Talk:Parkinson's law

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Another Parkinson's Law?

Cut and pasted from: https://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-government-so-bad-at-doing-things-that-capitalism-naturally-excels-at-is-the-world-doomed-to-the-realities-of-capitalism-as-a-superior-social-system-and-henceforth-a-theory-of-human-nature-which-is-what/answer/Susanna-Viljanen: "economist and author Cyril Northcote Parkinson (of the Parkinson’s Laws fame) and he came to the conclusion that when an institution (private or public) grows larger than a certain limit, it becomes inefficient and bloated. This is the reason why monopolies - private or public - are inefficient. The underlying reason is the length of the feedback loops. This was affirmed by Donella Meadows in her 12 leverage points’ theorem." 74.127.200.151 (talk) 11:10, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

formula error?

I'm not familiar with this topic, I so I haven't changed anything, but the equation seems wrong (on dimensional and logical grounds) is it possible it should be m^k vs k^m in the numerator? 198.84.249.151 (talk) 10:29, 22 November 2022 (UTC)

Indeed - I have no access to the original work of Parkinson, but it is cited in other sources (http://wiki.doing-projects.org/index.php/Parkinson%27s_Law_in_Project_Management), but the issue is how the values put to the formula are exactly defined in original work, as its description in the Wikipedia article is very unclear and leads to absurd numbers when taken directly. First of all: as the formula is about number of new employees hired per year one can expect that other values refer to one year of work as well. So, let's assume that we have small office with 5 employees "who want to be promoted by hiring new employees", so k = 5. and say they spend 10 hrs a year "for the preparation of internal memoranda" (which seems to be very little), so m=10, and P = 30 as they are young and have still 30 years of work before being retired, and say they "complete 10 administrative files a day each, which gives n = 5*10*365 = 18250 (pretty much for 5 people). So the result from Parkinson formula is: x = 1070 !!! which means that after that year the number of empolyess increases from 5 to 1075. Then - the best method to stop the office growing acording to this formula is simply to get rid of writing "internal memoranda" so the m = 0 and there won't be any new employees at all no matter what other values are... I guess the original definition of the values in the formula is substantially different the the ones in Wikipedia, or Parkinson was an idiot not able to calculate simple formulas... Polimerek (talk) 10:37, 24 July 2024 (UTC)

Criticisms section needed

No criticisms section? why not. 120.21.232.142 (talk) 11:45, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

Two meanings

It seems pretty clear that the term “Parkinson's Law” is used in two meanings, and the article is currently a mixture of the two:

1. work expanding to fill the time available,
2. bureaucracy / number of employees tends to grow

I didn't look at the entire edit history, but it seems like basically people will keep adding the “other” meaning no matter what; here are some example edits:

• https://en.wiki.x.io/w/index.php?title=Parkinson%27s_law&diff=next&oldid=697856975
• https://en.wiki.x.io/w/index.php?title=Parkinson%27s_law&diff=prev&oldid=791119771
• https://en.wiki.x.io/w/index.php?title=Parkinson%27s_law&diff=prev&oldid=1162268038

Both have some validity (the former seems to have more popular usage, and the latter is the original), so it seems that if the article tries to insist on one meaning it will ultimately be short-lived as the other meaning will get added at some point. So it would be good to more explicitly mention the two meanings, and separate out sections that have to do with each. Shreevatsa (talk) 17:30, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

I've done that a bit. More clean-up may be needed. Shreevatsa (talk) 17:59, 23 April 2024 (UTC)