Tag: Sandbagging

The Evil of Parkinson’s Law: At the heart of all inefficiency is the human tendency to procrastinate

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

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Evil of Sandbagging: Why a $359 Steak is good and well worth it

For many reasons, the problem of sandbagging came up over this last week on several fronts, and as I say in my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, and everywhere I go, all the time, one of the most evil things you can do in life is under commit and over perform, or at least, intend to.  Even under the most optimal conditions, people never end up overperforming once they realize their efforts’ expectations have been removed from them.  In short, this practice is called sandbagging, which I have never done as a person, and I never will.  Even under conditions where I was the only person doing the work, just good enough, or putting forth a lackluster effort was never acceptable.  This topic came up as people were telling stories of my past and why I used to ride bicycles to work while sick, through the snow, and under all kinds of horrendous conditions.  And from their point of view, it might have looked a little wild.  There are a lot of stories from my past that people like to tell because many of the things I do and have done are considered excessively pro-work.  So, of course, this provoked biblical reference because people seem to understand them as a common source of information, and I went on a long explanation that seemed to explain things well to those listening.  Keep in mind, the reason I hate organized labor so much is that they come from communist backgrounds, and, of course, they have a very anti-Christian view of the world.  Their practice as a communist organization is to withhold work from an employer to gain leverage for their financial position, and that is what Marxism is all about.  They are God haters and withdraw work to get some advantage in negotiating their terms.  This is why I call it evil; a lack of work is detrimental to the human race. 

I think a lot of people go to church, and they read the Bible.  But I don’t think they understand the point of many stories.  They learn the basics and believe that Jesus died on the cross for their sins so they can do whatever they want and still get into Heaven.  Which, of course, isn’t true.  It’s a fantasy for bad people to continue to be lazy slugs.  Most people do not understand the story of Cain and Able, the first kids of Adam and Eve, and why God was so insistent that the land of Canaan, named after the son Cain and all his descendants, why God wanted to punish the kid so emphatically.  It all started with two sacrificial offerings.  Able was a shepherd who offered God the best of his flock.  And God saw that he put that extra effort into what he dedicated to God and that Able was good.  On the other hand, Cain threw together just any old sacrifice as a farmer.  And what he gave to God was not the best of himself.  Sure, he gave what he was required, but he withheld his sacrifice, and that angered God immensely.  Something he never got over, as Yahweh of the Bible.  Now, God wasn’t mad because he wanted more.  He was the creator of the universe; he could have anything he wanted.  What he was angry at was the effort between the two boys.  One gave everything he had.  The other held back and sandbagged the efforts, keeping the best for himself.  Of course, Cain didn’t like being shown up by his brother Able, so he killed him, and this is something we see even today.  People who sandbag their efforts seek to destroy those who want to work hard and do well in the world.  And from this straightforward sentiment, most of the evil in the world is born.

Even in sexual practices, much of the evil in the world comes from the basic notion of sandbagging.  A man doesn’t want to work hard to have a wife.  So he hires a prostitute or goes to a strip joint.  Or develops a porn addiction.  A man doesn’t want to work hard to earn a woman’s attention, so he drinks too much and seeks to get her drunk so that she lowers her standards of him.  A person can’t deal with reality because they shrug away the pressure of responsibility, so they turn to drugs and alcohol for relief from social judgment.  Essentially, most of the evil done in the world comes from a sandbagging mentality.  And this is why each time God had to deal with the vile evil of the original sin, from Adam and Eve and their kids, it is the efforts of Cain that Yahweh sought to destroy.  Because Cain was lazy and a sandbagger, all his descendants had the same trait, which led to the massive amount of evil in the world before the flood came and tried to wipe them all away.  But then again, they would rise into Sodom and Gomorrah, the Tower of Babel, and even the Giants in the Land of Canaan that God told the Hebrew people to destroy completely.  The evil God was mad at was the lazy, sandbagging nature of the descendants of Cain.  Jesus, on the other hand, was born from the line of Seth, a third child that Adam and Eve had to replace their murdered son, Able.

That is always how I have seen work and why I say that lazy people who sandbag, those who hold back their good work for better pay or some social leverage, are evil.  I’ve never been a sandbagger in any way, and I find the trait repulsive in people.  Those who withhold their effort are like the descendants of Cain, and I don’t like them.  I may put up with them in the world.  But I don’t respect or enjoy them as people, and I think of them like Yahweh did in the Bible.  I understood the story of Cain and Able as a very young person and took it to heart, and I have always worked hard because there is goodness in the effort.  But people who like the bad guys in the world are the sandbaggers, and they defend their position by withholding good work for leverage in the world that is essentially evil and leads to most of the bad things humans do to each other, some of which have been described here.  Sandbagging leads to evil.  People who don’t like good work tend to desire to be bad and sell it like cheap cologne at a flea market.  And justify its cheapness as a bargain.  Rather than enjoy something at full price because they worked hard for it.  They are always looking for a way to give as little amount of something as possible, which makes the effort evil. 

This particular story of Cain and Able came up while I was dining with friends at the excellent restaurant Son of a Butcher at Liberty Center in Butler County, Ohio.  There are a lot of great steak restaurants in the city of Cincinnati, but many are saying the steaks at this place are the best.  These guests were well-traveled as we discussed nice restaurants in India, London, China, Paris, and Japan.  These people traveled everywhere and were used to the best. They told me that the steak they had at The Son of the Butcher was the best they had ever had.  I recommended one that cost over $359 each, and we bought a whole table full of them.  So we talked about why that steak was so much better than other steaks in nice restaurants worldwide.  And if you’ve ever been to the S.O.B. restaurant, you would know it’s a pretty crazy place.  But what it all comes down to at that restaurant is that they work hard in the front of the house and the back, in the kitchen.  The food shows they do a good job and give their best.  It’s worth $359, and a check for around $3k instead of a trip to Dollar General and a hamburger at Burger King.  It’s all food, but some comes from hard work, and some from just doing the basics and barely getting by.  So I told them the story of Cain and Able, and they understood, even if they hadn’t been thinking about hard work in quite the same way.  In many ways, it all comes down to embracing evil to make the least effort in the world.  Or to put forth the best and to expect the best, not because it’s expensive or fancy.  But because it is moral and sound, it represents God’s good intentions in the world and a people worth making an effort to do work in the world that everyone can and should be proud of.  Evil people, like Cain, would hear that people worked hard and went to a place like S.O.B. for a $359 steak, and they would plot a way to steal from them, just as Cain killed Able for making him look bad instead of giving their best and earning their right to get a nice steak dinner.  They would put more effort into plotting and scheming for collective bargaining contracts to do the least work to get as much for nothing as possible.  And they would do that because they are the bad guys in the world.  And for me, they deserve to be wiped away just as Yahweh has done in the past because they are worthless hindrances to the perpetuation of the human race. After all, they are evil sandbaggers.

Rich Hoffman

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