40/ The under-appreciated laws of business
I've written 40 of these so maybe it's time to share with your friends?
Goodhart’s law is best understood via rephrasing from Marilyn Strathern:
'Goodhart's Law' – That every measure which becomes a target becomes a bad measure – is inexorably, if ruefully, becoming recognized as one of the overriding laws of our times. Ruefully, for this law of the unintended consequence seems so inescapable. But it does so, I suggest, because it is the inevitable corollary of that invention of modernity: accountability
Conway’s law. I would summarize this as “your org chart explains your IT infrastructure.” This isn’t a bad or good thing, but it does often provide the best heuristic to answer this question “why on earth did we build it this way?” because the answer is usually found in “well at the time the CTO had 4 direct reports at the time”. Also this unfairly (in my mind) penalizes tech because tech infra lasts a lot longer than other org-chart driven decisions which are only really expressed in powerpoint.
Twyman’s law - "Any figure that looks interesting or different is usually wrong" came into my life thanks to Ronny Kohavi. Smart guy. Good book (all profits to charity, hit that buy button). The passive-aggressive version of this I used before was “statistics are the watercolors of math”
Parkinson’s law: work expands to fill available time.
later expanded by a different Parkinson, with Parkinson’s law of Triviality, which has ruled all of our lives at one point or another: “The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum [of money] involved."
A related academic law is Sayre’s law: "In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake." This has my favorite origin story because it is borne of a quote from Dr Sayre: "The politics of the university are so intense because the stakes are so low".
Hofstadter’s law - “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.”
Also shoutout Taimur for sharing one of his Dad’s laws: the effectiveness of an organization is inversely proportional to the thickness of their office carpets.