The Purpose, Strategy, and Operations Partner

for private, mid-market companies to seek profitable and sustainable growth
Maximize Value Creation
Optimize Capital Efficiency
Enable Sustainable Profitability
PROBLEM STATEMENT: PART A

Incongruences between fundamental components hurt value creation & capital efficiency

Incongruence is the lack of harmony between the fundamental components of a company.

Every symptom we experience as a gap in a company stems from an underlying incongruence between purpose, strategy, and operations.

PROBLEM STATEMENT: PART B

Time, scale, and environmental changes demand proactive evolutions

Sustainable and profitable growth is a non-linear, evolutionary path.

Attempting linear growth using accelerating investments and incongruous tactics leads to stagnation and regression.

  • Value expectations of stakeholders change with time, scale, and shifts in the environment.
  • Maturity needs and alignment of fundamental components change with scale.
Acumes Framework: Evolve To Stay Ahead Of Time, Scale, and Environment. Source: The Spiral Stairway: The System To Build A Holistic Company

Elusive Profitability

Perpetual Reactivity

Unsatisfied Customers

Deficient Offerings

Competitive Disadvantage

Unhappy Employees

Symptoms of Incongruence

Impractical Goals

Productivity Gaps

Over Hiring & Layoffs

Siloed Functions

Disappointed Investors

Strained Partners

THE SOLUTION

The Spiral Stairway

Comprehensive & Cohesive Methodology To Align Purpose, Strategy, and Operations

The Spiral Stairway continuously dovetails and matures all fundamental components to minimize incongruences. It enables system-led profitable growth through micro-evolution and macro-evolution cycles.

  • Unifying purpose that aligns the incentives of all stakeholders.
  • Single, cohesive, company-level strategy that yields the purpose and optimizes value creation.
  • Strategy-aligned and mature operations that maximize capital efficiency.
The Spiral Stairway: The System To Build A Holistic Company. Imprint: Acumes

Self-Assess Level  of Congruence

Why does our method work?

Unique Mindset & Promise
We believe in the power of great companies.
We enjoy helping building great companies.
We deeply care about all company stakeholders.
We create value from expertise and proven methods.
We will constructively challenge you to evolve.
We only stay as long as we create significant value.
Approach
Our Vision

The proliferation of profitable and sustainable companies focused on intrinsic value creation.

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John Oommen


John is a radically transparent, future-predicting human algorithm who tenaciously works to balance the incentives of everyone around a company. His approach to business and life combines philosophy, psychology, science, and mathematics.

John is a seasoned purpose, strategy, and operations leader with over 20 years of experience working with over four dozen Fortune 100, private equity, and venture capital companies in consulting and internal roles. He is a strategic thinker who excels at creating customer value through strategy development, planning, operations design, and execution management. John has worked across a wide range of sectors including technology, business services, manufacturing, supply chain and logistics, energy and utilities, and financial services.

John's key strength is his ability to collaborate with CEOs and COOs to develop company-level strategy while enabling operations aligning with that strategy. He is a cross-functional leader who is equally comfortable working with frontline value creators as he is with executives and board members. He has built and led analytical SWAT teams and large operational teams throughout his career. He uniquely focuses on overarching sustainable outcomes and is passionate about creating holistic companies.

John holds an MBA from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, is an electrical engineer, and a General Electric-certified Six Sigma Black Belt. He recently authored The Spiral Stairway: The System To Build A Holistic Company, a highly actionable guide designed to aid critical-thinking CEOs, executives, supervisors, and employees in building holistic companies.

Based in Chicago, John enjoys exploring different cultures and corners of the world. He is a fitness enthusiast and a forward-thinking individual who enjoys sharing his life and career lessons through critical-thinking and forward-looking thought leadership content.

LinkedIn

Architecting holistic companies...

I have been searching for an answer to the question, “How must we build and manage a ‘good’ company?” for 20 years. My lessons from rolling up my sleeves and doing the gritty work at dozens of companies helped me develop my method to architect [what I call] holistic companies. My method is The Spiral Stairway: The System To Build A Holistic Company.

The Problem Statement: Every company has incongruence between its purpose, strategy, and operations. Incongruence is like friction; it causes value delivery challenges, capital inefficiency, and unsustainability of outcomes. Incongruence also evolves with time, scale, and environment. Thus, addressing incongruence is not a one-time recalibration.

The Solution: Develop a system to intentionally minimize incongruence between who-to-serve, what-to-offer, and how-to-deliver in a manner that balances the incentives of customers, investors, employees, partners, and society. An effective company-wide system enables periodic macro-evolutions and ongoing micro-evolutions to recalibrate the company over time, scale, and environmental shifts.

The Result: Friction will never be zero. We can only minimize it. Minimizing incongruence across a company maximizes net positive value creation, capital efficiency, and sustainability of outcomes. Sustainable revenue growth and profitability follow. The converse is equally valid.

In summary, embracing system thinking to enable strong fundamentals and choosing intentional company-level evolution will reap dividends across customer value creation, investor outcomes, board and employee alignment, sustainable revenue growth, and profitability for years to come.

We have strategically & operationally evolved dozens of companies

Experience from dozens of public & private companies
Fortune 50 Public Companies
Mid-market Private Equity Companies
Growth-phase Venture Capital Companies
Early-stage Bootstrapping Start-ups
Cross-pollinating concepts & frameworks across sectors
B2B Technology / Services
Sustainability / Energy / Utilities
Financial Services
Professional Services
Manufacturing / Industrial
Supply Chain / Logistics
Telecom
Healthcare
Transformation expertise across all business functions
Company-level Strategy Development
Strategic Planning & Alignment
Strategic Execution and Value Realization
Product Design & Operations
Sales & Marketing Operations
Customer Experience & Value Creation

Numbers only explain our past…

Incentives, Decisions, and Actions Dictate Measurable Real-World Future Outcomes

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