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Part 4
Kimberly-Clark Corporation, the maker of Kleenex, Huggies diapers, and toilet paper, was known for not measuring performance. Tenure in the company is what mattered and the company prided itself on a no-layoff policy. Employees had a job for life, and the company tolerated low performers.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, the American author of The Great Gatsby and The Last Tycoon, said that “Action is character.” By this he meant that you know who someone is by what they do, more than by what they say. (We will return to Fitzgerald in Part Five, when we consider what the critical path means for the individual employee.)
Too many companies do not use their levers to promote the critical path. Instead, these levers push people in directions that undermine it. For example, many performance evaluation systems rate behaviors that are not related to the critical path. This wastes a lever and causes employees to wonder if management knows what it is doing.
