"A committee is organic rather than mechanical in its nature: it is not a structure but a plant. It takes root and grows, it flowers, wilts, and dies, scattering the seed from which other committees will bloom in their turn"
About this Quote
Parkinson makes bureaucracy sound less like engineering and more like botany, and that choice is a quiet act of satire. A “mechanical” structure suggests purpose-built efficiency: parts designed to do a job, predictably, repeatably. By insisting a committee is “organic,” he smuggles in a darker truth about institutions: they behave like living things that prioritize survival, not outcomes. They don’t just execute tasks; they metabolize them, converting problems into meetings, agendas, subcommittees.
The plant metaphor is doing a lot of cultural work. “Takes root” signals how committees entrench themselves in an organization’s soil: budgets, norms, reputations, the vague fear of acting alone. “Flowers” captures the performative phase - impressive-looking reports, mission statements, minutes that read like accomplishment. “Wilts, and dies” concedes committees can fade, but the sting is in “scattering the seed.” Even failure is fertile. A dissolved committee rarely ends the impulse that birthed it; it simply diffuses it. The same people, the same anxieties, the same need for procedural cover sprout again under a new name.
Context matters: Parkinson, a historian turned institutional humorist, wrote in the mid-century era of expanding administrative states and corporate management culture. He’s not merely mocking committees as slow. He’s diagnosing their reproductive logic: once an organization learns that responsibility can be diluted across a group, it will keep planting that solution. The subtext is evolutionary: committees persist because they protect individuals from blame, even when they fail to produce results. Bureaucracy, in this view, isn’t broken. It’s thriving.
The plant metaphor is doing a lot of cultural work. “Takes root” signals how committees entrench themselves in an organization’s soil: budgets, norms, reputations, the vague fear of acting alone. “Flowers” captures the performative phase - impressive-looking reports, mission statements, minutes that read like accomplishment. “Wilts, and dies” concedes committees can fade, but the sting is in “scattering the seed.” Even failure is fertile. A dissolved committee rarely ends the impulse that birthed it; it simply diffuses it. The same people, the same anxieties, the same need for procedural cover sprout again under a new name.
Context matters: Parkinson, a historian turned institutional humorist, wrote in the mid-century era of expanding administrative states and corporate management culture. He’s not merely mocking committees as slow. He’s diagnosing their reproductive logic: once an organization learns that responsibility can be diluted across a group, it will keep planting that solution. The subtext is evolutionary: committees persist because they protect individuals from blame, even when they fail to produce results. Bureaucracy, in this view, isn’t broken. It’s thriving.
Quote Details
| Topic | Management |
|---|
More Quotes by Northcote Parkinson
Add to List
