Obituaries : C. Northcote Parkinson; His Law Still Holds

C. Northcote Parkinson, the economist who fashioned a philosophy from idleness, died Wednesday in a clinic near his home in Canterbury in southeast England.

The Associated Press quoted family members as saying he was 83. The cause of death was not announced.

Son of an an artist father and a musician mother, Parkinson was trained as a naval historian. But his fame came instead through a quirky article he offered the London Economist in 1955: “How Seven Employees Can Be Made to Do the Work of One.”

In it he offered the now legendary maxim that came to be known as Parkinson’s law: “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

His World War II experiences on the general staff of the British War Office had led him to conclude that not only does work expand to fill that time but that bosses additionally create work for each other.

After also deducing that work expanded to occupy all the people available, he concluded, “somewhat to my surprise, that work which could be done by one man in peacetime was being given to about six in wartime.”

“I think,” he wrote, “this was mainly because there wasn’t the same opportunity for other people to criticize. You could always riposte: ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on?’ ”

He next reached back into maritime archives and discovered that between 1914 and 1928 the number of British naval vessels had decreased by more than two-thirds but the number of admiralty officials had doubled.

The melding of a scholar’s dry approach with a satirist’s humor made Parkinson’s aphorisms immediately popular around the world, even though the author--a respected teacher by profession-- maintained his anonymity for a time.

A New York Times critic noted that Parkinson’s tone ranged “from savage glee to coldly amused brutality.”

In 1957 Parkinson published a collection of his essays as “Parkinson’s Law,” in which he lampooned bureaucratic institutions.

He tweaked committees, saying that five is the optimum number a group should have and that groups larger than that should break into subcommittees of five or less to get any work done at all.

He then wrote the Law of Triviality, in which he suggested that the less something new is going to cost a firm, the more time will be spent discussing it because executives know more about $10 wastebaskets than they do about $100-million nuclear reactors. He also concluded that the more splendid an office’s decor, the more torpid the company that owns it. Another observation was that executives are so constrained at office cocktail parties they almost always mingle from left to right.

Among Parkinson’s fans was Alfred Speer, minister of arms production for Adolf Hitler, who dined with Parkinson in Spandau Prison in 1969.

“Speer claims he discovered my principles before I did,” Parkinson said later.

The BBC created a musical version of Parkinson’s Law, with an overture scored for typewriters. The law also won Parkinson an appointment as a visiting professor at Harvard University.

“Although he regarded most Americans as illiterate,” the Times of London said in its obituary Thursday, “Parkinson made an exception with Walt Disney, whom he considered a genius--’not a very well educated genius, but a genius all the same.’ ”

“His attempts to interest Disney in film rights to a screenplay based on the law foundered because no part could be found in it for the studio’s latest signing, Hayley Mills,” The Times said.

He was born Cyril Northcote Parkinson at Barnard Castle in northern England, and earned a doctorate at King’s College, London.

In 1935 he was elected a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and three years later took up a post as schoolmaster. In 1950 he was appointed Raffles Professor of History at Malaya University in Singapore, where he remained until 1958.

Parkinson wrote more than 60 books, including eight novels and two biographies of fictional characters, C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower and P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves.

In an interview with People magazine, Parkinson said his major philosophical contribution “has been to show that the vacuum caused by silence fills up with nonsense, innuendo and abuse.”