If you want to destroy a culture, teach them all the wrong things, such as Parkinson’s Law, that the time to perform a task will fill with the work to be applied. It’s because of Parkinson’s Law that we have timers in sports; otherwise, the game would be boring because the pressure to perform would be nonexistent. But the human desire to procrastinate is ever-present, so when you leave it to them to come up with what they think they can do, or what they want to do, they will tend to take up all the time that is available to do it. So when we talk about the efficiency of something, the biggest villain in the world is probably Parkinson’s Law. When we talk about government efficiency, we are talking about schedules and fulfilling the needed work to complete them on time, or ahead of schedule. If left to their own devices, however, people will pad their part of a schedule to the point where, by the time everyone does it that’s involved, suddenly you have grotesquely long lead times and a horrendously inefficient processing. It has always been bad, and the basic task of any management system is to push people out of their comfort zone and achieve things faster than they would otherwise do. That’s why there are 2-minute drills in football: to get the most done possible in a short amount of time. Without that pressure, the game wouldn’t be very exciting. If we asked players how much time they needed for something to get done, they would ask for weeks to achieve a touchdown. However, the pressure of time and its management are what make the game exciting. Without it, things get boring really fast. And that is the biggest problem we have in the world right now, Parkinson’s Law.
If you have dealt with the government, no matter what city you’re in, you’ll know that parking garages are very busy from 8 am to 9 am. It’s hard to park in a parking garage in any downtown area during that busy time of the day. But by noon, the parking garages are nearly empty, and by 3 pm, most everyone is gone home for the day. Government workers seldom do much of anything before 8 am; by 3 pm, they are almost non-existent. This came up recently when some people in government were trying to explain to me the lead time to approve a submission to them, and they indicated that they needed another 27 days to perform the task. The pressure to perform on time was not even remotely present in their lives, and they resented the question even being asked. Their attitude is that you’ll get it when you get it and be happy about it. It’s the kind of thing that I complain about regarding BMV stations all the time. Government workers have been taught that functioning under timed pressure is something not required of them and that it is actually a work benefit not to feel that pressure. So, no wonder it takes so long for the government to do anything. And because we use the government to teach our people, the government has taught our society the same dumb stuff, and now our entire civilization uses Parkinson’s Law to avoid the stress of performance in every industry. We still enjoy timed performance in our sports. But for our professional lives, we use it to full effect as a passive aggressive hatred for doing jobs that we’d rather not do, and because we are forced to make a living by performing work, we have used Parkinson’s Law to remove the demands and stress of having to do too much work and buy ourselves more leisure time because bored people in the world are miserable specimens of existence and want to shove that misery onto other people because they resent having jobs in the first place. And that lack of passion has killed most of our industries, from drive-thrus to hospital visits. Everyone these days involved in schedule making is using Parkinson’s Law to avoid doing hard work, and it has virtually killed most industries.
Behind Parkinson’s Law is the communist labor movement that is anti-management because they are anti-time. They have sought to remove management from all processes by selling the idea that the workers own all work and that management and ownership are greedy capitalists and must be removed from the process at every level because management imposes time standards that compress schedules. In a typically slow place of business, you will find unionized labor at the heart of the problem, you would be hard pressed to find any that perform efficiently. They encourage companies to hire too many workers to overstaff themselves because the time of opportunity to utilize a workforce entirely is limited by rules like an 8-hour work day, only 5 days a week. Weekend work is almost unheard of, and the unions want to take credit for being less productive. Some tricks can be used to shake them off this foundation, such as Lean Manufacturing, which Toyota has used to significant effect. But most of that is because the Japanese people’s work ethic and management systems do not yield to Parkinson’s Law, and their culture avoids it like the plague. But generally, Parkinson’s Law is not just a disease of the mind, as most people think. It’s a disease of society. You cannot talk about making a process efficient if you do not deal with Parkinson’s Law.
One of the truly great innovations of our modern society has been the Chick-fil-A drive-thru, which is among the best out there, at least in my experience in the Cincinnati area. During their lunch rush, they quickly produce and deliver an enormous amount of food with a double lane drive-thru. People go to Chick-fil-A because of the excellent service they get there. The chicken is good, but it’s the service that rules at that popular fast-food restaurant. The staff is always happy to serve and doesn’t waste your time. And people feel they get a better product at Chick-fil-A because their time is respected. They don’t make you wait; if you do have to wait, they are all over themselves with apologies. Chick-fil-A’s success in the marketplace is because they have created management systems that remove Parkinson’s Law from their interactions with the public. And the result has made them the best in the industry at drive-thru service. All the other fast-food restaurants have allowed themselves to be eroded with increased regulation that imposes Parkinson’s Law into their Labor Department processing, and it shows in the rate at which food hits the window on a drive-thru. If you’ve ever been to Europe, you will see that this need for speed is something they resent a lot. And too many Americans have been convinced they should follow the Europeans. But hidden in the background of that belief is the poison of slowness that comes with raw global Marxism. And behind those efforts is Parkinson’s Law, which panders to the worst of human behavior, which shows in their work. Which then deprives the culture of performance and merit. And it all starts with Parkinson’s Law. It’s been around for a long time; it’s not a new invention. But it’s gotten worse over time, not better, and after twenty years of Obama and his types in government getting their point across, Parkinson’s Law has migrated into just about every field of endeavor. Even amusement parks have bought into this trait by selling fast passes. They purposely make you wait in long lines to force you to buy their fast passes, for an admission ticket that is already expensive. They use the burden of time to force people to pay more for an expedited experience. FedEx and all the carriers do the same thing. If you want it fast, you’ll pay more. You’ll hire too many. The truth is that people should want to do better. Managers should show them the way and the workers should listen rather than allow procrastination to rule over the work that needs to be performed.
Rich Hoffman
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