The 80/20 Rule: Why the Next Time Someone Mentions It In a Meeting, I’m Going to Puke
I’ve worked in publishing long enough to remember when publishing companies were run by publishers and editors. Editors shaped the product and prepared it for publication; publishers made the deals.
Today it’s a different story. MBAs run the business, CTOs shape the process and the future, Sales and Marketing develop and push the products. Now that it’s more important for the Google bots rather than human readers to understand what’s on a page, SEO specialists are the arbiters of diction. Editors do whatever else is left—generally limited to checking spelling, fitting copy and firing the art director, just before taking the package themselves.
Even in the good old days, editors weren’t the highest-paid publishing professionals. But now with the print publishing pie diminished by intensified media competition and divided into more slices, editors are generally left with but a sliver—when they can get a taste at all. With the growth of Internet publishing, editors’ wages are heading unremittingly south. A colleague of mine recently sent this link: http://www.foliomag.com/2009/value-online-content-practically-nothing. Writers and editors–read it and weep.
Those at the top of the publishing food chain today are not the literati but the numerati—the financial analysts and biz dev folks—you know, the ones who theorize that if the size of the market is X, and if we reach Y potential customers, and if we can get a third party to pay as much as Z for the clicks, we may really have something. Supporting them are the process management specialists who say things like, “Let’s see, if we can eliminate paper clips from the memos—that’s $.01 per memo times B4, which should drop to the bottom line.” And of course there are the techies. Nobody really understands much of what they talk about most of the time, but that doesn’t really matter. It’s taken for granted that they know things that the rest of us don’t—and they can do math.
Together, these boys and girls can read a spreadsheet like I read Wallace Stevens. They need merely to glance over the columns and rows. They can then spend hours insightfully discussing the nuances of form and content, and distill the implications into a business plan.
Invariably during planning—usually when the editor (I should say content producer) asks for more resources, more time or greater influence in the QA process—someone invokes the 80/20 rule. It is based on the work of the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who observed in 1906, among other things, that 80 percent of the peas in his garden were produced by 20 percent of the pods, and 80 percent of land in Italy was owned by 20 percent of the people.
Axiomatic among today’s business leaders, the 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto Principle, observes that for many events roughly 80 percent of the effects are produced by roughly 20 percent of the causes, e.g., 80 percent of sales are generated from 20 percent of the clients; 80 percent of the goals of a given project are met with 20 percent of the effort, etc.
Ironically, the Pareto Principle was brought to the attention of students of business by Joseph Juran, a 20th century management consultant—ironic because Juran was an evangelist for quality and quality management. Most often when I’ve seen the 80/20 rule applied, it’s been as an argument for leveraging resources, a rationale for not sweating the small stuff, a strategic incentive to work only on the parts of the project that are easy money.
“Hey, Dude, if we can solve 80 percent of the problem with 20 percent of the effort, that’s pretty good. Now we can get started on making 80 percent of the next big thing.”
Now I am merely a writer and editor—accused by some of being overly focused on language and worse yet, a perfectionist. But I can do math, too. My first professional writing and editing jobs were creating math programs for junior college students—quite possibly the project managers, ad sales execs and geeks who lord their process-management skills over us content folks today.
So based on many years of experience in product development and Web publishing, here’s the Writes-A-Roni Principle: If you work to solve only 80 percent of the problem, you get none of the benefit of having something that’s actually finished and actually works.
The implication? If I were part of a team that failed to produce a product that was completely baked, you’d have to blame Pareto, not Writes-A-Roni.