Pareto Principle
The Pareto principle (also known as the 80–20 rule, the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity)[1] states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.[2] Management consultant Joseph M. Juran suggested the principle and named it after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who, while at the University of Lausanne in 1896, published his first paper "Cours d'économie politique." Essentially, Pareto showed that approximately 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population; Pareto developed the principle by observing that 20% of the peapods in his garden contained 80% of the peas.[3]
It is a common rule of thumb in business; e.g., "80% of your sales come from 20% of your clients." Mathematically, the 80–20 rule is roughly followed by a power law distribution (also known as a Pareto distribution) for a particular set of parameters, and many natural phenomena have been shown empirically to exhibit such a distribution.[4]
This principle is used quite often in business, often not effectively. (More on that later)
Along with the sales example, inventory costs almost always fall into an 80/20 split. That is eighty percent of inventory costs come from twenty percent of inventory items. Also eighty percent of help desk support requests are from twenty percent of customers. I have heard it broken down into the "trivial many and the critical few."
The issue is how to properly manage the trivial many. In Sales, or Materials Management, or IT support, or various other areas, if you give equal weight to the trivial many, or even worse, focus on them due to the sheer numbers, then you end up swamped. You aren't focusing on the big deal or resolutions, rather you are pulled down into the bullshit trivial issues.
So it is not the principle that fails in business, it is due to forces wanting to focus on the trivial. Often this focus on the trivial is based upon petty politics. Focusing on the trivial never results in optimal results regardless if the forces are meaning to focus on the trivial or they are just unable to comprehend the big picture.
So why am I wasting your time on Bus.101? Because every gun thread I have ever seen on DU quickly gets bogged down by trivial bullshit. "The stats are wrong," "here are some BS stats from NRA sources," "that person or the OP doesn't know the difference between automatic and semi auto," "hand guns kill more people than long guns," blah, blah blah.
It is trivial fucking bullshit, some be design, so don't fall for it. We have a gun problem in this country, period end of fucking discussion. If there are people who do not admit there is a problem and only offer up the trivial BS noise rather than discussion of solutions there is one effective method to manage them. Trivialize them, ignore them, yes they will get loud, throw tantrums, claim that elections will be lost due to them being ignored. But the fact is, it is just more trivial bullshit.
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