Richard Koch quotes

People think that creativity is largely a matter of talent, experience, or luck. They are wrong. Talent, experience, and luck are all key elements, but there is something more fundamental, accessible, and powerful that you can use to multiply your creative effect. (Richard Koch)
Progress is personal; it comes from individuals demanding more of themselves and everyone else.
Richard Koch
Conventional wisdom is not to put all of your eggs in one basket. 80/20 wisdom is to choose a basket carefully, load all your eggs into it, and then watch it like a hawk.
Richard Koch
Few people take objectives really seriously. They put average effort into too many things, rather than superior thought and effort into a few important things. People who achieve the most are selective as well as determined.
Richard Koch
In business the 80/20 principle is behind any innovation, any extra value. It is an entrepreneurial principle, a formula for value creation utilized not only by entrepreneurs, but by most managers and organizations.
Richard Koch
Marketing, and the whole firm, should devote extraordinary endeavour towards delighting, keeping for ever and expanding the sales to the 20 per cent of customers who provide 80 per cent.
Richard Koch
The key is to work out the few things that are really important, and the few methods that will give us what we really want.
Richard Koch
Business strategy should not be a grand and sweeping overview. It should be more like an under view, a peek beneath the covers to look in great detail at what is going on.
Richard Koch
Those who can create wealth - and know that they can - are able to dictate their own terms. Wealth is a means to happiness, but it is not the main one. What most people want is control over their lives. They want the ability to choose how they live: what work they do, the way they interact with friends and colleagues, the quality of their personal relationships, the way they view themselves.
Richard Koch
Everything you want should be yours: the type of work you want; the relationships you need; the social, mental, and aesthetic stimulation that will make you happy and fulfilled; the money you require for the lifestyle that is appropriate to you; and any requirement that you may (or may not) have for achievement or service to others. If you don't aim for it all, you'll never get it all. To aim for it requires that you know what you want.
Richard Koch
80% of the results come from 20% of the causes. A few things are important; most are not. (Richard Koch)
Strive for excellence in few things, rather than good performance in many.
Richard Koch
The few things that work fantastically well should be identified, cultivated, nurtured, and multiplied.
Richard Koch
If we did realize the difference between the vital few and the trivial many in all aspects of our lives, and if we did something about it, we could multiply anything that we valued.
Richard Koch
Hard work leads to low returns. Insight and doing what we want lead to high returns.
Richard Koch
To get useful new ideas, we must go beyond our immediate circle and make contact with distant parts of the social system.
Richard Koch
There is no shortage of time. In fact, we are positively awash with it. We only make good use of 20 per cent of our time.... The 80/20 principle says that if we doubled our time on the top 20% of activities, we could work a two-day week and achieve 60 per cent more than now.
Richard Koch
To be strategic is to concentrate on what is important, on those few objectives that can give us a comparative advantage, on what is important to us rather than others, and to plan and execute the resulting plan with determination and steadfastness.
Richard Koch
The 80/20 principle - that 80 percent of result flow from just 20 per cent of the causes - is the one true principle of highly effective people.
Richard Koch
The 80/20 Principle, like the truth, can make you free. You can work less. At the same time, you can earn more and enjoy more. The only price is that you need to do some serious 80/20 thinking.
Richard Koch
Celebrate exceptional productivity, rather than raise average efforts. (Richard Koch)
Laziness is the road to progress, but only when it is allied to intelligent thought and high ambition.
Richard Koch
What could you achieve that would make you proud, that no one else could do with the same ease?
Richard Koch
Use all the willpower at your disposal to make yourself happy. Construct the right stories about yourself - and believe them!
Richard Koch
The road to hell is paved with the pursuit of volume. Volume leads to marginal products, marginal customers, and greatly increased managerial complexity.
Richard Koch