One of the classic organisational book in the United Kingdom is ‘Parkinson’s Law. It was first published in 1955 and in matters of detail is somewhat dated. Its key precepts rain valid and I would certainly commend the book as an entertaining and educative read. On law states that organisations reach the peak of their physical state at the point when terminal decline has already set in.
This weekend there has been quite a bit of publicity in the United Kingdom about the future (or lack of) for public telephone call boxes. BT have argued that athird of their call boxes generate less than £1 in revenue each month
How does Parkinson’s Law apply to this? In 1998 around 25% of the UK’s population had a mobile phone. By February 2002, this had risen to 75%. Mobile phones, of course, make call boxes effectively redundant except in areas where there is no mobile phone reception. What else happened in 2002? You’ve guessed it. The number of call boxes reached its highest ever level.
Parkinson strikes again!
What struck me when I was last in London was not the number of people using phone boxes — as far as I can tell, the most prominent users seem to be those sticking cards advertising escort services — but that BT has, rather cleverly, in my view, turned the boxes into wireless access points, broadcasting Wi-Fi.
ReplyDeleteI do not know how many people actually use this Wi-Fi, but it struck me as being a clever use of infrastructure which is already deployed, even if no longer being used much for its original purpose.