Pearl Zhu's Blog, page 1282

The Spotlight on Digital CIOs Nov. 2016

Modern CIOs have many personas and face great challenges. It is not sufficient to only keep the light on. Regardless of which industry or the nature of organization you are in, being a digital leader will need to master the art of creating unique, differentiating value from piles of commoditized technologies, but more specifically, what are the digital-savvy CIOs doing to run IT as a value creator and innovation engine? Here is the monthly spotlight of the CIO.         The Spotlight of Digital CIOs  Nov. 2016The Digital CIO’s Five Priorities in Daily Grinding: Being a contemporary CIO is a tough job facing unprecedented complexity and numerous dilemmas, due to change nature of technology and exponential growth of information, CIOs seem to be always in the hot seat, with the pressure to reinvent IT to adapt to changes with rapidly increasing speed. Since so many CIOs have been perceived as tactical IT managers, rather than visionary business leaders,  and business still thinks IT as a service desk, rather than a strategic partner. The forward-looking CIOs have to build their credibility as trusted business adviser via setting the right priority in the key areas which need daily focus and manage the time and resource effectively. Here are five priorities in CIOs' daily grinding.?   CIO as Chief Improvement Officer -How to Run a “Future-Proof” IT ? Technology becomes pervasive in modern enterprises today, on one hand, CIOs play one of the most significant business leadership roles, to manage one of the most valuable business assets -information in digital organizations; on the other side, the rapidly changing business climate also makes CIOs feel like to live in the tropical jungle, facing many attacks, in the danger of getting dismissed as techies without business savvy by their executive peers.With emergent IT consumerization trends, businesses sometimes bypass the internal IT to purchase on-demand services with potential risk compromising. At the dawn of Digital Era with an abundance of information and lightweight technologies, how can CIOs act as Chief Improvement Officers in the organization, continue improving services and solutions, craft a set of unique capabilities and run a “future-proof” IT organization for achieving operational excellence and high-level agility and maturity?
Are you an “Atypical CIO” or a “Stereotypical CIO”? Traditional IT organizations have been perceived as technical support centers and help desks, and traditional CIOs have been portrayed as technology geeks to keep the lights on. Nowadays, businesses are on the journey of digital transformation, and IT is also on the way to transform from a cost center to a value creator. CIOs as digital leaders today, what’s your self-reflection? Are you an “Atypical CIO” or a “Stereotypical CIO”? Are you a transformational leader or a transactional manager? What’s your leadership strength and how to lead IT as a changing organization of the business?
Practice CIO Plus Leadership to Run IT with “Enlightenment”: IT is moving up its maturity level from functioning to firm to delight. IT is neither luxury nor commodity, it's a competitive differentiator. With the new and disruptive technologies, CIOs need to change IT DNA from 'static" with change inertia to "dynamic" with change as a new normal; from a controller to an enabler, from "inside-out" operation driven to "outside-in" customer-centric. No more dictating technology solutions, but having a better understanding of the business and transforming IT to a business partner for providing business and customer driven solutions?
Mastering the Complexity of the Digital CIO Role: Due to the abundance of information and omnipresence of technologies, IT plays a pivotal role in the business’s digital transformation journey. Therefore, digital CIOs have to wear multiple hats and play different roles in the information-abundant organizations today. Nowadays, the CIO is not just managing IT to keep the lights on, but managing information to ensure the right people getting the right information at the right time to make the right decisions; and take visionary leadership in orchestrating digital transformation journey smoothly. Transformation means to change the “nature” of something, albeit that the increasing pace of technological advances has clearly impacted the nature and scope of opportunities, digital transformation represents a break with the past, with a high level of impact and complexity. So how can IT leaders master the complexity of the digital CIO role in order to lead effortlessly?

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.5 million page views with about #3200th 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 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.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

"Change Insight" Book Tuning: From Change Readiness to Change Effectiveness

What's needed every now and then in any individual, team, organization, society, and on up to the entire planet's population, is a little or a lot of energy to re-focus, kick start or 'game-change.'


Change is inevitable, and organizational change becomes a common practice within an organization. However, more than two-thirds of Change Management efforts fail to achieve the expected results. How to capture the signals of change readiness, and how to manage and sustain change efforts effectively, not for its own sake, but to improve organizational agility, innovativeness, and maturity?
Change readiness can be determined via a validated instrument, the change profile-scan: Most of the organizations today are the “sum of functions,” not yet being a cohesive whole. Too many organizations are mechanistic, control and command hierarchies. When productivity is low, the further analytics is needed for understanding the cause, whether it is due to the change curve, inefficient practice/ process, or the culture complacency. If your organization fits the description, get out fast or initiate change within. Trace down the poor behaviors or lower-than-expected performances, and understand the causes behind it. Companies don't think about change. People in companies do, from different positions. Mostly the management wants to see a different (better) result of all combined efforts. So methods or people held responsible for those results 'have to change.'

An organization’s “DNA” is visible from the collective mindset, attitudes, and decision-making styles: The most critical one is how decision-making process at various levels within an organization affects all other factors that form the culture over a period of time. An organization's DNA is visible from the collective attitudes - how employees behave at the workplace with co-workers, interaction with customers, adapt technological changes and accept challenges and contribute to the organization's brand image etc. All these factors take shape over a period through the decision-making process. Closer to reality is that 'change' is continuously happening in the environment of a company. The desires of stakeholders, clients and employees are evolving naturally. The challenges, competitions, and complexities may be on the increase, but along with it there comes the increase in opportunity and in the form of demand.
Change readiness also reflects whether Change Management is a “snapshot” of one-time initiative or an ongoing "movie" as the business capability and continuum: Lack of change review, reflection, and recognition often makes changes not sustainable. The lack of recognition for change impacts individuals and businesses’ willingness to extend themselves again for the next change. When a change initiative is completed, often the team walks away without checking to see if it adds value or evaluating if additional work is required. Taking the time to communicate the expected outcome with consideration of the "right" way allows the team to have room to make success progressive. The lack of breathing space between change initiatives is an issue as well. Plowing on to the next big thing before completely embedding the change into business as usual or running multiple simultaneous changes can leave a workforce reeling and exhausted.
Understand change readiness via the multidimensional business management lens. Digital makes a profound impact on the overall organizational agility, from a specific function to the business as a whole. The purpose of building change management capability and accelerating radical digitalization is to make a significant difference in the overall levels of customer delight and achieve high performing business result. People are complex, business is complex, and society is complex, what's needed every now and then in any individual, team, organization, society, and on up to the entire planet's population, is a little or a lot of energy to re-focus, kick start or 'game-change.'
Change Insight” Book Ordering Link on Amazon
“Change Insight” Book Ordering Link on B&N
“Change Insight” Book Ordering Link on IBook

“Change Insight” Book Slideshare Presentation
“Change Insight” Book Introduction
“Change Insight” Book Introduction Chapter 1 The Psychology behind Changes


“Change Insight” Book Introduction Chapter 2 The People-Centric Change Management
Change Insight” Book Introduction Chapter 3 Change Leadership
“Change Insight” Book Introduction Chapter 4 Change Principles
“Change Insight” Book Introduction Chapter 5 Change Capability
“Change Insight” Book Introduction Chapter 6 Change Pitfalls
“Change Insight” Book Introduction Chapter 7 Change Assessment and Measurement
“Change Insight” Book Introduction Chapter 8 Building High-Mature Organization with Changeability
“Change Insight” Book Conclusion
“Change Insight” Quote Collection
“Change Insight” Quote Collection II
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From Change Readiness to Change Effectiveness

Change is inevitable, and organizational change becomes a common practice within an organization. However, more than two-thirds of Change Management efforts fail to achieve the expected results. How to capture the signals of change readiness, and how to manage and sustain change effectively, not for its own sake, but to improve organizational agility and maturity?

Change readiness can be determined via a validated instrument, the change profile-scan: Most of the organizations today are the “sum of functions,” not yet being a cohesive whole. Too many organizations are mechanistic, control and command hierarchies. When productivity is low, the further analytics is needed for understanding the cause, whether it is due to the change curve, inefficient practice/ process, or the culture complacency. If your organization fits the description, get out fast or initiate change within. Trace down the poor behaviors or lower-than-expected performance understand the causes behind it. Companies don't think about change. People in companies do, from different positions. Mostly the management wants to see a different (better) result of all combined efforts. So methods or people held responsible for those results 'have to change.' An organization’s “DNA” is visible from the collective mindset, attitudes: The most critical one is how decision-making process at various levels within an organization affects all other factors that form the culture over a period of time. An organization's DNA is visible from the collective attitudes - how employees behave at the workplace with co-workers, interaction with customers, adapt technological changes and accept challenges and show loyalty to the organization etc. All these factors take shape over a period through the decision-making process. Closer to reality is that 'change' is continuously happening in the environment of a company. The desires of stakeholders, clients and employees are evolving naturally. The challenges, competitions, and complexities may be on the increase, but along with it there comes the increase in opportunity and in the form of demand.
Change readiness also reflects whether Change Management is a “snapshot” of one-time initiative or an ongoing business capability and continuum: Lack of change review, reflection, and recognition often makes changes not sustainable. The lack of recognition for change impacts individuals and businesses’ willingness to extend themselves again for the next change. When a change initiative is completed, often the team walks away without checking to see if it adds value or evaluating if additional work is required. Taking the time to communicate the expected outcome with consideration of the "right" way allows the team to have room to make success progressive. The lack of breathing space between change initiatives is an issue as well. Plowing on to the next big thing before completely embedding the change into business as usual or running multiple simultaneous changes can leave a workforce reeling and exhausted.
Digital makes a profound impact from the specific function to the business as a whole, the purpose of building change management capability and accelerate radical digitalization is to make a significant difference in the overall levels of customer delight and achieve high performing business result. People are complex, business is complex, and society is complex, what's needed every now and then in any individual, team, organization, society, and on up to the entire planet's population, is a little or a lot of energy to re-focus, kick start or 'game-change.'


Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

CIOs as Talent Master: Develop the Next Practices to Innovate IT Talent Management

Digital workplaces are diverse and dynamic and digital workforces are multi-generational, multicultural, and multi-devicing than ever today. IT skills gap is not fiction, but a reality. CIOs as “Talent Master,” how to innovate talent management and develop the best and next practices for bridging gaps between strategy management and talent management, integrate talent management and performance management into a holistic people management solution and build a high-performing and high-mature digital organization?
Making the good alignment of strategy management and talent management:  CIOs need to think constructively about IT talent competencies at both the strategic level and operational level. IT leaders play a crucial role in identifying talent gaps and align talent skills and collective human capabilities with strategy execution. There is Out-of-Date traditional talent recruiting and performance management practices and mechanism in many organizations today. There's misunderstanding or miscommunication (lost in translation) in between IT talent request and HR's searching mechanism. Also, there's a disconnect of short-term IT staff needs and long term talent perspectives. Often times people are at the leadership or management position look narrowly at specific problems and projects developed to solve daily business challenges or meet the immediate staff requirement at the operational level, with ignorance of strategic imperatives; partly because that is the way funding is allocated, rather than having a broad view of their enterprise and the longer term strategy for the organization and build the sustainable and collective human capability for the business growth.
Improving employee satisfaction and engagement via communicating the big “WHY”: Organizations need to do a better job of communicating the "why" -mapping the strategic objectives of the business to individual employees’ daily tasks clearly. There are many different views of employee engagement. The very goal is to well align corporate goals with employees’ career goals, encourage talent growth, create synergy by putting the right talent in the right position with the right capability to solve the right problems. Engagement is assured, and excellence in performance is virtually guaranteed when people know their unique gifts are appreciated. Organizations need to make a concentrated effort to connect the dots for everyone and provide clear communication about the goals at each level in an endeavor to improve engagement. How does each employee work, accountabilities, and efforts support and contribute to the overall organization goals and strategy, and explore the best practices and next practices for building an engaged and high performing digital workforces.
Managing both potential and performance accordingly: Performance keeps the business running, and potential can leap your organization up to the next level, both need to be managed effectively. Performance is well done of current assignments and demonstrated the capacity of doing good work with the quantitative result. However, do not assume though that top performer is the top talent for the future. The high performer may be at the top of their game at the moment, but the question is how well will they adapt to changes, be learning agile to enhance their innate capabilities. This is where the potential comes into play. Potential is about future performance, how well does an individual continue to grow, how likely can they take on new challenges at work, rapidly learn and grow into next-level roles, or roles that are expanded and redefined as the business changes. From people management perspective, how to encourage IT professionals stepping out of comfort zone, continue to learn, continue to innovate, and update performance management practices by assessing both quantity and quality result objectively, to well define digital talent management in order to adapt to the fast-paced business new normal. Therefore, unleashing talent potential is a great human capital investment and business investment as well.
Reward innovators and creative problem-solving: Creativity is not a "thing," it´s a process that happens as a proactive mental activity to a problem. Creativity is the #1 most wanted skill in the 21st century. This is particularly true for IT professionals because creativity is the wind under technology’s wing, creative thoughts can bridge the gap between the industrial age and the digital era, and accelerates digital transformation.  Creative IT leaders and professionals can solve the business problems in an intelligent manner, to either bridge the gaps or delight customers.There’re a lot of opportunities to clarify the role of IT in innovation. As IT leaders/managers/professionals, you need to understand what the organization’s expectation from IT through an innovation lenses. In the business world, at least, you can't always wait for the "best" decision to emerge. Creative problem-solving starts with creative communication, sets alternative choices, and then you have to make best decisions you can, based on connecting unusual dots, identify and prioritize alternative solutions, to run IT as the innovation hub of the business. All humans are naturally creative, create and nurture an environment in your organization where humility is appreciated, curiosity is encouraged, and creative thinking is rewarded.
Appreciate talent quality and advocate digital professionalism: High quality IT can only be run by high-quality IT leaders and digital professionals. We are what we think, the quality of a person is often decided by the quality of his/her thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors. High-quality leaders or employees are great in attitude, aptitude, and altitude - a winning mixture composed of character, intelligence and competence, independent judgment, critical thinking,  and the sense of responsibility and balance through which it becomes possible to earn the role of trust and guiding the organization in which they work.The worst mediocrity is not the mediocre result, but a mediocre attitude, which often brings negativity, unprofessionalism, change inertia, silo, or lower team morality. Quality employees are the ones who can work independently, have excellent problem-solving skills, well disciplined, have a "customer focus." Unfortunately, in some organizations, mediocrity get encouraged or even rewarded, and ultimately drag the whole business down to irrelevant.
Talent development is a continuous effort to groom the right digital leaders and workforce for the business’s long-term prosperity. The best performance management system needs to tie everyone in the organization to the company’s long-term prosperity, the best or next digital talent management practices should encourage innovation, inspire learning, take a structural approach to digital transformation.







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The Monthly “Leadership Master” Book Tuning Oct. 2016

Leadership is complex yet simple: Complex in that there are so many traits and characteristics that are considered when evaluating a leader. Simplicity in that the substantial of leadership never changes, it’s all about future and change; direction and dedication; influence and innovation. The purpose of the book: Leadership Master - Five Digital Trends to Leap Leadership Maturity is to convey the vision of digital leadership, share the insight about leadership maturity, and summarize five emergent digital leadership trends Here is the monthly tuning of digital leadership.
The Monthly “Leadership Master” Book Tuning
Three Identities to Harness Leadership Maturity? Innovation is the light every organization is chasing, however, the majority of organizations still use innovation as a buzzword or treat innovation as a serendipity. They might put a lot of effort or make a big investment on it, but statistically, innovation management has very low percentage of success rate. Many organizations even experience innovation blue and suffer from innovation pitfalls. So what are the root causes of innovation fatigue or creativity brain drain, and how to improve innovation management effectiveness?
Three Traits of Transformational Leader  Fundamentally, leadership is more about future but starts at today. Leadership is about creating a powerful future that is compelling in the present, utilizes the best talents, capabilities, and resources of their people and organization to drive changes and produce meaningful and valuable results. Change is a vital element for the contemporary organization to stay competitive, and transformation is a radical change. Transformation is the momentum from quantitative accumulation to the quantum leap. What are the unique traits of transformational leaders though?
Digital Leaders’ three “Unconventional Intelligence”  Leadership is all about future and change; direction and dedication; influence and innovation, to set the direction for both oneself and others to follow. Today’s digital business ecosystem is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous; today’s digital workforce is cross-functional, cross-cultural and cross-generational, thus, the digital leadership bar is indeed raised, in order to lead effectively and effortlessly. Digital leaders today not only need to show solid conventional intelligence such as “IQ” and “EQ,” but also have to present a set of unconventional intelligence for dealing with over-complexity and hyper-competition of the digital new normal, and handling unprecedented uncertainty & ambiguity seamlessly?
Three Differentiators in Digital Leadership: Leadership is about future and change, innovation and influence. The intention of becoming a leader is to inspire and innovate, to improve and advance, to facilitate and encourage, as change is often uncomfortable, yet necessary part of reaching the future and maintaining success. Digital makes everything so transparent, and dynamic, it raises the leadership bar as well. The digital leadership effectiveness is not based on how loud you can speak, or how skillful you can control, but how profound you can influence, and how insightful you can perceive, to touch both hearts and connect minds. Here are three differentiators in digital leadership?
Accelerate Digital Leadership Shift: Leadership is about change, the substance of leadership never changes, it’s all about making positive influences, and providing direction, both for oneself and others. However, the journey of great leadership is never going to be smooth, with numerous obstacles on the way. No friction, no authentic leadership. You have to make continuous influence via envisioning and innovating. It is the time to celebrate the #3200 blog posting of the "Future of CIO" blog, not about writing, but about brainstorming the digital way to lead effortlessly. Imagining the blog is the knowledge power made of 3200+ building blocks, mightier than the magic bullets, to remove the barriers and overcome obstacles not for winning, but for progression, to advocate innovative leadership and accelerate digital leadership shift.
The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.3 million page views with about 3200+ 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.





Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

Mastering the Complexity of the Digital CIO Role

The digital CIO role is like the spinal cord for the organization.
Due to the abundance of information and omnipresence of technologies, IT plays a pivotal role in the business’s digital transformation journey. Therefore, digital CIOs have to wear multiple hats and play different roles in the information-abundant organizations today. Nowadays, the CIO is not just managing IT to keep the lights on, but managing information to ensure the right people getting the right information at the right time to make the right decisions; and take visionary leadership in orchestrating digital transformation journey smoothly. Transformation means to change the “nature” of something, albeit that the increasing pace of technological advances has clearly impacted the nature and scope of opportunities, digital transformation represents a break with the past, with a high level of impact and complexity. So how can IT leaders master the complexity of the digital CIO role in order to lead effortlessly?
The CIO-plus role is like the spinal cord for the organization: Digital IT is stretching up, no longer just dealing with technology challenges, but solving thorny business problems. Though it doesn't mean CIOs will solve every problem on their own; it’s about the ability to manage business solutions via high-performance IT teams in a structural way; the ability to align the business requirement with the IT capacity; the strong business orientation to bring the benefits of IT to solve business issues. It also means that CIOs are able to constantly and dynamically lead an IT structure that well integrate with businesses and well ahead of the business requirement; the ability to interact with businesses in their processes and pain areas; the ability to bring out not technology driven but business-focused solutions, driving adoption for application going with change management, which is the most tough piece of management). The CIO-plus role is like the spinal cord of the organization, integrating various functions, to simplify, unify, and optimize processes across functional boundaries, and often across the entire enterprise. This requires seamless communication and collaboration.
IT needs to go beyond just playing the background music to support the melody; it's the sheet music: Nowadays, IT has permeated into every core process of businesses and is the key component of differentiated business capability. There needs to be some in-depth technical understanding as well as business acumen. The global digital CIO must be attuned to the business’s IT needs and works with all stakeholders to ensure they have the right tools to execute and the business won’t miss opportunities to grow. IT must always be tuned up to enable business strategy and catalyze business information for the long run. The CIO as a conductor has to lead the in-house musicians and take into account the time lag of the orchestras on another continent. They have to keep the in-house order, and must simultaneously coordinate with distant contributors, otherwise, the music with jar the ears.
The complex digital CIO role has to follow the simplicity principle to make effective decisions and  master IT complexity: Complexity is one of the emerging digital characteristics. IT should keep optimizing its ability and deliver value-added business solutions with speed. Every decision is nuanced and informed by all business factors. More often, the simple decisions are not quite so simple anymore, and more frequently, a long-range strategy is more like wishful thinking than a plan likely to reach fruition. Technically, the complexity of aggregate layers of every internal system is a burden that often causes conflict, and the CIO manages that complexity regardless who builds it. Running a simplified IT means that IT should break down silos, keep the information flow, and optimize its ability, to deliver value-added business solutions with speed.
Digital is dynamic and complex. Making IT digital transformation is not an overnight sensation, but taking a systematic approach. Effective IT management means understanding every island of the operation and every workflow process thoroughly. It is based on such a comprehensive understanding that a CIO can master the complexity of the role and lead digital transformation seamlessly.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

The CIO’s Digital Agenda: Digital IT Best/Next Practices

IT is the foundation of data, information, and modern knowledge. The biggest misnomer regarding IT is that it is "just technology." The most powerful and differentiating tool in all of the today's businesses is INFORMATION and that, is provided by IT systems. How to continually fine tune IT and get digital ready?
Digital IT Best/Next PracticesThree Best Practices to Run a Frictionless Digital IT?  Businesses are transforming from an industrial era with knowledge scarcity to the digital era with information abundance. Technology plays a pivotal role in such a paradigm shift, and the information is penetrating into every core process of the organization. Companies that lacked the skills to manage information technology effectively suffered compared with competitors that had mastered those skills. Besides setting digital principles to follow through, which best/next practices should IT leaders develop and practice for running a frictionless digital IT?
Three Practices in Achieving IT Management Excellence? With the fast pace of changes and overwhelming information nowadays, Information & Technology are permeating to every corner of the business, often IT can either make or break a company almost overnight. IT strategy is an integral component of the business strategy, as more often than not, technology is the driving force behind business innovations. The history reveals that IT needs to be understood and harnessed by all stakeholders, to fulfill its potential and strategic importance as a differentiator of companies. A seamless digital journey is made of many solid steps, how to develop a set of next practice for achieving IT management excellence and improving organizational agility?
Three Practices to Overcome Corporate Silo Mentality? We have transitioned from an industrial to knowledge, innovation, and hyperconnectivity economy - with this shift has come to a change in organizational forms away from the traditional rigid hierarchies managed through command and control to more fluid and responsive network forms. Yet many business managers still apply old silo management mindsets to new ways of organizing and this legacy of the old economy limits many 'networked' organizations. Are silos a mere product of organizational design? Or is their nature tied to a deeper level: the humankind's nature?
The Daily Grinding of IT? Today’s IT organization plays a significant role in the journey of digital transformation, IT needs to be strategic, innovative, forward-thinking, agile, flexible, speedy, and customer centric. However, every journey starts with the first step, the long term perspectives come with the daily grinding. Thinking big, and start small. How can IT leaders manage IT with daily best practice, to not just fixing the symptoms, but building its capabilities and make continuous delivery to achieve the strategic goals and fulfilling the business vision?
Three Practices to Scale Up Digital Transformation? Organizations large and small are on the journey of digital transformation. Besides building a set of principles to follow, it’s also important to develop a series of best/next practice to scale up and amplify digital effects The business practice is always a combination of people and how they are used to doing things based on the set of principles and standards to adapting changes in the business or technology shift. Here are three practices to scale up digital transformation efforts.
The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.5 million page views with 3200+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. blog posting. 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 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 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.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

"Leadership Master" Book Tuning: Three Traits of Transformational Leader

Transformational leadership is moving you and others, from mindset to behavior, and evolving to what is needed next for radical changes.
Fundamentally, leadership is more about future but starts at today. Leadership is about creating a powerful future that is compelling in the present, utilizes the best talents, capabilities, and resources of their people and organization to drive changes and produce meaningful and valuable results. Change is a vital element for the contemporary organization to stay competitive, and transformation is a radical change. Transformation is the momentum from quantitative accumulation to the quantum leap. What are the unique traits of transformational leaders though?
Vision: A transformation is on the horizon, seek for change. Vision is a foresight with a proactive understanding of cause and effect, not reactive seeing. Vision differentiates transformational leaders from transactional managers. It is a clear choice among future scenarios that advocates future trends and promotes certain behavior. Leaders need to be constantly VISIBLE sharing VISION and enabling others to share it. The vision for long-term transformation is required for the change to be effective and lasting. Change the game is a mindset, transformational leaders can provide the direction as vision, mission, strategy, as well as leadership skills like decision-making, delegation, and monitoring. This role affects most through congruent behaviors, continuous endorsement of the change and regular communication to keep the momentum. Change leadership concerns the driving forces, visions, and processes that fuel large-scale transformation. The transformation is required to provide the vision and focus on what the organization needs to look like alongside the impetus and sense of urgency.
Creativity: A Transformation has long-range perspective, and focuses on goals of innovation. You can not make the omelet without breaking a few eggs. A transformation often needs to break down the outdated rules, that makes “creativity” a unique trait for transformational leadership. In addition to the set point changing, transformation requires first shifting mindsets, and then, building new nonlinear skills and integral capabilities, and reinforcing and embedding new practices/reflexes. From curious to creative to critical, the emphasis of transformational leadership should be put new ways to improve surrounding and the world. For what can be called "implement-table innovation." The term transformational change, when applied to an organization, carries with it a sense of "evolution" which means, a renewed understanding of the future of business; what’re the disruptive trends; how your organization catalyzes the positive and progressive changes and how much better one can do to leverage creativity and lead a seamless transformation.
Changeability: Leadership is about CHANGE. Change is the “DNA” of modern leadership. It is a basic human ability to inspire self and others to look beyond limitations and make continuous improvement. It is hard to believe the leader will be an effective transformational leader if he or she never made any transformational change in his/her own career or life. Keep in mind good leaders make tough decisions. If the end state is desirable, it is highly probable tough decisions will need to be made. People respond in different ways to different situations, and some people perceive less risk when compared with others. The fear of consequences; the perception / response to consequences vary from person to person, and that's what makes change interesting and challenging. Hence, change leaders/practitioners need to have good critical thinking skills, high level of adaptability, learning agility, communication and engagement skills. Change is a dance between the top management and the affected parts of the organization. Starting with a core belief that people can be trusted, they like to change, but dislike “being changed." We tend to need interpersonal transformation, then intra-personal transformation to achieve the organizational digital transformation.
Fundamentally leadership is about change and influencing people to change. The speed of change is accelerating, Transformational Leadership becomes a more critical capacity to influence others through inspiration, motivated by a passion, birthed by a conviction of a sense of purpose of why you were created. Transformational leadership is moving you and others, from mindset to behavior, and evolving to what is needed next for radical changes and societal advancements.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

Three Traits of Transformational Leader

Transformational leadership is moving you and others, from mindset to behavior, and evolving to what is needed next for radical change.
Fundamentally, leadership is more about future but starts at today. Leadership is about creating a powerful future that is compelling in the present, utilizes the best talents, capabilities, and resources of their people and organization to drive changes and produce meaningful and valuable results. Change is a vital element for the contemporary organization to stay competitive, and transformation is radical change. Transformation is the momentum from quantitative accumulation to quantum leap.What are the unique traits of transformational leaders though?
Vision: Vision is a foresight with a proactive understanding of cause and effect, not reactive seeing. Vision differentiates transformational leaders from transactional managers. It is a clear choice among future scenarios that advocates future trends and promotes certain behavior. A transformation is on the horizon, seek for change. The vision for long-term transformation is required for the change to be effective and lasting. Change the game is a mindset, transformational leaders can provide the direction as vision, mission, strategy, as well as leadership skills like decision-making, delegation, and monitoring.  Leaders need to be constantly VISIBLE sharing VISION and enabling others to share it. This role affects most through congruent behaviors, continuous endorsement of the change and regular communication to keep the momentum. The transformation is required to provide the vision and focus on what the organization needs to look like alongside the impetus and sense of urgency. Change leadership concerns the driving forces, visions, and processes that fuel large-scale transformation.
Creativity: A Transformation has long-range perspective, and  focuses on goals of innovation.A transformation often needs to break down the outdated rules, that makes “creativity” a unique trait for transformational leadership. In addition to the set point changing, transformation requires first shifting mindsets, and then, building new skills and reinforcing and embedding new practices/reflexes. From curious to creative to critical, the emphasis of transformational leadership should be put new ways to improve surrounding and the world. For what can be called "implement-table innovation."  The term transformational change, when applied to an organization, carries with it a sense of "evolution" which means, a renewed understanding of the future of business; what’re the disruptive trends; how your organization catalyzes the positive and progressive changes and how much better one can do to leverage creativity and make a seamless transformation.
Changeability: Leadership is about CHANGE. Change is the “DNA” of modern leadership. It is a basic human ability to inspire self and others to look beyond limitations and make continuous improvement. It is hard to believe the leader will be an effective transformational leader if he or she never make any transformational change in their own career or life. In addition to the set point changing, transformation requires first shifting mindsets, and then building new skills, capabilities, and reinforcing and embedding new practices/reflexes. Keep in mind good leaders make tough decisions. If the end state is desirable, it is highly probable tough decisions will need to be made. People respond in different ways to different situations, and some people perceive less risk when compared with others. The fear of consequences; the perception / response to consequences vary from person to person, and that's what makes change interesting and challenging. Hence, change practitioners need to have good critical thinking skills, high level of adaptability, communication and engagement skills. Change is a dance between the top management and the affected parts of the organization. Starting with a core belief that people can be trusted, they like to change, but dislike “being changed." We tend to need interpersonal transformation, then intra-personal transformation to achieve organizational transformation.
Fundamentally leadership is about change and influencing people to change. The speed of change is accelerating, Transformation Leadership becomes a more critical capacity to influence others through inspiration, motivated by a passion, birthed by a conviction of a sense of purpose of why you were created. Transformational leadership is moving you and others, from mindset to behavior, and evolving to what is needed next for radical change.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

The Noble Purposes of IT Performance Management

IT Metrics has to evolve from being a cost center to becoming a revenue generator. It’s dangerous to impose metrics just because the focus on what’s measurable is manageable. The only way to do this is to show a clear link to top executives between IT efficiency and productivity/ top-line revenues. Continually accelerating changes in IT consumption and production requires faster responses and better performance metrics. Start with the noble purpose of IT performance management and then select the right set of metrics for measuring the right things and measure them right.
Measuring IT performance to enable business growth and development: Contextually, the measurement method is to persuade management the progress of strategy execution.  IT value to the business can be categorized in a number of ways, IT is a key enabler to build almost all differentiated digital business capabilities nowadays. Assuming a healthy pipeline of work, trending to forecast on releasing new capabilities (the business getting what they paid for), KPI setting should focus on achieving the ultimate goals of business as a whole.  It is one thing to have the IT resource aligned with the business strategies/ objectives (IT Effectiveness); it is also something to have the IT resources (people and operational IT processes) refined to the point that they are nimble, can adapt to changing business demands in a timely fashion, can be reapplied to altering business priorities and be effective with little down curve via IT efficiency. There are indeed qualitative objectives where the basis for rating performance is the set of criteria that address the question: “what does it mean to achieve this objective? IT measures should cover all areas that contribute to value creation including service quality, employee engagement, customer satisfaction and financial outcomes.tself.
Measuring IT performance for improving revenue (enable the business to gain market share, enter new markets, etc): IT metrics has to evolve from being a cost center to becoming a revenue generator. The only way to do this is to show a clear link to top executives between IT efficiency and productivity/ top-line revenues. This is an important step to building IT reputation as a strategic business partner. Improving revenue alone without improving net will become meaningless as stakeholders will be more interested to see how much net generated from the business rather than revenue. A CIO can help business to improve net, by reducing cost of doing business by various means such as right sourcing & sizing, keeping IT cost flat while at the same time maximizing its output so when the business revenue increase, IT cost remain the same which will improve net or  hat will improve the top line and at the same time decrease expenses to improve the bottom line.  
Measuring IT performance for improving speed/agility (Speed to Market, ability to change direction with the market, etc): It is one thing to have the IT resource aligned with the business strategies/ objectives (IT effectiveness), it is also something to have the IT resources (people and operational IT processes) refined to the point that they are nimble, can adapt to changing business demands in a timely fashion, can be reapplied to altering business priorities and be effective with little down curve (IT Efficiency). When a CIO is able to position and maintain the IT organization to ensure it addresses both "IT effectiveness" and "IT efficiency," measure them in the right way, and communicate the tangible IT value to business partners, they have earned their stripes.
Measuring IT performance for improving customer satisfaction (internal customers -employee productivity and engagement, end external customers-customer experience): One of the noble purposes for IT and the organization as a whole is to build up a customer-centric organization. On one side of the gap is how well you understand your customers, and on the other side is how well you deliver to your customers. The narrower the gap then the more Customer Centric (CC) you are. Once recognition of the gap exists then the journey starts towards CC starts. Measuring how well you are delivering to your customers is relatively easy but developing a true measure of how well one understands their customers is the hard part. The other key factor on affecting a customer's perception is that of relevance. First of all you would look at how many of your KPI measure the end result from a customer perspective of outcome driven rather than output driven. IT internal users and / or end customers whatever works for your business, consider using the Net Promoter Score (NPS) to measure customer and/or partner advocacy of your IT organization
Measure IT performance for Risk Management (reduces business system downtime, create business continuity, etc): There are two aspects to managing risk, assessing it and then evaluating it against acceptable levels (risk appetite.) In this case, there are multiple players. The CIO will generally drive a periodic risk assessment, usually with the help and input of multiple areas. But it is up to board or other governance body to determine if the risk level identified is acceptable. The CIO does not own the risk, but he/she can and should  certainly be tasked with assessing and monitoring the risk on an ongoing basis.
Measure IT performance for optimizing cost (reduces the cost of current business process, improve margins, freeing up capital for new ventures, etc): Every new technology adopted must facilitate business but also bring down the incremental cost of growth and the time to market. That should be the true metric for the IT leaders: how have they been able to impact the top and bottom-line and facilitate growth and competitiveness. IT value is measured by optimization and consumption of IT assets in support of the business solutions. Some organizations apply the technique, either being called touch point analysis or another term for identifying and tracing through the manner by which an IT initiative impacts an organization’s bottom line.
Running IT as business, IT performance is clearly linked with the business performance. IT projects should be called a business project with a clear objective and full alignment with overall company’s objectives, otherwise, they do not exist. Most commonly, the narratives within strategic business cases reflect multifaceted business value pathways: responding to mandates by external parties; upgrading existing technologies; making business process improvements; responding to a competitive necessity; gain a competitive advantage; and, generating options for provisioning future business capabilities. Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu