What Law would bear your name?
What’s your favourite saying that you invented?*
(* it might be that, like mine, yours are not *really* unique — but don’t worry about that for today :-) )
See others’ contributions at:
(Feel free also to share any in other peoples’ names that you regularly call upon :-) )
Here are mine:
Taylor’s Corollary to Pareto’s Law for projects
the first 20% of value takes 80% of budget/time. The other 80% of value takes the other 80% of the budget/time.
Taylor’s rule of proposal recursion
if a proposal requires you to stay up until 3am to get it done then, somehow, so will every major deliverable on that project.
Taylor’s law of bidding
the more you really really care about the proposal and the work, the less likely you are to win.
Taylor’s first rule of Workshop Time
you will think there is not enough content for the time. In fact, there is not enough time for the content
Taylor’s second rule of Workshop Time
if at point x you’re twenty minutes ahead of agenda, in thirty minutes, you will be thirty minutes behind.
(To which I received:
Pickering’s first rule of workshops: the sooner you get behind, the longer you have to catch up.)
Taylor’s Law of Tables Where One Side Of The Table Shows The Bad Old Stuff And The Other Side Shows The Good New Stuff
this means that someone is using propaganda to sell you something — either a product or a worldview
Taylor’s Law of Cognitive Hierarchies
Any time someone presents you with a hierarchy of adult development or cognitive capability levels, they believe they are at a higher level than you.
What would you put in your name?
Shout-out to Mel Conway who has a seriously good law named after him! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
(I find it amusing that he is called @Conways_Law on Twitter, since @ConwaysLaw was already taken — by an Irish law firm :-) )
And let’s also acknowledge Stigler’s Law of Eponymy; no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy
“Examples include Hubble’s law, which was derived by Georges Lemaître two years before Edwin Hubble, the Pythagorean theorem, which was known to Babylonian mathematicians before Pythagoras, and Halley’s Comet, which was observed by astronomers since at least 240 BC (although its official designation is due to the first ever mathematical prediction of such astronomical phenomenon in the sky, not to its discovery). Stigler himself named the sociologist Robert K. Merton as the discoverer of “Stigler’s law” to show that it follows its own decree, though the phenomenon had previously been noted by others.”
