Leadership Quote by Don Fraser

Order, Fraser implies, is a fragile fantasy: the moment you build a perfect system, life rushes in to sabotage it. On its face, the line is a domestic joke about shelves, files, and labeled drawers. As a politician’s aphorism, it reads like a small, wry warning about governance itself. The trouble isn’t that we fail to design neat categories; it’s that those categories become magnets for whatever doesn’t fit elsewhere. “A place for everything” is the bureaucrat’s dream, the planner’s promise, the campaign’s tidy checklist. “Everything else” is the messy remainder: emergencies, unintended consequences, human impulses, and the political baggage that arrives uninvited.

The sentence works because it turns a proverb inside out. Instead of praising organization, it exposes how organization can create the conditions for its own collapse. Once you allocate space - in an office, a budget, a policy portfolio - you invite opportunists and drift. The drawer labeled “miscellaneous” is not an exception; it’s the system’s inevitable end point.

There’s also a sly critique of institutional creep. Programs expand beyond their mandates, committees acquire new responsibilities, regulations pile up in the gaps between categories. Fraser’s humor softens the blow, but the subtext is stern: good structures require constant pruning, not just clever design. In politics especially, “a place for everything” becomes an alibi for control; “everything else” is democracy’s noise, refusing to stay sorted.