Pearl Zhu's Blog, page 1228

The Digital Evolution at the Mindset Level

What is truly make a human as an intelligent being is our thinking capability? Our mind is a complex system of complex systems and many of them are very difficult to understand and grasp. They shape our thinking, communicating, and the way we perceive and understand things. Human has sophisticated language skills. Is it because our brain is bigger than animals? Is human cognition converged with machine intelligence? The thoughts piled with the thoughts build into a cognitive mind. The most important capability of cognitive mind is the willingness and ability to seek out knowledge, address our ignorance and the assumptions we make to minimize it, make a discernment based on such an understanding. Nowadays digital makes an impact on almost every aspect of our life and society. So, what’s the digital evolution at the mindset level? And how to change the game via changing the mindset?
Shaping the bigger, much bigger box of thinking is evolutionary at the cognitive level: The individual’s “thinking box" is a mental construct made up of personal and environmental components that one operates within. Due to the scarcity of information and static setting in the industrial age, many people are used to living in the familiar territory and apply conventional wisdom based on a very limited thinking box they shape quite a long time ago. If we all stayed in a box and didn't believe things exist outside of our box, there's no room to broaden our thoughts. digital is all about hyperconnectivity and innovation. Nowadays, with increasing speed of changes and abundance of knowledge, the content in that little thinking box can easily get stale and out of touch. In fact, great things and advancement don't happen inside your comfort zone or in a box which is associated with convention within context. When one leaves those outdated thoughts and standards to seek additional knowledge and experience, they are stepping outside that box to unfamiliar territory, they are expanded into a much bigger box, and let the creative mind run free, they are able to think with a new perspective, unconventionally, or simply differently. That could be a formidable mind power to accelerate digital transformation.
From apply linear logical thinking to practicing Systems Thinking is evolutionary at the cognitive level: We are moving from a static and linear business world to a dynamic and hyper-connected digital era, it directly impact how we think and do things more effectively. Systems Thinking is to understand the interrelationship between parts and the whole. At a high level, system thinking is an awareness of an entire system, and how changes to any part of that system impact the other parts of the system and the whole. From linear logical or analytical thinking to systems thinking is an evolution at the mind level because Systems Thinking is an integral thinking of analytics and synthesis. It encourages looking at the wider aspects around any problem space and then understanding the effect of imposing boundaries within that space, in order to frame the right problem and solve it in a systematic way.
From silo thinking to holistic thinking is evolutionary at the mindset level: Silo thinking often means to only pay more attention to the part, but ignore the whole. Silo-based traditional management practices achieve the certain level of business efficiency, but also cause the side effect and drag down the overall business maturity. The word "holistic" itself refers to something that transcends an adding or combination of thinking ways. Holistic thinking is more than a combination of these three ways of thinking: analytical, systems, and critical thinking. It requires very open mind and ability to transcend conventional wisdom. Holistic thinking is the type of thinking practice that appreciates how underlying complexity generates the features and phenomena of interest. It is critical to apply holistic thinking for understanding the holistic digital business ecosystem with “VUCA” characteristics and deal with emergent issues wisely.
Thinking in different ways often has to do with how one is willing to perceive, through what lens and knowing that each offers new and varied information that can be thought of. The deep problem that reveals is to understand what are the evolutionary pathways implied by these mind switches and how we can leverage different thought processes to solve complex problems effectively. In the meantime, our species is at a turning point that requires a significant adjustment in our evolutionary path rooted at the mindset level.

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Three Innovation Management Approaches

Today, at the hyperconnected digital ecosystem, innovation can happen anywhere, anytime, it expands both horizontally and vertically. Digital era opens the new chapter of innovation. Innovation comes in many flavors and there are many opportunities in an enterprise to do so, such as breakthrough innovation, evolutionary innovation, incremental innovation, systematic innovation, customer-centric innovation, open innovation, design-driven innovation, or management (leadership, culture, communication) innovation, etc. There is no one-size fits all formula to manage all sorts of innovations well. But innovation shouldn’t be just serendipitous as well. Here are three management approaches to improve the innovation management success rate.

An emergent approach: Innovation is to transform novel ideas to achieve its business value. Due to the “VUCA” digital new normal, leading organizations and managing changes & innovations shouldn’t wait until there is an immediate pressing task. Digital leaders must realize that proactive innovation management and continuous adaptability are necessary in a continuously changing world. They realize they should look uphills to identify the real problems that matter and on a scale that can make a difference. They should also look deeply into the future to navigate where to go and how to get there. Often the innovation lens provides them the better angle and broader perspective to build business competency, achieve the higher business value, and drive digital transformation seamlessly. Under such business circumstance with increasing speed of changes and predictivity, it is important to evolve the emergent properties or events to practice the dynamic innovation strategy management. It will be disappointing for those who wait until the last moment of some strategic or tactical tasks and then expect innovation to be forthcoming magically but come up short. For strategic innovation, the leadership team has to become involved in that capacity construction proactively and build innovation as the differentiated business capability. Digital is the age of customers, innovation also needs to become more customer-centric, focus on meeting important customer needs, instead of just doing simply interesting research topics. It helps to assure that the results of innovative approach will have a positive impact on the clients, partners, end users, and the marketplace.

An iterative approach: From idea generation to innovation implementation, plan, do, check, act are not linear steps, but an iterative continuum. Innovation Management is also situational, should be managed top-down, bottom up or middle out accordingly based on the innovation flavors and management style. What is needed today is top-down to be more about the vision of the outcome; top-down management does mean to micro-manage innovation, let employees use their brains in helping solve for leaders intent. Innovation is not a singular idea or event, as a key part of the innovation is the behavioral changes that occur as the idea is adopted by a user group. The robust process and tools that enable any entity to generate winning concepts for innovation management on the consistent basis and via an iterative approach, is the prerequisite for sustaining advantage and growth with continuous innovation delivery. This requires an effective 'innovation system' that is capable of supporting both widespread incremental innovation in products/services and ways of working as well as the rarer 'step-change' innovation in products/services, working methodology, business model, and market positioning.

An integrative approach: An enriched digital innovation ecosystem enables systematic innovation management.  It starts with innovation strategy defines "WHAT does the organization innovate" or "where should it innovate" to support the overall strategy. A systematic innovation management with an integrative approach is an effective way to manage a healthy digital innovation portfolio. Innovation ecosystem or the methodological environment should cover the whole innovation process, from processes in managing ideas or idea handling systems to idea implementation and promotion. The organizational content is the innovation capability which is how does the organization innovate. The digital innovation context goes beyond the traditional scope, the best point of view is to see innovation as a system, capable of delivering organization-wide capability. An integrative approach to managing innovation is to ensure that innovation process can be applied to create value without adding too much redundant complication. And innovation leaders can balance innovation with the order, change, and stability to improve business vitality to ensure future business growth.

Innovation has to result in something which leads us to a better state than where we are today. There’s no such one size fit all success formula for the business success. It is important to define the most compelling and unique innovation approach to addressing the needs; analyze the benefits per costs of that approach or a mix of different approaches. Innovation can be managed more systematically and develop it as a distinguished business capability.

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The Monthly “Unpuzzling Innovation” Book Tuning: Walk the Innovation Talk to Make a Digital Leap May 2017

Digital is the age of innovation. And innovation is what leads to differentiation. There are many ways to differentiate and, therefore, there are many ways to pursue innovation. Talking of innovation is not new nowadays, everybody, every organization now is talking about innovation. It's been at or near the top of the business or economics agenda for a long time. However, there’re a lot of confusions about innovation and there is no magic sauce to guarantee its success. Back to basic, what is innovation, the more you look into this topic, the more difficult to give a definition of innovation, as it is such a broad topic? One of the good definitions of innovation is: "to transform the novel ideas into commercial success.” In essence, innovation is, "intentional novelty bringing sustainable benefit."
        Walk the Innovation Talk to Make a Digital Leap
How to Walk the Innovation Talk Effortlessly? Digital is the era of innovation. Nowadays, many people and organizations are talking about innovation, but very few practice creativity persistently and manage innovation effectively, with the ability to walk the innovation talk effortlessly. There is innovation friction existing and change fatigue block the way. Once people get into a routine at work, they typically get stuck at the “We always do things like that” mentality, and they do not like to hear about how things could be done differently to make the work more productive, and innovative, or finding the better way to solve either the old or existing problems. So, digital business leaders today should learn how to walk the innovation talk and manage innovation in a structural way
How to Apply Creativity Wisdom in Problem Solving: Creativity is expressive, productive, inventive, innovative and emergent. The innovators are simply those who can see what's around, and easily and effortlessly discover a better way to do things. Every one of us has creative strength. Some have strength in “thinking” - generating ideas and options, reframing issues or queries in understanding things via different way; other people excel at “seeing,” or observing - spotting interesting challenges and opportunities, trend surfing or noticing the significant details that others do not; and some others are good at “acting,’ they take thoughts and notions and figure out a place, manage logistic to make the idea a reality. So how to build a highly innovative team or organization, and take a structural approach for applying creativity in problem-solving?
How to Build Innovation Strength in your Organization Digital innovation has a broader spectrum with hybrid nature, it is the incremental improvement- radical innovation continuum. It has broader scope beyond just a new product or service, radical innovation brings something that was not existing before. Incremental Innovation is more about taking something someone created and adding to it, changing it, adapting it; or to leverage the latest technology for business improvement. A fine tuned innovation is not a serendipity, how to build innovation strength in your organization?
Innovation Goes Beyond a Buzzword: Innovation" is a must word everywhere today, the trendy word obsessively filling all presentations, even of really backward organizations in most obsolete industries. Often the definition of innovation is way too broad. It is so broad that the term innovation sometimes becomes meaningless. Innovation is overused and misused by many, but it is still a useful concept. Generally speaking, "innovation means implementing ideas to create value.” This trend, forced by marketeers, in real life off the presentation rooms, causes the endless run that pushes good, proven products and businesses to disappear from the market to give way to seasonal novelties, that are usually just face lifting or cheaper versions of the older ones. This is mostly about creating the demand for "new" products among customers and replying to the demand for innovation of the management. Does innovation need to be absolutely new irrespective of time and place?
How to Define, Evaluate and Implement Innovation  Innovation has different meanings depends on the industry, but the basic concept must be the same. In a nutshell, business innovations include new business models, work processes optimization, and new products/services design and delivery, a new marketing methodology, or a new organizational experiment in business practices, workplace structure or external relations. There are both breakthrough innovation and incremental innovation as well.
The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.8 million page views with about 3700+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes the time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify your voice, deepen your digital footprints, and match your way for human progression.

"Unpuzzling Innovation" Amazon Order Link"Unpuzzling Innovation" B&N Order Link"Unpuzzling Innovation" iBook Order Link
"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Slideshare Presentation"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Chapter 1 Innovation Classification"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Chapter 2 Innovation Principles"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Chapter 3 Digital Innovators"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Chapter 4 Connecting Innovation Dots"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Chapter 5 Digital Innovation Best & Next Practices"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Chapter 6 Innovation Paradox"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Chapter 7 Innovation Gaps and Pitfalls"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Chapter 8 Innovation Measurement"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Conclusion Mastering Innovation in a Structural Way"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Quotes Collection I"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Quotes Collection II"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Quotes Collection III

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The Digital Board’s Digital Inquiries (II)

Digital boards play a directory role in strategy oversight, business advising, and monitoring, advocating changes and inspiring innovation. Board as a whole needs to be able to create the holistic digital view via listening, brainstorming, and questioning, This implies that Boards of the future will need to work much more closely and collaboratively, to become the “mastermind” behind the digital transformation. Here are a set digital board’s digital inquiries.
Is the board sufficiently engaged with long-term opportunities and threats, such as digital transformation, sustainability, and the environment, or global shifts in the balance of economic power? Organizations are complex adaptive living systems, which are comprised, in part, of people (subsystems) who are also complex adaptive living systems. All such systems function, grow and prosper by continually learning, innovating, adapting and evolving. An organization or company may be in business for many years but has not matured its management practices. Performing an organizational change impact assessment (“SWOT” or other business analysis) is very important to understand the 'current state' factors in digital transformation. Then determine what the impact, risks, and challenges of any proposed changes are. Do the routine check up on the journey of digital transformation. Digital transformation is to create organizations where change is the norm and happens the whole time thereby delivering faster and increasing market share.
Is the business able to shift the focus of existing people, investments and agendas, or does it need new capabilities, higher levels of investment? Digital transformation is not just about adopting the fancy technology tools,  Digital Masters understand it and take a more structured approach to expanding digital to all important dimensions with a set of well-defined digital principles and a series of digital practices. Today’s businesses must have changeability for adapting to the new digital dynamic and build recombinant business capabilities for managing the seamless strategy execution. Digital BoDs/executives will act more as conductors than constructors, with the ability to map the modular business capabilities to the business strategy, focus on integration and orchestration, look for productivity, engagement, efficiency, effectiveness, agility and maturity of the business. Thriving to become the digital master, it is about improving the top-line business growth by maximizing ROIs to add up the overall business performance and unleash the full digital potential on the second dimension. It is also important to assess the stage in a life cycle the company is at or the type of tasks that need to be done. Do better on IT-enabled business capability mappings which allow for an understanding of the impact of strategic changes, and to have open discussions across business disciplinaries on the steps that need to be taken to reach strategic goals timely.
Do we have the expertise to identify the strategic and operational changes that need to be made? Digital BoDs need to understand the extent to which digital technologies enable the people to function to manage an integrated ecosystem of stakeholders and operate as an efficient and effective strategic business partner. They also need to work more closely with the top management and take a proactive approach to purposely creating a defined corporate culture and the collective mindset. They should help identify both “problems framers” and “problem-solvers,” to ensure the right leaders/talented people with the right capabilities putting in the right position to solve the right problems. A solution is nothing if the problem is not perceived, therefore, creating the awareness of the problem is the first step to making a solution be understood and accepted. To manage a smooth digital transformation, it is critical to take a structural approach to clarify business visions, goals, and objectives; analyzing the current state of the business, determining the required business transformation; developing the business transformation roadmaps, and select the performance indicators to track the progress accordingly.
Being skeptical, being inquisitive, being creative; leverage real critical thinking to practice governance effectively. Accountability and oversight are all part of the game changes that boards must address. And the Board clearly has a role to play in all the major essential elements of leading a successful digital transformation.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

The Long-Jump to Reach IT Maturity

IT continues to grow in importance to organizations, both operationally and as a competitive advantage. However, the majority of IT organizations still get stuck at the lower level of maturity, running as a reactive order taker, and being perceived as a cost center and support function. IT organizations can be either leading or supporting, depending on the maturity of the organization and the vision of top leaders.  If the organization does not take advantage of or expect the IT department to innovate, initiate change or drive digital transformation, and then in the age of the digital era, IT is unlikely to be delivering the best solutions for its customers and achieving higher-than-expected results to shareholders. IT has to reinvent itself, and top business leaders need to reimagine how to leverage information & technology to build differentiated business competency. It is the journey with thoughtful strategic planning and step-wise approach to get the business digital ready and take a long jump to reach IT and overall organizational maturity.
At the lower maturity level, IT is a business enabler; at the higher maturity level, IT is an innovation hub and game changer of the business: Broadly speaking, at the lower maturity level, IT is an enabling capability to support business. However, when moving up the maturity, IT should catalyze business growth and become the game changer. IT maturity also depends on how it manages the changes - change attitude and capability. Traditional IT department is perceived as a change laggard, with a controller’s mentality to drag down the business speed to changes. IT staffs are trained early on to focus on change control as a sort of promotion to the production process; they are overloaded by the customers’ requests for bandaging the symptoms, and their performance are evaluated by some quantitative measures only. They don’t get motivated to step out of the comfort zone and take innovative effort for problem-solving.  “Keeping the lights on” only is important, but it’s not sufficient to build a high mature distinguished IT organization. IT has to do more with innovation, because innovations bring the new opportunity for the business growth, and create a unique business advantage. At the high-innovative organizational setting, information and idea flow smoothly and innovation is not serendipity, but a systematic management discipline & processes which underpin strategy execution. People are empowered to align their professional goals with business strategic goals to unleash the collective human potential and lead the business to the next level of the growth cycle and business maturity.
At the lower maturity level, IT is struggling to align with the business; at the higher maturity level, IT is striving to align with customers (internal users & end customers): Traditional organizations follow the reductionistic management philosophy to improve the certain level of functional efficiency. The side effect is that, more often, organizations are too siloed to be able to relate coherently as a holistic business to the customer's journey. Modern organizations are not just the sum of functional pieces, but an integral whole to maximize its performance and achieve customers’ expectation. Today’s organizations are at a crossroads where the segregation or silo of business units are at a need to reach across the aisles and respectively work with each other.  Each business function brings a unique perspective and a set of skills to the table. To make the link strong and the outlook clear is to empower the IT team and make them think through the business world and from customers’ perspective while working on the customer-centric solutions. It is the time to put one ahead of change curves and make a long jump from “aligning IT with the business,” to “align IT to the customer.” The biggest challenges for IT leaders would be the inability to effectively communicate the importance of delivering to expectations vs. requirements. IT should both leverage powerful digital technologies to improve internal users’ productivity, engagement, and creativity; but also take initiatives to digitize the touch point of end user’s customer experience, and improve the overall business responsiveness and maturity.  
At the lower maturity level, IT is measured through inside-out IT operational lens; at the high maturity level, IT is evaluated from outside-in business lens:  Digital transformation is now affecting all aspects of business operations from innovation within and around business ecosystem, to customer engagement, to business models and processes. Hence, the IT ROI performance management should take into account both financial and non-financial measures, assessing internal improvements, past outcomes and ongoing requirements as indications of future performance. In this regard, a Balanced scorecard offers a way for IT and business executives to gain a wider perspective on its strategic decisions by considering the impact on finances, customers, internal processes and employee satisfaction. A well-defined scorecard should contain a good mix of outcome measures along with performance drivers to track the progress in the short term (operational value) as well as provide the long term data-based perspective (strategic value) for decision-making.
Besides the disruptive digital technology trends and overwhelming information growth, IT effects in radical digital tuning are to be an integrator in knitting all important business factors, to improve business agility, flexibility, innovativeness, speed, customer-centricity, and maturity. Companies across sectors ultimately respond to the external environment as geopolitics, rapid innovation, and social expectations change the business landscape and blur the digital territories. It is a strategic imperative to broaden the IT outlook and envision the bigger picture about digitalization, reimagine the art of possible and maximize IT potential. IT maturity is based on the overall business maturity. IT maturity can further accelerate business changes and make a leap of digital transformation. And there are no shortcuts to getting to that state, it’s a long jump and it takes time and a real commitment to getting there.


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The Monthly “Decision Master” Book Tuning: How to Improve Decision-Making Maturity May 2017

Decision Masters refer to the digital leaders or professionals who can leverage multidimensional thought processes, information and intuition, take a step-wise scenario for making effective decisions consistently. Decision Masters also refer to the businesses or organizations that follow a set of well-defined principles, leverage fine-tuned decision processes, efficient information management system, decision frameworks, tools, and metrics to enable people across the organization making effective decisions collaboratively. How to Improve Decision-Making Maturity
The New Book “Decision Master” Conclusion: Five Pillars in Achieving Decision Excellence? Decision-making is both science and art. Decision making is the art only when decision makers understand the science. Decision power is mind power. From the scientific perspective, decision-making is not an event, but a capability underpinned by a series of interrelated processes or steps. And there are five pillars in achieving decision-making maturity.  
Five Pillars to Achieve Decision-Making Maturity? Nature offers countless choices during life struggle. Either at the individual or the corporate level, people have to make decisions, large or small even at daily basis. There are many reasons for making decisions (WHY & WHAT); there are many ways to make decisions (HOW), and there are also different personalities of decision-makers (WHO). And surely there is no “One Size Fits All” formula for making great decisions. Decision power is a mind-power. Decision-making is both science and art. The issue of the issue is: Decision-making is not an event, but a capability underpinned by a series of interrelated processes or steps. What are important pillars in building the decision-making capability and how to improve its effectiveness and maturity?
The Art and Science of Decision-Making? Both business and the world become over-complex, hyper-connected, extremely uncertain and ambiguous than ever, making effective decisions is both art and science. There are blind spots which block the vision and there are pitfalls on the way. What are philosophy and practices to improve decision making effectiveness and optimize the overall business responsiveness?
Five Principles to Reach Decision Maturity? One significant effect of digitization is increased velocity, complexity, ambiguity, unpredictability, and a need for a faster response to changes in business and industry based on effective and efficient decision making. How is that possible? Decision making is both art and science, especially for business leaders, making either strategic or tactical decision effectively is one of the most critical responsibilities facing them every day. How to set principles and guidelines in reaching the high level of decision maturity in your organization
Digital Master Tuning #76: Five-Step Decision-making Scenario: One of the most important tasks for management is to make decisions, however, across the sectors, many business leaders still make “gut feeling” only decisions all the time, what’re the logical scenario to make effective decisions? Technically, how shall you weigh in the data and gut feeling to make the effective decision at the right time?
The blog is a dynamic book flowing with your thought; growing through your dedication; sharing your knowledge; conveying your wisdom, and making influence through touching the hearts and connecting the minds across the globe. The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.8 million page views with about #3500 blog posting. Among 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating the new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes the time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

Decision Master Book SummaryDecision Master Amazon Order LinkDecision Master B&N Order LinkDecision Master iBook Order Link
Decision Master IntroductionDecision Master Chapter 1 Decision IntelligenceDecision Master Chapter 2 Decision PrinciplesDecision Master Chapter 3 Digital Decision StylesDecision Master Chapter 4 Decision PitfallsDecision Master Chapter 5 Decision Maturity Decision Master Conclusion Five Pillars in Achieving Decision ExcellenceDecision Master Quotes Collection 1Decision Master Quotes Collection 2
Decision Master Quotes Collection 3
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Decipher the Ideal Digital Workplace & Workforce

Compared to traditional industrial organizations running as a mechanical system, digital organizations are more like the living things which need to grow more organically and become more fluid to adapt to changes with self-renewal capabilities. In an ideal digital workplace, the organizational structure is solid enough keep people or things in order; but fluid enough to keep information and idea flow. What are the further perspective to decipher the ideal digital workplace and nurture a creative and productive digital workforce?
Strengthen the PEOPLE link: One of the key determinants of whether an organization can move to new digital structures is the development level of the people. People are always the weakest link in organizations. So, part of the digital transformation journey is to prepare people for the new structures and to recognize this is a crucial step. And this shift will also be supported by a new set of organization processes (talent management, IT, sales & marketing, performance development, etc). People have to be ready for moving to a more fluid structure. The digital ready people are those who can work independently, have excellent problem-solving skills, well disciplined, have a "customer focus," and bring positivity and creativity to the workplace. In many digital laggards, businesses still treat their people as cost, headcount or resource only.  Thus, the overall employee engagement is very low in these organizations, and people fear to step out of the comfort zone and adapt to changes. They are not motivated to be the innovators or change agents due to the culture of mediocrity. “Change inertia,” silo thinking, or other business frictions are the roadblocks to changes. These organizations are too heavy to flow, and too inflexible to speed up. In an ideal digital working environment, self-motivated leaders, teams, and employees have the passion for making things happen, catalyze changes, streamline business transformation scenario, build on organizational knowledges and respond to rapidly changing conditions effortlessly. These digital ready leaders or employees are great in attitude, aptitude, and altitude -a winning mixture composed of character, intelligence and competence, and bring the true innovation spirit and digital fluency to the workplace.
Empowerment - let capability shine: In an ideal digital workforce, empowerment is the mantra for developing a digital ready workforce. 'Empowerment' is very much a two-way street. To gain empowerment, team or individuals need to earn the level of trust. Surely empowerment doesn’t mean to make people cozy or just softening their words. Empowerment is like respect and works both way. Filter out the negative vibe and let the capability shine, and maximize the collective human potential. The organizations with the culture of empowerment will reap the benefits of knowledge workers who have self-actualized, the abundance of creativity via out-of-box thinking, and the amplified human capabilities. . Digital management is responsible for enabling a collaborative, innovative, and  productive working environment. Nurturing dissent and consideration rather than relentless drive to achieve a single metric is the only way to move forward.
Engagement -inspire discovery, autonomy, and mastery. Due to the hyper-connectivity nature of digital organization, the digital workplace will be shaped by changes that take place in the way people relate to themselves and to their experience of their environment and others around them, their voice can be amplified via social platforms, and their contribution can be recognized via digital style of talent/performance management. Performance and engagement go hand in hand. Performance is a result of how well a manager engages in developing an employee. Of course, the employee has to do his or her part of having the right attitude, skills, and willingness to participate in the development process. It is all about creating a strong relationship, to understand, reflect and drive performance. Or to put simply, performance is a byproduct of engagement. When one is so correlated to the other that with engagement, comes improved performance, and good performance. If measured effectively, will demonstrate higher levels of employee engagement. The "work is what you accomplish, not where you go" shift is unstoppable, it will lead to greater autonomy and "self-generated" engagement.  
Building an ideal digital workplace won’t happen overnight, and organizational structure optimization takes planning, experimenting and scaling up. The is no magic to cultivating a high-innovative and high-professional digital workforce as well, it takes open leadership, growth mindset, empathetic understanding, collective wisdom, and lining up on a common business goals to achieve. Under such working environment, quality is rewarded, and human potential is unleashed.
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Running a Goal-Driven Digital IT

IT plays a critical role to enable business and drive digital transformation. However, IT is not for its own sake, but to catalyze the business growth and improve the organizational competency. IT has to learn  the business; be the business and become the business. CIOs have to provide the foresightful leadership for running a goal-driven digital IT, and achieve high-performance business result both qualitatively and quantitatively.
Effectively managing existing and new technologies to enable business goals: Many IT organizations have the existing back end traditional enterprise IT services and now the new consumerized digital inventive IT. An effective CIO needs to ensure the delivery of agreed IT enablement to the business goals.  The underpinnings of this success are providing vision and development of business capabilities, management of expectations, development of relationships up, down and sideward, implementation of the process to ensure predictability, and development of talent within the organization. Highly effective IT management exists within a business to increase revenue, reduce costs, improve services/solutions, manage/mitigate risks and/or assist with statutory/corporate compliance. The goal driven IT also keeps improving effectiveness, efficiency, agility, innovation, flexibility and scalability; managing and utilizing IT budget for achieving better Return on Investment.
Optimizing business (Process + Scope) to improve productivity and efficiency: Effective IT management means understanding every island of operation and every workflow process. It is through this comprehensive understanding that IT would be able to help the business identify true cost savings, workflow optimizations, process efficiency, and additional revenue opportunities. Improving productivity is a noble business goal behind the consumerization of IT. Digitizing business should be perceived as an amazing opportunity to utilize and optimize processes and risk management skills to achieve something the users actually want without compromising the quality. With more powerful, also lightweight digital technologies, and the right strategy in place, IT can become more nimble, flexible and customer-centric. Though the transformation would not be easy, and more importantly, a big piece of this puzzle seems to be how users themselves identify their role as IT digitization. The business goal driven IT can not only expand the scope, optimize business processes to improve employee productivity and business efficiency, but also importantly, it should accelerate the speed of changes and build the business competency for the long term business perspective.
Refine & abstract information to business insight, and apply technology in new and innovative ways to stay ahead of competition and industry:  Nowadays information is overloading and technologies are permeating into every corner of the organization.  a good CIO needs to think on his/her feet during strategy planning and implementation. A goal-driven digital IT shouldn’t be limited to “keep the lights on” only, IT has to leverage more resource and asset to business growth and innovation. CIOs must look into opportunities for businesses and then see what IT can do to grow the business and catalyze innovation. CIOs must focus on “building the knowledge,” not just “having the knowledge,” or more precisely, managing information life cycle (information-knowledge-insight-intelligence-wisdom) in order to expand the horizon for innovation and grasp the growth opportunity for the business timely. CIOs must also continuously educate C-Level executives that the IT organization is an innovation engine. When BoDs/top executive teams recognize growth opportunities, the CIO can translate this into an IT-enabled business solution that will support the company's vision, in the example to grow market share and customer satisfaction.
Running a goal-driven digital IT to qualify and quantify business achievements is beneficial to run IT as the business. The main issue is the dynamic between running the IT utility and being a strategic business partner. Invest more on driving the top-line business growth, as applying technical capabilities to market opportunities is where the magic happens to reinvent IT as the business differentiator and make IT more shared, integrated, fast, flexible and reliable. Running IT as a business.






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The "Digitizing Boardroom" Book Tuning: The Digital BoD’s Leadership Inquiries to Celebrate the Mother’s Day

Leaders set principles, open to criticism, and take the risk for innovation.

Leadership is all about future and changes. Leaders set principles, open to criticism, and take the risk for innovation. Leadership is composed of three characteristics: Substance, skills, and styles. Contemporary corporate boards play the critical role in strategy oversight, business advising/monitoring. They also set the digital leadership tones and advocate changes. They are the mastermind behind the digital transformation. Here are a set of BoD’s leadership inquiries to celebrate the Mother’s Day.

Does the organization see the leader as authentic? There is a thick layer of passionate people who want to lead, and in fact, it is the great news for both corporations or our society. However, there are many confusions about contemporary leadership, such as leadership substance vs. style, vision vs. communication; creativity vs. status quo. We are still living in the era with authentic leadership scarcity. Leadership is the state of mind, the unique set of capabilities, and the process to solve problems in better ways. Being authentic is truly about discovering your leadership purpose and strength. The authenticity of leadership can be further checked via “3W+1H” leadership inquiries: Who are you? Why do you want to lead? What can you bring to the table? And how can you lead more innovatively and effectively?  When you have a fair reason to lead, you can connect with nature so deeply, and you will feel that the whole universe is eager to help. Being authentic is truly about being yourself, practicing independent thinking, no needs to pursue perfection, but being positive and progressive. Digital boards as the senior leadership team should set the leadership tone, make fair digital principles, to ensure the right people with the right capability in the right position to lead more effectively and innovatively.

Do your leaders have the ability to cope with “VUCA” new normal today? The rate of change has accelerated in the current business environment with “VUCA” characteristics. Uncertainty and ambiguity are also the key challenges facing business leaders today. It is indicating that business leaders must learn how to strike a balance between managing complex issues today and predicting the uncertain issues of tomorrow. Hence, today’s digital leaders should have multidimensional thinking capabilities to make sound judgments, and problem-solving capabilities to both frame the right problems and solve them innovatively. Because sometimes, even you have a good intention to solve problems but perhaps just fix the symptom, and causes more serious problems later on. In the past, many business leaders believed their organizations’ long-term goals could wait until they had dealt with the current crisis, this is no longer the case. Digital leaders today need to understand that the linear management skills are not sufficient to lead today’s nonlinear digital world with the deep learning curve. Hence, being learning agile is alway critical for updating your knowledge structure and sharpening leadership skills & capabilities for overcoming leadership challenges.

Are your leaders emotionally aware enough to listen, as well as tell? Digital leaders today also need to present emotional excellence, with the high level of maturity. Emotional Intelligence is the ability to identify your own emotions or even others’ emotions. It is the ability to harness constructive or positive emotions and apply them to tasks like thinking, decision-making, and problems-solving. To avoid the trap of emotional turbulence, bias, or individual perception, you have to think critically and profoundly, and hunt for others' viewpoint as well, and you have to really dig beneath the superficial layer, see around the corner and transcend the interdisciplinary knowledge into business insight, in order to make sound judgments and effective decisions.

Can your leaders manage multiple stakeholders inside and outside the organization proactively? Relationships are undeniably the root of all business.  Relationships are critical in business - both internally, and externally. But for those relationships to matter, to add value, they have to be relationships with empathy and in-depth understanding. A professional relationship doesn't mean to hang around or play around but through multi-angle observation and in-depth communication & understanding. In practice, there are multi-layer relationships digital leaders need to manage: Such as business peer/shareholder relationship, customer relationship, vendor relationship, team relationship, etc. Therefore, either making communication or providing the solution, they should target the different audience, speak the common language to avoid "lost in translation" syndrome, tailor the special needs in order to build up the long-term empathic relationship. Trust relationships are the foundation of high-performance culture. Without good business relationships, every decision becomes an argument. The deeper the trust, the more valuable the relationship.

BoDs as top leadership roles need to envision and lead the organization towards its future. Contemporary digital boards should set the critical tones from leadership grooming to talent/culture development, to ensure the right people are in the right positions for leading digital transformation and improving the digital leadership effectiveness and maturity.


Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

The Digital BoD’s Leadership Inquiries to Celebrate the Mother’s Day

Leadership is all about future and changes. Leaders set principles, open to criticism, and take the risk for innovation. Leadership is composed of three characteristics: Substance, skills, and styles. Contemporary corporate boards play the critical role in strategy oversight, business advising/monitoring. They also set the digital leadership tones and advocate changes. They are the mastermind behind the digital transformation. Here are a set of BoD’s leadership inquiries to celebrate the Mother’s Day.
Does the organization see the leader as authentic?  There is a thick layer of passionate people who want to lead, and in fact, it is the great news for both corporations or our society. However, there are many confusions about contemporary leadership, such as leadership substance vs. style, vision vs. communication; creativity vs. status quo. Leadership is the state of mind, the unique set of capabilities, and the process to solve problems in better ways. Being authentic is truly about discovering your leadership purpose and strength. The authenticity of leadership can be further checked via “3W+1H” leadership inquiries: Who are you? Why do you want to lead? What can you bring to the table? And how can you lead more innovatively and effectively?  When you have a fair reason to lead, you can connect with nature so deeply, and you will feel that the whole universe is eager to help. Digital boards as the senior leadership team do set the leadership tone, make fair digital principles, to ensure the right people with the right capability in the right position to lead more effectively. Being authentic is truly about being yourself, practicing independent thinking, no needs to pursue perfection, but being positive and progressive.
Do your leaders have the ability to cope with “VUCA” new normal today? The rate of change has accelerated in the current business environment with “VUCA” characteristics. Uncertainty and ambiguity are also the key challenge for business leaders today. It is indicating that business leaders must learn how to strike a balance between managing complex issues today and predicting the uncertain issues of tomorrow. Hence, today’s digital leaders should have multidimensional thinking capabilities to make sound judgments, and problem-solving capabilities to both frame the right problems and solve them innovatively. Because sometimes, even you have a good intention to solve problems but perhaps just fix the symptom, and causes more serious problems later on. In the past, many business leaders believed their organizations’ long-term goals could wait until they had dealt with the current crisis, this is no longer the case.  digital leaders today need to understand that the linear management skills are not sufficient to lead today’s nonlinear digital world with the deep learning curve. Hence, being learning agile is alway critical for updating your knowledge structure and sharpening leadership skills & capabilities.
Are your leaders emotionally aware enough to listen, as well as tell? Digital leaders today also need to present emotional excellence and high level of maturity. Emotional Intelligence is the ability to identify your own emotions or even others’ emotions. It is the ability to harness constructive or positive emotions and apply them to tasks like thinking, decision-making, and problems-solving. To avoid the trap of emotional turbulence, bias, or individual perception, you have to think critically and profoundly,  and you have to really dig beneath the superficial layer, see around the corner and transcend the interdisciplinary knowledge into business insight, in order to make sound judgments and effective decisions.
Can your leaders manage multiple stakeholders inside and outside the organization proactively? Relationships are undeniably the root of all business.  Relationships are critical in business - both internally, and externally. But for those relationships to matter, to add value, they have to be relationships with empathy and in-depth understanding.  There are multi-layer relationships digital leaders need to manage: Such as business peer/shareholder relationship, customer relationship, vendor relationship., etc. Therefore, either making communication or providing the solution, they should target the different audience, tailor the special needs in order to build up the long-term empathic relationship.  A professional relationship doesn't mean to hang around or play around but through multi-angle observation and in-depth communication & understanding. Trust relationships are the foundation of high-performance culture. Without good business relationships, every decision becomes an argument. The deeper the trust, the more valuable the relationship.
BoDs as top leadership roles need to envision and lead the organization towards its future. Contemporary digital boards should set the critical tones from leadership grooming to talent/culture development, to ensure the right people are in the right positions for leading digital transformation and improve the digital leadership effectiveness and maturity.


Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu