We Trained Hard

We trained hard . . . but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.

This is a modern sentiment usually atrributed to Petronius. One hint that it is not a real quotation is the variety apparent in the attributions. This merely reflects the lack of any real Latin source (and the complete ignorance of many who use the quotation). Some examples of attributions I have found just on the web include:

Gaius Petronius, arbiter, A.D.66 (just before he retired from arbitering)
210 BC by Petronius the Arbiter, who was a famous satirist during the reign of Nero (the emperor famous for being born more than a century before his own father!)
Galus Petronius, AD 57 (who came from Gallia, perhaps?)
Petronius (256 B.C.) (Wow! He was MUCH older than Nero!)
Petronius the Elder, 1st Century A.D. (though we have no idea who the Petronius Younger was)
Gaius Petronius, 65 AD
Petronius Arbiter, about AD 30
Petronius Arbiter, ?? AD
Petronius Arbiter, 210 BC
Petronius, 100 BC (I just love the guessing about the dates!)
Petronius Arbiter - Greek Navy - 210 BC (He emmigrated to Greece and joined the Navy when Nero was contemplating who is father would be in a couple of hundred years time)
Gaius Petronius, a Roman centurion in 200BC (Oops! Sorry, he didn't emmigrate, and he joined the Army instead, though how he went from favorite of Nero to a mere centurion is a long story!)
Petronius Arbiter, 201 B.C. (Well, 210, 201, 120, 102, some such combination BC will work!)
Gaius Petronius, Centurian, Rome, 1st Century. (Was he really in the army? Or is a centuriAn something else?)
Calus Petronius Arbiter (1st Century, BC) (Oh, I see, not from Gallia, but a pretty boy -- Kalos!)
Gains Petronius Arbiter in the 1st Century A.D. (He was an early capitalist no doubt!)

There is also some variation in the quotation itself, but all versions are sufficiently alike that they reveal that the variation is not a result of differing English translations of a Latin original, but merely the result of widespread sharing of the same faked "translation" in the course of which variations entered the tradition, as usually happens with such fictions. The published source (although it reproduces only a part of the usual quotation) appears to be Robert Townsend's Up the Organization (New York: Knopf, 1970), page 162:

I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.

Townsend cites "Petronius Arbiter (circa A.D. 60)." Another quotation from Townsend (page 7), "And God created the Organization and gave it dominion over man.... Genesis 1, 30A, Subparagraph VIII" should alert readers to his tendency to use fictitous quotations as part of his rhetorical style. An interesting suggestion as to the sources of this quotation appears in a note by J. P. Sullivan in the May 1981 Petronian Society Newsletter (12(1), p.1):

...let me give my tentative account, which I hope other readers can correct, of its provenance. Some disgruntled soldier of a literary bent, whether commissioned or noncommissioned I do not know, pinned this "quotation" to a bulletin board in one of the camps of the armies occupying Germany sometime after 1945 (the style suggests a British occupying force). Since the sentiment is impeccable, whether applied to military, governmental, or academic administration, it has enjoyed a cachet borrowed from Petronius ever since.