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.

Entering into Consulting?

When I started my consulting business, some youngsters asked me how they can also become a consultant.

Considering the initial hiccups I went through, I didn’t encourage them to leave their secure and well paying job and start something of their own. I told them that they need to identify an area that they are very passionate about. Should have absolute clarity on why they want to do what they want to do. Enough savings to pull through several months or even years; ideally enough passive income to cover all their monthly expenses of the family. ..

What surprised me was, there are so many youngsters, who want to do something of their own and make a difference in this world; that’s good for our country.

Once in a discussion forum, I answered the question When does a Consultant starts flourishing in his/her business...!? as below:

With respect to an independent consultant, I feel the consultant will flourish, when the consultant is able to

• Build trust with the client
• Provide value for the fees charged
• Build a brand for him.

The consultant needs to be in a ‘niche area’ for which there is a great demand. If this is not possible always, have some differentiation in a cluttered market. A consultant needs to have a lot of passion for the chosen field and an edge in it.

Several competencies are required for a consultant in addition to the domain knowledge. A good guideline is IMC USA's Management Consulting Competency Framework.

Some of the problems I experienced in my (independent) consulting practice in India:

• There are no support systems that typically comes with a corporate job (admin etc)
• In corporate, work comes to you; in consulting you have to hunt for work
• Selling your services could be a tough job and it can consume a lot of time
• Until you establish, the money you receive could be meager
• Being solo, you may feel often lonely
• Not much true consulting happening in terms of business problem solving; most consulting is around training and certification.

My thinking was on how to minimize the effects of being solo and still enjoy my professional freedom. One solution was to form a professional network of independent consultants. It was easy to locate a few people who had worked with me earlier. We formed a consortium under the name C-Star Consortium. Every month we met - shared info & experiences from the field and exchanged referrals; this gave a forum to have discussions that stimulated our mind. More independent consultants joined, each one making this group richer in collective intelligence and expertise. 

As the membership grew, people identified innovative ways of leveraging this network. It made sense to offer shared services to its members at low cost; some solution providers entered into partnership with the consortium. Offering sales services to the members in partnership with another marketing firm is another step being taken.

I have observed that several classes of problems that independent consultants facing today can be solved by connecting with the peers and collaborating.

If you are an independent consultant having a marketable service, expertise or information product that appeals to CXOs and Entrepreneurs, you could benefit by joining the C-Star community.

Modeling Excellence

One way to attain excellence fast is to model the behaviors and mindsets of people who are already successful in that field. You could model the business architecture of the market leaders too.

I have been fortunate to work with several top consultants, while leading organization initiatives in organizations such as TCS, FutureSoft and Aricent. In TCS, I worked with Ron Radice, a key architect of CMM, for a CMM Level 5 initiative. For ISO 9001, I worked closely with several consultants from KPMG. For People CMM, Srinivas T of KPMG did the assessment for us; I had interactions with Bill Curtis too. For developing the Sales System, I got inputs from Phaneesh Murthy, the legendary Sales Head of InfoSys and now CEO of iGate. For leading the Knowledge Management initiative, I got inputs from the Chief Knowledge Officers of the top IT companies, especially from Raj Datta of MindTree. For the OD initiative and the Balanced Scorecard, I got inputs from Raghu Ananthanarayanan of TAOKnoware. Rajesh Naik of QAI did the CMMI assessment for us (The best leaders are known for developing new leaders and by-the-way Rajesh Naik is in the Advisory Board of CXO Dashboards).

I have been trying to figure out what makes a great consultant, by observing these top notch consultants in the IT industry. Some of their attributes are

• Mastery of the subject
• Brings insights of high value
• Coaches well; they raise the bar every time they visit.
• Explains concepts in simple terms with analogy, metaphors and their own experiences which we can relate to easily; talking with them or attending their training sessions often generate ‘Aha!’ or ‘Wow!’ feeling.
• They command high respect and influence industry in several ways.

Modeling Excellence is a technique followed by several successful people. It is not blind copying, yet it involves some intelligent copying. Even in Innovation, you copy some ideas/practices to your own situations and get improved/break-through results. Modeling is a powerful learning technique for achieving personal mastery.

You can even model the business architecture of the market leaders to catch up with them fast. Balanced Scorecard gives a framework for modeling your business architecture. The methodology helps you to get crystal clear clarity on your business vision, mission, strategy, objectives, goals, and lead indicators of success. It helps you focus on what is strategically important for you from the four perspectives: Financial, Customer, Internal Processes (operational efficiency), and Learning & Growth (capabilities). It gives you an approach to track your strategy and achieve business results with certainty.

Read more on Balanced Scorecard and CXO Dashboards at http://cxodashboards.com/