Augmented Reality

Have you heard of Haddad’s Theorem? It was discovered in 1906, it states that 80 percent of your profits as a company are derived from 20 percent of your audience, and it’s named after Munir Haddad, a co-worker of mine. How did one of the guiding principles of economic theory get to be named after a man born 65 years after the principle was discovered? Pull up a chair…

During a conference call almost two years ago, my associate Munir Haddad mentioned the 80/20 Rule, which again, in our example refers to the fact that 80 percent of your profits as a company are derived from 20 percent of your audience. When I indicated that I was familiar with the rule, he mentioned that it was also known as the Pareto Principle, which I didn’t (at the time) know, and when I questioned this fact, he cited Wikipedia. The article read:

The Pareto principle (also known as the 80-20 rule, the law of the vital few and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

Before the phone call was over, it read:

The Pareto principle (also known as the 80-20 rule, Haddad’s Theorem, the law of the vital few and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

I’m not sure why I edited the harmless lie into the article, but I suspect it’s because I can be a bit of a joker.

Here’s the thing: most Wikipedia lies are so easily disproven that they immediately get edited out. Not in this case. For the four weeks following my edit, the unattributed cribbing from the Wikipedia article not only still stood, but had spread all over the Web. The funny thing is, there really is a Haddad’s Theorem, about something completely boring and unrelated. But the power of my Wikipedia lie had almost eradicated any actual mention of the real Haddad’s Theorem from the front page of Google.

It first showed up here on LinkedIn’s professional advice page, as user Joerg Kurt W wrote, “The 80-20 rule, Haddad’s Theorem, or Pareto principle is also related to several other principles, like the ‘Iron law of oligarchy’ and ‘tipping point principle.’”

From there, it appeared on the Atkins Diet bulletin board. Writer cgdat136 said, “So, this has me thinking about the 80-20 rule, Haddad’s Theorem or the Pareto Principle: Will 80% of our efforts (goals) really be achieved by only 20% of us?“

Then here, on a marketing blog called Ramblings of a Marketing Gurl. In her Customer Segmentation entry, the author wrote, “The Pareto principle (a.k.a. the 80-20 rule, Haddad’s Theorem) states that 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.”

At the time of this writing, only 2 of the top 10 Google results for Haddad’s Theorem involved the accurate mention of what the term refers to. The other 8 are Wiki citations.  And now, it could reasonably be argued that the 80/20 rule IS in fact known (by some, mostly the gullible) as “Haddad’s Theorem.”

Of course, eventually, Wikipedia caught wind and removed my edit. And to be clear, in the future, I don’t intend to post any more lies (or DO I?), but if I’m sure of anything, it’s that I’m far from the only joker with a keyboard. It was just interesting to see how quickly the lie took root and spread, and how quickly primary sources became secondary references in a copy/paste world.

And that’s the mostly true story of how I came to work with one of the world’s greatest economic marketing scientists.