Richard Koch > Quotes

“Those who seize the day become seriously rich.”
― Richard Koch, The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less

“The way to create something great is to create something simple.”
― Richard Koch, The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less

“golden rules for career success 1 Specialize in a very small niche; develop a core skill 2 Choose a niche that you enjoy, where you can excel and stand a chance of becoming an acknowledged leader 3 Realize that knowledge is power 4 Identify your market and your core customers and serve them best 5 Identify where 20 percent of effort gives 80 percent of returns 6 Learn from the best 7 Become self-employed early in your career 8 Employ as many net value creators as possible 9 Use outside contractors for everything but your core skill 10 Exploit capital leverage”
― Richard Koch, The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less

“There are people who want to achieve--and then there are sane people.”
― Richard Koch, The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less

“It may be that you will be happiest in the rat race; perhaps, like me, you are basically a rat.”
― Richard Koch, The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less

“Not only is happiness not money, it is not even like money.”
― Richard Koch, The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less

“Things that matter most Must never be at the mercy of things that matter least.”
― Richard Koch, The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less

“THE 80/20 PRINCIPLE AND CHAOS THEORY Probability theory tells us that it is virtually impossible for all the applications of the 80/20 Principle to occur randomly, as a freak of chance. We can only explain the principle by positing some deeper meaning or cause that lurks behind it. Pareto himself grappled with this issue, trying to apply a consistent methodology to the study of society. He searched for “theories that picture facts of experience and observation,” for regular patterns, social laws, or “uniformities” that explain the behavior of individuals and society. Pareto’s sociology failed to find a persuasive key. He died long before the emergence of chaos theory, which has great parallels with”
― Richard Koch, The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less

“being mostly correct and decisive typically yields better results than taking the time to figure out what is perfectly correct.”
― Richard Koch, Simplify: How the Best Businesses in the World Succeed

“We can change the way that we think about external events, even where we cannot change them. And we can do something more. We can intelligently change our exposure to events that make us either happy or unhappy.”
― Richard Koch, The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less

“The most successful people change the world not through sweat and tears but through ideas and passion. It is not a matter of hard work or time on the job; it is having a different view, an original idea, something that expresses their individuality and creativity. Success comes from thinking, then acting on those thoughts.”
― Richard Koch, Living the 80/20 Way: Work Less, Worry Less, Succeed More, Enjoy More

“80 percent of products, or customers or employees, are only contributing 20 percent of profits; that there is great waste; that the most powerful resources of the company are being held back by a majority of much less effective resources; that profits could be multiplied if more of the best sort of products could be sold, employees hired, or customers attracted (or convinced to buy more from the firm).”
― Richard Koch, The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less

“Who you work for is more important than what you do”
― Richard Koch, The 80/20 Principle: The Secret of Achieving More with Less

“Almost anyone can think up an idea. The thing that counts is developing it into a practical product. 4 Henry Ford”
― Richard Koch, Simplify: How the Best Businesses in the World Succeed

“Think, think, think.”
― Richard Koch, The 80/20 Principle: The Secret of Achieving More with Less

“from 20 per cent of clients. In the consulting industry that means two things: large clients and long-term clients. Large clients give large assignments, which means you can use a higher proportion”
― Richard Koch, The 80/20 Principle: The Secret of Achieving More with Less

“It is not shortage of time that should worry us, but the tendency for the majority of time to be spent in low-quality ways.”
― Richard Koch, The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less

“Creativity,” Einstein famously said, “is more important than knowledge.”
― Richard Koch, The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
― Richard Koch, The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less

“Innovation is the name of the game;”
― Richard Koch, The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less

“You might get much better value and happiness out of a simpler and cheaper lifestyle.”
― Richard Koch, The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less

“HINT 3: ONLY WORK FOR AN 80/20 BOSS What is an 80/20 boss? Someone who consciously or unconsciously follows the principle. By their works you shall know them: They focus on very few things—the ones that make a BIG difference to their customers, and, if they still have them, their bosses (hopefully a temporary arrangement—the best 80/20 bosses are not themselves constrained by a boss). They are going places fast. They are rarely short of time, and never flustered. They are usually relaxed and happy, not workaholics. They look to their people for a few valuable outputs. They pay no attention to inputs such as time and sweat. They take the time to explain to you what they are doing, and why. They encourage you to focus on what delivers the greatest results with the least effort. They praise you when you deliver great results, but are constructively critical when you don’t—and suggest that you either stop doing something unimportant or do something important in a more effective way. When they trust you, they leave you alone and encourage you to come to them when you need guidance.”
― Richard Koch, The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less

“businesses that could benefit from the way networks behave, and this approach yielded some notable successes. Richard came from a different slant. For twenty years, he was a ‘strategy consultant’, using economic analysis to help firms become more profitable than their rivals. He ended up co-founding LEK, the fastest-growing ‘strategy boutique’ of the 1980s, with offices in the US, Europe and Asia. He also wrote books on business strategy, and in particular championed the ‘star business’ idea, which stated that the most valuable venture was nearly always a ‘star’, defined as the biggest firm in a high-growth market. In the 1990s and 2000s, Richard successfully invested the money he had made as a management consultant in a series of star ventures. He also read everything available about networks, feeling intuitively that they were another reason for business success, and might also help explain why some people’s careers took off while equally intelligent and qualified people often languished. So, there were good reasons why Greg and Richard might want to write a book together about networks. But the problem with all such ‘formal’ explanations is that they ignore the human events and coincidences that took place before that book could ever see the light of day. The most”
― Richard Koch, Superconnect: How the Best Connections in Business and Life Are the Ones You Least Expect

“Scientists working with relativity, or quantum theory, or modern mathematics, or systems theory, or chaos, or complexity are at the top of their fields.”
― Richard Koch, The 80/20 Principle and 92 Other Powerful Laws of Nature: The Science of Success

“There are proven techniques for exiting feelings of incipient sadness and depression before they become damaging to your health and happiness. Moreover, by cultivating habits of optimism you can help to prevent disease as well as have a happier life.”
― Richard Koch, The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less

“Pursue those few things where you are amazingly better than others and that you enjoy most.”
― Richard Koch, The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less

“I give people the latitude to express their imagination.”
― Richard Koch, The 80/20 Manager: Ten ways to become a great leader

“In this kind of situation one might well ask: why continue to make the 80 percent of products that only generate 20 percent of profits? Companies rarely ask these questions, perhaps because to answer them would mean very radical action: to stop doing four-fifths of what you are doing is not a trivial change. What J-B Say called the work of entrepreneurs, modern financiers call arbitrage. International financial markets are very quick to correct anomalies in valuation, for example between exchange rates. But business organizations”
― Richard Koch, The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less

“10 golden rules for career success 1 Specialize in a very small niche; develop a core skill 2 Choose a niche that you enjoy, where you can excel and stand a chance of becoming an acknowledged leader 3 Realize that knowledge is power 4 Identify your market and your core customers and serve them best 5 Identify where 20 percent of effort gives 80 percent of returns 6 Learn from the best 7 Become self-employed early in your career 8 Employ as many net value creators as possible 9 Use outside contractors for everything but your core skill 10 Exploit capital leverage”
― Richard Koch, The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less

“When they buy businesses, all venture capitalists look hard at the technology, the management, the market. They get into all sorts of complex investigation. They hire consultants to assess the technology and the market, accountants to crawl over the books, and lawyers to tie the managers in knots and do whatever lawyers do. I did none of those things. I knew Betfair was a star business. That was enough for me.”
― Richard Koch, The Star Principle: How it can make you rich