Tamar just a symptom of deeper illness plaguing HK

Scholar Cyril Northcote Parkinson’s essays from decades ago offer a dose of surprising insights that the city’s ailing bureaucracy should heed

Browsing in a second-hand bookshop last week, I came across a slim volume of essays by the late Cyril Northcote Parkinson.

A professor of history at the National University of Singapore and a prolific author, Parkinson is best remembered today for his eponymous law which states: “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

This phenomenon is familiar to everyone used to working to a deadline. It may sound paradoxical, but as any journalist can testify, it is far harder to write a 1,000-word feature if the deadline is next Tuesday than if it is at 4.30 this afternoon – even if the final article turns out exactly the same.

In a 1955 essay, Parkinson extrapolated from this simple axiom to explain why bureaucracies and their workload tend to expand independently of their actual output.

As an example, he cited Britain’s Royal Navy, wherein the number of civil administrators increased by 80 per cent between 1914 and 1928 even though the size of the fleet fell by 70 per cent. Eventually, Parkinson forecast, the navy’s admirals would exceed the number of its ships – a prediction realised in 2008.

In addition to the original essay, the collection I picked up last week contains eight other pieces dating from the 1950s, some of which have much to teach us about Hong Kong in 2012. For example, in his essay Injelititis, Parkinson explained whymediocre people manage to rise to the top of so many organisations.

The problem arises with the promotion of an executive who combines high concentrations of both incompetence and jealousy. Neither quality is rare, but together they can be lethal. The incompetent man, failing to accomplish anything himself, sets out to make sure that no one else achieves anything either, lest he ends up looking bad.

Anyone with genuine ability is ruthlessly eliminated, and “soundness” – a willingness to conform – rather than talent, becomes the criterion for promotion. Smugness supplants drive as the most obvious characteristic of corporate culture and the organisation soon sinks into paralysis, then ultimately coma.

Then there is the essay in which Parkinson examines governments around the world and concludes that the decision-making power of a cabinet tends to be inversely proportional to its size.

By this standard, Hong Kong’s 34-member Executive Council ranks alongside the cabinet of the former Soviet Union for effectiveness: It exists only for show.

But following last week’s news that the plumbing of the Hong Kong government’s newly opened HK$5.5 billion Tamar complex is infested with Legionnaires’ disease, the essay that really caught my eye was the one on organisations that build themselves grandiose new headquarters.

Parkinson noted that active, effective institutions tend to operate from haphazard, makeshift premises. There is plenty of evidence to bear this out. The first electronic computer was built in a garden shed; the first nuclear reactor in a disused squash court.

As Parkinson explained “During a period of exciting discovery or progress, there is no time to plan the perfect headquarters.”

Any organisation that has the time and resources to design and build itself lavish new headquarters is clearly suffering from hubris and is no longer focused on what it ought to be doing. As Parkinson argued: “Planning is a symptom of decay.”

There is no shortage of examples to back this assertion.

Parkinson cites the glories of St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, whose construction coincided with the Reformation, which saw much of Northern Europe shrug off papal rule, forever diminishing the influence of the Catholic Church.

Next there was the Palace of Versailles, built just as the French monarchy suffered a series of crushing military defeats in the War of the Spanish Succession, followed by a devastating financial crisis when the Mississippi Bubble burst. It never recovered.

Then there was New Delhi, possibly the ultimate symbol of imperial hubris, built by the British as the eternal capital of their empire in India, and completed less than 10 years before India’s independence in 1947.

The Tamar complex fits this pattern. Consulting engineers have long complained that officials failed woefully to meet the government’s own standards in commissioning its extravagant new headquarters. Now with the Legionnaire’s infestation in a building just three months old, we have evidence of incompetence on a monumental scale.

Parkinson could have warned them – and in fact he did. Tellingly, the flyleaf of the second-hand book I picked up last week is stamped with: “This book is the property of the Commerce and Industry Department, Fire Brigade Building, Hong Kong.”

Clearly, our officials now feel they are above such warnings.

tom.holland@scmp.com