70-20-10 Rule

From Weekly I/O#69


70-20-10 Rule: Spend 70% on your core business, 20% on adjacent or nearby things, and 10% on wild bets.

Podcast: Eric Schmidt — Lessons from a Trillion-Dollar Coach

How to organize resources in a company for the long term? At Google, Eric Schmidt and Sergey Brin said they should spend 70% on their core business, 20% on adjacent or nearby things, and 10% on wild bets.

You need 70% on the core business to sustain innovation because you need revenue and growth. You need the 20% to explore adjacencies to extend your franchise. And you need the 10% on wild bets to build transformational initiatives, which is vital for what you want to do 5 or 10 years from now.

We can apply the 70-20-10 rule to personal development too. We should allocate our time to look up, down, and up. We spend 70% looking down and focusing on delivering work within the deadline, 20% looking around and talking to other functions in the company, and 10% looking up and gazing all the way further to our ultimate mission.


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