Congruence Brings Balance

Extremes sell, but truth is always in the middle.

I went through all the popular business-building and improvement ideas over the years and recognized a major gap. As a hands-on problem solver, Congruence wasn't a “book” that I sat down and wrote. It is a solution to a lot of systemic gaps I experienced across dozens of companies. I encourage you to go through Congruence with an objective mindset and compare it to other options out there.

If you categorize each mainstream approach to run and improve companies, they fall into one of two ideological extremes. I have been part of both of these camps several times and have learned a lot through them. But opportunities to improve were also apparent.

1. ‍Focus on History (TPS, Lean, EOS): This mindset relies heavily on what worked in the past and focuses on optimizing to get marginal improvements. The gap: A visceral aversion to disruption. This mindset leaves companies vulnerable to any or all macro shifts and their best answer tends to be acquiring a new-age company, where integrations are perilous, or New Product Introduction (NPI) efforts, which are still marginal in the grand scheme.
2. Focus on Disruption (Fast Scaling Ideologies): There is another cluster of concepts that focus on fast revenue acquisition and this is generally enabled by chasing the latest disruption force in the market. These companies tend to be on the front end of macro changes. The gap: The drive for new revenue also detracts from investing in growing roots and building a profitable foundation, which hurts their lifecycle. They often become M&A targets for the first category of companies, where such acquisitions rarely achieve the M&A goals of the acquirer.

This is like guarding a house by watching only the front door or only the back door. To protect and mature a company, we must secure both.

Congruence brings balance. The core of Congruence is Evolution.

Evolution is not relying only on what worked in the past, nor is it chaotic disruption. Evolution builds on a company’s intrinsic core while proactively adapting the company’s reality to all the changes associated with time, scale, and environment.

The middle ground is a concrete Operations Baseline that systemically embraces Macroevolution.

• Macroevolution: Every company lives within changing dimensions of time, scale, and externalities. What worked last year will not work next year due to this simple reality. Building the DNA to evolve is not easy and it is not an instinct that comes naturally to a company that is doing “well enough.” Evolution is a sophisticated necessity.
• Operations Baseline: The word operations gets thrown around a lot without any specific definition of what it actually means. Congruence builds a purpose- and strategy-aligned Operations Baseline (a complete definition of which is lacking in any of the approaches I looked at). A company cannot mature or evolve without a foundational core, which is its Operations Baseline.

In an economy where the conducive economic assumptions no longer apply and the real value created by individuals and groups is coming under increasing scrutiny, Congruence offers a path to creating unquestionable, intrinsic, and sustainable value.