The Practice Leader, affiliates and partners of The CMCT India Practice are bicultural in background or life experience, knowledgeable about Indian and American business culture, and seasoned professionals in global management, international business and intercultural education. Many of us are fluent in Indian languages. We come from a wide variety of specializations, industries and work backgrounds. All of us have strong academic qualifications as well as a serious, in-depth work style that creates meaningful results.
Karine Schomer, PhD, CMCT President and India Practice Leader
Dr. Karine Schomer is a global management and cross cultural awareness expert with a higher education background and experience in executive leadership and senior management. She has been involved professionally with India for over 25 years, has lived and worked there for 8 years, and is fluent in a number of Indian languages. She is a frequent speaker on cross cultural and organizational change issues relating to the India-U.S. business nexus. Her column “Culture Matters” appears in the online magazine Sourcingmag.com and elsewhere. Dr. Schomer delivers keynotes and leads seminars on cultural awareness as a business effectiveness skill, differences in business cultures, managing in the global workplace, intercultural communication, and how to establish credibility, motivate, manage, negotiate, sell and build teams across cultures, especially in the offshore outsourcing context. Her consulting specialties include human resource strategy, change management, strategic planning, organizational culture and design, work process improvement, team development, and training needs assessment. She is a skilled facilitator of meetings, retreats and other group processes, and an effective coach to executives and senior managers. Clients she has served include Accenture, Actel, Aon, Aristocrat, Cardiac Science, Charles Schwab, Ciber, CVS/pharmacy, Dow Jones, EarthLink, Foundation Systems, France Telecom, Fresh & Easy/Tesco, GIA, HCA, Harman, Hitachi, Insight, KLA-Tencor, LNBL, Levi Strauss, Lockheed Martin, Nielsen Mobile, Novartis, Novellus, Oracle, Parametric, Patni, Standard Insurance, Sun Life, TNS, Triton, University of California, USAA, Visioneer, and Xoriant. Dr. Schomer holds an undergraduate degree from Oberlin College and a PhD in South Asian Studies from the University of Chicago. Her background includes 10 years on the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley. She has been a Dean at Golden Gate University, San Francisco, where she developed a successful Applied Psychology program. She has also served as Chief Operating Officer of the California Institute of Integral Studies. In 1997, Dr. Schomer founded Change Management Consulting & Training, LLC, with the mission of providing integrated solutions to organizational change. She now leads The India Practice, a division of CMCT focusing on the cross cultural dimensions of doing business with India.
Carol Fleming, PhD, Affiliate Consultant
Dr. Carol Fleming is a communication consultant and speech coach who helps people increase their communication impact, and thereby their business effectiveness, by using all their communication capacities. She has worked with a wide variety of executive and professional clients, from many cultural and language backgrounds, enabling their success by teaching them to be better communicators. Her skill-building approach embraces vocal technique, articulation, intonation, poise, presence, and presentation techniques. She assists clients with personal professionalism, voice improvement, presentation skills, public speaking, foreign accent reduction, communication etiquette, and networking social skills. She provides one-on-one communication coaching, workshops focused on specific communication skills, public seminars, training audio-cassettes, and a monthly newsletter offering tips and practice activities for enhancing communication skills. Dr. Fleming is the author of the cassette series The Sound of Your Voice and The Serious Business of Small Talk. She holds a doctorate from Northwestern University. Her speech communication practice, The Sound of Your Voice, collaborates with The India Practice in offering our clients from India and the India subcontinent private coaching and group workshops to address general and culturally specific communication improvement needs.
Mohan Kapur, Strategic Partner
Mohan Kapur is a leading business coach, strategic organizational development consultant, group process facilitator, public speaker and writer, with 30 years of senior management experience in India with multi-national conglomerates. He has conducted over 1800 consulting engagements with over 300 organizations in India and the U.S., helping organizations systematically address their issues and develop their potential. He specializes in using a systematic methodology to identify needs, devise plans and track measurable performance goals. He has worked with large, mid-sized and small businesses, and has worked with CEOs, line managers and field staff. In India, he pioneered this approach with major corporations such as Siemens, Lucent Technologies, Honda Group, India Gypsum, Delphi, Nortel Networks, and Westinghouse. Awarded an exclusive immigration status for aliens of extraordinary ability by the U.S. Government, he has worked with American companies such as Alltel, Windstream, American Express, and Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu. Mr. Kapur holds an undergraduate degree in economics from St. Stephen's College, New Delhi, and an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad.
Edwin Bernbaum, PhD, Affiliate Consultant
Dr. Edwin Bernbaum is a lecturer, author, mountaineer and scholar who has done extensive research on the cultural significance of mountains and mountain metaphors of leadership. He has worked extensively on sacred sites in Mount Everest National Park in Nepal as well as in the Indian Himalayas. He is the author of Sacred Mountains of the World, and co-leads leadership treks to Mount Everest for graduates of the Wharton MBA, Executive MBA and Executive Education Programs. Dr. Bernbaum offers keynote presentations, workshops and seminars for corporate and business school groups on the power of mountain metaphors to help sharpen leadership and teamwork skills, and on the insights to be gained from the mountain metaphors found in the world's different cultures. He is the co-creator of our "Scaling the Heights Together" teambuilding program, which helps leadership and operational teams use the tool of mountain metaphors across cultures, and the experience of hiking together in local settings, to strengthen their leadership and teamwork skills. Dr. Bernbaum holds his undergraduate degree from Harvard College and a PhD in Asian Studies from the University of California at Berkeley. He is Director of the Sacred Mountains Program of the Mountain Institute, and a Research Associate in International & Area Studies at the University of California.
Dinesh Chandra, Strategic Partner
Dinesh Chandra is a global citizen by both experience and conviction. Born in India, and educated in both India and the U.S., he has worked professionally in the U.S. and 16 other countries. He has expertise in total quality management, knowledge sharing, change management, learning communities, transformational leadership, and global management. His approach to organizational issues and management challenges involves a special blend of western and eastern values and philosophies. Starting out as an engineer in India, Mr. Chandra acquired an MBA from the University of Florida, then served as Director of Productivity/Quality for Beckman-Coulter in India. He has delivered workshops and consulted with Fortune 500 companies around the globe, including U.S. companies involved with India and Indian companies involved with the U.S. Mr. Chandra is co-editor of What Is True Wealth & How Do We Create It, and a contributing author to Learning Organizations: Developing Cultures for Tomorrow's Workplace and Community Building: Renewing Spirit and Learning in Business.
Martin Kenney, PhD, Strategic Partner
Dr. Martin Kenney is a Professor at the University of California, Davis, and a Senior Project Director at the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy. He has published five books and over 100 scholarly articles on the development of Silicon Valley and service globalization. His two recent edited books, Understanding Silicon Valley and Locating Global Advantage, were published by Stanford University Press, where he is the editor of a book series in innovation and globalization. He was a visiting professor at the Copenhagen Business School; Judge School of Management, Cambridge University; Institute of Innovation Studies, Hitotsubashi University; Kobe University; and Tokyo University. He has consulted for or lectured at various private-sector organizations including, for example, Association of Computing Machinery, Dell India, Intel, and GHX. He has consulted or prepared commissioned papers for public-sector organizations such as Interamerican Development Bank, World Bank, OECD, the President's Council on Science and Technology, National Academy of Engineering, National Academy of Science, and the National Research Council. His research has been supported by the NSF, the Sloan Foundation, and the Kauffman Foundation.
Rafiq Dossani, PhD, Strategic Partner
Dr. Rafiq Dossani's consulting and research include business process outsourcing, innovation and entrepreneurship in information technology, financial, technology and energy-sector reform in India, Asian entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, South Asian security, and South Asian political reform. He has advised U.S. and Indian government agencies, corporations in a number of industries (telecom, information technology, heath care services, accounting) and associations such as the National Academies of Engineering. Recent projects have been in the areas of software offshoring operations, impacts of BPO expansion, infrastructure restructuring, knowledge process outsourcing structures, and developed country market strategy. He is Senior Research Scholar and Executive Director of the South Asia Program at the Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University. He worked previously for the Robert Fleming Investment Banking Group, first as CEO of its India operations and later as head of its San Francisco operations. He has also been the chairman and CEO of a stockbroking firm on the OTCEI exchange in India, the deputy editor of Business India Weekly, and a professor of finance at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Telecommunications Reform in India and Prospects for Peace in South Asia. Dr. Dossani holds a BA in economics from St. Stephen's College, New Delhi, an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, and a PhD in finance from Northwestern University.
For more information or to schedule a consultation, call 510-525-9222, write to info@indiapractice.com or describe your needs by filling our "Contact the India Practice" form.