Drucker on picking the “nays” out of an opportunity
Peter Drucker on Managerial Courage:
Business enterprise is not a phenomenon of nature but one of society. In a social situation, however, events are not distributed according to the "normal distribution" of a natural universe (that is, they are not distributed according to the U-shaped Gaussian curve). In a social situation a very small number of events—10 percent to 20 percent at most—account for 90 percent of all results, whereas the great majority of events account for 10 percent or less of the results.This is true in the marketplace.
A handful of customers out of many thousands produce the bulk of the orders; a handful of products out of hundreds of items in the line produce the bulk of the volume; and so on. This is true of markets, end uses, and distributive channels. It is equally true of sales efforts: A few salesmen, out of several hundred, always produce two-thirds or more of all new business. It is true in the plant: A handful of production runs account for most of the tonnage. It is true of research: A few men in the laboratory produce all the important innovations, as a rule. . . .
[Managers need] … the courage to go through with logical decisions—despite all pleas to give this or that product another chance, and despite all such specious alibis as the accountant's "it absorbs overhead" or the sale's manager's "we need a full product line."
