ConceptsNest

  The Pareto principle states that for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes (the "vital few"). Other names for this principle are the  80/20 rule , the  law of the vital few ,  or the  principle of factor sparsity . Management consultant Joseph Juran developed the concept in the context of quality control and improvement, naming it after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who noted the 80/20 connection while at the University of Lausanne in 1896. In his first work, Cours d'économie politique, Pareto showed that approximately 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. The Pareto principle is only tangentially related to Pareto efficiency. More generally, the Pareto Principle is the observation (not law) that most things in life are not distributed evenly . It can mean all of the following things: The Uneven Distribution What does it mean when we say that things aren’t distributed evenly? The key point is that each unit of wor