Daily Inspiration Quote by C. Northcote Parkinson

Bureaucracies love to advertise scale as strength, but Parkinson is pointing to the opposite: growth is often the moment an organization stops being a place where decisions happen and becomes a stage where decisions are performed. The number 21 isn’t mystical; it’s a jab at the threshold where a group tips from conversation into choreography. Above that size, airtime becomes scarce, coordination costs spike, and the meeting’s real job shifts from choosing to signaling: who’s aligned, who’s cautious, who’s “consulted.”

Parkinson’s intent is diagnostic, not merely cynical. As an historian of administration (and a satirist of its habits), he’s describing a recurring pattern: formal bodies swell for reasons that look virtuous - representation, inclusivity, stakeholder buy-in - while informal power consolidates elsewhere. The subtext is that democracy inside institutions is frequently a managed illusion. When the room gets too big, you create committees, subcommittees, steering groups; authority migrates to the smallest circle that can move fast and absorb risk. Everyone else gets visibility, minutes, and the comforting sense of participation.

Context matters: Parkinson wrote in the mid-century world of expanding states and corporate managerialism, when “more staff” and “more process” were treated as progress. His line lands now because it predicts modern governance-by-Slack-channel and executive “working groups”: the official org chart grows, but the actual levers of power shrink into a handful of people who can make decisions without needing to narrate them in real time to twenty-one others.