Lesson 62: Prioritize Deep Work and Flow

Lesson 61: Deep Work on the Critical Path

Knowing about critical path work and actually doing critical path work are two different things. People trying to contribute to the critical path often find themselves diverted by being swamped with emails, interruptions, make-work, or other distractions…

Lesson 60: What Every Employee Should Know about the Critical Path

It’s up to you if you want to be a major player on the critical path. To do so, use the guide below which was summarized from the first four parts of the book to gather current knowledge of the following:

Lesson 59: Understand the Definition of “Value-adding”

Creating more value for your employer than it costs to keep you is just the beginning. That is more of a “break even” way to think about your job. Instead, think about how your net value to the company is the difference between the money they can make off of you and your cost to them. The higher the profit margin on you, the more valuable you are to the organization.

Lesson 58: What about Passion?

Employees and students often ask where the “passion” is in this definition of jobs. After all, they say, if I’m passionate about the job, isn’t it more likely that I’ll be more interested, happier, and do better work?

Lesson 57: You Are Part of Money Making Mechanisms

Your value to any organization is as a potential asset that is worth more than your cost to the organization. For most business organizations, their simple goal is to make money by providing a service or product. For political organizations, it is to raise money to gain power (and oftentimes to use their power to raise money…

Lesson 56: Who Is Leveraging Whom – Mergers and Acquisitions?

Now let’s return to the example of Rupert Murdoch, who seems to have overpaid for a newspaper and two sports teams.

Murdoch is doing the equivalent of the consulting firm leveraging Corinne, only using companies rather than people. Plus, his end game is different. To understand why he would pay an additional $2 billion for the Wall Street Journal, we need to analyze past deals.

Lesson 55: Who Is Leveraging Whom – Employers or Employees?

Now let’s return to one of our examples in the previous Lesson and take a closer look.

Corinne, our 26-year-old MBA graduate, is thrilled with her $180,000 salary. Not only is it well above the average of her graduating class, it will help her pay down her $120,000 MBA debt more quickly. On top of all this, she will work for one of the premier firms and get great experience across multiple industries. So, we know what she’s getting from the deal, and on its surface, it sounds pretty good.

Lesson 54: Leverage: The Physics of Business

Let’s consider a few case studies:

Corinne, a 26-year-old MBA graduate from Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business, received a starting job offer of $180,000 at one of New York’s leading consulting firms. This is about three times what her roommates who did not go to graduate school are making. Who in their right mind would pay a 26-year-old $180K?

Lesson 53: Your Value Is in What You Do

At this point, many career advice books suggest that you take an inventory of what you bring to the world of work in order to figure out what you have and what is unique to you. Many career coaching books will tell you to list your skills, abilities, the disciplines that you are expert in…

Lesson 52: Dreams versus Assets

Most of us think about pursuing our dreams, as well we should. Dreams are powerful motivators. Equally important to consider is the reality that results from pursuing the dream. Once you have your unique assets in place, what are the chances for success?

Lesson 51: You are a Unique Bundle of Assets

You are a unique human being. No one else is even close. No one thinks or sings or laughs or even gets mad like you. Your many talents, the variety of your life experiences, and your range of emotions make you one-of-a-kind.

Lesson 50: Organizational Structures for Knowledge-Driven Companies

If your critical path is driven by knowledge, then you might consider an organizational structure that leverages that knowledge for the critical path. The classic article “Leveraging Intellect,” by James Brian Quinn, Philip Anderson, and Sydney Finkelstein looked at organizations where knowledge provides key value to the customer, ranging from airline operations and brokerage firms to medical practices, software companies, education, and professional firms.

Lesson 49: Tying Organizational Structure to the Critical Path

Another powerful lever that affects the critical path is the organization’s structure; that is, how it organizes itself to create value for its customer. For too many organizations, management structures the company to meet their own psychological comfort. If the CEO is a control freak, she sets up a command-control structure with clean lines of hierarchical authority.

Lesson 48: How Organizational Culture Gets You Off the Critical Path

Now that we’ve covered rewards, let’s return to our earlier discussion of the levers that organizations have at their disposal to promote the critical path.

Another major lever is the organization's culture. Culture is made up of the values, norms, beliefs, and behaviors that define what the organization is about and how it gets things done.

Lesson 47: A Final Word about Rewards

Reward systems are complicated and getting them right is not easy. Over the years, I have heard several objections to my framework that I’d like to share with you.

First, not all jobs are easily translatable into value-added outcomes. Some have long lag times, like R&D and Strategy, before you will know if those jobs produce any value-added outcomes.

Lesson 46: Office Space: A Special Case of Non-Monetary Rewards and the Critical Path

I’m always amazed at how people covet and fight over offices, regardless of how much money they make.

Offices become a manifestation of the occupant’s self-worth and social status. Very seldom are office size, location, and furnishings tied to the critical path. Most C-Suites are hidden away in citadels far away from the critical path.

Lesson 45: Non-Monetary Rewards and the Critical Path: Social and Psychological Rewards

Most experts on reward systems will tell you that money isn’t everything. In fact, it isn’t even the first thing. In my work with companies and their employees, I’ve found that the top 3 motivators are…

Lesson 44: Tying Economic Rewards Together

Let's now tie these economic rewards together within the framework.

Let's begin by comparing two examples as we did in Lesson 36, but this time with different splits. Consider Ben, our most conservative, risk-averse employee with the 90 - 10 - 0 profile and our value-added, outcomes-oriented employee, Arriya, with the 20 - 30 - 50 split.

Lesson 43: Applying the Critical Path Rewards Framework: Organizational Level

inally, we can look at organizational-level value-added outcomes rewards on the framework on page 139 in Chapter 37. All the employees who helped create the overall bottom-line results of the company should be given rewards that increase in value as your organization increases in value. This would typically be stock ownership.