Congruence Catalyst

Effective boards are a foundational necessity for a well-run company. Conversely, a weak board opens a company and its stakeholders to significant risks. An ineffective board leaves a company's prospects to chance due to the group's passive, inexperienced, or biased nature. Board development focuses on convenience rather than effectiveness too often. So, let’s explore how we would build an effective board. ⁠Read the article here⁠.

Author: ⁠John Oommen⁠.

Unlike previous economic crises, sustained government policies have masked the ill effects of long-term easy monetary policy. As government tools that hide these effects weaken, hard-working people will face a rough transition in their employment relationships. Transparency and predictability are the most basic expectations in any relationship, including an employment contract. Avoiding ecosystems prone to suboptimal outcomes with personal and professional costs is optimal. Minimally, it is prudent to predict involuntary separations to minimize impact. Read the article here.

Author: John Oommen.

Investors, CEOs, executives, supervisors, and all spend approvers must develop an objective investment effectiveness mindset to reverse their companies' productivity challenges. The first lever to drive productivity improvements is to embrace an opt-in mindset to curb wasteful investments. The second lever is to optimize human capital investment, which involves a fundamentals-focused recalibration of our labor force towards customer-centric work, skill-focused staffing, and reintroduction of up-skilling and performance management. An ability to connect every investment dollar to tangible intrinsic value creation for internal and external customers will characterize companies that can profitably and sustainably grow. Read the article here.

Author: John Oommen.

Organizations that manage for the middle use likability factors to measure success. It results in a skill drain and encourages mediocrity even among highly competent individuals. Companies that strive to lead their space invest in proactively identifying, hiring, and spotlighting individuals with strong competencies, deep skills, and high-quality experience from a customer value creation lens. They also build a system to enable these top players to succeed and encourage others to raise their game. Read the article here.

Author: John Oommen.

We are experiencing The Productivity Crisis worldwide, as companies and individuals. The predicament results from the easy money era of the last decade. Cost insensitivity, followed by investment ineffectiveness, set off The Productivity Crisis domino. Poor organizational designs, over-staffing, seniority and pay inflation, and decoupling of skill from employment rewards formed the domino that epitomizes this crisis. Self-diagnosing our organizations for this domino will set us up for remedial actions. Read the article here.

Author: John Oommen.

Given recent excitement and apprehension around “artificial intelligence” (“AI”) triggered by the public release of ChatGPT, the popular platform powered by OpenAI’s algorithm, we must parse reality from sensation and prepare for pretenders jumping in to clutter the powerful and dangerous space. Internalizing what really constitutes “AI”, what can “AI” really do for us, and what should scare us will simplify the conversation. Read the article here.

Author: John Oommen

March 2023 has been a month of banking turbulence in the United States and Europe. It was triggered by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's (FDIC) takeover of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB). I have been thinking about these events and the history of affected companies and the sector. I want to share some key takeaways. Read the complete article.

Author: John Oommen

We need a cohesive and comprehensive definition of a 'good' company. The lack of such a definition and its broad acceptance gives rise to dysfunctional behaviors within the concept of companies which is as natural to all of us as air and water. A holistic company satisfies all the intended conditions of a capitalistic enterprise while avoiding the most common form of its mutation - capital engineering. Read the article here.

Author: John Oommen.

Growth-at-any-cost era, spurred on by easy-money for fifteen years, is over. We turned a great and necessary idea of privately funded companies into an unproductive, artificially inflated asset class. Let’s internalize the harmful distortions caused by the pervasive tendency to focus on capital engineering. Read the article here.

Author: John Oommen.

Many companies have built their businesses around recurring revenue models that determine everything from company valuations to employee compensation. Stickiness is the lifeblood of such a business model. Losing focus on aspects that truly impact stickiness risks losing the entire plot. Almost every sustainably growing company has one common factor—they directly inject value into a critical operational component within the customers’ journey. Read the article here.

Author: John Oommen.