Life Coach - Step 30 of 100 - 80 -20 rule

Actually it is not a 80-20 rule. It could be anything depending on the situation 98-2 rule, 90-10 rule. What is important is the philosophy and its application to MBE.

80-20 once understood and ingrained in the psyche translates to sub-consciously feeding the MBE.

Let us understand the 80-20 rule
Statistically 70% of people would be between 5 feet 4 and 5 feet 10. 15% would be less than 5 feet 4 and 15% more than 5 feet 10. I am just pulling up the numbers. But the statistical distribution of a normal distribution is Gaussaion curve (bell shaped) with some sigma deviation. Being a Black Belt Six Sigma helps me to say that :)

Thus there would be 20 guys in a company out of 160 who actually form the games competition pool. So less than 15% of the total available people actually compete at company level. The rest only cheer them. This distribution is not bell shaped but skewed to one side.

In a class of 40 there would be 4 who are the geeks / nerds, 4 at the bottom who can barely make the pass grade. The rest of the class would be somewhere between. An instructor ends up talking to only those 4 geeks as they are the only one asking questions. And if he wants to understand if everyone has understood he has to ask the last 4 guys. If they have, everyone has.

I might making it sound very simple. But most of our management style evolves from focusing on the extremes.

What I am driving at is that 20% of your guys would be good. It could be 15%, 20%, 10%. You have to identify them and set them free. Similarly the bottom quartile (last 25%, 10%, 5%) would need to be micromanaged. 80-20 rule done subconsciously becomes MBE.

MBWA gets you on the ground and questioning, MBE helps to lead by exceptions and the 80-20 analysis corroborates the MBE in identifying what to focus on.

80-20 trends you need to identify

• Where do you spend your most time during a day?
• Where do your officers spend the most time during a day?
• What are the things that you and your officers doing that actually make a difference?
• And are you following up on those activities.

A slight slant here. Knowing that you will spend 80% of your activity on things that only preserve value, it is very important to track not that 80%, but the 20% that actually makes the difference. Since it is 20% it is easy to monitor too.