The 80/20 Individual: How to Build on the 20% of What You do Best

chapter 1

How to Be an 80/20 Individual

Take away our twenty most important people, and I tell you we would become an unimportant company.
--Bill Gates, chairman, Microsoft


Introduction

This book is about a revolution that is changing the lives of individuals, individuals who are changing the world. I call these revolutionaries "80/20 individuals," people and small teams who use the 80/20 principle to build businesses, and fuel their careers. You may already be an 80/20 individual without knowing it, but if you are not, you have everything to gain by becoming one.

The 80/20 Principle, my earlier book, struck a chord with many of readers by answering two questions:

*How can I use the 80/20 principle to raise the profits of my corporation?

*How can I use the 80/20 principle to be more effective personally?

This book answers a quite different question:

*How can I use the 80/20 principle professionally, to create my own wealth and improve my well-being?

This is a book for individuals at work. I explain how you can become much more successful in your career by transforming any business. Whether you are an entrepreneur, a manager, an executive, a worker, or unemployed, you can use the step-by-step method described to remodel an existing business or create a new one--one that most benefits you and your close associates. My objective is to help you first, your customers second, and corporations only if helping them helps you.

The world belongs to individuals, not to corporations. And by using the 80/20 principle to accomplish more by doing less, you can turbo-boost your career.


A Brief History of the 80/20 Principle

In 1897, Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) noticed a regular pattern in distributions of wealth or income, no matter the country or time period concerned. He found that the distribution was extremely skewed toward the top end: A small minority of the top earners always accounted for a large majority of the total wealth. The pattern was so reliable that Pareto was eventually able to predict the distribution of income accurately before looking at the data.

Pareto was greatly excited by his discovery, which he rightly believed was of enormous importance not just to economics but to society as well. But he managed to enthuse only a few fellow economists. Although he could write lucidly on less momentous subjects, his explanation of the "Pareto principle" lay buried beneath windy academic language and dense algebraic formulae.

Pareto's idea became widely known only when Joseph Moses Juran, one of the gurus of the quality movement in the twentieth century, renamed it the "Rule of the Vital Few." In his 1951 tome The Quality Control Handbook, which became hugely influential in Japan and later in the West, Juran separated the "vital few" from the "trivial many," showing how problems in quality could be largely eliminated, cheaply and quickly, by focusing on the vital few causes of these problems.1 Juran, who moved to Japan in 1954, taught executives there to improve quality and product design while incorporating American business practices into their own companies. Thanks to this new attention to quality control, between 1957 and 1989, Japan grew faster than any other industrial economy.