This is where Factor Two comes into operation. For these seven make so much work for each other that all are fully occupied and A is actually working harder than ever. An incoming document may well come before each of them in turn. Official E decides that it falls within the province of F, who places a draft reply before C, who amends it drastically before consulting D, who asks G to deal with it. But G goes on leave at this point, handing the file over to H, who drafts a minute that is signed by D and returned to C, who revises his draft accordingly and lays the new version before A.
What does A do? He would have every excuse for signing the thing unread, for he has many other matters on his mind. Knowing now that he is to succeed W next year, he has to decide whether C or D should succeed to his own office. He had to agree to G’s going on leave even if not yet strictly entitled to it. He is worried whether H should not have gone instead, for reasons of health. He has looked pale recently – partly but not solely because of his domestic troubles. Then there is the business of F’s special increment of salary for the period of the conference and E’s application for transfer to the Ministry of Pensions. A has heard that D is in love with a married typist and that G and F are no longer on speaking terms – no-one seems to know why. So A might be tempted to sign C’s draft and have done with it. But A is a conscientious man. Beset as he is with problems created by his colleagues for themselves and for him – created by the mere fact of these officials’ existence – he is not the man to shirk his duty. He reads through the draft with care, deletes the fussy paragraphs added by C and H, and restores the thing to the form preferred in the first instance by the able (if quarrelsome) F. He corrects the English – none of these young men can write grammatically – and finally produces the same reply he would have written if officials C to H had never been born. Far more people have taken far longer to produce the same result. No-one has been idle. All have done their best. And it is late in the evening before A finally quits his office and begins the return journey to Ealing. The last of the office lights are being turned off in the gathering dusk that marks the end of another day’s administrative toil. Among the last to leave, A reflects with bowed shoulders and a wry smile that late hours, like grey hairs, are among the penalties of success.
Source: C. Northcote Parkinson, Parkinson’s Law: The Pursuit of Progress, John Murray, 1958. Reprinted by permission of John Murray (Publishers) Limited.
Maxims in Need of a Makeover
by Justin Ewers
To many, they are the commandments of business management – truths to be ignored at a company’s peril. Say them together now: Great leaders make great companies. Strategy is destiny. Change or die.
But here’s a thought: What if some of the business world’s most dearly held axioms are wrong? What if there is a better way? This is the argument Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton, management professors at Stanford University, make in their new book, out this week, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management. Gathering the work of psychologists, sociologists, and management experts, the authors make a compelling case that some of business’s beloved truths are far from self-evident. Too many business leaders, they argue, are making decisions based on vague hunches, management fads, and heroic-success stories instead of on empirical data. Too often, the consequences are grave. ‘If doctors practiced medicine the way many companies practice management,’ Pfeffer and Sutton write, ‘there would be far more sick and dead patients, and many more doctors would be in jail.’
More than a few management experts agree that some of these Olde Business Maxims are long overdue for a makeover. ‘They have really touched a nerve here,’ says Tom Donaldson, a professor of ethics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business: ‘Managers often don’t know what they don’t know.’ So what is a Jack Welch disciple to do? U.S. News sat down with Pfeffer and Sutton to discuss their five favorite myths of management – and to see who they think is practicing business their way.
Myth 1. Financial incentives drive good performance
Managers often think money can solve all their problems. Workers not performing the way you’d like them to? Tie their pay to performance. Executives haven’t bought into the company’s mission? Offer them stock options. Pfeffer and Sutton argue, though, that using financial incentives to improve performance isn’t quite so simple.
Too many managers overlook the fact that incentives can inspire bad behavior as well as good – and often hurt performance as much as they help it. Take the incentive system put in place recently by the city of Albuquerque, N.M. To cut down on overtime paid to garbage truck drivers, the city began to encourage workers to finish their routes on time or early, by offering a driver who completed a route in five hours, say, three additional hours of ‘incentive pay’. The results were not quite what the city had hoped. Drivers drove too fast, often in trucks that were overweight, and in many cases garbage didn’t even get picked up. ‘When you tie money to incentives, people will not necessarily focus on what’s best for the organization,’ says Sutton. ‘They’ll focus on what it takes to get the incentive.’
Which, of course, can lead down a slippery ethical slope. In a study conducted last year comparing 435 companies that restated their earnings with those that did not, researchers at the University of Minnesota found that the bigger the proportion of stock options in senior executives’ payment packages, the more likely the companies were to have to restate their finances. Cooking the books, in other words, became increasingly tempting the more salary was linked to stock price.
So why do so many companies keep trying it? Simple intellectual inertia, says Pfeffer: At some point, ‘it just becomes what everybody does; nobody thinks about it anymore. They don’t ask if it’s appropriate, if it fits their particular circumstances. They don’t ask anything – they just do it.’ Managers don’t seem to realize that equity incentives rarely improve company performance. But they should. ‘The lesson here,’ the authors write, ‘is a variant on an old adage: Be careful what you pay for, you may actually get it.’
Myth 2. First-movers have the advantage
There is something about this idea that appeals to the entrepreneur in every executive: Be the first to move into a market, and you’ll have it all to yourself. Victory will be yours.
But actually, it may be better for a business in the long run to be second or even third. ‘Success stories that support first-mover [advantage] turn out to be false,’ says Sutton. ‘People believe in it religiously, but the evidence is mixed.’ There are plenty of infamous first-movers, after all, that did not go on to dominate their markets: Xerox invented the first PC, Netscape came up with the Internet browser, Ampex produced the first VCR – and yet none of these companies managed to hold on to their leads. Meanwhile, Microsoft has made a living coming in second: Windows is a copy of the Mac; Excel followed Lotus
1-2-3; Internet Explorer jumped into water warmed by Netscape. And Bill Gates isn’t alone. Wal-Mart was hardly the first discount retailer. Apple wasn’t the first company to sell MP3 players. And Amazon wasn’t the first to sell books online. ‘At first blush, it sounds like a good idea,’ says Sutton, ‘but as soon as you start challenging assumptions, it’s a half-truth.’
Many other management experts concur. ‘We’re still looking for the silver bullet: “If you do this, you will guarantee success; if you do that, you’ll guarantee failure,’’ ’ says Barry Staw, a professor of leadership and communication at the University of California-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. But being first to move into a market is not necessarily it. ‘A lot of what’s effective management is doing things well and doing it over and over again,’ says Sutton. Too many managers become obsessed with being first, when coming in second, oddly enough, may be the most cost-effective way to be the best.
Myth 3. Layoffs are a good way to cut costs
It seems like basic economics. If you have a company with 100 employees, and you’re over budget by 10 percent, laying off 10 workers will solve your problem. In one stroke, there go hundreds of thousands of dollars in salaries, healthcare benefits, and 401(k) plans – and suddenly your balance sheet is looking much better.
Not so fast, say Pfeffer and Sutton. While some research shows that layoffs have no effect on long-term financial performance, and other data show they have a negative effect, there are few studies, if any, demonstrating that layoffs have a positive effect on company performance. A recent report by Bain & Co., in fact, found companies that manage to avoid layoffs – even in tough financial straits – end up better off financially in the long term.
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