Recent troubles in the Labour party were likened by more than one unsuccessful letter-writer to the Daily Telegraph to those of the army described by Petronius Arbiter nearly 2,000 years ago:
We trained hard; but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form into teams we would be reorganised. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganising; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralisation.
That is not by Petronius, of course. It is a sort of urban thumbnail myth circulating with the help of the internet. Nigel Rees traces its main source to Up the Organisation by Robert Townsend (1970), but a smaller tributary takes us as far back as 1968, to another management book by David Willings.
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