Cracking the Pareto Code

Charles Thompson has had incredible success in business and has reached the level of CEO of his company. As a non-traditional college graduate, Charles is often asked what went into his accomplishment.

This is Charles’s story about the 20/80 rule and how it relates to his experience in the business world. The story begins with everything he did or could think of that led him to being a CEO, but ends with a Pareto analysis on how 80% of those things were responsible for only 20% of his success.

A common way of labeling the results of a Pareto analysis is a "Pareto Distribution". This distribution is often used as a probabilistic indicator for how much of an outcome will occur. In this article I will be analyzing the distributions associated with Charles’s life's business success.

For the analysis, I have taken all the successes Charles has had with his business and have categorized them into those that fall into either 20% or 80%. For each category, I have calculated and graphed their residual distributions. In other words, they are derived from their respective Pareto values. These residual distributions show by how much individual events contributed to Charles’s success.

The Pareto analysis has enabled us to find what I call "Pareto events" in Charles's life. We were able to determine his 20% of success was due to the following 80% of "Pareto events". His graph shows 95% of his business successes fall into three categories:

Business/Professional Endeavors that took less than 12 months to achieve their goals or milestones. (30%)

Business/Professional Endeavors that took between 12 and 24 months to achieve their goals or milestones. (54%)

These two categories alone accounted for almost 90% of Charles’s success.

However, the remaining 7% of successes were associated with Business/Professional Endeavors that took longer than 24 months to achieve their goals or milestones (7%).

Maintaining a positive attitude: To get where he is today, Charles says he has to stay positive. How? He says it comes from his love and understanding of people. His ability to focus on what will make a difference in both himself and others is what he believes keeps him motivated and maybe even lucky.

I have found that success can be measured in two ways:

Success as measured by one’s own definition. Success as measured by most other people’s definition.

To be successful in business and in life, you need to find out what success means to you. Then, work towards achieving your goals.

Who’s an expert? Even when people don’t know what they want to do, or are not sure of their abilities, they still feel qualified to give advice on how others should lead their lives. I think one reason for this is that people want others to achieve the kind of success they’ve achieved for themselves. By sharing what worked for them, maybe we can help guide someone else towards a direction that may lead them there too!

Charles Thompson graduated from college with a degree in Marketing and Finance. Charles’s first job was with a large recruitment firm where he specialized in screening candidates for management position openings and developing staffing programs for business clients.

Charles developed a reputation for helping his clients hire the right candidates for the most difficult positions, and handling both the internal and external pressures that accompanied these hires. Charles worked at this company from October 1991 until September 1993. Charles then moved to the banking industry, both on a retail and corporate level. He then decided to start his own consulting firm in January 2000 based on his strengths in recruiting, training and resource management that he had learned throughout his earlier career.

Charles has been featured on CNN, Fox News, and in Inc. Magazine as an expert on leadership, customer service and recruiting.

Charles has worked with some of the top businesses in the USA including The Big Four Banks (JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp., Wells Fargo & Co., and Citigroup Inc.), Siemens Corporation, Commerce Bancorp, Nexstar Media Group, The Carolina Panthers and many others.

Charles also co-hosts a weekly syndicated television show "The Great Consulting Challenge" where he interviews successful leaders about success strategies.

In December 2011 Charles wrote a book called 'The 80/20 Principle' that was published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers Ltd. The book takes a look at the 80/20 rule, both on an individual and society level. The first part of the book describes the 80/20 rule, then it goes onto describe in detail cases of individuals who have achieved success using this principle. Each case is followed by a Pareto analysis on how many of those people’s successes were due to “80%)” and “20%”.

The book has received a very positive reception, it was featured as one of the "Top 10 Business books" by Forbes Magazine and has been featured in many other publications such as: The New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal and Inc Magazine. It has also been described as: "A book on organization leadership that will surprise you, amaze you and help you become a better leader".

In March 2014, Charles Thompson published his second book called "The 80/20 Law of Success". The book focuses on the Pareto principle with regards to success. The book looks at statistical models to break down the Pareto principle and gives examples of how it relates to success.

By recognizing the 80% events in his life, Charles has set out to inspire others to make their own personal changes in their lives so they can achieve the same levels of success. He has the following goals for his company:

Charles Thompson’s website is www.8020Leadership.com.

The 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto principle is based on the theory that twenty percent of efforts result in eighty percent of results.

Some areas in business where the Pareto principle can be applied:

In a recent interview by Daniel Pink for his book A Whole New Mind, Charles Thompson described what he calls positive leadership and some of his beliefs and values regarding being a leader. He describes positive leadership as "a process by which an individual seeks to improve the quality of life for everyone involved including themselves.

Conclusion:

In Charles Thompson’s book, "The 80/20 Law of Success", he describes that Pareto Analysis can be applied to any business by looking into the areas where 80% of the results come from 20% of the efforts. For example, if you are running a company with only five employees, you would spend more time on the 80% of what truly matters.

Happiness is not always found in doing something that makes us wealthy or has us being recognized for our achievement. It is about finding what we are passionate about and doing that every single day. If we have things we love to do each day then our happiness will outshine anything else we could possibly encounter in life.