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.