Amazon.com: Customer reviews: The 80/20 Principle, Third Edition: The Secret to Achieving More with Less

Top positive review

Richard Koch is my new intellectual hero.

Reviewed in the United States on December 12, 2017

Incredible book. Richard Koch is my new intellectual hero.

The 80/20 principle has become somewhat popularized in the last 5 or so years. A lot of people think that just because they've heard about the concept, or because they shallowly know *about* the concept, that they've gotten all there is to it. Not so!

Richard shows that there is a far cry from actually *living* life the 80/20 way (which demands that you make tough decisions and learn to prioritize better). You have to take this idea very very seriously and apply it to more than one area of your life.

10 people found this helpful

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Jake

At least it proves it's principle

Reviewed in the United States on May 25, 2018

Save 80% of your time by reading the title and nothing else. Input to output ratio is nonlinear in most circumstances. There is little value offered by reading this book if you accept the premise of the title.

41 people found this helpful

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From the United States

Jake

At least it proves it's principle

Reviewed in the United States on May 25, 2018

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41 people found this helpful

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Juan Pablo Gómez

OK read -

Reviewed in the United States on April 13, 2019

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I can tell you this read was useful, it makes you reflect on how are you are working and living your life... are you really focusing on what’s worth? are you prioritizing on the activities that will solve the problem you are after? It has become a habit to me to ask myself the 80/20 question when tackling a problem at work and I think it’s working so far, at least it gives you perspective. I agree with other reviewers that you could just read 20% of the book and then watch some youtube videos to get the 80% results, but it’s OK if you still go for the whole book, it’s an OK read.

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Steve

Book review and analysis

Reviewed in the United States on December 26, 2016

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Richard Koch is a shrewd person. He basically HYPED the used the well known Pareto analysis/chart/principle (which is taught in middle and high school). The writing this book is scented strongly like those unscrupulous diet books that promises something amazing and secret-revealing that would change your life and yet what is offered is something rather trivial, minor and few. He is reluctant to attribute where credits are due (Pareto and others) and re-brands someone else work as his own "80/20".

Granted that he connected business management practices (which are also well know) to Pareto analysis; however, such connections are fairly intuitive for anyone with any business training. The subtitle "The secret to achieving more with less" is just a hook to get you to buy the book, the implied promise of "achieve more with less" is flawed. Because in real life "there is no substitute for hard work" (Edison), and of course we are "to work smarter not harder". Therefore, you will work hard, smarter. You will work just as hard and be effective and ethical.

Ethics is not this books' strong suit. I can't resist but feel the tones of the book strikes me as greedy, selfish and even Machiavellian.

The book should be a reasonably useful readers lack business training. However, don't be "bedazzled" by the hype. It is common knowledge that you work on what is most rewarding or impacting to be efficient. Just open your analytical eyes and see, and that is all.

4 people found this helpful

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Rene Pepin

80% Theory, 20% Examples

Reviewed in the United States on July 25, 2016

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Richard packs a lot of great theory into his book but with so little examples of the theories it is hard to grasp the meaning of the them. I did learn something like the book should have 20% theory and 80% examples instead of 80% theory and 20% examples.

One person found this helpful

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ariel

not finished yet

Reviewed in the United States on August 6, 2016

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Was expecting more than depth into the principle than what is in the book. I am only 1/3 the way through it... hoping for it to get better.

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G. S. MCGILL

80/20 for beginners

Reviewed in the United States on July 3, 2008

Hello. My name is Gary Shane McGill and I have an MBA from Wilmington University in Delaware (I also sell patented ice cream and milkshake dispensers internationally), so I have heard of The 80/20 Principal both academically and professionally, which is why I bought the book. It is something mentioned, but not really elaborated in any great depth at graduate school, so the ideas are so simple that we sometimes overlook the obvious.

I cannot say that I personally like Richard Koch's writing style though, since there appears to be some repetition with examples overly used in several areas, plus it was not an easy transitional flow through the first couple of chapters to the main body of the text. I would have given up on the book at the early stages if it were not for the simple fact that I wanted to examine the main points that he makes.

Putting his writing style to one side for one moment, I personally felt that the ideas that he put forward are in some respects were very good guides, but for a book called The 80/20 Principal I suspect that it could have been more direct and to the point. I personally had to rummage (like some overly wordy university level technical book) through the chapters to find the essential points that really appeared to matter.

The idea of pruning down business lines are pretty standard graduate school recommended business practices, since we are so often enamoured by our marketing mix that we tend to lose sight of our margins, although be quite careful about what you read because there are undoubtedly some loss leaders that you do have to maintain (something that I did not notice illustrated with any great emphasis).

You must also ponder his ideas about relationships with the few good friends that you can make in life (and how you can leverage them). Life is unfortunately a great deal about who you know, since knowledge unfortunately does not always carry the day, but if you can leverage what you know with your networking attributes that becomes an entirely different proposition altogether. Maybe a future updated edition should discuss the addition of personal branding for plugging into marketing a company's product.

His idea about the stock market is also quite interesting with the obvious concept of riding on long-term higher returns from the market (buy low and sell high philosophy). It is really a question of what level of risk you are prepared to stomach because in this current credit crunch the markets are not necessarily for the faint of hearted. The thing about the markets is caution because even the best financial advisors (or media news articles) may not necessarily give you the best advice (careful consideration is always required).

At the end of the day the arguments presented in this book are perhaps overly simplistic to create overall happiness (and in some areas possibly naïve). That is not to say that you should not read this book, since I might not necessarily agree with everything that Richard Koch has to say, but I do at least highly respect him as a business professional and this is a philosophy that has worked well for him. I would certainly like to meet Richard Koch in person one of these days to discuss in greater detail his perspective on The 80/20 Principal.

2 people found this helpful

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From other countries

Chris

A simple, obvious idea, I thought

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 9, 2020

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The essence of the 80/20 rule is that 80 per cent of your success is probably coming from 20 per cent of your activities and effort. The advice, therefore, is to put laser focus on those activities and efforts and ruthlessly cut out the rest.

This is the staggeringly simple idea behind the book. It really doesn't need the hundreds of pages to bring this through. There is certainly some material to make you think, but there's also a lot of filler there which has the fingerprints of a consultant (and consultancy is what the author spent his career doing) simply rehashing the point, and devising unnecessary ways of complicating a simple principle.

Simply: do what works. Pursue the things you're good at, the things that bring you success, and stay away from everything else. There's a lot of needless chat about many other topics which at times feels irrelevant.

A useful general idea and thought provoking book, even if a little repetitive, irrelevant and impractical in places. An ok read.

2 people found this helpful

Bogdan

Bad paper and glue quality

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 8, 2020

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The book copying is very bad. The papers are ripping apart and the writing is not aligned with the paper. I love a good book, but I cannot read it when the quality is that bad

Amine BEN

It ok, you can still learn something

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 17, 2016

Verified Purchase

I find it literally too academic and couldn't get my head around it compared to other books I read... Not sure why..?
But you can still learn something

arshla

Average read for me after understood the principle

Reviewed in India on January 23, 2021

Verified Purchase

Liked the personal life part of it. Couldn't build much interest in professional/business part of it, not a fan of numbers and figures at bedtime reads.
Though stating same fact again and again but stressing it with different examples everytime which is kind of good to make you believe it. Took me a little while to get use to the style of writing if this book.

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