The 80/20 Revolution

Why the creative individual is king and how you can create wealth and wellbeing

Richard Koch

Publisher: Nicholas Brealey, 2002, 243 pages

ISBN: 1-85788-305-5

Keywords: Strategy, Management

Last modified: April 5, 2021, 10:54 p.m.

Something surprising is happening in business and society — something that matters to every individual and is revealed here for the first time. No longer is the corporation or capital king. Creative individuals and their teams are the new driving force of the economy, creating — and capturing — wealth and wellbeing.

In this powerful sequel to his classic bestseller The 80/20 Principle, Richard Koch uniquely makes the connection between the rise of the individual and the 80/20 principle — achieving more with less to create great new wealth.

The old way was for managers to aggregate, to add assets and management structure. The new 80/20 way for individuals is to divide, to take averages apart, and to concentrate on the small parts of the system that have extraordinary power to generate wealth.

Clearly and simply, Richard Koch show how you can become an 80/20 person and get what you always wanted out of life. He explains the nine essentials of 80/20 success — from how to recognize your most creative and imaginative self to identifying the best new idea for your enterprise, from the vital elements that will make it super-profitable, to how to develop your business venture creatively so that it can fulfill its potential.

Koch gives 60 nreal life examples of '80/20 people' — some well-known public figures, most drawn from his own experience — all of whom have created something valuable and gained control of their own lives in the process. A majority of them use capital and corporations, but these work for the individuals, not the other way round. All the 80/20 individuals have latched on to a powerful idea and given it a unique new twist to create a very specialized and profitable social or business enterprise that has enriched the world and their own lives.

From big business to small, from Hollywood to sport, Richard Koch demonstrates how the innovative individual now has the competitive advantage. The key change has already happened: the most successful companies now revolve around a few individuals such as Bill gates and Warren Buffett, to name just two.

Huge wealth is transferring from institutions to individuals, from passive investors to entrepreneurs. Koch concludes that 'individual-centred' business on the scale seen today could pose a terminal threat to the big business system organized around the stock market.

The 80/20 Principle showed how individuals could improve their personal lives — but not their professional lives. The 80/20 Revolution is different. Koch reveals how innovative individuals are taking over the world and how you can join in the revolution — creating new wealth and wellbeing in a twenty-first century individualism that will replace traditional capitalism within a generation.

  • Part I: The Rise of 80/20 People
    1. Introduction to the 80/20 revolution
    2. The rise of the creative individual
  • Part II: The Nine Essentials of 80/20 Success
    1. Enlist your most creative 20 percent
    2. Enlist and mutate great ideas
    3. Enlist the vital few profit forces
    4. Enlist Einstein
    5. Enlist great individuals
    6. Enlist your firm
    7. Enlist other firms
    8. Enlist capital
    9. Enlist zigzag progress
  • Part III: The 80/20 Revolution
    1. From capitalism to individualism
    2. What if?
  • Appendix: The roots and ramifications of the revolution