The 80/20 Principle: The Secret of Achieving More With Less (27 page)

This has led to the anthropologists’ “village theory.” In an African village, all these relationships happen within a few hundred meters and are often formed within a short period of time. For us, these relationships may be spread all over the planet and over a whole lifetime. They nonetheless constitute a village which we each have in our heads. And once these slots are filled, they’re filled forever.

The anthropologists say that if you have too much experience, too early, you exhaust your capacity for further deep relationships. This may explain the superficiality often observed in those whose profession or circumstances force them to have a great number of relationships, such as salespeople, prostitutes, or those who move very frequently.

J. G. Ballard quotes a case example of a rehabilitation project in California for young women who mixed with criminals. The women were young, 20 or 21, and the program aimed to introduce them to new social backgrounds, basically to middle-class volunteers, who befriended them and invited them to their homes.

Many of these girls had been married at an incredibly early age. Many had had their first children at 13 or 14. Some had been married three times by the time they were 20. They had often had hundreds of lovers and sometimes had close relationships or children by men who were then shot or jailed. They’d been through everything—relationships, motherhood, break-ups, bereavements—and experienced the whole gamut of human experience while still in their teens.

The project was a total failure. The explanation was that the women were incapable of forming any deep new relationships. They were all used up. Their relationship slots had been filled, forever.

This sad story is salutary. It also fits in with the 80/20 Principle: a small number of relationships will account for a large proportion of emotional value. Fill your relationship slots with extreme care and not too early!

PROFESSIONAL RELATIONSHIPS AND ALLIANCES

We now turn to your relationships and alliances related to your work. Here the importance of a few close allies can hardly be overstated.

Individuals may appear to do amazing things—and they do. But exceptional individual performance requires allies.

You alone cannot make yourself successful. Only others can do that for you. What you can do is to select the best relationships and alliances for your purposes.

You badly need allies. You must treat them well, as an extension of yourself, as you treat yourself (or should). Do not assume your friends and allies are all of roughly equal importance. Focus your attention on nurturing the key alliances of your life. If this seems obvious or banal, ask yourself how many of your friends follow these lines. Then ask yourself whether you do.

All spiritual leaders had many allies. If they needed them, so do you. To take one example: Jesus Christ depended on John the Baptist to draw him to public attention; then on the 12 disciples; then on other apostles, notably St. Paul, arguably the greatest marketing genius in history.
³

Nothing is more important than your choice of alliances and how you build them. Without them you are nothing. With them, you can transform your life, often the lives of those around you, and occasionally, in small or large ways, the course of history.

We can best appreciate the importance of alliances by a brief historical excursion.

History is driven by individuals who form effective alliances

Vilfredo Pareto, the “bourgeois Karl Marx,” claimed that history was essentially a history of the succession of élites.
⁴
The objective of energetic individuals or families was therefore devoted to rise into the élite or to be part of one élite that displaced another (or, if already in the élite, to stay there and keep the élite in place).

If you turn a Paretian or Marxian, class-based view of history on its head, you can conclude that alliances within élites or would-be élites are the driving forces of progress. The individual is nothing except as part of a class, certainly; but equally, the individual allied with other individuals of the same class (or possibly, with individuals from another class) is everything.

The importance of individuals, allied to others, is apparent from some of history’s turning points. Would there have been a Russian Revolution in 1917 without the pivotal role of Lenin? Probably not at all; and certainly not one that diverted the course of world history for the next 72 years. Would the Russian Revolution of 1989 that reversed the one of 1917 have succeeded without the presence of mind and bravery of Boris Yeltsin? If he had not climbed on a tank outside the Russian White House, the Communist gerontocrats would probably have cemented their shaky coup.

We can play the game of historical what-ifs repeatedly to demonstrate the importance of individuals. There would have been no Holocaust and no Second World War without Hitler. Without Roosevelt and Churchill, Hitler would probably have united Europe rather earlier and more thoroughly and in a considerably more vexatious way than his successors have done. And so on. But the key point often overlooked is that none of these individuals could have turned the course of history without relationships and alliances.

In almost any sphere of achievement,
⁵
you can identify a small number of key collaborators, without whom individuals could not have succeeded but with whom individuals have had massive impact. In government, in mass ideological movements, in business, in medicine, in the sciences, in philanthropy, or in sport, the pattern is the same. History is not composed of blind, nonhuman forces. History is not run by classes or élites operating according to some preprogrammed economic or sociological formula. History is determined and changed by dedicated individuals who form effective alliances with a small number of close collaborators.

YOU NEED A FEW KEY ALLIES

If you have had any success in life, you will (unless you are a blind egotist headed for a fall) recognize the crucial importance of allies in your achievements. But you will also detect the hand of the 80/20 Principle here. The key allies are few in number.

It is generally a safe assertion that at least 80 percent of the value of your allies comes from fewer than 20 percent of their number. For anyone who has done anything, the list of allies, when you come to think of it, is incredibly long. But of the hundreds or more involved, the value is highly skewed. Usually half a dozen key allies are far more important than all the rest.

You don’t need many allies but you need the right ones, with the right relationships between you and each of them and between themselves. You need them at the right time, in the right place and with a common interest in advancing your interests. Above all, the allies must trust you and you must be able to trust them.

Make a list of your Top 20 business relationships, of people that you consider to be important allies, and compare it with an estimation of the total number of contacts with whom you would be on first-name terms—if you have a Rolodex, a Filofax, or a telephone list, this is the total number of active contacts on that list. Eighty percent of the value to you of alliances is likely to be comprised in 20 percent of the relationships. If this is not the case, the alliances (or some of them) are likely to be of poor quality.

ACHIEVEMENT ALLIANCES

If you are well into your career, make a list of the people who have helped you the most to date. Rank them from top to bottom and then assign 100 points between the top 10.

In general, the people who have helped you the most in the past will also be the people who can do so in the future. Sometimes, however, a good friend who is some way down the list becomes a much more important potential ally: perhaps because he or she has gained a new and highly influential post, has made a killing through an investment, or secured valuable recognition. Go through the exercise again, ranking your allies from one to ten and allocating another 100 points to them, this time on the basis of their future ability to help you.

People help you because there is a strong relationship between you. The best relationships are built on five attributes: mutual enjoyment of each other’s company, respect, shared experience, reciprocity, and trust. In successful business relationships these attributes become entwined and are impossible to untangle, but we can think of them separately.

Mutual enjoyment

The first of our five attributes is the most obvious. If you do not enjoy talking to someone, in their office, a restaurant, at a social occasion, or on the phone, you will not build a strong relationship. They have to enjoy your company too.

If this seems terribly obvious, reflect for a moment on the people with whom you mix socially, but basically for professional purposes. How many of them do you really like? A surprising number of people spend a lot of time with people they don’t like. This is a complete and utter waste of time. It’s not enjoyable, it’s tiring, it’s often expensive, it prevents you doing better things, and it will get you absolutely nowhere. Stop doing it! Spend more time with the contacts you enjoy, particularly if they can also be useful to you.

Respect

There are people whose company I enjoy immensely, but whom I do not greatly respect professionally; and vice versa. I would never advance someone’s career if I didn’t respect their professional abilities.

If someone is to help you professionally, they must be impressed by you! Yet very often we hide our light under a bushel. A good friend, Paul, who was in a position to advance my career considerably, once remarked in a board meeting where we were both outside directors that he was prepared to believe that I was competent professionally, although he had never seen the slightest evidence of it! I resolved to find a context where I could show some evidence. I did—and Paul moved sharply up my list of business allies.

Shared experience

Just as in the primitive village, we have a limited number of slots for important professional experiences. Shared experience, especially if it involves struggle or suffering, is very bonding. One of my greatest relationships, both as business ally and friend, came from being a new recruit in my first job alongside another recruit in the same situation. I am sure we would not have developed such rapport if we had not both hated our jobs in the oil refinery so much.

The implication is that if you are in a difficult job, develop one ally whom you like and respect. Make it a deep and fruitful alliance. If you don’t, you are missing a big opportunity!

Even if you are not suffering, find one person who has a great deal of shared experience and make him or her a key ally.

Reciprocity

For alliances to work, each ally must do a great deal for the other party—repeatedly, consistently, over a long period of time.

Reciprocity requires that the relationship is not one sided. Equally, reciprocity should come naturally and not be too finely calculated. The important thing is that you do whatever you possibly can, consistent with high ethical standards, to help the other person. This requires time and thought! You should not wait until they ask a favor.

What surprises me in reviewing business relationships is how infrequently true reciprocity is built up. Even if all the other ingredients—friendship, respect, shared experience, and trust—are present, people very often neglect to be proactive in helping their allies. This, again, is a massive wasted opportunity to deepen the relationship and store up future help.

The Beatles told us that “in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.” Similarly, in the end, the professional help you receive is equal to that you provide.

Trust

Trust cements relationships. Lack of trust can unwind them very quickly. Trust requires total honesty at all times. If there is even a suspicion that you are not saying what you think, even for the most high-minded reasons or to remain diplomatic, trust can be undermined.

If you do not trust someone totally, don’t try to build up an alliance. It shouldn’t work and it won’t.

But if you do have total trust, it makes business relationships so much faster and more efficient. A lot of time and cost can be eliminated. Never forfeit trust by being capricious, cowardly, or cunning.

IF YOU ARE IN THE EARLY STAGES OF YOUR CAREER, FILL YOUR ALLY SLOTS CAREFULLY

A good rule of thumb is that you should develop up to six or seven absolutely gilt-edged business alliances, composed as follows:

• one or two relationships with mentors, people more senior than you

• two or three relationships with peers

• one or two relationships where you are the mentor.

Relationships with mentors

Choose your one or two mentors carefully. Do not let them choose you: they might deprive a much better mentor of the slot. The mentors you choose should have the following two characteristics:

• You must be able to build up the “five-ingredient” relationship comprising mutual enjoyment, respect, shared experience, reciprocity, and trust.