THE 80/20 PRINCIPLE
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Italian, this is a shorter and better description of Pareto’s sociology than is his later work. The description of Pareto as the ‘bourgeois Karl Marx’ came as a backhanded compliment in his 1923 obituary in the socialist newspaper Avanti. It is an apt description, because Pareto, l.ike Marx, stressed the importance of classes and of ideology in determining behaviour. 5 Except possibly music and the visual arts. Even here, however, collaborators may be more important than is generally acknowledged.
Chapter 13 1
2 3 4 5
See Robert Frank and Philip Cook (1995) The Winner-Take-All Society, New York: Free Press. Although they do not use the phrase 80/20, the authors are clearly talking about the operation of 80/20like laws. They deplore the waste implied by such unbalanced rewards. See also the comment on the book in a perceptive essay in The Economist (25 November 1995, p134), on which I have drawn extensively in this section. The Economist article notes that in the early 1980s Sherwin Rose, an economist at the University of Chicago, wrote a couple of papers on the economics of superstars. See Richard Koch (1995) The Financial Times Guide to Strategy, London: Pitman, pp17–30. G W F Hegel, trans. T M Knox (1953) Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Oxford: Oxford University Press. See Louis S Richman (1994) The new worker elite, Fortune, 22 August, pp44– 50. This trend is part of the ‘death of management’, whereby managers are rendered redundant and only the ‘doers’ have a place in effective corporations. See Richard Koch and Ian Godden, op cit. (see Chapter 3 note 12).