The Wilfredo Pareto 80/20 rule is strongly present in companies seemingly across all industries—20% of the people produce 80% of the value. Since most companies are profitable, the improvement of efficiency from 20% to a more acceptable 75% causes not just a nominal increase in profitability but a multiplication of net profits.
Every year American business leaders purchase $1.3 trillion dollars in business automation products, and another $60 billion in training. The problem is that this investment is mostly wasted. With 70% of the people in jobs that do not significantly engage them, we are trying to train people to be who they are not.
We are trying to systematize the wrong people, and often even the wrong set of job functions. By building systems to make 70% of the wrong people more effective doing the work, we make the intrinsic job different from the one the top performers loved to do.
The other major factor in finding the key to human productivity is the culturally accepted purchase of a person’s skills and experience as the keystone to hiring decisions. Since the dawn of the industrial revolution this purchase of skills and knowledge without regard for the in exchange for a salary or wage.
