Pearl Zhu's Blog, page 1364

Three Elements to Fuel Creativity

 Creativity is the #1 skill needed in the digital age. Creativity is simply openness to finding connections between ideas, things, people, experience., etc, and making literally something new from existing things. Creative thinking is the way to look at the “old” problems or situations from a fresh perspective that suggests unorthodox solutions. Every forward thinking organization is eagering to build a creative workplace, but what are important elements to catalyze creativity, how can you recognize and empower your most creative people and build a culture of creativity?

Passion: Passion enables determination, creativity, strategy, and talent. If you do not have the passion for what you do, determination, creativity, talent, and strategy become HARD WORK which in turn disables determination etc. Passion is an emotion, which is something that comes from within. However, it is a result of the belief and conviction which can be fueled from without. Be passionate about learning and growing. The skills you develop will help you as your career evolves. Passion aligned with capabilities and meaningful work is a destination that grows with you. Although passion from a career perspective comes in many forms, it may change based on your set of career "lenses" as you evolve. However, having a passion and building a career around that passion would certainly fuel creativity, align your focus and therefore potentially aiding you in greater success.
Insight: Insight is the deep intuitive understanding of things, and it often breaks through the conventional wisdom. Creativity 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. It's not only about trying to "think outside the box," but an intuitive expression and alternative path that takes you wherever it needs to go, without boundaries. There’s critical link between creativity and intuition. An intuitive mind has the strength and the willpower to follow the courageous heart, and thus, having the better chance to be creative.  Creativity is a type of “out-of-box” thinking, and Insight is thinking into the box after thinking out of the box. Thus, 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. So insight is not just fuel creativity, but also make creativity more tangible and embed creativity with other thought processes to create value and produce the new knowledge.
Learning agility: The mind with learning agility likes to experiment and comfortable with change.Learning agility can move out of their comfort zone, take risks, learn from mistakes. It’s an important element to spark creativity. Being learning agile via experiment on innovation, delivering a result at the first-time situation will be more frequent than ever. It will allow one to obtain new insights and experiences that can only help in your future endeavors as well. Thinking outside the box, going against the grain. At times throwing away conventional means and trying something radically new, and overall multifaceted resourcefulness. Agility is related many things such as flexibility, changeability, robustness, sensitivity, comprehensiveness, speed, responsiveness, etc. That is, the multidimensional  competencies to formulate creative (unconventional) alternatives or solutions to resolve problems, to show versatility and flexibility in response to unpredictable or unanticipated circumstances.
Therefore, to build a creative workplace is to stimulate passion, encourage insightful feedbacks, and inspire learning agility. From  behaviorism philosophy perspective, if the environment is stimulating and challenging, and then the brain can thrive from new stimulus to generate new ideas, So creativity will not be suppressed, but rewarded or reinforced by a positive response in a group setting or team context. And then creativity flows and innovation will blossom.
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Three Digital Fatigues IT Needs to Overcome

Digital transformation is an intense, even a stressful journey, it’s more like a sweeping approach to alter many things underneath the surface of the business, such as value, process, culture or behavior, etc. When the need for significant digital shift is identified, IT often plays a crucial role in “gluing” all important hard elements and soft factors of the business to build differentiated digital capabilities. Therefore, it is the heavy duty for IT to adapt and innovate, and how can IT overcome digital fatigues and revitalize the business and achieve its vision?     
Strategic Leakage: Although IT plays more crucial role in the business today, many IT organizations are overloading and under-delivery. The major contributing factors are “ineffective leadership,”  "insufficient resources," “de-motivated teams,” and the classic “can’t say no,” mentality. Often there is a strategic leakage-the misalignment of IT and the business strategy. In most organizations, the business strategy is an archived document by which daily decisions are rarely driven. The first step is to create a situation where the main strategic performance drivers are well and commonly understood cross-functionally on the leadership team. This is where prioritization should take place; not on the solutions (projects, IT being only one ilk), but on the opportunities. The result of this exercise should be a roadmap of business initiatives vs. IT projects, and business strategy management vs. IT project portfolio management mapping. It’s also important to fix dysfunctional roles and relationships between the "business" and "IT." In short, if one of the parties is not up to the task of managing their roles and responsibility in the relationships, it will fail and project overloading is just one of the symptoms of digital fatigues.
Decision Silos: There are many decision silos in the decision process – and the study confirms this. What has to happen in organizations is to connect decision makers across departments to understand the impact of their decisions. For example, IT is delivering a project, while business expects IT to deliver a solution (including a change of existing business process, legal and financial aspects, marketing inside and outside of the organization). In such a case, IT is proud of delivering the item, business is very disappointed about the delivery and asks for then other steps, IT is very disappointed about the 'sudden change of deliverables' and in the end, none wins and the project is called a failure, because of the confusion about WHAT should be delivered? To analyze the root cause of decisions silos and “get lost in communication” symptom, IT leaders and management should trace further what kind of decisions cause churn in downstream project units? IT planners and project teams often find it difficult to stay connected with the perspectives of all the decision-makers around them and incorporate them into their plans. Thus, harnessing cross-functional communication and making data based decisions are best practices to overcome decision silos caused by such digital fatigue.
Project fragile: The high percentage of IT project failure rate is the other cause to serious IT fatigue. Every organization has a tolerance for the variance which, when exceeded, produces a failure scenario and results in a structural impact to, if not cancelation of a project. The small things are what cause all the problems. If engaging in a large project, it is usually about transformational change, not incremental change. Most large projects are that the nature of the challenge is not understood. And the nature of the challenge is people, not technology. These changes also require a significant change in the lives of the people involved. More specifically, there are a few people oriented major reasons for projects to fail:(1). Lack of the right talented people with mixed strength and skills working on the project. (2) People Issues: Every factor about large projects is rooted in the fact that people need to understand what is changing, what the impacts of those changes are, how they fit in the new world, and how they can participate in the change. Can they learn the new technology or will they be let go at the end? Will there be room for these employees in the new world. How does this affect their perceived expertise? All these things lead to people being afraid to commit to the new solution. (3). Poor Management: Managers micro manage when they have no knowledge of what they are micro managing. They also make promises without checking with the team, do not supply the necessary resources, or engage the team to deliver, and lack of clear communication upon the people concerns. etc. Therefore, developing the principles and practices to improve project management success rate is an important aspect to overcome IT fatigue.
For IT to break the cycle, from the ‘weakest link’ to superglue and overcome digital fatigue, it has to provide both business and technological insight into how they bring success to the company as a whole instead of being a commodity overcoming the "bad" experiences from the past, it needs to be proactive and value-added for building business-IT relationship, improve IT project success rate and overall performance, and pursue long term goals with strategic perspectives. Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

The Monthly Innovation Brief: The Practices and Pitfalls of Innovation Management Feb. 2016

Innovation takes the cycle of observing-questioning-connecting-networking-experimenting. From a 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.
The Practices and Pitfalls of Innovation ManagementCan you Impose a Culture of Innovation? Culture is better defined by the "collective mindsets, attitudes, and behaviors of people in an organization.” There is no question that culture can make or break an organization. Nowadays, innovation becomes an important ingredient in business strategy, but how to cultivate the culture of innovation is perhaps one of the biggest challenges facing business leaders today. Can you impose a culture of innovation, or shall you build, cultivate, or foster it, and how? What are the key elements in fostering a culture of innovation?
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 Avoid Pitfalls in Innovation Management Innovation is both art and science. Innovation is a systematic way of applying creativity in the real life and business. In general, business innovation is a management discipline, and innovation management has overall very low success rate. The reasons why failure occurs vary widely, it is no wonder why many leaders are reluctant to act on bold ideas with good business potential due to the high likelihood of failure. So more specifically, what are the pitfalls in innovation management and how to manage innovation more effectively?
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?
Three Aspects of Customer Centric Innovation:  One of the key characteristics of a digital business is customer centricity. The customer is absolutely a vital part of the overall innovation process. Customer-centric innovation can accomplish far more than incremental product/service improvement, it can also implement path breaking products or service, build evolutionary business models as well.
The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.3 million page views with about 2500+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes the time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify your voice, deepen your digital footprints, and match your way for human progression.



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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 perspective; but the issue is that most IT departments look inward. So how effective does IT enable the business growth, and how coherent is your IT enabled digital capability?
What’s the current IT maturity and capability? What things are in place that will enable the business strategy? What can be done to strengthen them? What things are in place that will inhibit or endanger the business strategy? What can be done to minimize them? Are the right skills in place? Are costs in line with the long term ( five-year) plan and short term goals? Information strategy is a complex domain. The best approach requires to take some leaps of faith setting the right things in motion, and delicately balancing and rebalancing the results toward urgent, but hard to predict outcomes. IT is an important component of many differentiated business capabilities, for example, it includes establishing a data analytics capability, or organizational change capability, operational capability, etc. The constraint is in getting all of the systems up to a current technology to snap into an enterprise information strategy. The other main obstacle is getting everyone to agree on what is necessary and what the information lifecycles should be. A comprehensive set of enterprise-wide information management capability-Enables better data access and analysis by breakdown the silos. -Reduces costs and increases efficiencies.-Increases IT alignment and engagement with the business.
What is the organization's capacity for change? Is IT often the force to drive the changes, or the obstacle to stifle changes? If radical changes are needed, does the change management structure exist internally to deliver on that? And does the organization have the multifaceted capability to manage changes? When the need for significant change is identified, it's generally naive to think it will succeed without transformation as well. IT can help weave all these important business elements such as process and digital technology & tools into the building blocks of change capability and highlight the characteristics of “Changeable Organization” such as flexibility, agility, and innovation. IT at the low level of maturity reacts to the business changes with slow speed, or even turns to be the very obstacle for changes. However, the high mature IT organizations are at an inflection point to lead organizational level digital transformation because it is at the unique position to oversight business processes and processes underpin business capabilities. IT is also the “superglue” for orchestrating the business capabilities that the organization needs to build, and the ones that the organization needs to preserve to be capable of executing the strategy.
What’s the overall organizational capability and maturity? Generally speaking, a capability is an ability that an organization, person, or system possesses. Capabilities are typically expressed in general and high-level terms and typically require a combination of organization, people, processes, and technology to achieve. The enterprise consists of a set of capabilities. The organization then uses these capabilities to understand the markets / environment, create new products and services and then deliver products and services. The capability is the ability to achieve the desired effect under specified (performance) standards and conditions through combinations of ways and means (activities and resources) to perform a set of activities. The business is then designed around the experience. Capability can "contain" many services, processes, and functionality in which IT as one of the most critical element in weaving them together and building them up. In any case to monitor or seek disruptive opportunities requires businesses’ transformational capability with agility to adapt to changes. Therefore, IT capabilities directly make impact on business capabilities, and IT maturity is proportional with overall organizational maturity.
IT or digital strategy is not the sole domain of CIOs, it is collective efforts of IT and other business departments deciding in line with the strategy and in the interest of the organization. The stepwise scenario includes: creating the strategy, aligning all your companies’ assets toward common objectives. The next step is defining intermediate goals that work towards achieving those objectives. The varying organizational goals such as innovation, process efficiency, increased employee productivity, or customer delight through information are well worth investing time in creating. And the cohesive IT enabled digital capabilities improve organizational agility and maturity. Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

The Valentine Day Theme in Management: How to Elevate a People-Centric Organization by following the “Love Principle”

Digital organizations are informative, hyperconnected and dynamic, the digital workforce is more purpose driven and inclusive. So which mood is a digital organization more often in? To adding a drop of Valentine Day’s tone, how to run an organization with the “Spirit of Universal Love”? And how to build a “Happy Organization” with both happy employees and happy customers?

A people-centric organization is more purpose driven: Work is an integral part of our lives, discovery and self-actualization are the fiber of our work. It is no sense to believe that ignoring the wonderful resources we are will ever truly be beneficial. Intentional human behavior always has a purpose. Organization is intentional, and therefore, it must have a purpose for forming the strong teams to achieve a high-performing result. Organizations and their people learn through their interactions with the environment: They act, observe the consequences of their action, make inferences about those consequences, and draw implications for future action. If one of the significant purposes of business is to create customers, then a happy organization will attract happier customers, it strives to become a people-centric organization with “universal love’ as a principle.
Change the language from Human Resources to Human Assets or Human Capital: The vision exclusively economistic should not make the organization forget the human aspect of the relationship with the employees, who are human beings, with emotions, that should be interpreted positively and fortified.Treat your employee as you would expect to be treated if the boot were to be on the other foot, if the employee were to be your employer! when employees do not feel valued or appreciated,  production goes down, and if the workplace is too hierarchical, creativity gets penalized. Employees are the lifeline of any business, they should be treated as such valuable ASSETS!! All it took was a little understanding of the problem and a little adjustment in not what they did, but how they did it and getting everyone including the executive to become part of the solution and not remain part of the problem using a little collaboration and team effort. To make the impossible possible and a little thinking outside the box assure there was a benefit to more than the old management approach.
Employee engagement does follow happiness: Better communication, empathy, valuing others, decision-making, clearer vision follows as well. At least, they are dynamically tied together biologically and emotionally. Happiness comes from within and creates energy. Engagement is an expression of that energy. People will feel more happy if the working environment encourages the positive thinking and behaviors, inspire creativity, and discourage negativity and unprofessionalism. That means ALL employees, from top to bottom, need to come to work with an offering of positivity, happiness, and love. IMAGINE! It only takes a handful of people to come to work unhappily, leaders or workers, and they start to operate with diminished energy and make unconscious substandard choices. Then the disengagement cycle begins. Maybe the focus should be on encouraging people to bring wisdom.  
The happiness comes from the heart, many thought that the heart of an organization should start at the top. Following “loving principle” to run an organization means a lot: inclusiveness, empowerment, fairness, engagement, even enchantment, etc. The heart consists fundamentally in the recognition of the value of its people. it's true that when we do see our own humanity more clearly we do extraordinary things that once didn't seem possible. And the goal to run a people-centric organization is to achieve a high-performing business result for the long run.


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Three Levels of Digital Fluency

Organizations’ digitalization is surely a transformation journey, as it has to permeate into business vision, strategy, culture, communication, and processes. etc. If digital literacy is the ability to effectively and critically navigate, evaluate and create information using a range of digital technologies; and to move a step further, digital fluency is the business capability to skillfully manage information lifecycle, to create fresh content enlightening customers; to gain contextual intelligence for solving complex problems; and more importantly to be fluently connecting the innovation dots for catalyzing business growth.
Content is more than just "important," it's the lynchpin of the overall experience. Just because you have the business's content doesn't mean you have everything. When the user is done, it's the content that leaves the longest lasting impression, good or bad. Great content keeps people coming back, not shiny bells and whistles.Content which speaks to the user engages them more directly than any visual appeal could. Content are often not perfect - considering user flows (needs/wants/ expectations) via questioning: a)  what does the user want to know or do, b) what is logical content structure needed to do this, c) how can the information be packaged in UI to meet the users’ goals,d) does usability testing confirm this, e) do delivery considerations suggest modifications to the content structure, etc. The 'content first' mantra speaks to the user engages them more directly than any visual appeal could. Therefore, “content first” is the mantra for practicing digital management and improving digital fluency.
Contextual intelligence is a higher-level of digital fluency: Digital ecosystem is complex and volatile, for complex problem solving, understanding context is often the first and the important step in understanding, create the relevant context to make a more lasting solution - without it, you are working without any boundaries, or basis for understanding what you are doing. You always have to build a scaffold towards the solution so that capacity can be developed. Only then can the information be used the way it needs to be used.  Context is of utmost importance. The art and the science are in the creation of the context, which some people will perceive immediately. Context is the king, and the purpose makes the difference. Contextual Intelligence is a construct that involves the ability to recognize and diagnose the plethora of contextual factors inherent in an event or circumstance, then intentionally and intuitively adjust behaviors in order to exert influence in that context. Context is part of a polygon. Each vertex dynamically interacts with the other vertices. One vertex is cognitive perception. Another vertex is the expectation that there is more going on than just the image. Each vertex interacts with the other, change happens as it interacts. Being digital fluent in contextual intelligence aids us in understanding what’s relevant and what’s not. From a practical perspective, 'seeing' the context you are 'part' of, allows one to identify the leverage points of the system and then 'choose' the 'decisive' factors, in the attempt to achieve the set purpose. This accompanied by growing global diversity and constant pressure to innovate gives rise to continually changing contexts. In turn, these phenomena require leaders to respond and adapt to quickly changing contexts.
Digital fluency also means to have the better ability for dots connection across the geographical or generational boundaries: Creativity is about connecting the dots. In life we come across various experiences (exposure to various situations) as colorful dots, the more dots you have, the better chance your mind can connect them freely. How cleverly you connect your dots by leveraging your experiences and finding a solution to the problems is creativity which is also an important aspect of digital fluency. It could be an out of the box thinking or intuition. On the navigation dimension, a connecting mind, or  collective minds with digital fluence have more antennae focused on the trends and what’s going on in the world, or what'll it impact the next generation. And what group will have better cognitive diversity with a different opinion, independent thinking, decentralization, and aggregation.
Digital is fluid, digital is also complex. It becomes complex if things do interact, particularly in the case of "non-linear" interaction, you can't separate things properly or you cannot predict the actual effect of interaction straightforwardly. Therefore, digital fluency does not mean you only master one language, but multiple, or only be skillful at one domain, but interdisciplinarity; not just see things from a single dimension but through different angles. And digital fluency takes practice, practice, and practice.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

How to Leverage IT to Unleash the Digital Potential of the Business

Every forward thinking organization has digital ambition to become customer-centric, living, and smart business. Digital organizations are hyperconnected and interdependent and they have to continue to adapt to the digital new normal with “VUCA” characteristics. Information is the lifeblood, and technology is often the “digital disrupters,” so more specifically, how can companies across industrial sectors leverage IT to unleash the digital potential of its business?
Digital is the age of customer-centricity:  Being customer-centric is not just a few best practices or even a pretty high-level customer interface, it has to go deeper to integrate all key business ingredients in orchestrating a digital business which has key capabilities to delight customers. From customer integration to customer experience: behavioral, emotional, social and transactional design are well understood and practiced. And often IT is the superglue to integrate both hard and soft business elements into a differentiative digital competency. A real customer-centric approach permeates everything about the way the CIO leads in the business. It influences how you communicate about the operational crisis, it drives how you deliver services to your end users, and it sets the agenda for every single communication action you take with everyone else in the 'C'-suite. And the focus of CIO’s role has changed from product-oriented to client-oriented. It's not necessarily a "client vs. product" centricity issue, but more one (product driven) enabling the other (client centricity). That will also fundamentally influence many things you do - a focus on key messages that need to be delivered, specific roles in the organization with responsibility for managing relationships with internal clients, a communications plan with actions / channels / dates, and a structured approach to run IT as a business with the goal  to delight both internal customers and external customers and optimize their customer experience.
Digital is the age of insight: IT is shifting from a technology custodian to an information steward. IT is also a change agent to advocate data-based culture and lead the organization to the age of insight. Information applies to the context and environment in which decisions are made. Information, with the inclusiveness of data as input, is primary drivers of decisions when they apply to automated systems, not human beings. Information Management makes information available and useful, exert lots of intelligence, do data analytics, look for insights, use the imagination, but make validation, predictability.  The intention of Eco-Information Management Life Cycle  (Data-Information-Knowledge-Insight- Wisdom) is to build a high intelligent organization via capturing insight & foresight in making the right business decisions timely and bringing profits to the organization for the long term. Data quality is important. If you mine, cleanse and improve the data to produce information, combine that information and visualize it in different ways, then you gain organizational knowledge and from that knowledge, you can make excellent strategic and tactical decisions.
Digital is the age of innovation: There are both radical innovation and incremental innovation. An innovation is when you change the game; or you bring a different twist to what is currently established and perceived. Continuous improvement is by tweaks of things in the old fashion way to bring efficiency. IT is a business innovation catalyst. More specifically, innovation can be categorized as empowered innovation (creative disruption), sustainable innovation (better version of product/service) or efficiency innovation (process improvement). IT can drive all sort of innovation, proactively pushing ideas on how to leverage technology to drive revenue growth, increase business productivity, flexibility, and agility. Running  IT as an innovation engine is about developing a deep understanding of the business value chain, competitive landscape, processes and capabilities, revenue models, P&L drivers, and balance sheet strengths and constraints.  IT is the custodian of solutions and data assets that can be applied in new and different ways to generate massive business value that far exceeds what other functions can incrementally bring to the table. This is especially true if you are looking at new sources of value that haven't been tapped before. And an innovative IT will leverage the advances in emergent technologies or existing technology differently to provide innovative solutions for business now and in the future.
IT is like a digital brain of the organization to convey the technological vision, bring the data-based insight, cultivate the frictionless business culture, re-framed processes to bridge silo, and  build the optimal sets of business capabilities to delight customers. IT is an enabler and catalyzer to unleash the business’s digital potential and leap the business to reach the era of radical digital.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

Three Questions to Assess an Employee’s “Balance”

Digital is all about the balance: the balance of the physical and the virtual world; the balance of innovation and standardization; the balance of unconventional insight and conventional wisdom ( the positive connotation in this regard). From talent management perspective, shall you also assess the “balance” of an employee? Surely we don’t expect all employees have gymnast's balance skills, so what does digital balance mean for today’s digital professionals? And what are thought-provoking questions to evaluate their “balance” ability?    
Q1: Are you a Binary Thinker or a System Thinker? Organizations rooted in the industrial era are composed of functional silos. Silos are inevitable in every structured organization, it can improve the certain level of efficiency. However, the side effect of sio is bureaucracy and unhealthy internal politics and competition. Silos are a method of containment and storage: bounded groups or insular tribes are evidence of silos, and silos are reservoirs for homogeneous thinking, limiting the organization's creativity and innovation. Employees working in silo environment are easily taking the side with the binary thinking or extreme thinking: “ We are right, you are wrong,” “ We are the winner, so you have to lose,” with ignorance of the fact that the organization as a whole is superior to the sum of pieces. From management psychology perspective, a binary thinker is often embracing the two opposite sides of viewpoint, and take the two-dimensional lenses to perceive the multi-faceted world, they perceive things either good or bad, right or wrong, black or white, there're no shades in between; such extreme thinking can limit your view to observe the world more objectively; distort the picture of reality, restrict the scope of your thought process, and cloud your mind to make good judgment either in decision making or problem solving. To put simply, lack of the balance to understand things in a holistic way.
Q2: Can you strike the right balance of following the business principles, but also be innovate to break the outdated rule or habits? Digital is the age of changes. Being only an order taker is no longer sufficient to be an high mature digital professional to ensure business effectiveness (doing the right things) and efficiency (doing them right). Most of the people, including leaders, often find themselves playing it safe and spending too much time trying to weigh risks and outcomes. Such capabilities of balance can differentiate a digital leader from a follower ; a change agent from a laggard; an innovator from a mediocre. The digital professionals with balance can bring agility and flexibility across the spectrum of digital dynamic and digital paradox. It can also bring more in-depth understanding across the spectrum of a "local"/"specific" to "global"/ "holistic"/ "systemic" (boundaryless /trans-epistemic)/ "whole-systems" elaboration.
Q3: Can you make a balance of thinking and doing? In traditional talent performance management, quantity over quality, and “keeping hands busy” over “keeping the mind focus.” However, digital means change.  It’s about the balance of consistent delivery and taking the calculated risks to do things differently.  Decide whether the possible gains will outweigh the probable losses. If you don't cultivate an atmosphere that fosters some risks, then you will stagnate. It's never just the tried and learn, and it's never just the new and risky that works. It is insight and foresight and the ability to integrate “Thinking Performance” and “Action Performance,” to encourage autonomy and mastery. Because the purpose of reviews is about improvement for the future, and stimulate employees thinking further about their authenticity, ambition, strength and innovation. Thinking Performance can make the assessment on employee’s vision, cognition, and creativity as well.
Therefore, the assessment of an employee’s balance ability is to push and encourage teams to "think in bigger boxes" (think outside of your job description and consider company and industry and even societal impacts). Engage all employees in improving their thought processes, and create the expectation that positive behaviors and creativity are valued above everything else. Assume that every problem has multiple solutions. Take the time to look at every situation from multiple points of view (customer POV, supplier POV, management POV, etc). Do not rush up to take the side, but be more thoughtful in decision making and bring wisdom to the workplace.
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The Weekly Insight of the “Future of CIO” 2/12/2016

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. 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”  2/12/2016Three Aspects of Managing Digital Business Continuum  The effects of an increasingly digitalized world are now reaching into every corner of businesses and every aspect of organizations. Business agility is imperative to meet the demands of rapidly evolving digital consumer behaviors and dynamic business ecosystem. Therefore, digital leaders need to more proactively rethink the art and science of business management, from learning to doing, from design  to delivery, from talent management to customer satisfaction; here are three aspects of managing such a digital continuum.
Five Pitfalls to Fail IT:  IT plays a more significant role in leading changes and driving innovation in the organization than ever because  information is pervasive, permeating into everywhere in a contemporary business, and the speed of change is increasing nowadays. IT is also a critical element in improving business agility to adapt to changes. However, it doesn’t mean it's an easy job to run a high-performing IT organization. What are the pitfalls to fail IT, and how to overcome them in running a high mature digital IT?
Three Big “Where”s in Change Management: Change comes in two forms; good change (improvement) or bad change (deterioration). The good change can drive business growth and collective progress; the bad change will deteriorate the business development, lead to negative perspectives or backward direction. And the purpose of Change Management is to enable and accelerate good change, discourage and eliminate bad changes. Change has to be orchestrated at all levels. Besides exploring WHY, WHAT, WHEN, WHO questions about changes, here is the last “W” -Where shall you change?
How do you Define Quality Data: Corporate IT is the steward of the business information system. And information System (IS) is "a system" that deals with Information Management: collecting, storing, and processing data and delivering information, knowledge, and digital products. Too many businesses are data rich but information poor. Or they spend so much time and energy collecting data for that "just in case" scenario. Information Management quality means quality data, quality management, and quality measurement. What are further perspectives about Data Quality?
To Celebrate the Lunar Year of the Monkey: Leadership Lessons from the Animal Kingdom People often analogize human society to the animal kingdom, indeed, it’s vivid: In the old ancient time, perhaps dinosaurs or  dragons controlled the world; in the primitive rainforest or chaotic hidden mountains, roaring lions or crunching tigers are in charge based on their muscle power; foxes & wolves manipulate the surroundings due to their  trickery deception. But, in a benign and friendly animal kingdom, often, the monkey is emerged as the leader to harmonize and enlighten their world from the darkness, because of their intelligence and ingenuity. In the human society, we are  moving from the “command-control” style of leadership dominated in the agricultural and industrial society to more innovative and intelligent leadership styles in the digital age. So what can we learn from the spirit of the animal at the lunar New Year of Monkey?

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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How to Build the Value Added IT Capabilities

Many forward thinking IT organizations are on the journey to improve its own maturity, also take a leadership role in driving their organization’s digital transformation. A CIO must be able to develop and optimize  IT operational functions and harness value added IT capabilities within itself. It is one thing to run IT as an enabler for the business strategies and objectives. It is also something to have the IT resources (people and operational IT processes) refined to the point that they are nimble, can adapt to changing business demands in a timely fashion. More specifically, what are the most important IT capabilities and how to build them effortlessly?
Effectiveness: Generally speaking, effectiveness is about doing the right things. To build and demonstrate IT success, IT leaders need to focus on the business IT roadmap; that is how IT enables strategic goals and objectives, business processes leveraged by IT, and an effective IT strategy as an integral component of business strategy. IT supports the achievement of tactical business objectives. IT investments positively affect business productivity and the customer experience. IT provides the  competitive leverage. If CIOs had the seat at the big table, IT can achieve strategic business objectives with the priorities from an executive management perspective.
Efficiency: Efficiency means to do things right. Tactically, IT delivers perceived added value services at a reasonable cost, IT delivers to operational and service level agreements and commitments, IT  improves process efficiency and manage cost continually. The approach is to implement a program that like a gardener would prune the tree and nurture the valuable solutions. Pruning the weeds would face resistance, however, at the end of the day, this was not just an IT decision and rather than let the senior management team beat them up, by understanding and communicating the actual costs, IT is responsible to keep the light on in most efficient way, and leverage the latest technology tools to manage business complexity.
Agility: Agility is a measure of ability to recognize, act and benefit from changing business circumstances. Business agility is about the reciprocal of the lag time between recognizing an emerging business opportunity and being able to act on that opportunity. And IT agility is about the reciprocal of the drag that IT places on business' agility. At the micro level, it is more about building the product right, In the context of IT, from the highest strategic to the deepest technical levels, "agility" is a fast, sure response to external stimuli. It is the ability to "pivot" and change direction in response to market pressure, or to create market opportunity, It requires distinct patterns of IT capabilities, with specific positioning in the organization.
Change: IT is always at the center of change, it’s also an important element in building the business’s change capability. Change is happening all the time, the management just has to acknowledge and appreciate that."Change" can be a somewhat mechanical implementation of new or different ways to doing something while the leapfrogging change like digital transformation is more likely to be a sweeping approach to altering a culture, or parts of it, possibly even to parts of its value system, to embrace such as change and help it become self-perpetuating. Process underpins business capability,  IT is the only entity in the organization supposed to understand business entirely and oversight organizational processes horizontally, and pay attention to the change processes under the surface, in order to build change as a crucial business capability via platform approach and systematic disciplines.
Innovation: Innovation is to transform novel ideas and achieve its business values. and innovation is crucial capability for digital businesses.  IT has a natural innovative spirit - most IT specialist is eager to use new technologies and gadgets. But there is a significant difference between technical proficiency and business innovation. Natural IT innovation spirit can be used to the benefit of business only when IT participates in defining strategy and business goals and make IT as a business driver and strategic capability. Innovation is not just about technology, Innovation is not always equal to the latest gadget, it’s about people, culture, partnership, manners, etc, woven together as a unique business capability.  Isn't that what innovation is all about: do it better, differentiate yourself from your completion, run, grow and transform the business. IT needs to be able to provide an innovative solution or supply a differentiated solution that contributes to top line growth, and become the business’s innovation engine.
Flexibility: Flexibility is to embrace the different PoVs and alternative way to do things. A flexible IT organization is a complex social system starting to appreciate such attributes as 'readiness,’ 'ownership,' ‘integration,’ 'full open communication,’ customized structuring as well as developing  partnerships. From a structure perspective, centralized, decentralized, and hybrid models can all work given the proper planning and management focus to keep them well-tuned for improving IT flexibility, business agility, and governance flexibility.  Scalability: With increasing speed of change and continuous digital dynamic, IT nowadays is more about “designed to change,” less about “built to last”;  be able to scale up and down according. With cloud and the emergent consumer-drive IT service model, business leaders are keen to drive adoption forward, particularly given current cost pressures and the need to explore new business ideas quickly, IT can leverage Cloud to improve technical characteristics  like “scalability” and “capability modernization more seamlessly.
IT is not just the sum of services or processes, or monolithic hardware only, IT needs to build a set of digital capabilities via weaving all necessary hard and soft elements, in reaching high-level maturity.  IT is not just part of the business; it is a critical, integral component of the business. When a CIO is able to position and maintain the IT organization to ensure it addresses both IT effectiveness and efficiency, agility and innovation, flexibility and scalability, they have earned their stripes. And IT can show how it is improving business and enforcing business capabilities.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu