Parkinson’s Other Law

Many people are aware of Parkinson’s Law: work expands to fill the time allotted to its completion. Not as many are aware of C. Northcote Parkinson’s other law: once any large organization has completed its grand new headquarters, it marks the peak of its influence and power. It’s all downhill from there. That’s what I think of when anybody mentions Apple Park, as Rob Pegoraro does in his Washington Post op-ed:

Apple Park certainly sounds like a pleasant place to work, if not to have worked on. Journalists who have visited it — I haven’t — have said as much.

But if the company wanted to craft a target for resentment among its loyal customers, it could not have done much better than to put this circle of glass and metal on the map.

At his talk in Washington, Ive made a case that by putting designers across multiple disciplines in the same space, Apple Park will yield better products down the line. (Possibly years down the line: The Apple Watch, designed with zero input from Steve Jobs, shipped almost three years after Jobs’s death in October 2011.)

“I can’t imagine another time in the future where we get to try and make something that is for us,” he said. “Not to be indulgent in a sort of ghastly, selfish way; we made it for us, to try to help us do better.”

But the Apple customers of today can’t caress Apple Park’s wood paneling, stride uninterrupted through its threshold-free doorways or treat themselves to a non-soggy pizza at one of its desks courtesy of that patented pizza box.

Maybe Apple’s management will prove me wrong and Apple’s mystique isn’t synonymous with Steve Jobs. Nothing the company is doing has persuaded me otherwise.