The 80/20 Principle: The Secret of Achieving More With Less Read Online Free PDF Page B

This is not so. If 80 percent of people are right-handed and 20 percent are left-handed, this is not an 80/20 observation. To apply the 80/20 Principle you have to have two sets of data, both adding up to 100 per cent, and one measuring a variable quantity owned, exhibited, or caused by the people or things making up the other 100 percent.
    WHAT THE 80/20 PRINCIPLE CAN DO FOR YOU
     
    Every person I have known who has taken the 80/20 Principle seriously has emerged with useful, and in some cases life-changing, insights. You have to work out your own uses for the principle: they will be there if you look creatively. Part Three (Chapters 9 to 15) will guide you on your odyssey, but I can illustrate with some examples from my own life.
    How the 80/20 Principle has helped me
     
    When I was a raw student at Oxford, my tutor told me never to go to lectures. “Books can be read far faster,” he explained. “But never read a book from cover to cover, except for pleasure. When you are working, find out what the book is saying much faster than you would by reading it through. Read the conclusion, then the introduction, then the conclusion again, then dip lightly into any interesting bits.” What he was really saying was that 80 percent of the value of a book can be found in 20 percent or fewer of its pages and absorbed in 20 percent of the time most people would take to read it through.
    I took to this study method and extended it. At Oxford there is no system of continuous assessment, and the class of degree earned depends entirely on finals, the examinations taken at the end of the course. I discovered from the “form book,” that is by analyzing past examination papers, that at least 80 percent (sometimes 100 percent) of an examination could be well answered with knowledge from 20 percent or fewer of the subjects that the exam was meant to cover. The examiners could therefore be much better impressed by a student who knew an awful lot about relatively little, rather than a fair amount about a great deal. This insight enabled me to study very efficiently. Somehow, without working very hard, I ended up with a congratulatory First Class degree. I used to think this proved that Oxford dons were gullible. I now prefer to think, perhaps improbably, that they were teaching us how the world worked.
    I went to work for Shell, serving my time at a dreadful oil refinery. This may have been good for my soul, but I rapidly realized that the best-paying jobs for young and inexperienced people such as I lay in management consultancy. So I went to Philadelphia and picked up an effortless MBA from Wharton (scorning the boot-camp style so-called learning experience from Harvard). I joined a leading U.S. consultancy that on day one paid me four times what Shell had paid me when I left. No doubt 80 percent of the money to be had by people of my tender age was concentrated in 20 percent of the jobs.
    Since there were too many colleagues in the consultancy who were smarter than me, I moved to another U.S. strategy “boutique.” I identified it because it was growing faster than the firm I had joined, yet had a much smaller proportion of really smart people.
    Who you work for is more important than what you do
     
    Here I stumbled across many paradoxes of the 80/20 Principle. Eighty percent of the growth in the strategy consultancy industry—then, as now, growing like gangbusters—was being appropriated by firms that then had, in total, fewer than 20 percent of the industry’s professional staff. Eighty percent of rapid promotions were also available in just a handful of firms. Believe me, talent had very little to do with it. When I left the first strategy firm and joined the second, I raised the average level of intelligence in both.
    Yet the puzzling thing was that my new colleagues were more effective than my old ones. Why? They didn’t work any harder. But they followed the 80/20 Principle in two key ways. First, they realized that for