The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Success by Achieving More with Less (book)

I have read a fair number of what people would consider to be the best business books of all time, tons of Drucker, etc.
I would put this book in my top 5. It pounds home a concept that really throws people off, but is critical to master. Some things/people/ways of spending time/products/customers (on and on) count for much, much more than others. It isn't the most politically correct view of the world, but understanding it can save you so much time and wasted effort. So many critical implications come out of this book that aren't acted upon in the real world, to everyone's detriment and suffering. A person of a particular mix of talents can be useless in one environment and vital in another. Pay should be dramatically more skewed than it is in the average business. People could work less than half the time they do now and have more overall output if they thought harder about cost/benefit relationships before making their to do lists. There should be many more people fired from their jobs each year. A really original book, I loved it.

I really liked this principal of the 80/20 theory, but found it hard to listen to his voice on CD. A very mundane voice that lacks motivation for me at least.

You can't avoid hearing about the 80/20 Principle in life, but this book is the first thing that really forced me to sit down and think criticially about how to apply it. I'd highly recommend this book - particularly the first few chapters - to folks working within a business context. In particular, his examples about how to analyze your current product units were insightful and non-trivial. He doesn't just recommend the obvious thing (cut 80% of your work), but integrates 80/20 with future value and market potential analyses.

Similar to the other reviewers, I found the example set rather limited, his statistics and tables motivating but unconvincing, and his prose less than compelling. Even given that, though, this book deserves a read and some serious contemplation.

The 20% you need to know: This book is poorly written, and the author would do well to use the 80/20 principle in his writing.

The 80% that will make up the rest of the review: I have never read such boring prose. I've had the concept fully explained to me. I fully understand what the principle is. I have heard it about 80 times now when 20 would have been enough (actually, once would have been enough). Now, what do I do with it? How do I implement it into my life? I am now on page 53 and he still hasn't gotten around to that part. It seems to me he should have used the theory when writing this book. Cut to the chase! Give me the top 20% of useful information so I can go ahead and use it to increase my productivity and effectiveness by 80%. Instead I get the feeling I'm wandering around aimlessly in the bottom part of his bar charts among the 80% of fluff to fill up his book quota. How many stories about economists and computer software do we really need? I don't know about you, but I wanted to increase my productivity by using my time better, and reading this book so far has been a complete waste of it.

In the 80/20 Principle, Richard Koch has captured one of the most important secrets to success in business and individually. He takes an age-old principle and applies it in very practical ways. In my management consulting practice I use this principle more than any other concept. In my work with Chief Executives and Presidents I find that putting this principle in practice has been revolutionary in their business success.

The basic principles of 80/20 thinking are:
* A few things are always much more important than most things, so spend your valuable time and effort on the vital few.
* Progress means moving resources from low-value to high-value uses.
* The best people - meaning the people best fitted to what they are doing and doing the things that make the most money - generate enormous disproportionate value.
* Margins - between value and cost, between effort and reward - are always highly variable.
* Resources are always misallocated by giving too many resources to low-margin activities and too few to high-margin activities.
* Success is under recognized, under celebrated, underrated, undervalued, and under exploited.
* Equilibrium is illusory. Nothing is ever in equilibrium. Innovation is the only constant.
* The biggest wins all start from something which is small.

Along with Koch's second book, The 80/20 Individual, he has given every business executive a gift that can be used over and over again. Probably 20% of the books you read give you 80% of the benefit, so make this one of them.