The laws of the office revisited

Do you remember a long time ago,

an episode that you and I did together, where I can fast, yep, to a minor. - A crime. - No. - That's to a crime? - I would say mouth-feasants,

I could fast of to some mouth-feasants, whatever. - You broke a rule. - I definitely broke a rule. - Fast off. - You know, potato potato.

- Any exactly where you're going. - Do you remember that episode? - Of course. - Well, we were like, not scanning groceries. - Well, we don't have to get into the specifics

'cause we're about to run the episode. - Okay, okay, okay. - That is about, okay. - Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember.

“It's like the one and only time can you broke a rule, I think.”

- Certainly the only one I've confessed to on tape. And then, do you remember what that episode was about, overall? - No, what is it?

- Well, so the episode was about,

my crime I contend and will contend in this episode we're about to run was about incentives and incentives going rogue. - Perverse incentives, yeah. - So, this episode was a bunch of those. And it was from a long time ago,

but may I share the very exciting news, all right, ready? I'm gonna show you something, because this relates to the new Planet Money Book. Are you ready? - Okay. - Look at this.

- Oh, the laws of the office episode. - This is a poster, like an industrial safety poster that you-- - It looks like - Yeah, it's your water cooler. - Yeah, it's your water cooler. - A hundred percent, but this is custom made

for only very special Planet Money Book buyers. And it is the laws of the office. It's the laws that you're about to hear in this episode, but put into a useful water cooler, like safety poster. And you can point to your colleagues

obnoxiously when you're like, no, no, you're really, really doing Parkinson's law right now, or really good arts law going on over there. What do you think? - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

“So this is like, wash the dishes in the, you know, sink,”

post-stick, you know, version. - Yes. - It's like a version of that. - So, like, don't be that employee. Don't be that co-worker. - Yes, and all of these particular laws,

as you will hear, have some kind of economic backing to them. That's what today's episode is about, but the important information here is, this is a special edition poster. Only available, limited edition,

only for people who pre-order the Planet Money Book. And the way that you do that is you go to PlanetMoneyBook.com and if you miss the link, don't worry, we will say it plenty more times. Okay, so here's the episode that inspired the poster

that you can get when you pre-order the Planet Money Book. - I'm excited to hear it. - It was good. It was very fun. Here you go. Here's the episode.

- This is Planet Money from NPR. - Sarah, did you look up the thing? - I liked of the thing. The statute of limitations in Pennsylvania for misdemeanors is two years.

- Three years, that's it? - Yeah, so can you tell us the story? - Okay, yeah, but let us not do it here. - Let us do it here. - Kenny Malone has brought us to a drug store

that has a self-checkout. - I used to be a cashier at a grocery store when I was about 16 years old. - Oh baby, can you? - No idea, dude.

I looked like I was 11 years old at that. - Oh, I can see that. I can picture it. - It was bad. - Hey, I learned that my managers have started to keep track

of the performance of all of the cashiers. - Like how friendly you are to the customers? - No, no, no, no, no. They were measuring our items scanned per minute. And then I believe they were posting those

for the other cashiers to see. - Okay. - So I'm a little competitive. I'm also a goodie two shoes. And I'm like, I gotta be faster.

I gotta get my bosses, these numbers. And then I get this item that won't scan.

- Oh, like cilantro, cilantro never scans.

- At the grocery store. I was in a ton of cilantro and rural Pennsylvania. I think it probably was like cat food. Cat food was weirdly hard to scan. The label got all torn up in crap.

Anyway, I'm trying to scan this thing. And all I can think is like, oh my God, my items per minute is plummeting, plummeting. And then finally, I just let it go down the register. Unscanned.

And I grab the next item and I move on. - So you gave the cat food away for free? - Yes, technically I suppose we would have to say I stole the cat food, but to be a good employee.

“- That's why you asked me to check the petty theft”

less in Pennsylvania. - I was just trying to be a good employee. I was trying to get good numbers. And I got good numbers. My items per minute were, I believe,

the best in the entire grocery store. So. - Okay, but when your boss has said speed things up, I'm sure that they didn't mean break the law in the process. - Yes, and that is the point of this story.

I may have been breaking the normal law, but I have since learned that I was simply following a different law known as good heart's law. - Good heart's law. - Good heart's law.

It essentially states that if a company decides to measure something, the employees are gonna find a way to give you good numbers, you just may not like how they do it. (upbeat music)

- Hello, and welcome to Planet Mani.

- And I'm Kenny Malone and there are dozens of these laws

or rules or principles or whatever you wanna call them. - Like, good heart's law. Also, the Peter Principal Parkinson's Law. Today on the show, we take a look at these laws that claim to explain just about everything

that can go wrong in an office from bad managers to terrible procrastination. - So, yeah, this episode originally ran in 2018, and we just love this episode. It is one of those where once you hear these laws,

you're gonna see them everywhere. You cannot help it.

“- And so that's how we thought we'd turn these laws”

of the office into like a real poster that you can hang in your office for your manager to see. - And again, the way to get that is to pre-order the Planet Mani book at planetmanibook.com. - So, today on the show, we'll hear the laws of the office

along with a new one we found.

And we hear from 2018 Kenny and 2018 Sarah, along with Alexi Horowitz-Gazzi, back when he was just a baby producer at Planet Mani. - Oh, we were all babies, Sarah. We had so much energy, so much energy.

(upbeat music) (bell ringing) (bell ringing) (bell ringing) - Hello, hi, is this Professor Goodart?

- Yeah, speaking. - And you are Professor Goodart of Goodart's Law. - I am indeed. - Do you proudly wear that moniker? - Um, I'm slightly mixed feelings.

- Mm-hmm. - This is Charles Goodart,

“economist, former advisor to England Central Bank,”

Professor Emeritus at London School of Economics. And about 50 years ago, Charles Goodart wrote a paper about monetary policy that included in the introduction a fateful little line. - It says ignoring Goodart's law

that any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes. - Okay, hard to understand, but he was making a very narrow point about how measuring one tiny slice of the economy

seems to mess up that slice of the economy. - Goodart's law was actually a rather goking side comment. It was not intended at that to be taken all that seriously. - But over time, it was. People took Goodart's law out of the world

of monetary policy and came up with new formulations of the law. - Uh, for example, once you target a measure, it ceases to be a good measure. I think it's one of them.

- That's correct. The point is really fairly simple. - Yeah.

“- Let's say that one of the measures of a hospital”

is that the waiting time is kept short. - This is a real example. The British government started pressuring its hospitals to see emergency patients faster within four hours. And sure enough, wait times dropped.

Just not always for the right reasons.

- Hospitals started kind of gaming the statistics and one of the most outrageous examples was this practice where patients would be asked to wait inside an ambulance until the hospital was absolutely sure that patient could be seen

within the four hour time limit. Then the patient came in. - Another way of stating Goodart's law, be careful what you measure because your employees are going to make it happen.

- Indeed, and they will do it by reallocating resources to achieve that one measure and fail to meet non-targeted measures because resources will have been allocated away from them. - When you first introduced Goodart's law,

you had a very specific application. - That's correct. - This is not exactly the same. How do you feel about these broader formulations? - Well, I know I'm perfectly happy with them.

I know all publicity is good. - That's right, but in some ways it's a bit disappointing that I'm probably best known for what is a jock of the comment. After some 60 years of doing more considered academic detailed work,

but we try and less known. - And so Sarah, I feel like we should introduce a corollary to Goodart's law here. If you decide to name a law, it will become a law,

and you may not like what it does to your legacy. (upbeat music) - Hello, hello, check one two, Kenny Malone here, walking up to the desk of Sarah Gonzalez.

- Hey. - Okay, so it's like what? - 9/30 in the morning, Thursday, November 8th, and we are supposed to be working on the next segment of this episode.

- And we're not even close to finished. - No, we're supposed to tell you about the so-called Parkinson's law, which states essentially that work expands to the time a lot. - So for example, Kenny and I have an entire week

to finish this Parkinson's law segment.

that should really only take like one day's worth of work.

“- Probably, yeah, but we have a whole week.”

So that means we're probably gonna spend time like looking for archival tape that we're probably not gonna use. - We are gonna do extra interviews that if we're being honest, there's not room for in this piece.

- I always do that. - We have a week, and so the work will expand to fill the week. - But today we're gonna try to use Parkinson's law to help get this done.

- And the reporter for this segment, though, he does not know it yet, is planet money's newest producer, Alexie Horowitz-Gazi, and we are waiting for him to get into the office right now. - You're from, yeah.

- Alexie. - Yes, hey man. - Hey. - So Alexie, you just got into work? - Yes.

- It's your coming to the studio with me. - Come in, come in, come in. - Okay, all right. So we have a professor on the line right now who's an expert in Parkinson's law.

- Hello, professor. - Hi. - And I told you that I was gonna do the interview. We want you to do the interview. And furthermore, we want you to do the whole segment.

There's one catch. The time allotted for you to finish this work is one day.

“You have to finish this by the end of the day.”

- All right, let's do it. He's literally rolling up his sleeves. - That's right. - That's good. You can throw it, you can throw the headphones on.

- Professor, can you hear me? - Yes. - Great. Okay, so maybe just to start out with if you could interview. - Well, we are back in the studio.

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. - 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.

- Yes.

- So it always started with Humorist Essay,

published in the Economist in 1955. The author was C. Noscoe, Parkinson, who was a British naval historian. - That's Fang Zhiu of the Johns Hopkins Business School. In 1955, the Economist published Parkinson's Essay

as a kind of facetious argument. And 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 archival tape.

- Oh, you actually read as archival tape. - Nice man. - It was unserious in form. And it might have been sent to a humorous magazine instead, and I think more wisely,

I sent it to the London Economist. - Somehow you found someone that is more British than Professor Charles Goodhardt. This is very impressive. - That actually came off a 1960 vinyl album called Professor C. Northcoat, Parkinson explains Parkinson's law.

The blurb on the cover calls it, quote, "delightfully unprofessorial." - That should be planet many slogan.

“I feel like that's what we're going for.”

- Makes as 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.

- So he summarized the law in the first sentence of his essay.

That basically says, "work expands." So as to feel the time available for its completion. - Makes as that even though it started as a joke, by the 1960s, people were actually treating this like a real law. So you had psychologists and economists

coming up with experiments in the laboratory to try and figure out if people would expand their work to fit changing deadlines. It seemed like they actually did. And then you had other people going out

and trying to find Parkinson's law in the wild. - Field tests across a variety of contexts, such as wood, harvesters, steel industry, school system. - Meng and her colleagues have actually studied this.

And sure enough, they found that when they gave their subjects longer deadlines, they expanded the work to fit those deadlines. And she says that by now Parkinson's law has become a storied part of cubicle law.

It has been a man topic for management training. How do you fight Parkinson's law? - How do you fight Parkinson's law? - Well, she says there are few ways.

First, you could shorten your deadlines.

You know, something about that. Second, you could offer a reward for fast task completion. - Are you asking us for a reward right now? This is a holdup.

- Like a stick up? - Like how much money do we have in our pocket? - I'm tear pockets turn them out. - I don't have any money. Oh, I do. - I do. I don't even have my wallet.

- I do. I'll give you all the money in my wallet. - Oh, I got a whole dollar. - Thanks. - Good work, man. - Made it rain.

This is backed up by science. Meng says that even though Parkinson's law started as a joke, it's been documented through a lot of different studies. But more importantly, she says it just

makes intuitive sense. - Yeah, that's the thing. I think people intuitively agree

- Oh, Meng? Meng?

I think we just got cut off.

“I think that means that our interview expanded”

to the time we had a lot of it for it. (laughing) - It's your studio. It's I'm actually cut out. - It did.

(laughing) - Alexa, you did it. You finished the task at hand in one day instead of a week. - It was exactly as good

as if we had done it in a week too. - Better. - Hurray! - Thank you, Alexa. - Thanks, Kenny. Thanks, Sarah.

- Okay, this is 2026 Kenny popping in now because obviously, we heard this segment. And Alexa Horowitz-Gazi is now one of the co-hosts of planet money, so graduated from producer to co-host. And Alexa, obviously, we needed to bring you back

into the studio to deepery find this. Eight years later, but deepery, if yes, very happy to be here, Kenny. It's like a therapy session. - All right, so eight years on,

what do you think about being pulled in to prove Parkinson's law point? How was that?

“- On the one hand, I still get like nightswets”

about that level of in the moment stress. But, you know, on the other hand, I think it really, it really taught me you just gotta get out there and talk to people and make it make sense.

So, on the whole, feel pretty good about it. - Okay, okay, that's a very positive review. We obviously, we give you a little bit more time on episodes these days. And I do feel like I haven't seen you in months

because we've given you a lot of time on a very specific project. Alexis working on a series based on wait for it listeners. The planet money book.

Yes, it is, it is a little bit coincidence that Alexis here, but it does work out great. - Not spawncon. Can you tell us a little bit about the book?

- Yeah, so the book basically

does a version of what we do here on the show. It applies in economics lens and a playful, whimsical sensibility to looking at everything in the economic world. Everything from tiny choices you make every day.

Like, what to eat for breakfast to who you pick for your life partner? What do you do with your free time? So, there's a lot of great stories that money listeners will recognize

in a ton of new reporting and new stories that they're going to love. - Okay, so April 7th book, it is a deadline also.

“If you want to get the poster inspired by this episode”

that you're listening to right now, you do need to pre-order the book by April 7th. All right, Alexis, thank you for joining us. Again, for like the second or third time, I've lost track.

- Thank you, Kenny. - I'll come back every time. Okay, so back eight years to our next law. - Okay, the next law is called the Peter Principle. This one says that in a hierarchy,

every employee tends to rise to their level of incompetence. If you're good at your job, your boss notices, promotes you and then if you're good at that job, it happens again and you keep getting promoted until you get promoted to a job that you are not good at.

To find out what that feels like, we asked our boss. - Oh, okay. - I'm going to remember this, and you will refuse just a few weeks. - Just kidding, we all think Alex is really good at his job, but Alex, we asked you to find someone

who had the self-awareness to realize that they were falling victim to the Peter Principle. - Yes, and I found Stephanie Burn. - This story starts almost two years ago.

I was doing a job that I love and never felt like I was even working.

I loved it so much. - Stephanie was a social media specialist for a large university, and this is a kind of behind-the-scenes job, which she liked.

She got to find good stories about people around campus and then figure out how to share them on social media. It took creativity. She had a lot of freedom. She got to work independently.

And these were the things she was looking for in a job. - It just felt that it was somewhere around it's really comfortable. It really felt that that brought a lot of strengths that I have. - Phase one of the Peter Principle right here.

She is doing great. She knows that she's good at some things, and not others. - And then I was asked of the interested in this figure role. - Right, promotion.

Totally normal. This is how jobs work. - Now she's in charge of web content for the university. It's a lot of time and meetings.

And part of her job is to tell other people how to do their jobs. So this is not behind the scenes anymore. - I'm an introvert. So having to stand up in a group of people

super uncomfortable for me from the start. I had to do monthly trainings. And I just felt sick before that every time. - And she becomes the person who everyone brings their problems to

asking her to find a solution. - I remember one time having to want me in the cafeteria about something they didn't like being put on the spot. And you know, holding my lunch

and standing there not sure what to do or how to handle it. I am terrible at this job. - There are millions of Stephanie's everywhere in every industry.

- Right, just because you're a good teacher doesn't mean you're going to be a good principal

doesn't mean you're going to be

“going to be good at bringing in new clients”

to the law firm. - This is the Peter Principal. It comes from a bestselling book back in the early '70s by a professor Lawrence J. Peter. And it was actually sort of kind of a joke.

- Of course, all of our laser jokes. - This one was satire. And the point the doctor Peter was trying to make was look around. This is the explanation

for why so many people are bad at their jobs. Like so many mistakes just happen over and over again. And why so many people hate their jobs. - Like Stephanie Burton.

- And Stephanie is rare and that she is self-aware enough to know it and admit it and also to do something about it. Stephanie is fighting the Peter Principal by stepping down from her new bigger job.

- Today is actually my very last day in it.

- She isn't going to quit.

She's going to demote herself. She went and talked to her boss and she said, "Hey, I want a job like my old one. The one that I love, the one that I was good at." - Yeah, you know, I don't know that a lot of people

admit that they should be demoted. But I think for me, it makes me happier. It makes me feel like I can do a better job. And I feel smarter at what I do because I know my job so well now.

- Self-demotion, that is one way to beat the Peter Principal. - Okay, nice job. Alex, good job reporting, but don't get any ideas.

“I think there are some important meetings you have to go to.”

I think it's payroll day today. I'm going to go find Kenny. Tell him to come on back in here. Thanks, let's go. - Thanks, Alex.

After the break, we go searching for a law that did not start as a joke. - All right. For this last law, we figured we need something that did not just start out as a joke

about crappy management or lousy procrastination. - Our final law comes from Alice Evans. - And I've got a long-born title that you should cut. I'm a lecturer at King's College London. My title is a lecturer in the social...

- Well, she told us we could cut it. What you really need to know about Alice is that she is the kind of professor who, when a brand new World Bank report comes out, she lived tweets her reactions

as if she is watching Game of Thrones. - And the love that Alice told us about is pretty well documented, but as far as we know, it doesn't have a name, but here's how Alice explains it. - Social change accelerates

when we see that others are changing. - In other words, people want to change.

They just want to see other people do it first.

- But it's process of a snowball. - Yeah. - But the tricky thing is how do you get that snowball to move in the first place? So let me give you four examples.

- Four examples. This is great. - You can't picture inches it trying to, like, so there's brilliant intervention in Uganda. - This was an intervention by Innovations

for Poverty Action IPA. - Uganda was struggling with domestic violence. It was happening at alarming rates and people didn't seem to be reporting abuse. Something needed to change.

- But, per this law with no name, you shouldn't just tell people to do something.

“You should show them that other people are doing it.”

And so IPA ran a video campaign doing essentially that. - So the video did not tell people that gender based violence is wrong. All it showed is people going out reporting

and being supported by their community. And what they found within six months is this led to a rapid increase in reporting, a big reduction in gender based violence. - There are a bunch of examples of

changing social norms this way. For example, college binge drinking. - Instead of putting up posters that said binge drinking is bad. Researchers put up signs that essentially said,

"Hey, actual statistics show that your classmates don't drink as much as you think they drink." And that approach seemed to work. - So this approach, it occurred to me, I think I have a problem that this could help fix.

So Alice, I know that typically your job deals with very important global political high stakes issues, but would you mind talking to be about the fact that known at my office washes dishes?

- Shoot! - It's okay. - Yeah, let's go. - People in our office are leaving dirty dishes in the sink all the time.

And so my idea was like, what if we worked with the office manager to put up posters that didn't say, "Hey, you should do dishes." What if instead they said,

"Hey, did you know everybody else does the dishes a bunch?" - And Alice was like, "No, this approach only works if you are actually telling the truth." - So I wouldn't run a fake campaign,

I think that's really dangerous, because if people realize that the office manager is putting up fake posters, then that could undermine trust in the office and a fake source of other things.

- That's a good point. - So I wouldn't do that, Kenny. Can I draw parallels with Rural Zambia here? - Please. - So for example in Rural Zambia.

- Alice says that in remote parts of Zambia, healthcare workers often feel like no one cares what they're doing. This curb's worker morale makes it hard for them

- But one thing that really helped was when supervisors started awarding a trophy for people's work. There wasn't even money attached. It was just a trophy.

- Just that sense of being appreciated, people seeing that you're making your effort and people rewarding that.

“And I think that's something that we did learn”

from with regards to your dishes problem, Kenny.

- You're saying I should make an amazing

dishwashing trophy. Is that what you're saying? - I think that could be cool, yeah. - I 100% can expense a dishwashing trophy for this story. - Yeah.

- Those are your laws of the office folks and once more, we have turned them into a wonderful poster. If you Google OSHA safety poster, that's what it looks like.

Because we don't have a place for you to Google our poster. But you can see what it would look like. And again, this is part of our book, planet money, a guide to the hidden forces that shape your life.

If you pre-order the book before April 7th, you get the poster as a free gift. As a thank you for pre-ordering the book.

- And the whole book in general

was just filled with like these kinds of visual jokes. There's a chart on toothberry inflation. There's like a whole love advice column from real economies. It's truly, it's like colorful and bright to the book. And really, it's just like a joy to read.

So go to planetmoneybook.com for info about the poster and about our book tour in 12 cities. Because that's right, planetmoney is going on tour on a real book tour. - The book tour is for real, everybody. It's like book, talk, meet life, planet money,

meet, meet, meet and greet. Like, it's all of the things. - I'm hosting one in LA with co-host Nick Bowman, and you guys know this person. He's a celebrity, Jack Corbett, our famous...

- Oh, real? - Jack, Jack Guy, so, you know, if you're in LA. - That's the LA one. - That's the LA one. - I will be in San Francisco.

He's going to be very fun.

“I believe we have one of the co-founders.”

It's gonna be there, one of the most cut-a-gauge AI companies. So we've got some questions for anthropic. I'll also be in Portland, Seattle. - It's been some time with us. And you can find ticket information for these live events

and a link to where to buy the book at planetmoneybook.com or you can click on the link in the show notes. - This episode was produced by Alexi Horowitz-Gazi. It was edited by Brian D'Eurstep. - And our competent supervising producer is Alex Goldmark.

- If you have a law that you think we should know about, you can email us, we are [email protected]. - And special things to form our planetmoney intern

Shane McKee and he handled the most important part of this episode.

- If we got about this. So I have a weird request. I'm trying to make a trophy with a golden mug on top. - Yeah, of course we asked Shane the planetmoney intern to go and custom order a congratulations.

The kitchen is clean, trophy. - Yeah, so all it needs to say is the dishes are all done. - Shane bought a five foot tall trophy. - And then let's throw an exclamation point on the end. - It had a real mug spray painted gold on the very top.

- And when the dishes were clean, this giant trophy would show up. If they weren't, the trophy disappeared. - We left a recorder out and we just let people figure it out. - It's rolling here. - So there's this giant ass trophy.

- It has fork and knife tape to it. So I imagine it's an award for eating of some kind. - I feel like a psychological experiment is being conducted without my consent. - Oh, I bet this is for the planetmoney podcast about office problems.

- So you think, yeah? - Uh-oh, there's no trophy. - There's a dirty spoon in the sink. - It's not mine, but I will wash it. - So that we can get the trophy back.

- The dishes are all done, yes. - But because I see the trophy, I feel like I'm being tricked by a trophy. - Just a trophy would make me want to do that. - It's interesting.

- Maybe I'm not going to wash any dishes. - The trophy is disappeared again. - There's some dishes in the sink. Supervasing producer Alex Goldmark is doing them. - With a big smile because I know I'm going to get a trophy.

- Ah! - This was quite unscientific, but I'm just going to say it.

“I think there were way fewer unwashed dishes.”

- Yeah, it seemed to work. - I'm Kenny Malone. - And I'm Sarah Gonzalez. Thanks for listening. - To this episode was all over the place.

It's Kenny Breaking a rule. It's a Lexi like Crash Courseing. It's making a trophy. - Yeah, it's great. It's a great episode.

- I don't remember it at all.