|
You know the deal:
20% of the people have 80% of the wealth. 80%
of a book's value can be found in 20% of the pages.
20% of your clothes will be worn 80% of the time.
20% of your customers give you 80% of your profits
(or headaches).
Of course, it's not always exactly 80/20. Somtimes
it's more like 80/1.3 (80% of movie reviews come
from 1.3% of the movies produced). The point is,
as Richard Koch writes in his book The 80/20
Principle, "...there is an inbuilt imbalance
between causes and results, inputs and outputs,
and effort and reward.
This principle is so fundamental it's like a
Swiss army knife - it can help in lots of different
situations. The question is, how can we use it
to leverage the highest results?
There are two major ways this rule can help us.
It can teach us what to focus on (the 20%) and
what to eliminate or reduce (the 80%). For example,
are we really short on time? If the 80/20 rule
holds true, then we accomplish 80% of our results
in about 20% of our time. If we could accomplish
all the things we're doing during that 20% in
a single day, we'd get almost a week's worth of
work done on Monday. If we could repeat that,
we'd get another 80% of our normal results on
Tuesday. That would get us 160% productivity in
40% of the time! If we really get this, and have
the management skills to make it happen, we would
never have a shortage of time to do the 20% things.
And we would stop seeing time as a scarce commodity.
The 80/20 Principle gives us more time.
If in fact we achieve 80% of our results in 20%
of our time, then the converse is also true, 80%
of our time is spent achieving 20% of our results.
Does this give us some help in identifying what
work we might consider eliminating?
Apply the 80/20 rule to your team. If your whole
team is spending 80% of its time to get 20% of
its results, don't you suppose there's some work
in there that could be eliminated or reduced?
Do you think investing a little bit of time to
eliminate a lot of unnecessary work would be helpful?
Of course it would! The key to using the 80/20
rule is to focus on the few activities that generate
the most results. The 80/20 rule shows us what
to eliminate or reduce.
This article was taken from the book "Prioritize!
A System for Leading Your Business and Life on
Purpose," written by Joe Calhoon and Bruce
Jeffrey, copyright 2005. Joe Calhoon is a keynote
speaker at the 2005 TMCA Annual Conference and
Educational Forum.
>
Return to Sales
|
