Volume 3 · The Corner Cabin · Essay 139

Laws of Human Stupidity

They call it a law, though no parliament passed it. Laws of Human Stupidity is a law of behaviour, and it enforces itself.

Laws of this kind are really observations that refused to go away. Enough people bumped into the same wall that someone finally painted a sign. This page is the sign.

Consider the wedding caterer. Fifty dishes, three hundred guests, one small kitchen. He does not motivate his crew with speeches; he sequences the work so that nobody is ever waiting on anybody.

An organisation is only a group of people who have agreed, for now, to pull in roughly the same direction. That is all. A small tool, honestly kept, beats a large one admired.