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Griffith’s Law You’ve heard of Parkinson’s Law, Sod’s Law and various other codifications of observations about human affairs. How about this one?
One of the comments to an earlier post of mine, made by Mark Griffith, seemed to embody such a fundamental truth of commercial life that it deserves to be a law in its own right.
“Speaking as someone from Manchester, I can tell you the Guardian is not the only Mancunian organisation to get silly after moving to the capital.
“Marks and Spencers’ troubles really date from the shift of its head office from Manchester to London.
“Come to think of it, I believe the headquarters of the hyper-merde bank Credit Lyonnais were relocated to Paris, not Lyon, a couple of decades ago, before the debt disaster really took off.
“Could we have a theme here?”
Can readers think of any other examples?
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Motown Records when it moved from Detroit to Los Angeles.
“This Morning” (Richard and Judy) definitely got worse after moving from Liverpool to London. Or maybe it was just me who got bored with it.
Rot!
1) Credit Lyonnais was crap because it first nationalized in 1945, and when “The Florentine” alias Francois Mitterand became president he appointed his crony Trichet to fund other socialist friends like that crook Tapie.
As far as I know the CL HQ is still Lyon.
2) As a Liverpool fan, I can only say “sour grapes” to Mancunian whinges about moving out of Manchester. Especially after last weekend’s football: 2-0 to the real Reds.
3) London is objectively the greatest city on Earth. I’m sure the Guardian would be EVEN WORSE if it had stayed in that grimy has-been crime sink.
On a serious note, Parkinson’s Law is actually a series of laws, one of which states that an organisation is doomed the moment it builds itself a momumental headquarters. The best example is the Lutyens design for New Delhi, built as the symbol of the British Raj, with the scheme in place in 1929, just in time for the launch of the Congress Party’s demand for independence and a year before the civil disobedience campaign began.
Well, as a counterexample, the NFL’s popularity shot up after it moved its headquarters from Philadelphia to New York.
A business analyst friend held a golden rule about companies (whether they move city or not): whenever a fountain or fish tank appears in the lobby – sell!
With reference to
“an organisation is doomed the moment it builds
itself a momumental headquarters”
and…
“whenever a fountain or fish tank appears in the lobby – sell!”
I invite readers to study the recent history of GlaxoSmithKline.
Since that firm built and moved into its Gormenghastian new Head Office on the A4 at Brentford – complete with fountain(s), fishpool(s), and much much more, the share price has halved and shows no sign of recovering.
Parkinson, thou shouldst be living at this hour…
Well, I’m flattered by the comparison! A law all of my own! Of course, Motown’s move to LA – brilliant example.
I’ve long been a fan of C. Northcote Parkinson, and I must be the first to agree that any move-to-the-capital rule is a special case of his law that the completion of grand purpose-built headquarters [one of his examples being the pre-war League of Nations] is a very good sign of imminent collapse.
Vigorous stuff Antoine! Here is a page giving Credit Lyonnais’ HQ address as Paris. Naturally, the actual http://www.creditlyonnais.com is so pompous that its history page demands a Flash animation download before you can check any dates.
However the CL legal notice does say the registered office of Credit Lyonnais is Rue de la Republique, Lyon, so maybe you’re right, Antoine. I seem to recall that all the important stuff moved to Paris a couple of decades ago, so I suppose to get my appendix to one of Parkinson’s Laws off the ground, we have to decide what “head office moves to capital city” really means! After all the Manchester Guardian still exists as an entity [a kind of news digest sold in Europe mixing bits of International Herald Tribune, The Guardian, & a couple of other papers], so maybe there’s a sense in which the Guardian is “still” [but not really] in Manchester?
Can anyone trace a related claim by someone that Washington, DC started to dominate the US only after the development of cheap, good air-conditioning made it bearable in the summer months? Lots of Americans before WWII felt they could ignore the federal capital and national offices that had moved there. Any confirmations on this version of events?
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How about legislators?
Eh?