Pearl Zhu's Blog, page 1330
June 7, 2016
Innovation Brief: Innovation as Core Business Capability
Innovation takes cycle of observing-questioning-connecting-networking-experimenting. From management perspective, innovation is how to transform novel ideas to achieve its business value, due to the hyper-complexity of modern business, innovation is essentially about reducing the unnecessary business complexity to tackle the complexities of business dynamic. Here is a series of blogs to brainstorm the practices and pitfalls of innovation management.
Innovation as Core Business Capability Innovation as a Strategic Capability Innovation becomes simply "creating value by solving simple or complex problems." Today, innovation can happen anywhere, anytime; it expands both horizontally and vertically. It’s the state of mind to think and do things from a new angle, it’s the business’s unique capabilities to gain a competitive advantage in the face of fierce competition and business dynamic. Generally speaking, innovation is to connect à solution to an unmet need, usually creating a win-win situation for both parties in term of value creation.
Digital Innovation Premium? Many say digital is the age of innovation. With the increasing speed of changes and hyper-fierce competitions, at present days, innovation is the “Must Have” element of the business strategy if the organization want to stay competitive on the market. Digital organizations are complex adaptive living systems, which are comprised, in part, of people who are also complex adaptive living systems, all such systems function, grow and prosper by continually learning, innovating, adapting and evolving. Creativity has just become indispensable, and innovation turns to be a competitive necessity. From a business management perspective, how to build a high competitive organization with digital innovation premium?
Innovation Agility: How to Accelerating Idea Validation: Innovation agility is a critical business capability to manage innovation life cycle with speed, Idea validation is a crucial step in managing innovation with effectiveness and agility. The idea evaluation is a critical part of successful new product/business development. The basic goal of Idea Evaluation should be to quickly and thoughtfully weed out potential projects that are not a good fit for your particular business, so you can focus on the good ideas and commercialize its potential business values. It is also an important aspect of innovation agility.
Running IT as an Innovation Engine in Digital Organizations : Organizations large or small are at the digital journey, and corporate IT is also shifting from a support center to an innovation engine, because more often information is the lifeblood, and technology is the disruptor to push the business world into the digital paradigm. Hence, for any forward-thinking organizations, IT mantra is shifting from “doing more with less,” to “doing more with innovation. But more specifically, how to run IT as an innovation engine to accelerate digital shift?
Can Corporate Do Disruptive Innovation: Fundamentally there are two types of innovations, incremental innovation, and disruptive innovation; on one side, many ambitious organizations have big plans to pursue disruptive innovation in creating exponential value for their businesses; on the other hand, it takes bigger risks to manage disruptive innovation, and therefore, it has very low success rate. Can corporate do disruptive innovation, and how?
The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.3 million page views with about 2800+ 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 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
How do you define “Digital Fit”?
People are always the most invaluable asset 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 define “Digital Fit”?
The term 'fit' can be interpreted with a degree of variability: “Digital fit” should be first defined as “mind fit,” first of all. The right mindset is utmost quality for being a right fit, because the power of mind is the force to change the business or even the world for better, and then following with attitude fit and behavior fit. Where you want to look for 'fit' is in relation to the cognitive intelligence to speed up digital transformation, values you want to build or maintain within your team, and the kinds of behaviors that you would expect to see as a result of, or in alignment with those values. “Fitting” doesn’t take cookie cutting approach, organizational fit means "incluversity." “Fit” doesn't mean that everyone needs to have the same thought process, the same personalities, the same preferences, or the same experiences. On the opposite, the beauty is in the color of characters and many shades of creativity. Fit and diversity are not mutually exclusive. Just because two different people have different backgrounds, different approaches, and different opinions does not mean they can't be a good fit. Organizations need to be thoughtful about whether you are hiring people who are an obvious "fit," and passing on people who are less so (at least on the surface). Thought, skill and experience diversity are what make effective innovation and growth possible, and you are selling short when you hire for homogeneity.
Fit or misfit is contextual: "People engagement" blended with "context-fit" makes the people "fit. The goal of an organization is to find out how you can locate the right candidate for a specific position within an organization.Are you planning to build a homogeneous or heterogeneous team; a complimentary team or a competitive team? Organizational fit from conventional lenses makes relationships easy and perpetuates the status quo, o if companies are satisfied with where they are and going then they should pay attention to the profound understanding about the Digital Fit. If things need to change then they need to quit hiring clones. What is important is that everyone feels committed to the goals of the team, and are comfortable with “who they are” associated with those goals. A "context-fit" culture of the team/job profile matches with the culture of the individual, or a 'misfit' mind helps culture transformation, is highly desired along with attributes. The guiding principles, which is part of the culture set by the leadership of an organization, should be at the forefront of the mind of anyone doing the hiring because finding the right person who fits in the company will only lead to greater success for the individual and the company. Moreover, a passionate and motivated leader makes the hiring right as he/she can engage the team members and can unlock their motivation. It further leads to enhancement of productivity and performance.
Set the principles to innovate talent management and embrace digital fitness: Every single individual is right (talent or genius) in some way. There are some basic fundamental characteristics will separate a digital fit candidate from a wrong candidate. Hiring good people is hard; hiring great people is brutally difficult. Different organizations set different criteria. Fit is not equal to compliance. Generally speaking, a “digital fit” person is self-motivated, self-directed, self-inspired, purposeful or creative., etc. Although there are many attributes that may influence hiring the right people. The culture of the organization begins at the top with the leadership. That culture is communicated through documentation, through informal practices and formal behavior. When it comes to finding the right people, one must first assume the goal is to find the right person who not only fulfills the required needs of the job at the moment, but also has the potential to lead organizations to the next level; the right person who fits into, more precisely, who can bring the wisdom to the culture of the organization, or who can transform the organizational culture to accelerate business execution.
The digital fitness is based on both how you think and what you are doing. The right people are the ones who possess the right mind with knowledge, skills, abilities and behaviours necessary to move your business in the direction it needs to go; to help realize the vision and values of the organization, they are fit for changes, and keep innovating and transforming the business for the long-term prosperity.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
Three Aspects in IT Maturity
Most of IT organizations today still run in a reactive mode as an order taker to keep the bottom line, and struggle with operational efficiency. However, with the rapidly change and overloading information, forward-looking organizations have to empower their IT leaders to lead more proactively, contribute for strategy making, and focus on innovation. Briefly speaking, how to improve IT maturity as a true strategic business partner?
IT maturity is based on overall business maturity: At the industrial silo mode, IT plays as a controller, IT staff often takes heroic measures routinely to keep "their" IT systems working well for the business and their colleagues. Also, due to the limitation of monolithic hardware, at the traditional IT organizations, if you choose "cheap" and also choose "good," then expect "slow." Alternatively, if you choose "fast" to accompany "cheap," then expect poor quality. Cheap, fast and good - it seems you can have only two choices at a time. With emergent lightweight, and more nimble and powerful digital technologies, IT has better chance to achieve them all - better, faster and cost-effective, to achieve overall operational excellence. Also, IT organizations can be either leading or supporting, depending on the maturity of the organization and the vision of top leaders. if the organization does not take advantage of, or expect the IT department to innovate and lead or initiate change, then in the age of the digital era, IT is unlikely to be delivering the best value for its customers and shareholders, and still get stuck in the lower level of maturity.
Agility is one of important digital pillars in IT and business maturity: If foresightful businesses empower IT organization to lead, then IT must be structured to lead. Agiit isn't primarily about engineering. It is about making organizations more waste-repellent, and adapt to changes. The agility can be productivity multipliers by eliminating impediments; understand the fundamentals of core agile principles which are not only in the spirit of Agile, but in a sense serve as a mature cornerstone of its implementations. Hence, it is too narrow-minded if you think "Agile is an engineering solution to an engineering problem, designed for developers, not managers." Organizations should have in-depth understanding about the fundamentals of creation of agile value, constraints, etc. Via agility, IT can run in a more proactive digital mode, rather than in a reactive industrial mode. To improve overall business agility, many companies have incorporated Agile practices into broader based business (non-development) practices, from strategic planning to customer services. The journey of IT and organizational maturity is also the “rocky road from doing Agile to being agile.”
Managing the variety of IT portfolio is also an important step in improving maturity: The variety of IT portfolio is to build a unique and varying set of business capabilities, to enforce agility, harness innovation, and improving IT maturity. Digital IT is dynamic, with a variety of teams to run the variety of IT portfolio. IT has to adapt to changes via managing a healthy portfolio by continuous consolidation, simplification, integration, modernization, cloudification, innovation, and optimization. Unused or under -utilized applications that consume a disproportionate amount of resource when compared to their value, need to be addressed. It takes holistic thinking and planning to treat projects the way and measure success of business projects as a whole, rather than keeping technology projects separate with silo thinking, and ensure that all business units required for the success of the project have requirement clearly defined with engaged stakeholders and senior business leaders.
If IT is leading, then IT must be structured to lead, high mature IT leaders are top business executives who are both strategists and innovators, they can take strategic planning, fine-tune organizational structure and processes, build a set of differentiated capabilities, not only mitigating risks but performing risk intelligence, and transform IT as a business enabler and reach the high level of maturity.
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June 6, 2016
The Spotlight on Digital CIOs June. 2016
Modern CIOs have many personas and face great challenges.
Modern CIOs are transformational leaders who play the significant role in driving changes and business digitalization. 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, differentiated 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 June 2016CIO as Digital Capability Builder: How Coherent are your IT Enabled Digital Capabilities IT plays a pivotal role in leading digital transformation at many forward-thinking organizations today, and IT strategy is an integral component of the corporate level digital strategy. A digital strategy has a purpose of driving customer engagement and experience as a cross-functional responsibility. Thus, the digital strategy needs to look outward with outside-in customer perspective; but the issue is that most IT departments look inward. So how effective does IT enable the business growth, and how coherent are your IT enabled digital capabilities?
CIOs as Digital Influencer: Leveraging IT as a Business Decision Influencer: Fundamentally, the purpose of IT organization is to ensure the right information going to the right people at the right time and location in order to make the right decision. Indeed, IT is a key business decision influencer at information-explosion era, but more specifically, how does IT make an impact on the business decision, and how can IT improve business’s decision-making capabilities and effectiveness?
CIOs as an Information Guru: Back to Basic, IT needs to Focus on Information Management: At today’s digital dynamic, information is abundant and even explosive, businesses have become over-complex also hyper-connected, Back to basic, the focal point of IT needs to focus on Information Management, what’s the correlation between data, information, and decision-making, and how to manage data- information- knowledge- insight life cycle effectively?
CIOs as a Business “Insighteer”: How to Understand the “Three Sides of Coin”:Forward-looking organizations empower their CIOs to lead digital transformation because IT is at a unique position to oversight business process and becomes a critical component in building business capabilities. Most of the senior CIOs understand that the digital transformation of most of the organizations depends, to a large extent, on their capabilities to transform their duty from an inside-out focus into an outside-in focus. They must not just understand both sides: IT and business, but also focus on the third side: How can IT interact with both internal customers and end customers, and how can IT and business integrated into a “whole” to ensure that the holistic business is superior to the sum of pieces?
CIOs as Change Agent How to Run IT as a Changing Organization Digital makes a significant impact on every aspect of the business from people, process to technology and capability. IT plays a pivotal role in digital transformation. Given the power of SMAC technologies and abundance of information to fuel business innovations, how does a CIO make the multitude of digital influence, like a Pro?
The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.3 million page views with about #2800th 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
Modern CIOs are transformational leaders who play the significant role in driving changes and business digitalization. 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, differentiated 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 June 2016CIO as Digital Capability Builder: How Coherent are your IT Enabled Digital Capabilities IT plays a pivotal role in leading digital transformation at many forward-thinking organizations today, and IT strategy is an integral component of the corporate level digital strategy. A digital strategy has a purpose of driving customer engagement and experience as a cross-functional responsibility. Thus, the digital strategy needs to look outward with outside-in customer perspective; but the issue is that most IT departments look inward. So how effective does IT enable the business growth, and how coherent are your IT enabled digital capabilities?
CIOs as Digital Influencer: Leveraging IT as a Business Decision Influencer: Fundamentally, the purpose of IT organization is to ensure the right information going to the right people at the right time and location in order to make the right decision. Indeed, IT is a key business decision influencer at information-explosion era, but more specifically, how does IT make an impact on the business decision, and how can IT improve business’s decision-making capabilities and effectiveness?
CIOs as an Information Guru: Back to Basic, IT needs to Focus on Information Management: At today’s digital dynamic, information is abundant and even explosive, businesses have become over-complex also hyper-connected, Back to basic, the focal point of IT needs to focus on Information Management, what’s the correlation between data, information, and decision-making, and how to manage data- information- knowledge- insight life cycle effectively?
CIOs as a Business “Insighteer”: How to Understand the “Three Sides of Coin”:Forward-looking organizations empower their CIOs to lead digital transformation because IT is at a unique position to oversight business process and becomes a critical component in building business capabilities. Most of the senior CIOs understand that the digital transformation of most of the organizations depends, to a large extent, on their capabilities to transform their duty from an inside-out focus into an outside-in focus. They must not just understand both sides: IT and business, but also focus on the third side: How can IT interact with both internal customers and end customers, and how can IT and business integrated into a “whole” to ensure that the holistic business is superior to the sum of pieces?CIOs as Change Agent How to Run IT as a Changing Organization Digital makes a significant impact on every aspect of the business from people, process to technology and capability. IT plays a pivotal role in digital transformation. Given the power of SMAC technologies and abundance of information to fuel business innovations, how does a CIO make the multitude of digital influence, like a Pro?
The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.3 million page views with about #2800th 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
"CIO Master" Book Tuning XXIII: Running IT as a Business Energizer
Whatever & wherever the business needs are, IT needs to proactively solve the problems with setting priority right, and recharge business via innovation.
The majority of IT organizations today have still been perceived by their business partners as a cost center and support function which drags down the speed of business change, and many IT organizations also suffer from change fatigue due to work overloading and under-staffing. Therefore, forward-looking IT organizations must reinvent their tarnished reputation, and businesses should empower their IT leaders to drive digital transformation more proactively, run IT as a business energizer to catalyze growth and achieve not just IT “changeability,” but overall organizational agility.
Information technology should be seen by any business as a “digital transformer”: Thanks for the latest lightweight digital technologies, IT organization is shifting from a monolithic industrial mode to mosaic digital style. More importantly, IT is switching from inside-out operation-driven to outside-in customer focus. Because, nowadays, IT is a significant part of the business strategy, and not simply as a tool or mechanism to support business goals, but a business enabler and digital engine. Running IT as a business energizer means that IT is no longer live in a silo as a commodity no one care about if the “lights are on.” Rather, there are very few businesses today can state that IT does not play a significant role in the long-term strategic positioning of the company, and all forward-thinking organizations claim they are in information management business. An energized IT delights customers and enables digital flow, also it’s in conjunction with the business as a strategic partner, not be seen as in competition with the business.
Running IT as a business energizer via decomplexitizng business processes and enforcing organizational capabilities: Simplicity is an optimal state of complication. It means IT can add a necessary layer of complexity in order to build differentiated business capabilities. On the other hand, to energize is to de-complexitizing via consolidation, integration, modernization, innovation, optimization. etc. You can not deliver value without "de-complexitizing" and make transparent what is being delivered and how or what is being delivered. The gaps between IT and business are often the causes to unnecessary complication either strategically or technically. Unless there is a collaborative & understanding environment, the perception is that IT is raising roadblocks. As part of and in concert with the top management team, it’s crucial to break down old school silos of thought, IT and business are not separate departments. IT does not run the show and should not hold up the business and business does not own the goals and own the solution to the tough problems. In the company, every “part” of the business needs to work together to be successful, collaboration, transparency, respect and clear leadership are the keys to breaking down the barriers, energize business mood, and unleash the full potential of the business.
Running IT as a business energizer to reach the full speed of the organization: Speed matters for businesses surviving and thriving: speed matters for businesses to adapt to changes; to grasp the opportunities for marketing expansion; speed matters for building the new capabilities gaining competency for the business’s continuous improvement. People and organizations could now learn faster in a time when leading strategists were arguing that the only sustainable advantage was to learn faster than your competition.The emergence of potential opportunities for exploiting digitization is likely to follow a nonlinear pattern, even with an exponential speed, as the pervasiveness of an organization's digitization journey increases. The pervasive digitization means "reduced the time to knowledge." And IT is an enabler to accelerate changes. The common element of a proactive IT is business engagement - whatever & wherever the business needs are, IT needs to proactively solve the problems with setting priority right, and recharge business via innovation.
To energize business, IT has to recharge itself as well, to engage IT employees and digitalize its own processes. A good relationship between Business and IT becomes visible by clearly defining tasks, authorities, and responsibilities. Ensuring a high-performing, high-reliable and high-proactive IT is the key success factor in organizational digital transformation.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
The majority of IT organizations today have still been perceived by their business partners as a cost center and support function which drags down the speed of business change, and many IT organizations also suffer from change fatigue due to work overloading and under-staffing. Therefore, forward-looking IT organizations must reinvent their tarnished reputation, and businesses should empower their IT leaders to drive digital transformation more proactively, run IT as a business energizer to catalyze growth and achieve not just IT “changeability,” but overall organizational agility.
Information technology should be seen by any business as a “digital transformer”: Thanks for the latest lightweight digital technologies, IT organization is shifting from a monolithic industrial mode to mosaic digital style. More importantly, IT is switching from inside-out operation-driven to outside-in customer focus. Because, nowadays, IT is a significant part of the business strategy, and not simply as a tool or mechanism to support business goals, but a business enabler and digital engine. Running IT as a business energizer means that IT is no longer live in a silo as a commodity no one care about if the “lights are on.” Rather, there are very few businesses today can state that IT does not play a significant role in the long-term strategic positioning of the company, and all forward-thinking organizations claim they are in information management business. An energized IT delights customers and enables digital flow, also it’s in conjunction with the business as a strategic partner, not be seen as in competition with the business.
Running IT as a business energizer via decomplexitizng business processes and enforcing organizational capabilities: Simplicity is an optimal state of complication. It means IT can add a necessary layer of complexity in order to build differentiated business capabilities. On the other hand, to energize is to de-complexitizing via consolidation, integration, modernization, innovation, optimization. etc. You can not deliver value without "de-complexitizing" and make transparent what is being delivered and how or what is being delivered. The gaps between IT and business are often the causes to unnecessary complication either strategically or technically. Unless there is a collaborative & understanding environment, the perception is that IT is raising roadblocks. As part of and in concert with the top management team, it’s crucial to break down old school silos of thought, IT and business are not separate departments. IT does not run the show and should not hold up the business and business does not own the goals and own the solution to the tough problems. In the company, every “part” of the business needs to work together to be successful, collaboration, transparency, respect and clear leadership are the keys to breaking down the barriers, energize business mood, and unleash the full potential of the business.
Running IT as a business energizer to reach the full speed of the organization: Speed matters for businesses surviving and thriving: speed matters for businesses to adapt to changes; to grasp the opportunities for marketing expansion; speed matters for building the new capabilities gaining competency for the business’s continuous improvement. People and organizations could now learn faster in a time when leading strategists were arguing that the only sustainable advantage was to learn faster than your competition.The emergence of potential opportunities for exploiting digitization is likely to follow a nonlinear pattern, even with an exponential speed, as the pervasiveness of an organization's digitization journey increases. The pervasive digitization means "reduced the time to knowledge." And IT is an enabler to accelerate changes. The common element of a proactive IT is business engagement - whatever & wherever the business needs are, IT needs to proactively solve the problems with setting priority right, and recharge business via innovation.
To energize business, IT has to recharge itself as well, to engage IT employees and digitalize its own processes. A good relationship between Business and IT becomes visible by clearly defining tasks, authorities, and responsibilities. Ensuring a high-performing, high-reliable and high-proactive IT is the key success factor in organizational digital transformation.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
Running IT as a Business Energizer
The majority of IT organizations today have been perceived by their business partners as a cost center and help desk function which drags down the speed of business change, and many IT organizations also suffer from change fatigue due to work overloading and under-staff. Therefore, forward-looking IT organizations should empower their IT leaders to drive digital transformation more proactively, and run IT as a business energizer to catalyze growth and achieve not just IT “changeability,”, but overall organizational agility.
Information technology should be seen by any business as a “digital transformer”: Thanks for the latest lightweight digital technologies, IT organization is shifting from a monolithic industrial mode to mosaic digital style. More importantly, IT is switching from inside-out operation-driven to outside-in customer focus. Because, nowadays, IT is a significant part of the business strategy, and not simply as a tool or mechanism to support business goals. Running IT as a business energizer means that IT is no longer live in a silo as a commodity no one care about if the “lights are on.” Rather, there are very few businesses today can state that IT does not play a significant role in the day to day operations or even long-term strategic positioning, an energized IT delights customers and enables digital flow, also it’s in conjunction with the business as a strategic partner, not be seen as in competition with the business.
Running IT as a business energizer via decomplexitizng business processes and enforcing organizational capabilities: Simplicity is an optimal state of complication. It means IT can add a necessary layer of complexity in order to build differentiated business capabilities. On the other hand, to energize is to de-complexitizing via consolidation, integration, modernization, innovation, optimization. etc. You can not deliver value without "de-complexitizing" and make transparent what is being delivered and how or what is being delivered. The gaps between IT and business are often the causes to unnecessary complication either strategically or technically. Unless there is a collaborative and understanding environments, the perception is that IT is raising roadblocks. As part of and in concert with the top management team. It’s crucial to break down old school silos of thought, IT and business are not separate departments. IT does not run the show and should not hold up the business and business does not own the goals and own the solution. In the company, every “part” of the business needs to work together to be successful, collaboration, transparency, respect and clear leadership are the keys to breaking down the barriers, energize business mood, and unleash the full potential of the business.
Running IT as a business energizer to reach the full speed of the organization: Speed matters for businesses adapting to changes; speed matters for businesses to grasp the opportunities for marketing expansion; speed matters for building the new capabilities gaining competency for the business’s continuous improvement. People and organizations could now learn faster in a time when leading strategists were arguing that the only sustainable advantage was to learn faster than your competition.The emergence of potential opportunities for exploiting digitization is likely to follow a nonlinear pattern, even with an exponential speed, as the pervasiveness of an organization's digitization journey increases. The pervasive digitization means "reduced the time to knowledge." And IT is an enabler to accelerate changes. The common element of a proactive IT is business engagement - whatever & wherever the business needs are, IT needs to proactively solve the problems with setting priority right, and recharge business via innovation.
To energize business, IT has to recharge itself as well, a good relationship between Business and IT becomes visible by clearly defining tasks, authorities, and responsibilities. Ensuring a high-performing, high-reliable and high-proactive IT is the key success factor in organizational digital transformation.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
June 5, 2016
Talent Management Monthly Brief: See Through Talent from Different Angles XII June 2016
Digital contemporary professionals are perceived as modern, open-minded, informative, creative, and changeable to adapt to the digital new normal.
People are always the most invaluable asset in businesses. “Hiring the right person to 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? Traditional Performance Management focusing on measuring what an employee does (mainly being told to do) in quantitative way is not sufficient to identify high performance or high potential, should we see through talent from different angles?
See Through Talent from Different Angles XIIThree Questions to Assess a Person’s Contemporary Digital Fit? Contemporary means “living or occurring at the same time” in the dictionary. To add the digital theme of the word, digital contemporary goes beyond describing the art or artist, digital contemporary professionals are perceived as modern, open-minded, informative, creative, and changeable to adapt to the digital new normal. They “think digitally,” contrary to analog thinking; they live digitally, not just because they use the latest fancy gadgets or wear the fashionable dresses, more because they are equipped with digital mindset, have the ability to adapt to changes or weather changes, and they have unique and impressive digital footprint to build their contemporary digital persona and capability portfolio cohesively and continually. Therefore, digital contemporary is less on style, more based on strength. You have to dig beyond the surface. Which questions should you ask to assess a person’s contemporary digital fit?
Three Questions to Assess a Person’s Experience Regardless whatever we are today, our knowledge and capabilities are on account of our cumulative experience to become part of “who we are.” These experience got created consciously and subconsciously, some are positive, and some are negative; some are direct, some are indirect, some help us grow, and some are undesirable; some are building blocks and some are roadblocks. Which questions should you ask to assess a person's experience?Three Questions to Assess a Person’s Passion People are passionate about different things. We are all different. Where is your passion flowing toward perhaps makes the best clue for discovering "who you are." Are you passionate to be a leader in a certain domain? Are you passionate about learning the new knowledge and skills? It takes passion to fuel energy and overcome obstacles in reaching new height; it takes passion to learn, grow, fail forward or start over. Does passion come from the heart of mind, how to assess a person’s passion, though?
Three Questions to Assess a Person’s EGO: Ego is an interesting world with both positive and negative meanings. Different dictionaries give synonyms such as “self-esteem,” “'self-importance,” “self-worth.” “self-respect,” “self-conceit,” “self-image,” “self-confidence.” It is often defined as the 'conscious mind' or 'self,’ especially as distinct from the world and other selves.' Ego can be both healthy or toxic, which questions should you ask to assess a person's "EGO"?
Three Questions to Assess a Person’s Culture Wisdom: The definition of culture is “the mindsets, attitudes, feelings, values and behaviors that characterize and inform a group and its member.” There are organizational culture, community culture, societal culture, etc. From a business perspective, culture is the way how we think and do things around here. Culture wisdom is the type of intelligence for tolerance of ambiguity, and a set of capabilities such as learning agility, cultural flexibility, empathetic communication, complexity handling. Etc. Which questions should you ask to assess a person’s culture wisdom?
The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.3+million page views with about #2800+ 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, to inspire critical thinking and spur healthy debates. 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
People are always the most invaluable asset in businesses. “Hiring the right person to 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? Traditional Performance Management focusing on measuring what an employee does (mainly being told to do) in quantitative way is not sufficient to identify high performance or high potential, should we see through talent from different angles?
See Through Talent from Different Angles XIIThree Questions to Assess a Person’s Contemporary Digital Fit? Contemporary means “living or occurring at the same time” in the dictionary. To add the digital theme of the word, digital contemporary goes beyond describing the art or artist, digital contemporary professionals are perceived as modern, open-minded, informative, creative, and changeable to adapt to the digital new normal. They “think digitally,” contrary to analog thinking; they live digitally, not just because they use the latest fancy gadgets or wear the fashionable dresses, more because they are equipped with digital mindset, have the ability to adapt to changes or weather changes, and they have unique and impressive digital footprint to build their contemporary digital persona and capability portfolio cohesively and continually. Therefore, digital contemporary is less on style, more based on strength. You have to dig beyond the surface. Which questions should you ask to assess a person’s contemporary digital fit?
Three Questions to Assess a Person’s Experience Regardless whatever we are today, our knowledge and capabilities are on account of our cumulative experience to become part of “who we are.” These experience got created consciously and subconsciously, some are positive, and some are negative; some are direct, some are indirect, some help us grow, and some are undesirable; some are building blocks and some are roadblocks. Which questions should you ask to assess a person's experience?Three Questions to Assess a Person’s Passion People are passionate about different things. We are all different. Where is your passion flowing toward perhaps makes the best clue for discovering "who you are." Are you passionate to be a leader in a certain domain? Are you passionate about learning the new knowledge and skills? It takes passion to fuel energy and overcome obstacles in reaching new height; it takes passion to learn, grow, fail forward or start over. Does passion come from the heart of mind, how to assess a person’s passion, though?
Three Questions to Assess a Person’s EGO: Ego is an interesting world with both positive and negative meanings. Different dictionaries give synonyms such as “self-esteem,” “'self-importance,” “self-worth.” “self-respect,” “self-conceit,” “self-image,” “self-confidence.” It is often defined as the 'conscious mind' or 'self,’ especially as distinct from the world and other selves.' Ego can be both healthy or toxic, which questions should you ask to assess a person's "EGO"?
Three Questions to Assess a Person’s Culture Wisdom: The definition of culture is “the mindsets, attitudes, feelings, values and behaviors that characterize and inform a group and its member.” There are organizational culture, community culture, societal culture, etc. From a business perspective, culture is the way how we think and do things around here. Culture wisdom is the type of intelligence for tolerance of ambiguity, and a set of capabilities such as learning agility, cultural flexibility, empathetic communication, complexity handling. Etc. Which questions should you ask to assess a person’s culture wisdom?The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.3+million page views with about #2800+ 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, to inspire critical thinking and spur healthy debates. 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
Digitize Boardroom: A Professional Board
"Thinking professionally" is the first step in building a high-performance digital board.
The corporate board plays an important role in strategy advising, governance oversight, leadership exemplifying, culture tune setting, talent management influencing. The contemporary board also moves from the industrial mode to digital mode: from emotional to effective, from monitoring to participating; from controlling to information savvy. More specifically, how to run a professional board?
Professional Thinking: Corporate board spends significant time in making strategic decisions and crafting policies. Therefore, the board professionalism is fundamentally based on how BoDs think before how they act. Do they have decision-making wisdom based on synthesizing thought processes to make sound judgments? Are they critical enough to diagnose the problems, and find strategy defects or potential business risks? Are they creative enough to bring the alternative solutions to the table? Can they avoid “Group Thinking” syndrome? Group thinking is often caused by the homogeneous team setting: From the industry study, group polarization means that a group of people can make a more extreme decision than an individual. There is good and bad judgment. Every board decision is particular to the objectives, circumstances and - as seems in this case - board dynamics. Applying deep insight and rubber stamping are such counter-propositions. A professional board should embrace cognitive differences and complementary capability & expertise, not just see diversity through the lens of conventional wisdom, in order to set good policies and make effective decisions. All of these require thinking, requiring asking questions - the most powerful tool of a Director is the capacity to frame and ask good questions. The BoD’s mindfulness is based on vision, insight, and multidimensional intelligence.
Professional knowledge: With the abundance of information and shortened knowledge cycle, having subject-matter experts with updated knowledge in each domain dramatically increases the board’s effectiveness, learning agility and high professionalism. A professional board as a top leadership team can set a clear digital tone by providing in-depth knowledge, diversity of thought regarding culture, economics, geopolitics, competition, technology, demographics, innovation, and environment perspectives. Digital BoDs must become information-savvy, they must have a clear vision of what they need to know, how the information provided pertains to the strategic plan, and what they are going to do with that information. The digital Board is responsible for ensuring an appropriate mix of skills, knowledge and experience are present or available for it to fulfill its functions, and Boards should proactively look for people who have cognitive difference or unique strength as part of the mix of Board skills, for business growth and embrace business trends such as digitalization and globalization.
Professional processes and methodologies to practice board duties: The main point of the digitizing boardroom is all about innovating the digital culture, leveraging the latest technology and tools, fine tuning the optimized processes to build a high-performance digital board. If a Board is to fulfill its fiduciary responsibilities to its stakeholders, it needs to take a professional and systematic approach for assessing strategy, prioritizing agendas, advising strategy, overseeing risks and keeping track of business performance via efficient technological tools. BoDs might not always participate in developing business strategy, but the Board needs to determine suitability, adequacy, viability, sustainability of the organization etc in advance.
A professional board is not only about filling with cool-headed, high-professional and high-intelligent BoDs, but also about tuning the structured and intelligent processes to digitize boardroom in a radical way via optimizing its decision-making capacity, inspiring a culture of innovation, and improving its overall effectiveness, agility, and maturity.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
The corporate board plays an important role in strategy advising, governance oversight, leadership exemplifying, culture tune setting, talent management influencing. The contemporary board also moves from the industrial mode to digital mode: from emotional to effective, from monitoring to participating; from controlling to information savvy. More specifically, how to run a professional board?
Professional Thinking: Corporate board spends significant time in making strategic decisions and crafting policies. Therefore, the board professionalism is fundamentally based on how BoDs think before how they act. Do they have decision-making wisdom based on synthesizing thought processes to make sound judgments? Are they critical enough to diagnose the problems, and find strategy defects or potential business risks? Are they creative enough to bring the alternative solutions to the table? Can they avoid “Group Thinking” syndrome? Group thinking is often caused by the homogeneous team setting: From the industry study, group polarization means that a group of people can make a more extreme decision than an individual. There is good and bad judgment. Every board decision is particular to the objectives, circumstances and - as seems in this case - board dynamics. Applying deep insight and rubber stamping are such counter-propositions. A professional board should embrace cognitive differences and complementary capability & expertise, not just see diversity through the lens of conventional wisdom, in order to set good policies and make effective decisions. All of these require thinking, requiring asking questions - the most powerful tool of a Director is the capacity to frame and ask good questions. The BoD’s mindfulness is based on vision, insight, and multidimensional intelligence.
Professional knowledge: With the abundance of information and shortened knowledge cycle, having subject-matter experts with updated knowledge in each domain dramatically increases the board’s effectiveness, learning agility and high professionalism. A professional board as a top leadership team can set a clear digital tone by providing in-depth knowledge, diversity of thought regarding culture, economics, geopolitics, competition, technology, demographics, innovation, and environment perspectives. Digital BoDs must become information-savvy, they must have a clear vision of what they need to know, how the information provided pertains to the strategic plan, and what they are going to do with that information. The digital Board is responsible for ensuring an appropriate mix of skills, knowledge and experience are present or available for it to fulfill its functions, and Boards should proactively look for people who have cognitive difference or unique strength as part of the mix of Board skills, for business growth and embrace business trends such as digitalization and globalization.
Professional processes and methodologies to practice board duties: The main point of the digitizing boardroom is all about innovating the digital culture, leveraging the latest technology and tools, fine tuning the optimized processes to build a high-performance digital board. If a Board is to fulfill its fiduciary responsibilities to its stakeholders, it needs to take a professional and systematic approach for assessing strategy, prioritizing agendas, advising strategy, overseeing risks and keeping track of business performance via efficient technological tools. BoDs might not always participate in developing business strategy, but the Board needs to determine suitability, adequacy, viability, sustainability of the organization etc in advance.
A professional board is not only about filling with cool-headed, high-professional and high-intelligent BoDs, but also about tuning the structured and intelligent processes to digitize boardroom in a radical way via optimizing its decision-making capacity, inspiring a culture of innovation, and improving its overall effectiveness, agility, and maturity.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
Digital Agility: How to Take a Disciplined Approach
Organizations large or small are on the journey for digital transformation. Business agility is an important capability for them to creative certain changes, also adapt to change seamlessly. Does being agile take more discipline or less? What are important driver to agility? And which characteristics determine whether organizations are truly agile or just calling themselves agile
Agile is about self discipline. Disciple means embracing certain values and principles. Based on these values and principles develop some guidelines and policies and then take a disciplined approach for managing business. Although, discipline doesn’t mean overly prescriptive. Following "people over process" Agile principle. In most cases, the lower-agile organizations are not in a good position to leap directly to a mature agile team structure and supporting policies and culture. Most people misinterpret the agile values as "no documentation" "no process and tools" etc. This kind of misunderstanding gives room for the confusions, Many waterfall organizations have no discipline at all. They collect requirements and then filed them in a cabinet and never looked at them again. Once things started going "wrong" (such as a new requirement emerged), there is no clear plan to get things back on track. And to deliver effectively, it’s important in using a lightweight method depends on "people over process" to enforce self discipline and assure high-quality results.
Being agile is about building a culture of continuous improvement: Agile is about doing, we learn by doing, we change as the output of that doing. Either for individuals, teams, departments, and enterprises, always have the plan to be getting better: If you don't know more and have the capability to execute better than you did six months ago, there is a good chance one or more of your competitors can. Since people are at the heart of agile,, Agile can fail and particularly because - and most often specifically because it is erroneously planted, cultivated and modeled as just that, undisciplined and ad-hoc. Therefore, a cohesive set of insight and thinking is important to build a collective mindset and embed agility to the business culture for making continuous improvement.
The beauty is that “Being Agile” promotes great flexibility and opportunity to change. The power is in the "change management" which is controlled and disciplined. Organizations with that do to Agile well is the most disciplined way that you will ever deliver the right products with customer centricity. And the discipline is most needed at the leadership level where they often don't have really effective planning processes nor ways to identify their products and the value streams that they work in. Being Agile definitely isn't easy or ad-hoc. It requires focus, patience and commitment across the organization. The necessary trainings are also important from “doing agile,” to “being agile.”- Training to act in accordance with rules-Plan activity, exercise, or a regimen that develops or improves a skill -Punishment inflicted by way of correction and training. -The rigor or training effect of experience, adversity, -Encourage behavior in accord with rules of conduct; behavior and order maintained by training and control -Set system of rules and regulations.
Without discipline, Agile will turn to be ad hoc, but with overly rigid rules, rigid processes, or practicing over-prescriptive agile, it will stifle innovation. The overall goal of adopting a more "Agile" approach is "resilience," in essence. It’s about advocating transparency and autonomy. A disciplined agile is the right path to scale up and run a true digital organization to achieve high effectiveness, high innovation, and high maturity.
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June 4, 2016
The Monthly Innovation Brief: The Best/Next Practices in Innovation Management June. 2016
Innovation takes cycle of observing-questioning-connecting-networking-experimenting. From management perspective, innovation is how to transform novel ideas to achieve its business value, due to the hyper-complexity of modern business, innovation is essentially about reducing the unnecessary business complexity to tackle the complexities of business dynamic. Here is a series of blogs to brainstorm the practices of innovation management.
The Best/Next Practices in Innovation ManagementHow to Innovate Talent Management? With the increasing speed of changes and advanced digital technologies, organizations large or small is also facing the challenges to innovate talent management and take care of their most important assets - people more effectively. It starts with mind shift - from treating people as cost and resource to plug in, to thinking them as human capital to invest in. Researches show that the foundation of business success is innovation. Creativity is #1 skill needed in the digital Era, how can organizations build a creative working environment and unleash their talent potential as well as the full business potential?
Three Aspects of Practicing Intrapreneurship in the Enterprise If entrepreneurship is to look for changes, deploy it as an opportunity, then, intrapreneurship is about creating new venture from within an established organizations to leverage the startup culture for catalyzing changes and improving IT agility. But more specifically, how to practice intrapreneurship to innovate business and accelerate digital transformation?
Three Practices of Digital Innovation Generally speaking, innovation is to transform novel ideas to achieve their business values. It is not a serendipity, but a discipline and a set of practices to achieve business goals. Innovation helps to tackle the complexities of business dynamic in the digital ecosystem, but often within itself, it needs to change and improve as well. Therefore, digital paradigm shift also includes the perspective of building a scalable innovation environment or innovation ecosystem. It is crucial to fine tune innovation processes, capabilities, and develop a set of practices to manage innovation portfolio more effectively.
How to Build Innovation Strength in your Organization? Digital innovation has a broader spectrum with hybrid nature, it is the incremental improvement- radical innovation continuum. It has broader scope beyond just a new product or service, radical innovation brings something that was not existing before. Incremental Innovation is more about taking something someone created and adding to it, changing it, adapting it; or to leverage the latest technology for business improvement. A fine tuned innovation is not a serendipity, how to build innovation strength in your organization?
Running IT as an Innovation Engine in Digital Organizations? Organizations large or small are at the digital journey, and corporate IT is also shifting from a support center to an innovation engine, because more often information is the lifeblood, and technology is the disruptor to push the business world into the digital paradigm. Hence, for any forward-thinking organizations, IT mantra is shifting from “doing more with less,” to “doing more with innovation. But more specifically, how to run IT as an innovation engine to accelerate digital shift?The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.3 million page views with about 2800+ 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 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
