Resources and commentary on the Pareto Principle from Pareto Principle Coaching and Consulting and other sources (links elsewhere open in a new page).
The Wikipedia entry on the Pareto Principle offers a basic description of the term: “for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes”. Named after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto by management consultant and engineer Joseph M. Juran in the early 1940s, it originates with Pareto’s observation in 1906 that 80% of the property in Italy was owned by 20% of the population, and that this power law probability distribution of wealth and income could be found expressed in a broad swathe of historical situations across many centuries. It has since been used to describe social, scientific, geophysical, actuarial, and many other types of observable phenomena.
While the phenomenon itself, and the observed power law distributions, predate Juran’s description of it as “Pareto’s Principle”, and thus people dispute the use of the term to describe such phenomena, the name has stuck and doesn’t seem likely to be changed any time soon.
As we gather resources and articles worth passing on, we’ll post them below (links open in a new page).