Family Doctor and You

Recently I was filling the bio-data of my school going kid; the form had columns for filling the details of the family doctor. As you know, it is a good idea to have a family doctor, instead of visiting different doctors at different times. Since the doctor knows you closely, he can give better diagnosis. He is in your locality, you have better trust in him, procedures are simple and sometimes you take liberty to consult him over phone.

Occasionally you may have to go to speciality hospitals. Once I had to spend some time in Apollo Hospitals to attend a family member. Occasionally there I bumped into doctors who also ran clinics in my locality; these doctors spent part of their time as consultant-doctors with Apollo.

I liked the Apollo model very much; doctors running their own clinics could also work as consultants on their specialities in Apollo. The benefits for the doctors are many – they have a set of clients in their locality and are well respected. Their association to speciality hospitals adds to their reputation. They are able to network and collaborate with their peer experts and keep their knowledge up to date.

This model of working is beneficial to the clients too. Apollo doesn’t have to have all the specialist doctors on its rolls, thus keeping the cost/billing low. Once I got help from my family doctor, who was also a consultant there, to choose the best doctor in Apollo for a special treatment for my relative. Diagnosis and treatment of complex problems require expertise from multiple experts and in such cases a panel of doctors join together.

When we started C-Star Consortium in 2009, we modelled it like Apollo – many consultants having their own practices, joined together to form a consortium to offer several speciality business services. C-Star can address business problems related to revenue growth, profitability, employee retention, customer retention, product quality, information security, and accounting. In C-Star, you will find several consultants who spent decades enabling business transformation using methodologies & tools such as CMMI, People CMM, ERP, process-automation-tools, Six Sigma, Knowledge Management and Balanced Scorecard. You will also find great trainers and experts who can help you to achieve business critical, prestigious certifications.

In C-Star, we have several practitioner-turned consultants with diverse backgrounds and rich experience from reputed organizations (such as TCS, Wipro, CTS, CSC, Infosys, IBM, Oracle, KPMG). They can diagnose your business problems, put in place right solutions and help you through the implementation – and the pricing is made sweet for the Indian SMBs, through our innovative approaches in solution delivery and low overhead of operations.

More than ever, people want to do business with people, not with complex organizations. Trust and integrity are valued more than anything. The beauty of C-Star is that it is  simple, small, flexible, responsive, and offers greater customer intimacy, yet it has the strength and reliability coming from the power-network.

C-Star is more than a collaborative consulting services organization – it is a community of experts and CXOs. As a business owner or a CXO, a membership will benefit you to get access to the experts – includes some free services too.

Whatever may be your pain-point now, you can approach a C-Star consultant and be assured that you will get holistic solutions. You can tap into an expertise of 500+ person-years of experience.

So if you choose to have a family doctor for your kids, why not have a consultant from C-Star for your business? This consultant will be your local expert/mastermind and can act as a channel to the large pool of expertise that you can access whenever you want.

Tools for transformation change with times

Gandhi used the ‘Charkha’ to achieve self-sufficiency for millions of Indians and to align/focus them on the key goals during the Freedom Struggle.

Obama and his Federal CIO Vivek Kundra are transforming the way the US Govt works, starting with ‘Federal IT Dashboards’.






What tools do you use for transforming your business?

Today, several top organizations use performance measurement based tools such as Balanced Scorecard and Business Dashboards for transforming their business.

Translate your vision into reality by tracking your strategy in measurable terms. Provide dashboards for your key people to start with, and see the productivity revolution unfolding.

You might be interested in 10 Questions to a Balanced Scorecard Expert: Answers by MG Thomas in Balanced Scorecard Designer.

For getting weekly tips/insights on performance measurements and improvements, by email, subscribe to CXO Insights.

Antidote for Uncertainty

Our external environment is so dynamic and the feeling of uncertainty can become overwhelming at times. Uncertainty can stop you from moving forward.


Certainty is a state of mind, like happiness. It is essential for leaders. When you have certainty, people backing you would buy into your vision, feel inspired and move towards the direction you show. You need certainty to create the life/business what you yearn for. How do you embrace uncertainty and convert it into excitement?

You can tackle uncertainty at multiple levels.

You need to note that certainty being a state of mind like happiness, need not depend on what is happening outside. When you play say foot-ball, you don’t expect the ball to come favorable to you always, rather you respond to it irrespective of the direction from which it comes. Uncertainty is certain when you take away your eye from the ball/goal. Instead of fearing the unknown future, you can get excitement with uncertainty. A movie is exciting when you don’t know the story/outcome. Similarly playing a game.

Knowing what is controllable and what is not, are important. One beautiful poem called ‘A Professional’s Prayer’ that I used to read, starts like this:

O God!
Give me the clarity and courage
to control what is controllable,
to change what I can change

O God!
Give me the grace and serenity
to accept what I cannot change;
but to gently continue influencing
what is controllable by others.

Another way to feel certainty is through meditation and visualization. Meditation calms your mind and gives you time to listen to the inner voice. You can feel certainty through self-affirmations and by visualizing the end-outcomes with clarity.

You can also use an NLP technique ‘Anchoring’ to put you into a state of certainty. In anchoring, you associate a past intense experience to an anchor such as a ‘Thumps up’ gesture and recall the same state of mind with that anchor.

Another way is to have a spiritual mind-set. Surrender everything to God. Trust that He will take care of everything. Treat everything you do as a means to serve God. Several top executives and business owners, whom I have closely interacted with, are deeply spiritual.

There are some tools you can use to get certainty. Getting clarity on your life purpose and goals is important for feeling certainty. Tools such Personal Scorecard and Business Scorecard can help you to get clarity on your purpose and goals; they help you to track your goals & lead measures and prompt you to take course correction. So these tools can give you predictability and certainty in your business and life.

CXO Dashboards offers you simple but powerful dashboards, with which you can tackle uncertainty. To know more about how dashboards can give you certainty in your business, you can contact me at Thomas.MG@CXOdashboards.com.

The Tower of Babel

As you build organization bigger and bigger, one thing that is bound to happen is, people start speaking different languages. They use words that mean different things to different people. This is something similar to the Tower of Babel and it can stifle the growth of the organization.

I have seen some organizations that do not have a common vocabulary about key measures. Otherwise how can HR, Finance, and Delivery functions report ‘Employee Attrition’ to the CEO three different figures using different ways of calculation. Similar is the case with ‘Manpower Utilization’ or ‘Residual Defect Density’ in IT Industry - different ways of computing the same metrics by different groups, functions or locations. For an organization to become aligned people should start speaking the same language, they should understand a few key measurements in the same way; what it means, how it is collected and how it is related to the business and their roles. Then the employees can co-relate the impact of their actions on the organization goals. It will also make the communication from the top management easier to understand.

Lack of holistic view of the business processes is causing a lot of harm to the organizations. Even today, the processes for managing the most critical resources – people and their competencies - are very ad-hoc, fragmented and ineffective in several organizations.

One of the best ways to get this alignment and energy to move forward in one direction is to implement a business performance measurement system. Balanced Scorecard is the most effective methodology today for doing that.

With Balanced Scorecard approach, you start with your vision, mission, objectives, values, strategies, goals, and you arrive at the organization level metrics to be tracked. Then you cascade it to down to various functions and roles. Then every employee understands what they are accountable for and how their activities contribute to the overall business purpose. Balanced Scorecard methodology insists on developing a dictionary of all metrics definitions, and this is the foundation on which the dashboards are built.

Try to build a dictionary of metrics applicable for each role in your organization; that will be a major step towards business alignment. To know more about how you can get business alignment fast using Balanced Scorecard approach, click on CXO Dashboards.

Fix root-cause to cure multiple symptoms!

Sometimes we come across doctors who treat for symptoms. After the medication period, these symptoms may reappear. Sometimes you will find the opposite: with one medicine multiple issues will vanish. This is true in business too.

When I started my career as a programmer in TCS, the prominent programming language used was COBOL. We were using punch cards for keying in the program. We were allowed maximum 3 compilations before any program was compiled error free. Beyond that the issue would go to the Center Manager. Sometimes even one punching error, such as a hyphen missing in the Working-Storage section, could result in hundreds of errors. Fixing that one error used to eliminate those hundred errors.

When I took charge as Quality Head in one organization, we wanted to pilot ‘Defect Prevention’ or ‘Causal Analysis’ in one project. We choose a project that was just starting the system testing. I was expecting about 8 to 10 errors in system testing and the intention of the causal analysis was to analyze the root cause of each defect, fix the root cause and eliminate a few categories of defects from the system. But the system testing gave me a surprise when the testing team reported about 800 defects. Then I realized even the basic processes were not working. We strongly enforced self-review and peer-review with a documented checklist at every phase, as an immediate solution.

Once I called all project managers for a meeting and asked them to list all the problems they face to ensure quality. Again to my surprise, there were 47 unique problems listed. I realized that if I started working on those problems sequentially, it could take several years. From my previous experience, I knew that several problems related to project management and quality can be eliminated if we go for process automation. That was the time when we took a decision to go for an enterprise wide project planning and defect tracking tool.

Even after decades of Quality movement, some organizations are struggling with several operational issues. Think of a situation where everybody in the organization knows their purpose, their responsibilities and goals. Assume they are excited about it and have a mechanism to track it; they are working towards achieving the overall organization goals and objectives. In this scenario, it is not difficult to imagine that several classes of issues will vanish from the organization. That is why, several large organizations that implemented business performance management systems continue to thrive even during recession.

If you are finding several performance related problems, you could look at Balanced Scorecard as a solution to several classes of problems your company is facing.

Aligning Ferret, Aligning Life

Sometimes a thought or small idea is good enough to change the direction of life.

A few months back, I had an opportunity to read a business novel Aligning Ferret : How an Organization Meets Extraordinary Challenges by Swapna Kishore and Rajesh Naik. I enjoyed reading it. I found striking similarities with situations I encountered while leading initiatives in several organizations. It describes an exciting journey of an organization beyond the operational processes and how the organization transformed itself as a real business powerhouse, surmounting several obstacles.

I read this book while I was offering consulting on IT. I was always amazed by the power of IT in transforming business. However, I was also looking for an area to focus on. Aligning Ferret clearly brings out how clarity of strategy supported by a measurement system can have a significant influence on the organization performance. It highlights how tools/methodologies such as Balanced Scorecard and People CMM can be used to address issues faced by several organizations today. I must say, reading this book influenced me to choose Business Dashboards as an area of focus for my consulting offering.

Several organizations face a peculiar situation, on achieving certification of operational processes (like CMMI and ISO). Clients’ expectation go up. Organization thinks they can relax for some time before taking up an improvement initiative. Some of the QA resources are pulled out for ‘revenue generating’ projects and some QA resources leave the company. Even when the celebration is going on, the core delivery process may be operating at level 5, but the enabling processes such as hiring and performance management may be operating at level 1. Often, the combined forces bring quality level back to square-one in a few months time. So, another improvement initiative is undertaken, typically without linking it to the “big picture”.

Aligning Ferret is a wonderful business novel that packs not just several interesting events and humorous situations, but also several deep insights for CXOs, Delivery Heads, Quality Professionals and Project Managers, in their journey towards the next level of excellence.