Pearl Zhu's Blog, page 1309

Running Digital IT as DECISIONEERING & SOLUTIONEERING & ENGINEERING

Forward-thinking IT organizations continue to reinvent themselves to improve efficiency, effectiveness, and agility. Ambitious companies also understand how crucial IT is to drive businesses growth and optimize business capabilities. Digital transformation is on the way. IT Transformation seeks to change. The word "transformation" in itself means change and change for the better - new ways and methods of doing things, new structures, new relationships etc. The contemporary CIOs are visioneers - who can run a digital IT as decisioneering, solutioneering and engineering changing organization.
Running digital IT as decisioneering: IT as the steward of business information takes important responsibilities to ensure the right people getting the right information to make right decisions. IT must embrace a responsibility to engineer best practice decision paths, “decisioneering" if you will. This demands a disciplined, process-based approach not only to data and information but also a deep understanding of the decisions that need to be made and their impact. IT must design information strategies around decisions. IT needs to be seamlessly embedded into the business decision processes, also plays a crucial role in building an information -based decision-making culture. At traditional companies, both strategic decisions and operations decisions are often based on static or often outdated information available and the “gut feeling” of decision makers. Now the abundance of information flow and the more advanced technologies make it possible to gain real-time insight and business foresight if organizations are truly being digitized underneath, at the process level. What should be focused on is the integration of IT into the business decisions and processes to be highly responsive. Hence, running IT as decisioneering will help to build a high-intelligent and high-agile organization.
IT has to get more involved in the business as Solutioneering: Traditional IT is run as an inside-out operational driven service provider and measured via internal IT lenses. IT managers who become territorial over the department only compound the problem. It is not sufficient enough to reinvent IT as an outside-in customer-centered business partner for problem solving. IT as a ‘Solutionary’ to understand how the organization works and then give solutions that will increase the functionality to lower cost and, if applicable, increase output. That means a higher profit. Besides improving efficiency, IT should do more profitable things for the organization. The focus of IT needs to engage with the business units to find out how the department is perceived, what the pain points are and to identify opportunities for developing new services or improving/optimizing current ones. A CIO can't just sit back and apply yesterday’s techniques to today's problems, the key is engagement with the business. The CIO has a role in selling the merits of IT to the business and quantifying projects in terms of ROI.
IT is an engineering discipline, as always, but adding more enriched digital context: Digital CIOs are intrapreneur to run IT as a software startup. They apply scientific logic with the structural approach and engineering discipline to break big business problems down into deliverable chunks to deliver value to the business at regular intervals. From software management perspective, it is the stepwise scenario to identify mindsets, technical and nontechnical strategies, and tactics needed to realize the new software engineering approach. This would include strategic and tactical planning, Systems Engineering, concurrent engineering, project design, quality engineering, optimization, systems ecology, etc. Digital organizations become more dynamic and responsive, open systems concepts will focus on meeting the needs of the environment, socialization will improve the collaboration, communication, cooperation, and coordination and software economics will increase customer value. Digital engineering approach is combined with the simplification of programming tools and proliferation of “DIY” - doing it yourself interfaces. An effective CIO’s job is to improve operations to reduce the burden on the company while trying to stay current with ever-changing technologies. That includes reducing costs, improving systems, streamlining processes and providing continually expanding business solutions.
The purpose of IT is to move the business forward with the speed. Technology and its associated methodologies and practices are parts of that leverage mechanism. IT role is critical to operational business success, but it is ever more important for business strategy and digital transformation via practicing decisioneering, solutioneering, and engineering.  Still, IT is the means to the end, not the end.
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The Monthly Insight: Five Big “WHAT”s in Change Management Aug. 2016

Change is inevitable, organizational change has become a common practice within an organization, but too often changes are made as a reaction to outer impulses, crisis, and demands. This is the bureaucracy’s way of meeting the challenges. People, process, technology, WHAT are important factors in Change Management, and pitfalls to avoid, in order to improve the success rate of change initiatives?     Five Big “WHAT”s in Change Management Three Big “WHAT”s in Change Management: Everything changes continuously and the rate of change is accelerated. Change is no longer just a one-time initiative, but an ongoing capability. Change capability is one of the strategic capabilities which underpin successful execution and move the organization from efficiency, effectiveness to agility and maturity. Besides the "Big WHYs" about the change we discussed earlier, here are three big WHAT about Change Management.?
What’s your Organization’s "DNA" and Personality : Organizational culture is the collective mindset, attitudes, and the set of behaviors, expectations, and assumptions that people have about "how things are around here." Further, it is like an iceberg where the visible elements, such as behaviors, make much sense with recognizing and understanding the underlying mindsets, expectations, and assumptions. Many also think culture is an organization’s DNA or personality. So what's your organization's personality? And can it be changed??
What Factors keep Business from Championing transformational change? Organizations large or small are faced with more radical digital or management transformation now, however, change management (the overarching term includes both transformation and change) has very high failure rate overall, what factors keep business from championing transformational changes, or what are key success factors in driving transformation?
What are the Truly Competitive Advantages of Inclusiveness: Contemporary organizations are diversified with multigenerational, multicultural workforce using multidevicing to do multitasking. Competitive advantage can be created by bringing together diverse groups of people whose mindsets, experiences, preferences, skills and capabilities are additive to one another. We are stronger through diversity, it allows us to explore options that one individual or a homogeneous group might not have uncovered; we are idea-rich and vision clear through inclusiveness. Diversity is the engine for creativity and a facilitator for merging building blocks of new ideas, fresh insights, and ultimate wisdom. But how to embrace the diversity of thoughts and achieve such competitive advantages of inclusiveness?
 What Drives you to be a Change Leader or an Agent? Change - big or small is inevitable. You can’t step into the same river twice, meaning that everything is always in a state of flow. However, as human beings, we mostly want familiarity and stability. As a Change Manager or Change Agent: What’s your inspiration and motivation to lead changes? And how to manage it more effectively?
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

"CIO Master" Book Tuning: Are Visionary CIOs Often Outliers?

Modern CIOs have multiple personas, they have to wear different hats to fit the roles in order to lead effectively. Technology is complex, business is complex, and people are complex. Due to increasing changes in the digital dynamic environment, The CIO needs to be a dynamic person with vision, open, growth and complexity mindset- with high ability to handle personal attributes, manage impressions, communicating to suite situations so as to make things happen. So are visionary CIOs often outliers?
Visionary CIOs are often outliers: CIOs are expected to constantly propose new ideas and challenging the status quo. Sometimes organizations go stale and need the so-called "shot in the arm" of someone who thinks different – take customer’s view or connect dots of innovation. while an “outliner,” "fresh blood" scenario where a CIO is brought in from outside the vertical industry to reinvigorate an IT organization. In either case, the CIO has to be flexible, adaptable, learning agile and able to adjust the lingo to suit the audience. Visionary CIOs are often outliers because they can connect the nonlinear dots interdisciplinarily. As IT leader, CIOs need to have the technological vision and awareness; as more often than not, technology becomes the game changer and innovation driver for businesses. Vision should have a direction which sets in clarity. Setting a vision that isn't high enough doesn't challenge the organization to excel. But establishing a vision that is based on unrealistic expectations will either discount the value of even creating the vision or disenfranchise stakeholders. A CIO’s technological vision should be attainable subject to current times and its ability to adapt to changing times and help the business gain the competitive advantage for the long term.
“Outlier” CIOs have better ability to connect innovation dots: Innovation is another dimension to the mix: An opportunity for the CIO to add a lot of value in the C-Suite is helping C-Level leaders understand the possibilities of how new technologies can enhance the creation or improvement of products and services while balancing the technical and business risks, the investment needed, timing, etc. Outlier CIOs are the one who can step out of a conventional thinking box, or linear patterns. Therefore, they could see things further or deeper. An outlier leader is creatively disruptive, who dare to ask a deep “WHY” - to diagnose the root cause of problems but also ask the optimistic “Why NOT?" -The refusal to be bound by constraints and limitations and a pursuit of possibilities rather than impossibilities seems to be a hallmark of great leadership achievements.A confident outlier CIO needs to keep asking, "why? why? why?", to manage incremental innovation in optimizing business processes, also, hunt for disruptive innovation with structure in renovating business model and upcoming business expansion. CIOs who are only putting stress on "have the knowledge" not on "build the knowledge" might be in danger just to preserve the organization and thus create huge constraints for the possible innovation.  
An outlier CIO needs to know how to play a bridge between what businesses understands and what technology understands. He/she would then make sure the two worlds meet to ensure an optimal performing business. An outlier CIO needs also to be a structural thinker because the  CIO’s structured thinking processes are the things they bring to table for solving business problems. Engineering practices require systematic thinking and analytic capability. Thus, CIOs need to develop, demonstrate and increase their decision-making and problem-solving skills, thinking and problem-solving skills are always and continued needs for CIOs to master complexity. In addition, CIOs need to become far, far more business focused and business literate. As the CIO needs to provide this "innovation execution" service to your fellow business peers. The concentration should be on what these technologies can do for the businesses, not on the technology itself.  
CIOs as “Chief Innovation Officers,” are one of the most pertinent titles to fit the digital leadership role. Companies are recognizing that IT is roughly coupled to the business strategy as an innovation engine, and it is a very good sign about how the companies will deliver value. An outlier CIOs have the interdisciplinary knowledge, and their imagination are not constrained by the knowledge, they have growth mind, creativity, and technological vision, and  thus, they can lead change confidently and effortlessly.


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The CIO’s Digital Agenda: Driving Digital Transformation via the View of the Whole Chessboard Aug. 2016

The effects of an increasingly digitalized world are now reaching into every corner of businesses and every aspect of organizations. Business digital transformation is not just about the latest technological gadgets, it’s a holistic management discipline to implement a well-crafted digital strategy. And IT plays a critical role in catalyzing changes. However, many IT organizations today still get stuck in the lower level of maturity, they are perceived as a silo function and the weakest link by their business partners due to the slow pace for changes, reactive mode to fix the things, and lack of innovative initiatives to make a difference. In practice, how to run IT as a digital transformer via the view of the whole chessboard and ensure a seamless digital transformation?
Driving Digital Transformation via the View of the Whole Chessboard How to Take a Structural Approach to Handle Unstructured Digital Disruptions: Digital disruption is frequent and unstructured, businesses just have to get used to the new normal and learn how to deal with them proactively. Obviously, there is no one size fits all solution, and "boil the ocean" approaches seldom deliver expected results. So how to take a structural approach in dealing with digital disruptions, and what’s the logical scenario to manage digital transformation seamlessly?How to Build an IT Roadmap for Digital Transformation? Forward-looking IT organizations are on the journey to digital transformation. And strategic IT leaders also build a solid roadmap to show the time sequence of a strategy. A "roadmap" is simply a plan for moving or transitioning, from one state to another. More specifically, how can CIOs build a digital-ready IT roadmap?.
Three Hybrid Elements in Running a Digital IT and Organization  With emergent digital technologies, organizations large or small reinvent themselves to become more agile, flexible and innovative. Digital doesn’t mean just tear down all the old things in the previous era, in reality, digital means to strike the right balance between the new way and the “old way,” the physical building and the virtual platform, the face-to-face communication and the always-on online presence. Here are three HYBRID elements in running a digital IT and organization?Running Digital IT from “Outside-In”  Traditional IT organizations are inside-out operation-driven, and the company relies on an IT system via standardized usage of technologies, but often treated as the commodity. Nowadays, at the dawn of the Digital Era, information is one of the most invaluable business assets and technologies are disruptive forces behind the digital transformation. How to run a digital IT from “Outside-In,” as a customer advocate and a business differentiator?? IT’s Digital Portfolio : IT plays a significant role in the business’s digital transformation journey. To reimagine IT potential, reinvent IT management and maximize IT value, it is important to build a balanced IT digital portfolio with a set of differentiated capabilities to enable business growth and improve IT and overall organizational operational excellence. Generally speaking, a capability is an ability that an organization, person, or system possesses. Capabilities are typically expressed in general and high-level terms and typically require a combination of people, processes, and technology to achieve. Digital Capability Portfolio management is essential to successful strategy management. So What’s in an IT digital portfolio?
The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.5 million page views with about #3000th 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.
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Running a Steadfast Digital IT

Enterprise IT is reinventing its reputation for a reactive support center to a proactive strategy partner, from an overloading help desk to an adaptive changing organization. “Steadfast,” is perhaps a pertinent adjective to articulate the bi-model of the IT organization today: Keep steady for sustaining the business's bottom line, but also run fast with the accelerating speed to drive the organization’s digital transformation.
“Keep the light on,” is always fundamental for running IT smoothly: With increasing speed of changes, keep steady doesn't mean be static or slow to change. IT needs to do a better job of quantifying the value of the services they provide, measurements go beyond KPIs that focus on the warranty of the services. IT owns delivery of one of any organization's key assets - its information. Information is like the perished food, you have to process and deliver it timely, to ensure the right people getting the right information in making timely and effective decision. There is an “innate risks” in Information Management, keeping IT steady also means to have abilities for managing risks with the balancing act along a continuum of risks and rewards. So IT can reach the up level of operational efficiency and business effectiveness.
A steadfast IT would also puts its emphasis on speed, agility, beyond stability: The type of speed issues in the traditional IT organization (such as IT slow to change) comes from gaps created between IT and the rest of the company. When there is no willingness to serve users and on the other way round, no appetite from users to involve IT. The goals to accelerate IT is to achieve strategic responsiveness and organizational flexibility of the business. Enterprise leaders are increasingly looking to the IT function to introduce beneficial change into their business models to improve strategic performance, enforce customer intelligence and to position the enterprise for future industry leadership, etc. IT should be more integration focused rather than re-inventing the wheel with most custom development that takes place. With emerging digital technology trends such as SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud), many IT organizations now explore the consumer based model -running faster, nimble and resilient IT with digital speed, to focus on IT agility -the IT capability and capacity to adapt to the changes. Because IT can no longer feel like it has a monopoly on delivering solutions to the business. At the higher level of maturity, IT needs to run as a business' innovation engine. Innovation management is about transforming new ideas to achieve its business value. You need to make sure, that your company has a steady flow of fresh ideas floating in your innovation pipeline, and, therefore, you need a methodological platform that allows you to do that.
Running steadfast digital IT means that IT has to not only improve its own speed, but also overall organizational agility. It intends to manage two coherent IT delivery modes: One focused on stability to “keep the lights on,” the fundamental IT responsibility to support business and serve internal customers, the other is even more aggressive to explore the new possibilities, and grasp opportunities for improving the top-line business growth and digitize the the touch point of the end customer experience. Hence, IT can unleash its digital potential and improve the overall business agility and maturity.

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"CIO Master" Book Tuning XXXXXXX: Running IT with both High Digital “IQ” and “EQ”

IT with both high "digital IQ and EQ" can proactively build all different management capabilities and play a different role to the situation at hand.

At individual level, we know that leadership effectiveness is based on the good combination of “IQ +EQ” (and beyond at today’s digital new normal with “VUCA”characteristics); at the business level, how agile and mature the organization is also based on how “intellectual” it can make effective decisions, detect the growth opportunities and manage risks, as well as how excellent it can adapt to changes via the collective mindsets and attitudes (Culture). From IT management perspective, how to run digital IT as a “digital brain” of the business with both high “IQ” and “EQ” traits?

Running an “I” - Information driven IT to improve the overall business’s “digital IQ”: IT is the information steward of the business. Information is the foundation of creating business insight, insights perceive the new business opportunities and risks. However, the organizational data environment is often fraught with inconsistency, if IT does it well, it will achieve high business value. Information Management means that the business has the information, that the information has the right quality, that the information is used properly, but also that managing information (the information provisioning) is a strategic imperative, to ensure the right people getting the right information to make right decisions at the right time. IT stands out as a value-added function by managing information effectively and efficiently. It can abstract business and customer insight from explosive information, and bring to the table tailored solutions that meet customers’ needs, while reducing the cost to market, without sacrifice of strategic goals and strategies invoked on it by its business partners. However, in many companies, the person assuming the position of the CIO was rarely seen as the chief 'Information' Officer, but the “Boss of all things Bits and Bytes.” IT gets stuck at the lower level of maturity. Thus, the digital IQ of IT organization depends on the IT leader's "digital IQ." Fundamentally, it boils down to whether the CIO perceive himself/herself as a business leader or leader of the IT function within the organization. The contemporary CIOs with high digital IQ should focus on the INFORMATION aspect of the role in the context of the business, modern IT needs more integrated data lifecycle management solutions to conquer information management challenges, and provide information accessibility and availability, ensure transparency and visibility, enable trust and reliability, with the goals of running a highly intelligent and highly effective digital business.
Running IT as a “strategic business partner,” with high “digital EQ” (Operational Excellence and business maturity): At the individual level, EQ is one of the significant indicators to assess a person’s professional maturity and leadership potential; at business level, “Digital EQ” is to assess the overall operational excellence and business maturity, with a culture of change. The EQ of IT can be read via how business partners perceive IT organization. IT needs to engage with the business units to find out how the department is perceived, what the pain points are and to identify opportunities for developing new services or improving/ optimizing current ones. In the end, the low maturity of IT stems from the prevalent cultural norm that accepts IT as a tactical function, but not as a strategic partner. Until this changes, IT will be stuck in the struggle between "big bang" initiatives that take multiple years, huge budgets and rarely deliver as promised and "no bang" tasks that are mundane, misunderstood and underappreciated (if appreciated at all) by most organizations. The organization’s digital EQ can also be read via the business’s culture expression. Is it the culture that can fulfill the business vision and accelerate strategy execution today? Is it still helping the company grow and transform? When the company grows, the corporate culture tends to stay the same over time -the culture inertia. it turns to be the very barrier to stop businesses from gaining agility and maturity. However, in order to move up to the next level of organizational maturity, the culture needs to be changed as well to adapt to emerging digital trends and pulling strategy execution towards the right decision. IT can play a crucial role in shaping a culture of change via making the good alignment of people, process, and technology and integrating into tailored business solutions.

IT with both high "digital IQ and EQ" can proactively build all different management capabilities and play a different role to the situation at hand. IT involves co-creating business strategy. What should be focused on is the integration of IT into the business decision processes to improve digital IQ of the business, and leverage IT to build a culture of change and innovation, for improving the digital EQ of the business. This will allow IT to shine in both roles –as business enabler and digital transformation driver.
CIO Master Order Link on Amazon CIO Master Ordre Link on Barner & Noble CIO Master Order Link On IBooks “CIO Master” Book Preview Quote Collection III “CIO Master” Book Preview Quote Collection II “CIO Master” Book Preview Quote Collection I, Slideshare Presentation “CIO Master” Book Preview Conclusion Running IT as Digital Transformer “CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 9 IT Agility “CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 8 Three "P"s in Running Digital IT “CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 7 IT Innovation Management “CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 6 Digital Strategy-Execution Continuum "CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 5 Thirteen Digital Flavored IT “CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 4 CIO as Talent Master Introduction “CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 3 “CIOs as Change Agent” Introduction “CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 2 “CIOs as Digital Visionary” Introduction “CIO Master” Book Preview: Chapter 1 “Twelve Digital CIO Personas” Introduction "CIO Master - Unleash the Digital Potential of IT" Introduction "CIO Master - Unleash the Digital Potential of IT" Book Preview
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Running IT with both High Digital “IQ” and “EQ”

At individual level, we know that the leadership effectiveness is based on the good combination of “IQ +EQ” (and beyond at today’s digital new normal with “VUCA”characteristics); at the organizational level, how agile and mature the organization is also based on how “intellectual” it can make effective decisions, detect the growth opportunities and manage risks, as well as how excellent it can adapt to changes via the collective mindsets and attitudes (Culture). From IT management perspective, how to run digital IT as a “digital brain” of the business with both high  “IQ” and “EQ”?
Running an “I” - Information driven IT to improve the overall business’s “digital IQ”: Information is the foundation of creating business insight, insights perceive the new business opportunities and risks. However, the organizational modern data environment is fraught with inconsistency, if IT does it well, it will achieve high business value. Information Management means that the business has the information, that the information has the right quality, that the information is used properly, but also that managing information (the information provisioning) is a strategic imperative, to ensure the right people getting the right information to make right decisions at the right time. IT stands out as a value-added function by managing information effectively and efficiently. It can abstract business and customer insight from explosive information, and bring to the table tailored solutions that meet customers’ needs, while reducing the cost to market, without sacrifice of strategic goals and strategies invoked on it by its business partners. However, in many companies, the person assuming the position of the CIO was rarely seen as the chief 'Information' Officer, but the “Boss of all things Bits and Bytes.” Thus, fundamentally, it boils down to whether the CIO perceive himself/herself as a business leader or leader of the IT function within the organization. The contemporary CIOs with digital IQ should focus on the INFORMATION aspect of the role in the context of the business, modern IT needs more integrated data lifecycle management solutions to conquer information management challenges, and provide information accessibility and availability, ensure transparency and visibility, enable trust and reliability, with the goals of running a highly intelligent and highly effective business.
Running IT as a “strategic business partner,” with high “digital EQ” (Operational Excellence and business maturity): At the individual level, EQ is one of the significant indicators to assess a person’s professional maturity, at business level, “Digital EQ” is to assess the overall operational excellence and business maturity, with a “changeable” culture. IT needs to engage with the business units to find out how the department is perceived, what the pain points are and to identify opportunities for developing new services or improving/optimizing current ones. In the end, the IT low maturity stems from the prevalent cultural norm that accepts IT as a tactical function, but not as a strategic partner. Until this changes, IT will be stuck in the struggle between "big bang" initiatives that take multiple years, huge budgets and rarely deliver as promised and "no bang" tasks that are mundane, misunderstood and underappreciated (if appreciated at all) by most organizations. The organization’s digital EQ can be read via the business’s culture expression. Is it the culture that can fulfill the business vision and accelerate strategy execution today? Is it still helping the company grow and transform? When the company grows, the corporate culture tends to stay the same over time -the culture inertia. it turns to be the very barrier to stop businesses from gaining agility and maturity. However, in order to move up to the next level of organizational maturity, the culture needs to be changed as well to adapt to the emerging digital trend and pulling strategy execution towards the right decision. IT can play a crucial role in shaping a culture of change via making the good alignment of people, process, and technology.
IT with both high digital IQ and EQ can proactively build all different management capabilities and play a different role to the situation at hand.  IT involves co-creating business strategy. What should be focused on is the integration of IT into the business decision processes to improve digital IQ of the business, and leverage IT to build a culture of change and innovation, for improving digital EQ of the business. This will allow IT to shine in both roles –as enabler and driver.
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"Leadership Master" Book Tuning VIII: Three Leadership Understanding beyond Status Quo

Confusing of leadership substance with style is one of the root causes of turning leadership as a Status Quo.

People perceive leadership differently, also try to classify leadership or lead in a different way. However, due to the limitation of the human wisdom and silo thinking, no one can understand the depth and breadth of leadership completely. Often, people get confused about leadership substance with style, try to be the build blocks of one type of good leadership, but turn to be the roadblock when scaling up leadership influence, or making leadership from good to great. Leadership is about future and changes, how to lead profoundly beyond status quo?

Leadership is not about who is ahead, but who has the vision to see further with clarity: Leadership is situational, there is the time you need to lead ahead, there’s the time you might need to lead from behind. But regardless of your position, vision is one of the most important leadership traits. You need to see further than others with clarity in order to navigate the uncharted water, and steer toward the right direction. Visionary leaders see possibilities before others, but they also need to tackle great challenges with grand consequences over long time spans; they convey a vision based on principles that make an advanced movement. They have the capability to look ahead and imagine what is possible for their organizations as part of the whole, and then execute the right options as part of the overall vision for the firm/company via logic steps. They intuitively draw on the timeless wisdom and cognizance and present it in a new synthesis and frame the fresh picture to meet the particular need of the times.

Leadership is not about who is above, but who has a real understanding with insight to see underneath the surface: Effective leadership must come from in-depth understanding first, before communicating. To put briefly, understanding and insight are leadership substance, and communication is the leadership style. It must go beyond “who’s above who” sort of status quo. The insight of situation requires in-depth understanding. If you analyze the word “understanding,” you will find that it exists of two seemly opposite words: "Under and Stand," well articulate the multifaceted meaning and paradoxical wisdom of understanding.  Too often people may take the easy path, think and work at a superficial level rather than spend the time to understand what is going on underneath. Insight is an understanding of cause and effect based on the identification of relationships and behaviors within a model, context, or scenario. The insight based on fully understanding which takes both creativity and reasoning, intuition and logic, the power of acute observation and deduction, questioning, connection, penetration, discernment, and perception.  

Leadership is not just about providing answers for controlling, but on how to frame the good questions for brainstorming and make sound judgments & effective decisions: In the static industrial age, leaders perhaps think they should have all the answers to controlling the situation. And nowadays, businesses become over-complex and extremely uncertain, more often, framing the right questions to ask or defining the real problems to solve is more challenging than finding the answers or discovering the solutions. Leadership is an ability to be able to not only ask the right questions but understand the context. Leadership must go beyond the status quo, to value collective wisdom, because it helps you actually UNDERSTAND the problem, and understanding a problem is the most critical step in solving it. Leadership competency is based on the soundness of judgment and decision effectiveness for solving problems directly or indirectly.

There is no magic formula of great leadership, with the digital paradigm shift, today’s multi-generational, multicultural and multi-devicing leaders must break down the silo thinking and gain in-depth understanding, envision the better way to lead, capture the insight, grasp the substance, be creative, in order to lead effortlessly.
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Three Leadership Understanding beyond Status Quo

People perceive leadership differently, also try to classify leadership or lead in a different way. However, due to the limitation of the human wisdom and silo thinking, no one can understand the depth and breadth of leadership completely. Often, people get confused about leadership substance with style, try to be the roadblock of good leadership, but turn to be the roadblock when scaling up leadership influence, or making leadership from good to great. Leadership is about future and changes, how to lead profoundly beyond status quo?
Leadership is not about who is ahead, but who has the vision to see further with clarity: Leadership is situational, there is the time you need to lead ahead, there’s the time you might need to lead from behind. But regardless of your position, vision is one of the most important leadership quality. You need to see further than others with clarity in order to navigate the uncharted water, and steer toward the right direction. Visionary leaders see possibilities before others, but they also need to tackle great challenges with grand consequences over long time spans; they convey a vision based on principles that make an advanced movement. They have the capability to look ahead and imagine what is possible for their organizations as part of the whole, then execute the right options as part of the overall vision for the firm/company via logic steps. They intuitively draw on the timeless wisdom and cognizance and present it in a new synthesis and frame the fresh picture to meet the particular need of the times.
Leadership is not about who is above, but who has a real understanding with insight to see underneath the surface: Effective leadership must come from in-depth understanding first, before communicating.  It must go beyond “who’s above who” sort of status quo. The insight of situation requires in-depth understanding. If you analyze the word “understanding,” you will find that it exists of two seemly opposite words: Under and Stand, but well articulate the multifaceted meaning and paradoxical wisdom of understanding.   Too often people may take the easy path, think and work at a superficial level rather than spend the time to understand what is going on underneath. Insight is an understanding of cause and effect based on the identification of relationships and behaviors within a model, context, or scenario. The insight based on fully understanding which takes both creativity and reasoning, intuition and logic, the power of acute observation and deduction, questioning, connection, penetration, discernment, and perception.  To put briefly, understanding and insight are leadership substance, and communication is the leadership style.
Leadership is not just about providing answers for controlling, but on how to frame the good questions for brainstorming and make sound judgments & effective decisions: In the static industrial age, leaders perhaps think they should have all the answers to controlling the situation. And nowadays, businesses become over-complex and extremely uncertain, more often, framing the right questions to ask or defining the real problems to solve is more challenging than finding the answers or discovering the solutions. an ability to be able to not only ask the right questions but understand the context. Leadership must go beyond the status quo, to value collective wisdom, because it helps you actually UNDERSTAND the problem, and understanding a problem is the most critical step in solving it. Leadership competency  is based on the soundness of judgment and decision effectiveness.
There is no magic formula of great leadership, with the digital paradigm shift, today’s multi-generational, multicultural and multi-devicing leaders must break down the silo thinking and gain in-depth understanding, envision the better way to lead, capture the insight, grasp the substance, be creative, in order to lead effortlessly.

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Running a Digital Ready Talent Management (III) Aug. 2016

People are always the most invaluable asset, but often the weakest link in businesses. “Hiring the right person for the right position at the right time,” is the mantra of many forward-thinking organizations. The question is how would you define the right people? How do you define wrong, average, mediocre, good, great or extraordinary person? Or put simply, for what should they be right? How do you run a digital ready talent management?
  Running a Digital Ready Talent Management (III)How to Empower Change Agents? Change is at the heart of the modern organization and in the mind of forward-thinking business leaders, however, more than two-thirds of change initiatives fail to achieve the expected result. Besides applying the latest technology tools and optimizing business processes, first things first, how to recognize your change agents and how to empower them to make "impossible possible"?
How to Build a Creative Workplace In recent years, creativity has become a very highly valued skill. Creative people combine existing possibilities to reach more often unexpected solutions. Creativity is an essential building block for innovation in business. Everyone possesses a certain level of creativity; some just have more than others. How does creativity manifest itself in the workplace? What's the best work environment for creativity? What products (tangible or otherwise) are creative? Where that creativity arises from. And what acts, behaviors etc. may be examples of the organizational creative process? What risks are associated with creativity not being manifested in the workplace? How might you see a creativity employee?
Three PoVs of Talent Competency  The word competencies, and thus true meaning of its use, comes from competent which means being capable of doing something. The knowledge life cycle is significantly shortened due to the increasing speed of changes, and a huge skill gap in the workforce needs to be filled due to the continuously updated technology and regulation, digitalization and globalization, etc. The forward-looking organizations are now looking for people that have the right minds, characters, attitudes, traits, or can demonstrate the ability to do the work more innovatively, not just based on the previous experience, but through recombinant capability and integral talent competency.?
How to Innovate Talent Management Digital is the age of people. Hence, HR has to transform from an administrative supporting function to a strategic business partner. More and more very large organizations are moving “business” people into senior HR roles, particularly within talent management. Looked at positively, this reflects the increasing strategic importance of talent management and how some HR processes are being transformed into digitized business processes which underpin innovation capability of the organization?
How to Get Performance Management "Unstuck"? In the hugely inter-connected and volatile digital world today, Performance Management is a complex management discipline out there with so many variables that determine performance - including inter-dependencies within teams or organizations, quantity vs. quality; performance vs. potential, etc. Performance is also very much visible in spaces that are outside the corporate world because digital footprint becomes part of “WHO WE ARE!” All of them have one common thread - a group dialoguing and performing together where each individual contributes and counts. So is traditional Performance Management out-of-date, and how to get Performance Management unstuck??
The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.5 million page views with about #3000th 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 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