KNOWLEDGE PARTNERS


TQCI has pioneered flexible and customized knowledge transfer engagements in India. Our engagement with our clients has business objectives and zero pre-sets. TQCI does not replicate solutions and techniques and best practices. We sort and choose, along with the client, the number and extent to which particular techniques need to be applied in particular business environments. The means can never be confused with the end. 

The client and TQCI begin with the end in the mind. Long before, it gained currency, in early 1990's; TQCI's professional fee was linked to outcomes. Being extremely wealth-centric, we have always advocated tangible gains. This focus on tangible gains and measurable benefits has an added benefit. As successes become visible, it is easier to build on them. The market for change within the organization gains credibility and momentum.

TQCI achieves a delicate and rare balance between Research & Innovation in its engagements related to performance enhancement and strategy. A completely research based practice assumes that the rate of change in the past is similar to the rate of change in the future. Radical practices advocate total tearing down of structures and processes and building them anew. TQCI treads the middle path, the slant towards either end of knowledge and thought is best determined in situ at the operational wave-front.

Strategic Planning: TQCI's approach to strategy is based on "Clarity and Speed". We advocate a real-time strategy building framework at the locus of action and speedier transmission of information to enable shifts in corporate strategy. In line with Mintzberg's views, we make a distinction between synthesis and analysis. We believe that strategy is an individual or organization's response to an environment. And therefore the overall strategy has to allow for changes in the environment and the people within that environment.

Management Systems: Management Systems deliver strategies for value creation. Even reasonable congruence between strategy and system design has been rarely found in the course of our engagements. Conflicts between business objectives and personal insecurities, conflicts between risk and security, conflicts between corporate positions and personal values of executives, conflicts of commensurate control and operational freedom abound within organizations. The management system design and

information architecture is critical to establish trade-offs between diverging interests.

TQCI believes in Contextual Management Systems which leverage the cultural backdrop of the region of operations and is designed to achieve competitive advantage. We have always advocated 'Building on the existing good' ahead of 'Acquiring what is lacking' as our management system design principle. Results show that innovative use of strong positions work better than acquisitions of culturally alien management systems.

People & Knowledge: People operate systems to achieve strategic objectives. TQCI advocates the primacy of people in a culturally sensitive way. We have worked with clients to evolve practices which reinforce leadership, complement social and business roles of an individual, discourage dissonance between management hierarchies and abjure slogan-mongering and acronym-coining. People who work in organizations are mature and hold socio-economic positions outside the organization. They also work with values embedded in them through years of cultural conditioning. We advocate performance management system designs which leverage what an individual has rather than chase what he does not have. It is easier to build on what exists and use it for the organization's benefit. The PMS is designed to do just that.

TQCI has worked with clients to identify culturally compatible differentiating competencies. Dealing with people is always dealing with culture. HR systems which do not include culture as the main ingredient inevitably never mature from enforcement to commitment. 

In the global environment of today, it is easy and contemporaneously triumphant to advocate a globally homogeneous HR practice. Since organizations address global customers, each individual unit of the organization needs to be homogeneously congruent to the global culture. This view is fraught with danger, first there is nothing homogeneous called global culture, and second, it dissolves regional advantages. The impact is significant on competitive positioning. Regional advantages in people need to be strengthened to achieve global business superiority. And that is what we call HR strategy.

It is our considered opinion that HR Systems have to be designed with people in an environment focus. A significant part of that environment is extraneous to the organization. HRM is about strategically deriving competitive advantage from people in a cultural context.