Boiling The Ocean

A headline in the Guardian recently blared: “the Top 1% of England owns 50% of the land”. Another article I read said that only 4% of its total digital audience pays the New York Times for its content, and yet this was a very good profitable year for newspaper. What unites these stories? A concept known by some as the 80/20 Rule and in Economics as the Pareto Principle. You may not know these names, but you need to know this principle - because it’s tremendously important power law that is as true in business as it is in real life. People wear around 20% of their clothes 80% of the time. The most frequently used 20% of the words account for 80% of word usage. 20% of your friends give you 80% of your overall enjoyment. In a nutshell, 80% of the outputs result from 20% of the inputs. Now the distribution is not always exactly 80 / 20 (it can sometimes be 95 / 5), but it remains shockingly true that a very small percentage of activities that you perform lead to the majority of what you accomplish. In managemen