I will help you balance value, optimize capital, and sustain profits.

Congruence: The Playmaker’s Guide To High Value Companies

"Any company’s greatest enemy is itself, not competitors or the economy."

Congruence introduces a revolutionary model and method for building sustainable, high-value companies. The book champions holistic companies, which balance value exchange among customers, investors, employees, partners, and society by aligning purpose, strategy, planning, operations, and execution.

Focusing on a company’s intrinsic nature, it merges profound philosophical ideas with actionable steps to create the best version of a company. Centered on fundamentals, system thinking, and a one-company mindset, Congruence equips thoughtful operators to transcend hype cycles and industry silos, becoming game-changing playmakers who connect all the dots in designing capital-efficient companies.

Congruence Diagnostic: Self-assess your company’s congruence and maturity

A 2-hour diagnostic for executive teams and boards to self-assess the entire company.

Our proctored self-assessment, rooted in the Congruence Method, evaluates the alignment between purpose, strategy, and operations across your company. It delivers both quantitative scores and unique qualitative insights.

The diagnostic is ideal for kick-starting an internal evolution cycle, assessing exit readiness, or conducting acquisition diligence on a target company.

Congruence Blueprint: Comprehensive genomic decoding of the entire company

An actionable, comprehensive decoding of your entire company—top-to-bottom, left-to-right, and longitudinally—in just 4 weeks.

Congruence Blueprint is the most advanced company-wide reality check on the market, identifying blind spots, solving root-cause of problems, and proposing evolutionary changes.

Unlike typical advice based on siloed MBA theories or the narrow, one-size-fits-all perspectives of investment and consulting firms, Blueprint achieves unparalleled company-specific depth and breadth because of its unique reliance on our Congruence method.

Congruence Evolution: Hands-on partnership for value creation and capital efficiency

A company is a symbiotic organism, and the best ones are system-centered and congruent.

As part of Congruence Evolution, we step in as your interim playmaker, driving your company’s transformation by elevating overall congruence and equipping and training your in-house Congruence Architect.

We collaborate directly with executive teams, applying our fast-paced, high-impact method to align purpose, strategy, and operations. Our approach is designed to minimize incongruence, ultimately boosting value creation, capital efficiency, and sustainable profitability.

Congruence Academy: Transforming playmakers into company-level Congruence Architects

Every company needs a true #10. It's not a jersey. It is a mindset, skill, and responsibility.

Wearing a playmaker’s jersey comes with the expectation to be a visionary athlete who can connect the past, present, and future and every building block of a company. The Playmaker Program arms talented strategic thinkers and intrinsically motivated problem solvers with the knowledge, method, and practical guidance necessary to be the conduit that turbocharges congruent value exchange and capital efficiency across the company.

A CEO or a General Manager cannot be a coach, captain, and evangelist, and design and run plays simultaneously. A Congruence Architect is the ideal game-changing, on-field playmaker.

Vision

The proliferation of profitable holistic companies that aspire for congruent value exchange between all stakeholders throughout their lifecycle.

Our Story

For two decades, I searched for an answer to the questions, “What is a ‘good’ company?” and “How must we build and manage a ‘good’ company?” I can summarize my lessons from doing hands-on work across all functions and seniority levels at over four dozen companies in two ideas.

Each company is most likely to achieve its optimal outcomes when it focuses intently on optimizing value exchange between its unique stakeholders—customers, investors, employees, partners, and society.

Every company has incongruences between its purpose, strategy, and operations, which directly cause value creation and delivery challenges, capital inefficiency, and unsustainability. Methodically maximizing and maintaining alignment between purpose, strategy, and operations is the only path to optimizing value exchange between our unique stakeholders.

These two ideas are the foundation of Acumes’ pillars and its three core philosophies: one company mindset, focus on fundamentals, and system thinking.

John Oommen

Congruence Architect

John is a playmaker who connects the dots across a company – top to bottom, left to right, and across time. He developed Congruence, a model, method, and mindset that balances value, optimizes capital, and sustains profits through a focus on fundamentals, system thinking, and a one-company mindset.

Raised in the nationalized Indian economy of the 1980s, John grew up around the realities of unemployment and economic strife. Having experienced and influenced companies in Western capitalism since the late '90s, John brings a realistic and global perspective on the importance of an economy led by balanced, value-focused, and reliably profitable companies. As an electrical engineer turned business architect, he proactively designs and implements real-world incentives, decisions, and actions that transform companies into their uniquely optimal version.

With over 20 years of experience working with Fortune 100, private equity, and venture capital companies, John excels in dovetailing organizations through purpose framing, strategy development, planning, operations design, and execution management. He holds an MBA from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management and is a Six Sigma Black Belt. He combines science, mathematics, psychology, and philosophy to enable executive teams and board members to achieve new standards of excellence through congruent value exchange and efficient use of capital.

Based in Chicago, John enjoys exploring different cultures and is a fitness enthusiast. He also finds joy in sharing his experience through thought-provoking writing and teaching forums that empower other playmakers to influence their companies.