Life & Wisdom Quote by Norman Ralph Augustine

Augustine’s line is a perfectly engineered piece of management heresy: it takes the comforting story executives tell themselves - that growth will “absorb” costs - and flips it into a tautological trap. If overhead rises when business shrinks, you nod; fixed costs don’t magically evaporate. But when he adds that overhead also rises when business grows, the logic becomes uncomfortable, because it’s also true. Expansion demands new layers: compliance, HR, IT systems, legal review, meetings to coordinate the people hired to coordinate the people.

The wit works because it’s not a joke about incompetence so much as about institutional physics. Bureaucracy isn’t merely the price of failure; it’s the side effect of complexity. When an organization contracts, it clings to process as armor. When it expands, it builds process as scaffolding. Either way, overhead is the organism’s immune system: it swells in response to threat and opportunity alike.

The subtext is a warning to anyone who thinks “efficiency” is a destination rather than a constant battle against organizational creep. Augustine, best known for “Augustine’s Laws” and his experience in aerospace and government-adjacent industry, is speaking from a world where programs balloon, stakeholders multiply, and paperwork can become a parallel product. The real sting is that both narratives - “we’re cutting costs” and “we’re scaling up” - can justify the same outcome: more overhead. The only antidote is intentional design, not momentum.