Thursday, May 24, 2007

In Search of Pareto

Slow Leadership looks at the limitations of the Pareto Principle (a.k.a the 80/20 Rule).

An excerpt:

  1. Can you identify which actions make up the useful 20%? And can you do so in advance? We have to live forwards in time, so to be useful a principle has to be predictive.

  2. Going forward, will this useful 20% still contain more or less the same actions? If it doesn’t, repeating them won’t produce any benefit.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm not in sales, so I can't speak to some of the article, but I will say this: As the 20% becomes more productive and you pour more resources into it, it because larger and larger. Eventually the 20% is effectively 100%.

I agree with the main point of the article that if the 80/20 rule is true, you have to constantly re-evaluate what is what.

Michael Wade said...

Pawnking,

I'm a big fan of the Pareto Principle and mainly for the reason you describe: It inspires continual re-evaluation.