The 80/20 Principle: The Secret of Achieving More with Less

The 80/20 Principle--that 80 percent of results flow from just 20 percent of our efforts--is one of the great secrets of highly effective people and organizations.

One of the decade's most original, provocative, and powerful books, The 80/20 Principle shows how you can achieve much more with much less effort, time, and resources, simply by concentrating on the all-important 20 percent. Astonishingly, although the 80/20 Principle has long influenced today's world, Richard Koch is the first person to show how to use it in a systematic and practical way.

The pattern of predictable imbalance underlying the 80/20 Principle was first discovered a hundred years ago by Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto while studying income and wealth patterns. But the pattern of "predictable imbalance," as he termed it, crops up throughout life. In The 80/20 Principle, Koch opens our eyes to the way the principle works through a wide range of examples in business, commerce, and virtually every aspect of our lives. For example, 20 percent of products account for 80 percent of sales and profits; similarly, 20 percent of customers account for 80 percent of revenues.

By identifying and focusing on the 20 percent of our efforts that result in the huge bulk of our success, we can leverage our efforts to vastly increase our effectiveness. For we discover that little of what we do really counts. By concentrating on those things that do, we can transform our effectiveness in our jobs, our careers, our businesses, and our lives. By showing how to unlock the enormous potential of the magic 20 percent, The 80/20 Principle will revolutionize your life.