Pearl Zhu's Blog, page 1355

Three Aspects to Improve Agility

The term ‘Agile’ is derived from ‘The Manifesto for Agile Software Development’ which describes a collaborative way of working based on a set of twelve principles that has come to mean early delivery of business value. The problem is people do not really understand what agile is. Most of the times they use the word "agile" when in fact they are talking about agile software development. So how to achieve agility from doing Agile?


"Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist," despite not being known for his martial arts”  -Pablo Picasso. The processes and frameworks (Scrum, SAFe, XP to an extent) are the means to the end, not the end themselves. Often, most of these processes and tools are treated as rigid sets of rules that must be followed to the latter. ay too much focus on methodology and frameworks as a silver bullet, under emphasis they radical organization needs to occur in many situations, loss of focus on "agility" and that there are real big barriers to knock down if any organization that is not agile wants to be agile. Mix and match the tools as you need. Pay attention to the constraints of each tool. What most organizations lack is the ability to step back, inspect and ask questions to what is going on. They blindly make a plan and land up in a rut where nothing changes, even when everyone is talking at the water fountain complaining how bad it is. In order to improve agility, in the experimentation of mixing and matching tools to uncovering better ways to define a culture and a mindset so that:-aligns with the manifesto and 12 principles for developing solutions by doing it and helping others do it-allows the customer discover what they need, how to build it, and to be adaptive (move quickly and easily to think and understand) as things change along the way.
There are two related drivers to real agility: autonomy and trust. If a team is not truly autonomous---and that includes making up its own processes to suit its members, members self-selecting the team, etc., it can't move fast enough to have real agility. Teams can't be truly autonomous unless the organization trusts them to do the work. Everything else follows. Whether you can change an existing organization to support true autonomy is another issue. Usually not. It's far more than getting the basics started (collaboration, collocation, better skills, etc.). It really comes down to getting really good technical people in a trust and autonomous relationship with the corporate strategy. Organizing the company around hiring really good people and then trusting and enabling them to do their jobs. The very jobs they were hired to do! To allow them to weed out the wasted associated with the production of value. The shift from always asking permission to getting stuff done. The encouragement of inspection/transparency/adaptation is the heart of empirical process control and agility. It promotes face-to-face conversations.
Being agile is about continuous improvement: Agile is about doing, we learn by doing, we change as the output of that doing. A cohesive set of insights and thinking is often given a name. In this case "agile" is the name. Sure, if that name is redefined, the movement associated with that name is effectively redefined too.  Always have the plan to be getting better. Enterprises, departments, teams, individuals. If you don't know more and have the capability to execute better than you did 6 months ago there is a good chance one or more of your competitors can. A combination of really good leadership and the fact that, once they get past the chaotic start-up phase, they immediately go in a truly agile direction in an organic way, without going through a command/control phase. 1) Knowledge and understanding of what is appropriate to the context.2) Desire to do what is appropriate in the context3) The ability to remove impediments to doing what is appropriate in the context4) Genuine teamwork
Agile is the mind shift. Agile leverages the wisdom of the masses to scale up and drive success. One main factor, though, as in any development project, Agile or no Agile, you need good decision makers, who can bear the risk, and drive everyone towards the common goals. Every situation is different and you have to fit the solution to the problem. From doing agile to being agile, it is the transformation from methodology adoption to mind shift, from process toning to culture refining; from an industrial business model jumping into digital enterprise dynamic.
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Three Questions to Assess a Person’s Ingenuity

Generally speaking, creativity is an innate process to create novel ideas,  ingenuity is the ability to solve difficult problems, often in original and creative way. It is the qualification to be creative, insightful and inventive. Some say, ingenuity is the distant cousin of creativity, ingenuity often needs creativity as a mixed ingredient for puzzle-solving or invention. Ingenuity is increasingly important because the business world becomes overly complex and hyper-connected, so which questions to ask for assessing a person’s ingenuity?
Are you an original thinker?  Originality is valuable as Authenticity. It is not easy to recognize "original thinker," and it becomes more difficult as most of the modern people are too busy to even think and observe. Original thinking is a tough job and recognizes original thinking is equally tough if not less. The points like character, motivation, personality, and confidence can be the indicator of original thinking. It can be done if someone remains conscious, alert and has the inclination to search excellence.Those come up with conclusions and solutions for problems with their own unique brain processes. Nearly all thoughts, come from some sort of internal or external stimulus, thus, the seeds of original thinking may come from the unoriginal input, but it’s such dot-connecting capability to synthesize the unoriginal input into unique output, which makes one an original thinker. To be original, you need to be true  to one's own personality, spirit, or character. Consider authenticity to be a positive outcome of enlightened and informed motivation rather than a negative outcome of the rejection of the expectations of others.  
Are you an insightful observer?  Insight is the vision through ‘mind's eyes,’ the act or result of understanding the inner nature of things or of seeing intuitively in Greek called noesis. When you learn to create inner space of clarity, calmness in the storming mind of thoughts emotions, sensations, dreams and imagination, insights can be perceived. insight takes both creativity and reasoning, intuition and logic, the power of acute observation and deduction, questioning, connection, penetration, discernment, perception called intellection or noesis. The insight of situation requires in-depth understanding. It’s about the understanding of possibilities, adversaries, environments effects. The more complex the situation is, the more different approaches and role gaming is needed to reach for understanding.
How creative are you? Creativity is one of the most important ingredient in ingenuity. True creativity has an inner origin. It keeps surfacing from within and keeps expressing. It means that creativity needs a problem to solve, and a creative mind needs a purpose. And creativity is part of ingenuity. Creativity is infused with an inner cohesion and comes from a vision of uniqueness. Creativity has many dimensions, with multi-faceted truth and myth, and manifold knowledge. The point is not to be unduly constrained in your thinking, but at the same time not to lose sight of the objective of thinking.  Start with "what if . . ., " and see where it takes you. Only then do you have enough to start weeding out the bizarre and tweaking sound ideas into reality, either for invention or problem-solving.


If creativity is more artistic and aesthetic, it is a result of living in your intuitive space. It is an action or a reaction to the world, from that place, it has no fear or traditions. And then ingenuity is more purposeful and functional, it’s not for its own sake, but a combining thought process and ability to achieve certain values either for benefiting the businesses or our society.


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Setting IT Priorities via Three Lenses of IT Value Index

IT is at the crossroad to either transform from a cost center to value center, or become irrelevant in the digital age. Most IT organizations are also overloading and under delivered, there is triangulate value from different value lens in building a more comprehensive IT value index has three lenses: Strategic imperative, operational excellence, and business agility. There are also tangible (cost savings efficiency, etc.) and intangible (brand equity, business growth enablement, etc.) components of value. So how to set IT priority right to enhance its value proposition and maximize its value delivery?
Focus on the most critical projects with strategic imperative: At many organizations today, IT spends most of their resources and budget on operational projects which do not provide differentiate business capabilities to compete for the future. Therefore, to avoid such pitfalls, IT strategy needs to become significant component of the business strategy, co-developing strategy from both business and technology will make all projects essentially business investment, to focus on business growth or cost optimization, the study also found that in general, IT investments were more effective in improving profitability by increasing revenue than by decreasing operating expenses. In fact, IT investments had a marked positive effect on revenue growth. It’s important to have a long-term roadmap that shows where you want to be and why is needed. You need to ensure you’re investing in the right projects. This focus will free up money in every facet of IT and create headroom for IT innovation and business growth. Work to simplify your existing technical debt using the capability model and roadmap as a guide.
Prioritize IT to delight customers via operational excellence: At the age of people-including both customers and employees, IT needs to set priority to digitalize every touch point of customer experience. IT has two sets of customers as well, the internal users who count on IT to equip them with the effective technology tools to improve productivity and work satisfaction; and the end customers who shop the business’s products or service and continue to compare their customer experience with competitors', the user would need a delightful experience because if the user is bored or confused with the applications, the revenue or productivity will decrease, it will directly impact the business’s top line growth or bottom line efficiency. Hence, in order to delight customers, the forward-thinking and fast-growing businesses set top priority to build new capabilities in which IT is a key enabler. They will challenge the cost control efforts, with the drive to bring new capabilities to the business at a fast pace, this, in turn, can force some cost control measures to lower on the priority list.
Prioritize IT to improve business agility: Agility is a common business term that is used frequently these days to measure how fast business will respond to opportunities or threats, and enterprises are even having key agility indicators. IT Agility is about how IT will enable business agility, how fast IT will deliver the required effectively and efficiency. The more alignment between business and IT the more level of agility for both will be achieved. Every CIO may ask self: Is IT responsive and proactive enough to find answers and solutions in case of emerging chances? Does IT have a platform which is scalable, secure, resilient and well interconnected. For achieving agility, there should be a rolling plan in addition to the mid term or long term strategic planning document. Need for agility arises due to changes in underlying assumptions. If these changes are captured in the rolling plan, flexibility can be achieved.  The business aspiration to agility can often be leveraged to help align business and technology stakeholders around the case for application modernization and rationalization. Many businesses aspire to agility when they are burdened by brittle, tightly coupled systems constrained by rigid roadmaps and deployment schedules due to the underlying technique redundancy,  integration dependencies, and testing complexity.Agility requires a set of complementary & strategic IT competencies: It includes but not limited to portfolio management, project management, change management, enterprise architecture, rapid adoption and deployment of new platforms, etc. Using agile IT methods and DevOps will help control runaway projects and keep those costs lower while bringing quick incremental value to the business through your business innovation efforts. In the meantime, the well-run IT organizations can demonstrate agility by being responsive to tactical business opportunities to the degree possible while remaining focused on developing, communicating, and executing a longer-term strategy to enable and maintain true enterprise agility.
A value driven IT needs to understand stakeholders’ expectations and propose a service/solution portfolio that corresponds to both demand and cost drivers with a focus on business priority, IT develops the professional competencies needed for successful business solution delivery. IT planning has to be steady and adaptive while coordinating different and sometimes competing for resources. In the context of business technology, these resources are demands, capabilities, applications, technologies, risks, projects, and costs, and they are organized in portfolios. Still, many organizations keep these portfolios in silos. But they need to be managed as a cohesive one that is constantly linked to the business vision and adaptable milestones. This relies on having an optimized prioritization/planning process and ongoing IT efforts to continuously improve IT value proposition and maturity.
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The Weekly Insight of the “Future of CIO” 3/18/2016

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.3 million page views with 2600+ 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. Here is the weekly insight about digital leadership, IT Management and Talent Management.
The Weekly Insight of the “Future of CIO”  3/18/2016Five Traits of Innovators: Creativity is #1 wanted quality for digital leaders and professionals nowadays, but where can you discover innovators? Do innovators belong to rare breed or they are among us and within us? Why can innovators find more view spots than others? Why can innovators think differently via connecting unusual dots? What are important traits of innovators?
Three IT Movements to Improve Organizational Maturity: Due to the “VUCA” characteristics of digitalization, organizations today need to build a unique set of business capabilities and enforce organizational democracy to adapt to changes, accelerate business growth, catalyze innovation and achieve operational excellence. Information and Technology play a pivotal role in such a transformation, here are three digital IT movement to harness business competency and improve organizational maturity.
Three Questions to Assess a Person’s Empathy: Many say digital is the age of empathy, to simply put, empathy is the ability to understand others from their perspectives. Humans aren't as good as we should be in our capacity to empathize with feelings and thoughts of others. Now the physical barriers such as oceans or mountains can not stop people from communicating with each other, there are still walls built in people’s minds and there are knots tiered in their hearts. Empathy is an important leadership trait and a crucial quality for today’s multigenerational and multicultural digital professionals as well. So which questions shall you ask to assess a person’s empathy?
Running IT as a Business Multiplier: Many IT organizations are on the journey to transform from a cost center to a value creator, from a commodity service provider to an innovation engine. The word "transformation" in itself often means radical change and change for the better - new ways and methods of doing things, new structures, new relationships etc. There are changes in two shapes from IT management perspective: One is internal where IT transforms, and the second where IT helps to transform or change the business in line with new strategic imperatives. Change is not for its own sake, but to maximize IT value and ideally, running IT as a business multiplier.
 The Two Important Components of People Management : People are always the most invaluable asset in businesses. People Management is both science and art; hard and soft. Talent Management and Performance Management are two important components in it: Talent Management (TM) focuses more on the people element of the organization; where Performance Management (PM) is more about the overall alignment of various organizational functions towards shared vision, mission, and objectives. Both PM and TM are important in any organization if functions and objects are aligned properly. PM is about building sustainability into the organization; and TM is about building talent competency of the business -finding, renewing and protecting the right of talent. Unless the right talent is there, Performance Management cannot salvage sustainability. What are the emergent trends in TM/ PM to manage today’s digital workforce more effectively?
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.
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Three Questions to assess a Person’s “EQ”

Emotional Intelligence is the ability to identify and manage your own emotions and the emotions of others.A mature reaction to a given situation will determine your level of emotional intelligence. Higher EQ helps you have an open mind, minimize biases, be cautiously optimistic, be an effective listener and be more creative. More specifically, how to assess a person’s “EQ” level?
Can you manage emotion with a balanced mindset? EQ is generally said to include three skills: (1) Emotional awareness, including the ability to identify your own emotions and those of others; (2) The ability to harness emotions and apply them to tasks like thinking and problems solving; (3) The ability to manage emotions, including the ability to regulate your own emotions, and the ability to cheer up or calm down another person.” (psychology.com) Some of the important attributes of EQ are like: how do you relate to others' problem, are you empathetic, are you optimistic and so on. These skills are required because it helps to inspire others, make better decisions, build a team, drive ideas and solve interpersonal relationships.  Only a balanced person can offer a helping hand and empathy towards others. Only a balanced mind can take the tough decision and make better choices. Without the inner balance of energies, one cannot achieve a perfect balance of emotions and logic.
Can you show gravitas and maintains the composure whatever be the situation - either being glorified or vilified? The importance of EQ gets prominence as seniority increases - working with people and getting more complicated tasks done gets more relevance as you grow. IQ is about the ability to reasoning and cognitive skills which are important for the digital knowledge workers today. However, to move up and take more responsibility and accountability, EQ is important as it drives the organization success. The high EQ drives a positive mindset and keeps you motivated about life. A leader who neither reacts tremendously when he/she does/sees/receives good praise nor extremely dejected about anything (glorified or vilified) happening to him/her is a hallmark of a human with supreme EQ. He/she High EQ helps a leader in holding a group on a common goal, be confident when things are tougher; and be humiliated when getting complimented.
How adaptable, empathetic and mature are you as a digital professional or leader? Emotional intelligence is also a key component of an intellectual mind. There are as we all know, varying levels of intelligence; An EQ directly decides one’s adaptability, empathy and maturity. Emotional Intelligence is one of the essential qualities that makes a successful Leader. Though maturity is not necessarily equal to emotional intelligence, it’s part of EQ, Emotional Intelligence as a Human quality has elements such as:Self-awareness (knowing our strengths and weaknesses)Self-regulation (controlling our emotions)Empathy (understanding the emotions of others, being able to put ourselves in their shoes)Motivation (having a passion/drive for achievement & continuous improvement)Social skills (building rapport with others and influencing others).  
EQ becomes an more important quality for digital leaders and professional because we live in such a fast changing, complex, uncertain and ambiguous world. No matter if one is managing or participating in a collaborative environment, one’s emotional maturity enables the suspension of judgment. The self-actualized individual proposed by Maslow’s law is able to clearly understand their perspective and try to understand and incorporate the understanding of others without feeling the egos cry for attention. It is both trusts as well as an emotional maturity (a highly self-actualized nature) that allows one to collaborate and easily integrate the ideas of others. A digital leader or professional with high EQ can adapt to change more seamlessly and practice empathetic leadership more effortlessly.
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The CIO’s Digital Agenda XXXXX: 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?


Leveraging IT as a Business Decision InfluencerHow to Leverage IT as a Business Decision Influencer?  IT spends a very large amount of professional time working on the "business" side of things to work through structured approaches that lead to real decisions and properly resourced projects. Decision-making scenario is depending on problem context. A structured or an unstructured approach to management's decision making is depending on a problem context. An effective way for resource allocation and utilization is an important factor for a decision making.
Information vs. Decision Making At today’s digital dynamic, information is abundant and even explosive, the business has become over-complex also hyper-connected, what’s the correlation between information and decision making. If data-decision pair works fine to advocate analytics based culture; as information is the processed data; and knowledge is processed information, how about information-decision pair? It's not necessarily information, but the business insight leads to the right decision making. So how to measure information accuracy as well as decision-making effectiveness?
From Big Data to Decision Management:  Businesses enter the digital era of Big Data, with the business dynamic of velocity, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, how to make the right decision by the right people at the right timing also becomes a strategic imperative, because it will directly make an impact on business’s short term bottom line and long time prosperity.
Decision Effect: Making a decision is one of the significant tasks for business leadership, however, the high ratio of strategic decisions have been made poorly and cause the catastrophic effect. How to avoid such decision pitfalls, to make effective decisions both strategically and tactically?
Timing, Group and Decision Making  Decision making is perhaps one of the most important tasks for business leaders and managers, and there’re also many great debates upon this topic. From the old chestnut of "Isn't a gut reaction decision as good as a well-considered decision?”, to the timing concerns: do decisions get worse with time? Do they stale date? Would a cognitive reaction to not making a decision lessen the decision's importance to a person so that it no longer mattered? Is there any truth to the statement "ignore it and it will go away", and to the emergent concerns: individual or group, which way is better for making effective decisions in the face of today’s complexity and uncertainty.
The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.3 million page views with 2600+ 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

CIOs as Talent Masters

People are always the most invaluable asset in any organization, and having the right person in the right position at the right time is always one of the biggest challenges facing any business. This is particularly true for IT, due to the changing nature of technology and the abundance of information. Is IT skills gap fact or fiction? What differentiates high performance or high potential talented IT professionals from others? And how to manage IT talent, culture and performance in a more cohesive way?
IT leaders need to do self-reflection first: CIOs as IT leaders need to craft a long-term talent strategy for managing talent life cycle effectively. One of the skill gaps is the lack of digital mindset and recombinant capabilities in CIOs themselves . Sometimes they too much focus on fixing the symptom, without digging through the root cause of IT skills gap, hiring only for immediate need, not paying enough attention to the business’s long term perspective. Often times they look narrowly at specific problems and projects developed to solve those business problems, partly because that is the way funding is allocated, rather than having a broad view of their enterprise and the longer term strategy for the organization. Often times projects are not cohesive and create more problems when done independent of the enterprise than they solve. They fail to keep up on standards within their domain that can lead to the holistic enterprise viewpoint, and execution of IT strategies that fit within that enterprise viewpoint.
Improving employee engagement and satisfaction is another challenging facing IT leaders today: The good IT leader has to be prepared to constantly realign technology against the enterprise's business needs. With emergent digital trend and agile practices, he/she has to orient the IT organization for constant realignment therefore and has to communicate vision with credibility and passion, motivating business stakeholders and the IT team to collaborate effectively in everybody's success. If engagement is low, the team corner of the triangle (quality, process, and holism) is off balance, which can be reflected from the IT management. Organizations would benefit from creating a culture where employees feel safe in expressing themselves without reprisal, then listening to their internal partners before implementing change initiatives. The studies show that the majority of people are not engaged in their jobs because their talent is not being utilized; though every employee has individual reasons for not being engaged that is rarely revealed by engagement and exit studies. If you have someone in a role where their natural strengths and talents are being recognized and utilized, they will be engaged. To build a learning agile IT organizations, IT leaders need to check up:-The social/digital business with organizational structure becoming flat and agile?-The learning organization defined at Fifth Discipline?-The self-managed organization following Agile principle?There is a need to evaluate the performance of employees in more objective and continuous way. There is a danger of not having a process to "develop and nurture" performance, bias and favoritism are common in the workplace. Waiting until once per year or even every six months to evaluate workers is also not enough to know key performance nor should it be. There is more to an employee's performance than metrics on an assessment form or survey.
Continuous Performance Management: There is a need to evaluate the performance of employees in more objective and continuous way. There is a danger of not having a process to "develop and nurture" performance, bias and favoritism are common in the workplace. Waiting until once per year or even every six months to evaluate workers is also not enough to know key performance nor should it be. There is more to an employee's performance than metrics on an assessment form or survey. Performance assessment is a combination of many factors and shouldn't be quantified so easily. Do managers add value to the employee's professional or personal goals, and objectives as well as the other way around? Such that both employer and employee are following through on stated commitments to each other. Due to the complexity of IT, both "ends" and "means" must be balanced. "Thinking performance" and "doing performance," behavior and outcome are all important elements in performance assessment. Should employee performance assessment be based on behavior or outcome? Behavior and outcome are not, or should not be mutually exclusive, you need both and they need to be aligned. That's why a good manager is a very valuable asset. At today’s knowledge, technology, and innovation economy, thinking performance is as important, or, even more, important than just doing. The assumption is that key behaviors emphasized are the right ones to enable the right outcomes. manage talent but if you can't answer the five questions below with specificity. IT leaders and talent managers also need to ask the fundamental questions such as, how do you define talent? How do you measure talent? And how do you put the right people in the right position to unleash both individuals and the business’s potential, etc
With increasing speed and hyperconnectivity of digital businesses, talent management systems and processes are also gradually moving away from a static, unidirectional, and time-bound avatar to a more dynamic, continuous, and interactive state. Improved transparency, goal tracking, real-time feedback, and enterprise-wide acknowledgment/recognition of achievements are some of the key drivers, which result in the adoption of digital talent pipeline and social performance management systems Reimagine IT and reinvent IT management starts with people management, IT leaders need to manage the most invaluable business asset - people more effortless and innovatively.

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The Monthly Strategy Highlight: Strategic Wisdom Mar.2016

Strategy is the light to guide you ahead, not the hand to walk you through.
The strategy is the focal point of the “Future of CIO,” and the pillar of organizational existence, its design, structure, functions, vision, and mission. A real strategy is neither a document nor a forecast but rather an overall approach based on a diagnosis of a challenge. It brings up new functions, roles, and responsibilities, collaboration, demand for intuition and emergence, complementarities, philosophy, neutron sciences, and trans-disciplinary businesses. But these are not new per se. The frameworks of thoughts, consciousness and maturity assessments apply to strategy, then, now and in the future. Here is the first monthly strategy highlight of the “Future of CIO” blog in 2016.
Strategy Wisdom    Mar., 2016Three Questions to Assess a Person's Ability to think strategically: There is no doubt that strategy becomes more important, not less in organizations large or small today, because of the fierce competition, rapid changes, and hyper uncertainty. Digital professionals have to continuously set up standards of competence and ability to enforce professional responsibility, with good intentions, and having capabilities to think strategically, but is there such one question to ask to determine a person’s ability to think strategically?
Which Color is Your Strategy? The strategy is an everlast puzzle, organizations big and small try to solve it, there’re many big questions upon it such as how to find a ‘winning’ strategy; how to align all business projects, processes and plans with a chosen strategy? How to implement a strategic plan and measure its achievements? Back to fundamental, do you have a common language about strategy? There are different points of view about the strategy based on how the individuals are framing the problem, or at what level of abstraction. Everyone is hunting for Blue Ocean or Purple Cow, which color is your strategy.Is Silo Eating your Strategy for dinnerI  Silo II: Many of us like the witty quote from Drucker: “culture eats strategy for lunch.” The strategy is indeed in the face of more risks than culture, could it be the SILO – the symptom of industrial management mindset will eat your strategy for dinner?
Strategic Management: How to Do it Right:A strategy delineates a territory in which a company seeks to be competitively positioned to derive economic profits. The strategy is the art of designing a way of navigating and effectively utilizing available resources to attain a clearly defined objective. Strategy management, how to do it right?
Five Aspects to Leverage Systems Thinking in Digital strategy Making ?Digital organizations are complex systems that are dynamic, self-evolving, and somewhat self-perpetuating, they are a dynamic living organism and should be viewed from systemic perspectives. The fact is that change is happening at a much faster pace than ever before, requiring a much more rapid response in order not only to succeed but to survive. However, do business executives have enough information & insight to design long-term strategies? Are numerical data enough for that? Can they deal with complexity? How many business strategists understand Systems Thinking, concepts of emergence, requisite variety, relationships and boundary critique? How many managers understand the difference between open and closed systems? To put simply, how to leverage Systems Thinking in digital strategy making.
The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.3 million page views with 2500+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. blog posting. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating the new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

Three "C's in Building an innovative team

There are still full of serendipity in creativity: How many forms of creativity are there? How are they different? How are they similar? Isn't what makes them similar or different, also what makes them creativity? Creativity has many forms and manifestations. Take the standpoint that creativity has its starting point within an individual. Individual creativity is absolutely critical, but how to build a creative team to harness collective creativity?

Cognition:  Inclusiveness is a necessity to sow the seeds of innovation. The team members with cognitive difference can understand things from different angle, and bring the new perspective to the table. The exercise of blending people's problem-solving abilities to produce the desired outcome is a worthwhile thing to do. It is not just a mere cumulation of the creative inputs of those involved. It is also not only a synchronizing of their individual inputs to make something that no one individual would achieve. It is more than that. It has its own dynamic that is in a state of constant flux. It builds up a momentum that draws creative contributions from the participants that they did not previously conceive or understood they were capable of.
Capacity: Whether creativity can be collective is clear and flows from what seems like an expansive, generous, creative minds, how creative is the team depends on the creative capacity of its member. You can get a diverse group of people together in one room and still not have "creativity" if the participating individuals are not particularly creative. What matters is how creative are the individuals. Hence, the collective creativity depends on varying factors, because the team perhaps have different intents (destructive vs. constructive), different processes (enforcement vs collaboration), different participants (compliant vs. creative), different outcomes (disharmony vs harmony) and different philosophies (selfishness vs selflessness). The workplace needs to be designed to help employees at all levels within an organization (from leaders to front-line) understand and develop their creative capacity to solve problems and exploit opportunities in new and innovative ways, the tool utilizes cutting-edge narrow band psychometrics to diagnose, assess and train the core four factors of creativity: namely, cognitive processes, personality, motivation, and confidence.
Culture: Once we take into consideration the influences around this person (environment, culture, principles, etc.), how to build a creative team and the associated issues are a matter of the corporate culture. Organizations with a command type of organizational culture indifferent to external innovations and have innovation inertias. Most of creative teams and innovative organizations with real teamwork are headed by strong leaders with original ideas. The spirit comes from the top. Team's creativity are inspired and motivated by the leaders, who see, understand and appreciate the merits of different people. If there are no inspiring ideas – people’s motivation is reduced. At creative organizations, people are encouraged and given the time resources to work on new things that excite them, all are required to produce new ideas, people are often trained in creative methods and techniques, the business model is often challenged, everyone has a personal creativity objective at work and there is much humor to go around.
Given the nature of most companies, integration of the art and science of creativity is proportional to the need to maintain and increase the bottom line. All humans are naturally creative. Create and nurture an environment in your organization where curiosity is encouraged, and creative thinking is rewarded. The great leaders understand this and with that understanding, they build an innovative culture and take their organizations to the pinnacle of unbelievable success of innovation.







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Three IT Movements to Improve Organizational Maturity

Digital enterprise with high-level maturity is a way of designing organizations to amplify the possibilities of human potential and build unique capabilities of the organization.

Due to the “VUCA” characteristics of digitalization, organizations today need to build a unique set of business capabilities and enforce organizational democracy to adapt to changes, accelerate business growth, catalyze innovation and achieve operational excellence. Information and Technology play a pivotal role in such a transformation, here are three digital IT movement to harness business competency and improve organizational maturity.

Agile Movement: Agile sees the world through the lens of change, and Agile mindset puts emphasis on three “I”s: Interaction, Incrementalism and Improvement. It is not only the methodology for software development which largely resides in the stochastic or empirical domain, but a philosophy and a set of principles to run IT and business as a whole. There is a meta value for agility -becoming agile over following Agile. To scale the agile practices to an enterprise. You don't need to get bogged down by the word Agile with a capital ‘A,’ but utilize the values and principles to scale an enterprise process without labeling it Agile. It values effectiveness in delivering value over efficiency in delivering schedule & budget. The simple agile assessment questionnaires include: 1) Are your employees / team members enjoy working? 2). Is your project financials healthy? 3). Does your customer smile after every delivery, etc. An agile organization is one that is open to change and can adapt readily when change is needed.  The defining characteristic of being agile is that it can adapt readily when change is needed. Business agility is an ultimate goal the organizations pursue to reach their maturity.
Cloud Movement: Cloud Computing by itself is not the answer. It comes down to how your organization will rethink how it offers IT services to achieve business agility. The well-tuned cloud strategy and fined-designed cloud environment can bring speed, efficiency, agility to organizations -- Robust change capability, as well as allow IT and business to spend more resource on innovation and top priority business strategy. Cloud Computing doesn't suddenly make IT organizations faster and more efficient, but it does provide overall agility that benefits many businesses. If your organization wants to figure out how it can improve customer's experience and is willing to "change," cloud computing with proper management can be a possible enabler. And the elastic nature of the cloud is a good fit if your IT demand is very dynamic, expanding or contracting in significant ways that need to be addressed and provisioned quickly. Looking ahead, the pace of cloud adoption could well accelerate as businesses start to expect these benefits right across the systems landscape. Most significantly, Cloud has moved from a platform managed by IT to a way of working that the business as whole values and wants to use for important new initiatives. And Cloud is now fundamentally driving the future of business and technology fusion –it’s about the business benefiting from the Cloud.
Social Movement: Many say the world is moving forward from taxonomy to folksonomy. Enterprise social platform and tools provide unprecedented opportunities for businesses to share ideas, enhance cross-functional collaboration and fuel innovation. Innovative organizations are using social to source new ideas and refine current products or services, to manage three types of innovation: sustainable innovation, efficiency innovation and disruptive innovation at more systematic way. Social business allows knowledge or information to flow more seamlessly cross functional silos; The real impact of making the invisible visible, and then measurable, comes when companies find ways to use social to open communication channels both top-down and bottom-up; both inside-out and outside-in, and across the enterprise, to harness communication and expedite strategy implementation. From talent management perspective, social analytics helps to pinpoint who knows what within or even beyond your organization, based on social influence and action rather than assertion, allow organizations to identify the strength of these relationships and how information flows between the groups, recognize the thought leaders and high-professional experts. And enable companies to target group influencers who can best affect decisions, expand digital talent pipelines and manage talent more scientifically.
With three digital movements discussed above, IT is shifting from a cost center to a value creator, and from an order taker to a strategic partner of the business. Digital enterprise with high level maturity is a way of designing organizations to amplify the possibilities of human potential and build unique capabilities for the organization to achieve strategic goals effortlessly. So the business as a whole can create needed changes, also adapt to the fast pace digital dynamic with hyper-connectivity, hyper-innovativeness, and hyper-dynamism.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu