From The Business Shrink: In every walk of life you can find examples of the 80/20 rule. You can get very simplistic and also very complex with the examples. Some quick examples that are spoken of repeatedly in college textbooks are things like:
20% of customers produce 80% of the profits
20% of employees produce 80% of the real results
20% of the input creates 80% of the result
20% of a sales force produces 80% of the sales
You can also get more creative and look at these rules in the life as a blogger, digger or every day events.
80% of website visitors view only 20% of the web pages
80% of Digg Front-page items are by 20% of the Digg Users
20% of program features in a program like Word cause 80% of the use
20% of blog posts will create 80% of the traffic
20% of car repairs will cost 80% of your money
A well respected MIT professor named Noam Chomsky talks about the 80/20 rule in this video on YouTube here. Chomsky talks about how big business tries to figure out who the most profitable 20% of customers are and attempt to eliminate the rest of the 80% of customers to reduce costs.
It’s hard to argue with the facts of the 80/20 rule that were discovered back in 1906. (more…)
