Advisory
HR is not a cost centre. It is where the margin is decided.
Consulting engagements on HR strategy, organization design, performance management and reward. Those four systems decide how well a business runs and what it costs to run it. The diagnosis is done alongside your own managers, so what you are left with is something they can run without him.
Who brings this work
- Boards and promoter groups
- CEOs and founders
- CHROs and heads of HR
- Public-sector and government bodies
The work
The brief usually arrives as one of three sentences.
Under each one sits a different kind of engagement. Which of them it becomes is settled in the diagnosis, not in the brief.
“We do not have the right people in the right places.”
Structure, roles and who is ready
- Strategic workforce planning. Matching the demand for roles against the supply of people, so headcount cost and time-to-productivity stop being estimates.
- Organization structure and role clarity. Structure, roles and decision rights, so throughput is not lost to overlap.
- Succession planning frameworks. Who is ready for what, and what a leadership transition costs when nobody is.
“We are paying for performance we are not getting.”
Performance, reward and cost
- Performance management system design. Measures tied to the business objectives and profit levers they are meant to move.
- Compensation and rewards structuring. Pay structures built to hold the people the business cannot afford to lose.
- Strategic HR cost diagnostics. Where value leaks across CTC components, absenteeism and role productivity.
“Our HR function cannot support where the business is going.”
Policy, technology and the people at the top
- HR manual and policy development. Policy architecture that stands up to governance and statutory scrutiny.
- HR digitalization and AI integration. What to automate, what to predict, and where the data stops and judgment has to take over.
- Executive coaching for CXOs. One-to-one work with the people whose decisions set the tempo for everyone else.
How it runs
Three stages, and the last one is leaving.
There is no fixed package. What an engagement covers follows from the diagnosis, but every one of them runs through the same three stages.
Find the constraint, not the symptom.
Interviews and working sessions with the sponsor and with the managers who will have to live with the answer. The brief and the problem are rarely the same document.
Build the system, not the deck.
Policy architecture, structure, performance and reward, written to fit how the organization actually runs rather than how the org chart says it does.
Leave it running without him.
The rollout is run by your own managers. What the organization keeps afterwards is the system, and the people who can operate it.
Where it has run
Five organizations, and what the work was.
Engagement detail appears only where it can be described publicly. Where it cannot, the organization is named and nothing further is claimed for it.
- Comptroller and Auditor General of India. Engaged to conduct a performance audit, and to redesign how performance audit practice itself is done.
- Atos Global, Paris head office. A market penetration and growth strategy framework for Atos IoT applications in the SME market, reported to the Global Head of Atos IoT Solutions.
- KP Group and KPI Green Energy. HR policy architecture and a performance management system, from diagnosis through to a rollout the group’s own managers run.
- Bosch India. Management consulting and mentoring engagement.
- Hindustan Urvarak and Rasayan. Management consulting and mentoring engagement.
Evidence
A case other business schools teach from.
Research that stays inside journals changes nothing. AMRG and Associates: Crafting Professionalization Through HR Transformation is a published teaching case, first-authored, of the kind an MBA cohort is handed on a Monday and argues over by Wednesday.
It follows a family-run firm that had outgrown its own informal habits, and covers the part most transformation stories skip: formal job descriptions, performance-linked incentives, a compliance unit, and what it cost the leadership to push all three through. It is the same problem most growing organizations bring to him.
What sits behind the advice
- PhD in Management, Strategy and HRM, IIM Ahmedabad
- Academy of Management HR Division, Best Paper Award 2023
- Ten peer-reviewed papers, five of them in ABDC-A journals
- Editorial board, International Journal of Organizational Analysis
- Peer reviewer for nine journals, including Human Resource Management
- SHRM-SCP, and research scholar at HEC Paris
Next step
Start with the decision you are facing.
Tell him the decision, who it affects, and when it has to be made. Whether that becomes an advisory engagement, a programme, or a short conversation that saves you one, follows from there. He reads every enquiry himself, and a reply usually comes within two working days.