Atlanta- While attending a NetApp executive briefing today in Atlanta, I caught myself daydreaming about how senior leaders can apply the Pareto Principle, or 80/20 Rule to make important organization decisions.
Using these 5 questions as guidelines, what key decisions can help your organization become more agile?
1. Improve employee productivity by eliminating or at least reducing activities that do not touch the customer.
2. Seek ways to reduce time to market bottlenecks in the supply chain. Study your “from Quote to Cash” decision tree to reduce complexity.
3. Be relentless to improve quality. Remember to focus on speed and simplicity.
4. Be able to quickly recover from unforeseen events. Don’t wait for a disaster, predict it.
5. Apply risk management and leverage proven architectures instead of implementing “cutting edge” technology that has not had time for the production bugs to be worked out yet.
How you apply 80/20 thinking? List the activities to be addressed, stack rank them and focus on a laser on the top 20%. Knock those activities out and then re-sort the remaining items on the list.
Let me know how it goes.
Remember to encourage excellence in everyone that you interact.
For a more detailed video segment on the 80/20 principle, click here:
Click below for Forbes.com’s approach to the 80/20 concept in the business realm:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/piyankajain/2013/05/26/the-8020-rule-of-analytics-every-cmo-should-know/
Bryan E. Wilson 