There are good ways and bad ways to interpret the book. Just because good engineers have historically not lived their lives according to these particular buzzwords, does not mean they haven't implicitly incorperated similar, analogous, strategies. I would be surprised if Linus Torvalds and Peter Norvig and the like didn't use concepts like prioritization, investing in tools, and some similar idea (though not necessarily expressed in that way) to the 80/20 rule. Why should it matter from which culture productivity buzzwords originate from?