Kenny Malone

You've had a day.

Your sleeves are still rolled up, actually.

You interviewed the professor.

Do you have a story for us?

That's the key to my success.

And yes, I do.

All right.

Let's do it.

So the first thing she told me was that Parkinson's Law started out as a joke.

That's Meng Zhu of the Johns Hopkins Business School.

In 1955, The Economist published Parkinson's essay as a kind of facetious argument.

In it, he talked about why bureaucracies almost always grow no matter how much work they're really doing.

I actually found some archival tape of the now deceased Professor Parkinson talking about the essay.

Nice, man.

Somehow you found someone that is more British than Professor Charles Goodhart.

This is very impressive.

That actually came off a 1960 vinyl album called Professor C. Northcote Parkinson Explains Parkinson's Law.

The blurb on the cover calls it, quote, delightfully unprofessorial.

Meng says that Parkinson's article was mostly about why bureaucracies grow, but the thing that really stuck with people, that really made it a big deal, was the opening line.

Mank says that even though it started as a joke, by the 1960s, people were actually treating this like a real law.