Daily Inspiration Quote by C. Northcote Parkinson

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.