The most important thing you can do for yourself and your company is to get on the critical path.

Think about what your organization actually makes or does for your customers. Do you provide them with: Cars? Accounting Services? Electricity?  Vegetables?  Software?  Transportation?  Healthcare?  Mortgages?  Music? The Promise of salvation?

As discussed in Lesson 1, every organization provides some kind of good or service, or else it doesn’t last very long.

How does your organization go about making and getting its services/products to its customers? What does that chain of activities look like? Try to draw a map of what happens at your organization once a customer orders something from your company and that customer receives it. Identify and track every step in the process. Here are some questions to help you tease out every step along the way: 

  • What triggers products/services being designed and made?

  • How does the salesperson interact with the customer to make a sale?

  • What does the salesperson do with the order?

  • Who gets the order from the sales person?

  • How does the product/service department get notified of the sale?

  • What process is used to get the product/service ready for delivery?

  • How is the product/service delivered?

  • What triggers a bill to be sent?

  • How do you know if the bill has been collected?

  • How do you know if the customer got the product/service and is satisfied?

  • How is customer support triggered?

After looking at the map you’ve drawn, ask yourself: Is it an efficient process? Are there too many steps in the process? Does the process make it difficult for the customer to be well served? Is the process frustrating to the customer? Can you spot opportunities to serve the customer better than is being done now?

As an employee, you want to be directly on this critical path—or doing work that clearly and substantially supports those who are on it. The critical path is the guts of the business. Everyone’s job at the company is to make this critical path: 

  • More customer-focused

  • More profitable

Let me repeat: everyone’s job is to improve the critical path in these ways. If your position in the organization doesn’t put you directly on the critical path, then you are in a position of supporting those who are on the path.

To achieve these two goals, you often need to make the critical path:

  • Better

  • Smarter

  • Shorter

  • Faster

  • More effective

Being on the critical path means that you do actual work along the path. You have a direct connection to the product or service that the customer buys, such as making or delivering the spinach noodles to the customer. When the customer goes into an auto showroom, the salesperson who approaches the customer is on the critical path. She is bringing the customer into contact with the product and helping the customer buy it.

Critical path people make possible the money that pays everyone’s salaries. If you are not on the critical path, then you are beholden to the critical path folks for your salary. If they don’t make enough money for the firm, then non-critical path employees cannot get paid.

Many people get confused about what is and isn’t on the critical path. Accountants in a baseball factory are not on the critical path. They don’t ever touch those baseballs coming off the assembly line. For accountants to be on the critical path, they need to work for a firm that sells accounting services to others—in other words, work for a CPA firm.

A finance worker in a candy company once told me that he was on the critical path because he arranged financing for the business. But he was mistaken because he never did anything that touched the candy being created, made, or sold. The candy company did not sell money; it sold chocolate and sugar treats.

For any finance person to be on the critical path, she must work for a company that sells money, such as an investment bank. These firms sell their customers a return on the money they pay to the financial firm. As Ken Griffin, the CEO of the hedge fund, Citadel LLC, told the Wall Street Journal, “I don’t manufacture cars, but we do manufacture money.” This is what Citadel’s customers are buying. Citadel creates a product that might invest in providing loans to distressed companies at a very high interest rate. These customers are not to be confused with Citadel’s shareholders, who invested in the overall firm. No, these customers, like pension funds or rich people, bought Citadel products with the goal of getting money back from that specific product.

Critical Path Action Items

  • Draw a map of your company’s critical path.

  • Where could the map be improved for the customer?