Richard Koch

Twenty percent of those who marry comprise 80 percent of the divorce statistics

He happened to be looking at patterns of wealth and income in nineteenth-century England. He found that most income and wealth went to a minority of the people in his samples. Perhaps there was nothing very surprising in this. But he also discovered two other facts that he thought highly significant. One was that there was a consistent mathematical relationship between the proportion of people (as a percentage of the total relevant population) and the amount of income or wealth that this group enjoyed.4 To simplify, if 20 percent of the population enjoyed 80 percent of the wealth,5 then you could reliably predict that 10 percent would have, say, 65 percent of the wealth, and 5 percent would have 50 percent. The key point is not the percentages, but the fact that the distribution of wealth across the population was predictably unbalanced.

Zipf’s principle said that resources (people, goods, time, skills, or anything else that is productive) tended to arrange themselves so as to minimize work, so that approximately 20–30 percent of any resource accounted for 70–80 percent of the activity related to that resource.7

There seems to be a natural, almost democratic, expectation that causes and results are generally equally balanced

Every resource is ideally used where it has the greatest value

“the entrepreneur shifts economic resources out of an area of lower productivity into an area of higher productivity and yield

the most powerful resources of the company are being held back by a majority of much less effective resources

In this kind of situation one might well ask: why continue to make the 80 percent of products that only generate 20 percent of profits? Companies rarely ask these questions, perhaps because to answer them would mean very radical action: to stop doing four-fifths of what you are doing is not a trivial change.

Most of the time, we do not realize the extent to which some resources, but only a small minority, are superproductive—what Joseph Juran called the “vital few”—while the majority—the “trivial many”—exhibit little productivity or else actually have negative value

But in the second half of the twentieth century it seems much more accurate to view the world as an evolving organism where the whole system is more than the sum of its parts, and where relationships between the parts are nonlinear.