C. Northcote Parkinson Quotes

11 Sourced Quotes

Expansion means complexity, and complexity decay.

C. Northcote Parkinson
Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

C. Northcote Parkinson
A committee is organic rather than mechanical in its nature: it is not a structure but a plant. It takes root and grows, it flowers, wilts, and dies, scattering the seed from which other committees will bloom in their turn.

C. Northcote Parkinson
Men enter local politics solely as a result of being unhappily married.

C. Northcote Parkinson
Parkinson's Law is a purely scientific discovery, inapplicable except in theory to the politics of the day. It is not the business of the botanist to eradicate the weeds. Enough for him if he can tell us just how fast they grow.

C. Northcote Parkinson
If there is a way to delay an important decision, the good bureaucracy, public or private, will find it.

C. Northcote Parkinson
Perfection of planned layout is achieved only by institutions on the point of collapse.

C. Northcote Parkinson
The Law of Triviality... briefly stated, it means that the time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved.

C. Northcote Parkinson
The man who is denied the opportunity of taking decisions of importance begins to regard as important the decisions he is allowed to take. He becomes fussy about filing, keen on seeing that pencils are sharpened, eager to ensure that the windows are open (or shut) and apt to use two or three different-colored inks.

C. Northcote Parkinson
Perfection of planning is a symptom of decay. During a period of exciting discovery or progress, there is no time to plan the perfect headquarters.

C. Northcote Parkinson
No king or minister could have instructed Newton to discover the law of gravity, for they did not know and could not know that there was such a law to discover. No Treasury official told Fleming to discover penicillin. Nor was Rutherford instructed to split the atom by a certain date...

C. Northcote Parkinson