More bureaucracy yields progressively less effectiveness.
Unattributed, and the honest label matters — it circulates widely without a traceable source. Parkinson's coefficient of inefficiency is the researched version of the same intuition.
In practice
- A department that adds a fourth approver to the purchase process finds the average purchase takes eleven days and the same things get bought.
- The researched version is Parkinson's coefficient of inefficiency, which puts a committee's point of ineffectiveness between 19 and 22 members.