Richard Koch - The 80/20 Individual. The Nine Essentials of 80/20 Success at Work

The 80/20
Individual

The Nine Essentials of
80/20 Success at Work

Richard Koch

To Matthew

This abridged paperback edition first published by
Nicholas Brealey Publishing in 2003
Reprinted 2007

First published in hardback as The 80/20 Revolution by
Nicholas Brealey Publishing in 2002

www.nicholasbrealey.com
www.the8020principle.com

Richard Koch 2002, 2003
The right of Richard Koch to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

ISBN-13: 978-1-85788-310-7
ISBN-10: 1-85788-310-1

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library.

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Printed in India by Gopsons Papers Ltd, Noida.

As business changes, the individual is the one who brings tools to the company.

Philip Harris, CEO, PJM Interconnection

Its almost as though the village blacksmiths of the world can now build axles in their backyards, and assemble them together and compete with General Motors. And thats literally what is going on. We have proof through the Linux operating system.

Paul Maritz, vice-president, Microsoft

In all of these industries, the key unit of value creation is the individual the logic of deconstructing value chains is carried to its limit: individual employees (the smallest possible sliver of the business) extract the value that they uniquely create.

Philip Evans and Thomas S. Wurster, Boston Consulting Group

Take away our twenty most important people, and I tell you we would become an unimportant company.

Bill Gates, chairman, Microsoft

The emperor of the future will be the emperor of ideas.

Winston Churchill

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea.

Thomas Jefferson

There is a new way to create wealth that is better than the traditional route of managerial capitalism.

Creative individuals are at the heart of the new revolution. Creative individuals are more important to wealth generation than are corporations or capital. Individualism is replacing capitalism.

The revolution follows one simple principlethe 80/20 principle. Success comes from an exclusive focus on the few very powerful forces operating in an arena. The most important forces to which the 80/20 principle applies are ideas and individuals. The principle also applies to all the other raw materials of enterprise: customers, partners, technologies, products, suppliers, and capital.

Wealth is most effectively multiplied by subtraction and rearrangement of industries, not through the traditional routes of aggregation of activities and assets. More separate enterprises are created, spawned by a new idea from new individuals, and linked together by markets rather than by hierarchy and central planning.

The 80/20 revolution is as important as the three other transitions in economic history: the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, and the managerial revolution. These resulted in quite different economies and societies. The same will probably happen again, over the next two decades.

Perhaps the most seminal change has already happenedthe most successful corporations now revolve around a few individuals. The corporation serves the individuals, not the other way round. Yet this does not apply universally. Most of the economyalthough not the most profitable partstill follows the old pattern of managerial capitalism. When this ceases to be true, the economy will change abruptly and radically. We will witness a huge transfer of wealth to individuals and away from institutions, to entrepreneurs and away from passive investors.

Individuals who want to benefit by being part of the 80/20 revolution can do so by taking some straightforward steps. These are fully described in .

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 turbo-boost their careers and build businesses. 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 an extraordinary chord 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 wealth and wellbeing as an individual?

This is a book for individuals at work. I explain how you can become hugely more successful in your career by transforming any business in which you operate. It doesnt matter whether you are an entrepreneur, a manager, an executive, a worker, or unemployed. You can use the step-by-step method described here to remodel an existing business or create a new one, so that you and your close associates benefit. My objective is to help you as an individual first, customers second, and corporations only if helping them helps you. The world belongs to individuals, not to corporations.

Turbo-boost your careeruse the 80/20 principle to accomplish more by doing less.

In 1897, Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto (18481923) discovered a regular pattern in distributions of wealth or income, no matter the country or time period concerned. 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. Pareto was eventually able to predict the results accurately before looking at the data.