The 80/20 Principle: The Secret of Achieving More With Less (35 page)

READERS’ INSIGHTS

I’d like to pass along a few of the best or most amusing reader insights into the principle. First, a comment from Sean F. O’Neill:

In the U.S. in the 1920s, there was an accomplished writer named Edmund Wilson. He championed Marcel Proust to the Americans. His 20 percent was his writing and research. Here is how he dispensed with the 80 percent of low-priority stuff. He used to answer requests with a postcard that read: “Edmund Wilson regrets that it is impossible for him to: Read manuscripts, Write articles or books to order, Do any kind of editorial work, Judge literary contests, Give interviews, Conduct educational courses, Deliver lectures, Gives talks or make speeches, Take part in writers’ congresses, Answer questionnaires, Contribute or take part on symposiums or panels of any kind, Contribute manuscripts for sale, Donate copies of his books to Libraries, Autograph books for strangers, Allow his name to be used on letterheads, Supply personal information about himself, Supply photographs of himself, Supply opinions on literary or other subjects.”

Michael Cloud focused on his professional life:

I did an 80/20 analysis of my income-generating activities [as a speechwriter and fundraiser] and found that in the previous year I had earned 89 percent of my income in 15 percent of my work time, from 15 percent of my work. I gave away or discarded the 85 percent of the work that generated only 11 percent of my income, slashed my work time by 70 percent, doubled my time doing my high-leverage projects—and more than doubled my income…

Then I wrote a high-octane e-mail urging friends and clients to buy and read
The 80/20 Principle
with my promise that, if they didn’t get extraordinary value from your book, I would refund double their $25 hardcover purchase price. I sent my message to 107 people. Thirty-eight of them bought and read the book. All said they had profited from it…A vice-president of marketing bought a case of your books for his team.

Michael offers four new insights:

1 I benefit from urging people to read, reflect on, and apply the 80/20 Principle…imagine the benefits from having 20 percent of my community, businesses, country, and 20 percent of the individuals on earth thinking and living 80/20. Wouldn’t you like to live in a world of da Vincis and Mozarts and Einsteins—where everyone offered their highest and best?

2 Some people succeed by reinventing the wheel. Most fail by reinventing the flat tire. Perhaps you should pen a brief book on the Toxic 20%—the 20 percent that are most costly and damaging.

3 Good poker players fold a lot. As Larry W. Philips writes in
Zen and the Art of Poker,
“Play only the best 15 to 20 percent of your hands and throw in the rest.”

4
Good to Great
by Jim Collins has one chapter—Chapter 4, “The Hedgehog Concept”—that’s a shimmering application of the 80/20 Principle.

Terry Lee writes from Hong Kong to pick up the connection with chaos theory:

Yes, the universe is unbalanced, otherwise, perhaps, there would have been no Big Bang. I see Eliyahu M. Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints, which focuses on improving or exploiting bottlenecks, as a special version of the 80/20 Principle. The idea is to concentrate on the few causes—and usually only one cause—of the bottleneck. That releases enormous power.

It strikes me that this theory of constraints, like the principle, applies both to our work and personal lives:

• At work, what is the one constraint that, if it were removed, would make us five, ten or twenty times as productive? For you, is it your boss, your fear of failure, your lack of qualifications, your inability to choose what you work on, your lack of the right collaborator, or something else altogether? What is the constraint, what stops you from enormous improvement? If you identify the constraint, you can then work on a campaign to remove it.

• In your private life, what is the one thing that stops you making the best of your life and bringing happiness to the people you care about? There may be one overriding constraint. What is it?

DOES THE 80/20 PRINCIPLE REALLY APPLY TO OUR PERSONAL LIVES?

Quite remarkably,
nobody
has disputed that the 80/20 Principle works in business. Some readers, indeed, gave examples of very different “businesses” that have benefited. Dr. Mark Shook is pastor of a church in Texas who has increased his congregation 300 times by using the principle. He writes:

Your books on 80/20 thinking have transformed my life. I am the pastor of Community of Faith in Cypress, Texas. Following 80/20 principles we have grown from five people meeting in my living room to over 1,500 in average attendance in two-and-a-half years. We call ourselves the 80/20 church. I bet you didn’t know that you were a church growth guru!

Since then, however, I’ve discovered that there’s another much larger “80/20 church.” Veronica Abney, the church administrator for the largest mega-church in Chicago, wrote to me that “our church currently has 25,000 members, with the arena facility next to the United Center, where the Chicago Bulls play and home to Michael Jordon. I would like to grow our ministry from 25,000 to 50,000 using the 80/20 methodology.”

And some readers did value the application of Pareto’s concept to the whole of life, starting with business but going well beyond it, which was my biggest innovation in reinterpreting the principle. Kevin Garty, director of relocation for a firm of realtors in San Francisco, told me:

I’ve applied the 80/20 rule to pretty much every aspect of my life with amazing results. I can confirm I’m getting up later in the morning and leaving work earlier in the afternoon, and still making a very healthy six figure income. I had applied facets of 80/20 since I was a kid in New Zealand so when I read your book it was a great validation of the direction I was starting to head in. I felt more confident in my laziness, if that makes sense.

Yes, perfect sense, Kevin.

A reviewer from Indonesia says that 80/20 can be applied to work and life in the same way because “the basic concept is
focus.
Choice is important; we only have to do the most important things in life…This is the most easy explanation of how we can achieve more by doing less.” A Japanese reviewer says:

I read this book almost two years ago. Applied its theories to the four companies I was working for. Managed to cut my working hours by 25 percent and still maintained my original salary. Opened my own business in the meantime. With all the extra time I’ve created I get to think of new ways to make my life more fun and easier on the bank balance. A simple approach to calculating where you are wasting time, money, and effort and where to move the effort to create more time and money. I’m about to…apply the formula to my Japanese language studies, exercise regime, and anything else I can think of.

“Teach this [80/20] to your children,” adds a reader, “and you will increase the likelihood they will move out when they are grown, because they will be able to afford to.”

Nevertheless, some reviewers question whether the principle should be applied to our private lives. “Whilst I am sure that the author meant well,” writes one Amazon reviewer, “in attempting to apply the 80/20 Principle to non-business areas (more specifically, to personal relationships), it has no place within this book, and should have been left well alone.” The reviewer was kind enough to say that there was a pearl hidden within the oyster of the book—the business applications of the principle—that was “well worth diving for.” But ignore the personal stuff!

A second reviewer says the book:

provides an astute evaluation of the economic and social realities of business. Koch goes further, though, and tries to extrapolate the 80/20 theory to success, happiness and life in general. While some of what he suggests makes sense, his examples seem to get progressively weaker as he moves from the world of business.

ISN’T THE 80 PERCENT ESSENTIAL TOO?

The second and major criticism concerns whether it is realistic, or even desirable, to get rid of the 80 percent of activity that yields few results. Here is the case against, courtesy of Chow Ching “Cornholio,” probably my most eloquent critic, whose comments are still on the
amazon.com
site. It is worth quoting his review in full:

An excellent idea, but 20 percent of the 5 stars is taken out, because
[The 80/20 Principle]
is also packed with other BS, like lecturing you on how to use your life and other areas where the author has no authority. He pointed out some of the voices of opposition, and beat them one after one. However, there is one very important one that he left out. I’m a Hong Kong Chinese. In our 5,000 years’ culture, Yin and Yang has come into play from the very beginning; the author seems to ignore this.

For example, he tells you to analyze your life and see which 20 percent of your life gives 80 percent of your happiness and concentrate on that 20 percent only. I did just that years ago, but I only got worse. Life is a balance between work and play—you enjoyed that 20 percent of yang activity because you are released from that 80 percent of yin activity.

Eighty percent of the tastefulness of a hamburger is from 20 percent of it, the meat inside, but if you drop the bread on the top and bottom, its taste will become too strong—it’ll lose its flavor. Similarly, perhaps your honeymoon or a graduation trip to Europe was the most wonderful experience, yet, if you re-do that over and over, by principle of marginal return, it’ll be boring.

20/80 can be applied perfectly to work, but to play, not so. I also wonder if the author will think 80 percent of sex pleasures derives from 20 percent of the time between (yang) climax, so probably we should drop the (yin) foreplay altogether?

A similar concern was raised to me by Lord Carr, formerly a top U.K. cabinet minister. He cited the case of the then British ambassador to the U.S., who told him:

You might think that much of my time is spent on trivial matters, such as having endless dinners and spending time socially with American leaders. But that time is not wasted. When it comes to the crunch, I know whose judgment can be relied on and who is really flaky. That is invaluable in a crisis, so the “wasted” time isn’t wasted at all.

Several people have taken me to task along similar lines, because they are rightly concerned that the pursuit of efficiency—cutting out the low-value majority of activity—is self-defeating in the long run. If we become obsessed with efficiency and only doing the important things, we might cut out activities that are necessary for renewing ourselves, our businesses, and even our society.

“What about parks?” demands one of my friends. “Parks are a relic of feudalism and might be part of the 80 percent that you would cut out. They have no right to exist if we cost out everything. Parks have no return on capital. They would be invaluable as houses or retail developments. But if you cut out the parks, you’d end up with a really unattractive city.” He might have cited Johannesburg, which has pleasant suburbs but almost no parks or open spaces, and which, not coincidentally, is one of the most dangerous cities on the planet.

A related concern is that, by cutting out the inefficient elements in our work and lives, we may become mindless and soulless, favoring the short-term economic solution and harming our long-term heritage. As Andrew Price writes in his forthcoming book
The Power of the Unessential:

by far the greatest fish harvest come from coastal areas; these make up only a tiny fraction of the oceans’ total area. The 80/20 Principle tells that coasts are where fishing action should be. And fishing along coasts is precisely what has happened.

But exploitation has removed too much stock; not only that, these rich coastal waters coincide with major breeding grounds. So hammering cod and fish stocks around coasts has affected reproduction, leaving insufficient fish available for capture and reproduction in future.

For followers of the 80/20 Principle, the message is clear. Our efforts to target the disproportionately valuable 20 percent should be not just for use; there should be some non-use too. Otherwise, it can easily disappear, just as fisheries demonstrate. There is another important message. The best-performing stock (fisheries or financial) this year, or most valuable species in an ecosystem over the last decade, is no guarantee for future success. The truth is that the world and its resources do not remain constant for long.

Criticism of my application of the 80/20 Principle can be summarized under three main concerns:

•
The corner-cutting concern.
If 80/20 is viewed as an efficiency device, we may end up being very inefficient but not very effective. Cutting corners is all very well, but unless we go into something fully and deeply, we won’t achieve anything worthwhile or enjoy it. We may get 80 percent of a book’s message by reading 20 percent of it, but if the book is important enough to us, we should want to read all of it, and even remain disappointed that we’ve finished the book. Getting 80 percent of results through 20 percent of effort can appear to represent a simplistic, materialistic and not authentic way of approaching both work and life.