Leadership Quote by C. Northcote Parkinson

Parkinson’s barb lands because it flips the official story of management on its head. We like to pretend bureaucracy is a rational response to complexity: bigger mission, bigger machinery. Parkinson suggests the opposite pathology: shrink the actual work and the managerial superstructure swells to fill the void, like foam expanding in an empty cavity.

The intent is satirical but diagnostic. As a historian of institutions, Parkinson was watching empires and offices alike: when purpose fades, procedure becomes purpose. A “smaller function” is a narrowed remit, an obsolete department, a project that’s been tamed into routine. Instead of winding down, the organization invents new layers of oversight, meetings, reporting lines, and performance rituals to justify its continued existence. Management becomes a self-referential economy, producing not outcomes but proof-of-management.

The subtext is about status and self-preservation. Administrators don’t multiply because they’re stupid; they multiply because they’re incentivized. A small function is especially ripe for managerial inflation: the work is too meager to confer prestige on its own, so prestige is manufactured through hierarchy. Add a deputy, subdivide responsibilities, formalize approvals. The fewer the hard constraints of urgent production, the more room there is for politics, turf, and the soothing theater of “alignment.”

Context matters: Parkinson’s Law emerged in postwar Britain, when expanding civil services and corporate offices were mastering the art of paper. His line still reads like a memo from the present, aimed at any institution that confuses motion with progress and calls it governance.