The 80/20 Principle, Third Edition: The Secret to Achieving More with Less

HINT 4: FIND YOUR 80/20 IDEA

build up a long list of spurious concerns and requirements early in a negotiation, making them seem as important to you as possible. These points must, however, be inherently unreasonable, or at least incapable of concession by the other party without real hurt (otherwise they will gain credit for being flexible and conceding the points). Then, in

Projects obey the law of organizational complexity. The greater the number of a project’s aims, the effort to accomplish the project satisfactorily increases, not in proportion, but geometrically. Eighty percent of the value of any project will come from 20 percent of its activities, and the other 80 percent will arise because of needless complexit

When I was a partner at management consultants Bain & Company, we proved conclusively that the best-managed projects we undertook—those that had the highest client and consultant satisfaction, the least wasted time, and the highest margins—were those where there was the greatest ratio of planning time to execution time.

Impose an impossible time scale This will ensure that the project team does only the really high-value tasks:

Related to the idea of feedback loops is the concept of the tipping point. Up to a certain point, a new force—whether it is a new product, a disease, a new rock group, or a new social habit such as jogging or roller blading—finds it difficult to make headway. A great deal of effort generates little by way of results. At this point many pioneers giv

In 1963, IBM discovered that about 80 percent of a computer’s time is spent executing about 20 percent of the operating code. The company immediately rewrote its operating software to make the most-used 20 percent very accessible and user friendly, thus making IBM computers more efficient and faster than competitors’ machines for the majority of ap

Juran’s path-breaking Quality Control Handbook was first published in 1951 and extolled the 80/20

What is the 80/20 Principle? The 80/20 Principle tells us that in any population, some things are likely to be much more important than others. A good benchmark or hypothesis is that 80 percent of results or outputs flow from 20 percent of causes, and sometimes from a much smaller proportion of powerful forces.