Pearl Zhu's Blog, page 1413

Digital Master Tuning #107: How to Build a High-Mature Digital Organization

Forward-thinking means to focus on the future, even a few steps ahead, to build a long- term prosperity. Due to the fierce competition and unprecedented uncertainty, the pressures from stakeholders, and “keep the light on” mentality, many organizations only focus on short-term profitability, with ignorance of forward-thinking and long-term vision, the life cycle of Fortune 500 companies have significantly shortened. Only very few forward-looking organizations have a long-term vision, transformational leadership, and well-tuned processes and capabilities to become a high-mature Digital Master in pursuit of “Built to Last!” What are the characteristics of a forward-looking digital organization, and how to overcome the challenges to building a successful business for a long run?
Collaboration Enforcement: Building and sustaining dynamics in a workforce are about collaboration with everyone at any level. Collaboration happens in that space in between people in relationship receptively and thoughtfully interacting with interest and care for one another's needs and activities. Understanding and recognizing that everyone plays a "piece of the pie," imagine the true meaning when you say "Teamwork." Giving everyone a voice in how the organization and the people in it can prosper and thrive. Management would have to convince from a value perspective. What are the costs to an organization if employees aren't getting along if there are problems with management, and if no one is communicating? What is the value to an organization if internal conflicts can be mitigated and turned into something more productive? Do everything you can to provide the opportunity to succeed, and then if it does not work, make a change. Make the forum and encouragement to debate on any issue, without being judgemental and without taking things personally. High levels of employee engagement will help, apart from a culture that respects individual or group opinion.

Trust Building: People in business often have difficulty speaking with each other, and the outcome of the conversation can be demotivating, or worse. Especially these days when people are so busy! Building trust by not only saying the right things but acting in a manner equivalent to your words. Doing it well is about the words chosen which in turn influences tone. Attention paid to that solves a lot of problems and reduces the barriers to collaboration, social interaction, and forward thinking. The platinum rule - asking others how they wish to be treated. This means open communication. Asking others how they work best. What makes them tick. Treat people with courtesy, respect, and empathy. Each employee is a unique individual, not just a "pair of hands." Treat them as such and it is amazing what can be accomplished. All this builds team collaboration. How is this achieved? By progressive team meetings and workshops coaching individuals, sharing knowledge, proactively discussing negotiation, conflict management, etc..Whenever people feel respected and needed in an organization, it provides an opportunity for more social interaction and even collaboration. Forward thinking is all about the plans of the organization and how the employees feel they can contribute to it - getting and using employees input/s in the decision process helps further build collaboration and forward thinking. When people feel apart of a process, they are encouraged to see it succeed.

Forward-thinking Leadership: Being able to foster a workplace that thrives on collaboration, social interaction and forward thinking is dependent on those at the top - executive level. Leadership is required to gain commitment and engagement, rather than just compliance to working tasks. It is also required to ensure endurance, a persistence that mere authority can’t generate. In some respects, the role of a business leader is to attain those things that management alone is unlikely to attain. A position of authority may give a manager a ‘jump start’ in achieving business missions, but commitment may fade without leadership. Leader, must accept responsibility for others, model values by example, develop the team through praise and shape a culture of collaboration, social interaction, and forward thinking. Leaders must encourage and facilitate empowerment to all of their colleagues. Empower them to make sound decisions and be innovative in their way of thinking. Drivers such as communication, performance clarity and feedback, organizational culture, rewards and recognition, relationships with managers and peers, career development opportunities and knowledge of the organization's goals and vision are some of the factors that facilitate employee engagement.

Technology, Culture and Process alignment: Use the technology as the enabler of communication, collaboration, social interaction and forward thinking. The levels in between executive and hands-on employees (departmental leaders, team leaders) needs to be monitored to make sure the message and how it is interpreted or perceived is carried out the way it was meant, so the company as a whole moves in the same direction. Culture is crucial to creating collaboration, interaction, and forward thinking or any other favorable attribute. You could start by asking or finding out what the current culture is - especially at different levels. Does the leader talk about collaboration, interaction, and the future? How do their actions make these tangible? What about the leadership team and managers? Do they know those are critical attributes? Do they see those in action? If you can map the culture you have and the culture you want, and you have efficient processes to enable transformation with strong management support, then you can begin making the actions happen.

Holistic Performance Management: If you want collaboration, and build a forward thinking organization, each responsibility of each job within the organization should be evaluated based not on the impact of the individual or a department's goals, but on the overall impact of the enterprise. Building and maintaining trust, transparency, respect and envisioning workforce, collaboration and forward thinking are frequently retarded or prevented by how organizations define success on the individual or departmental performance level. Two critical areas that require focus are compensation and the definition of performance success. Set the relevant performance metrics to manage those who are roadblocks to collaboration. Everyone should get a fair chance upfront to join the team. However, if they are not positive influences, regardless of skills, they will bring the team down. Avoid silo thinking, individual goals typically are goals that are based on a subsection of a department's goals, or a division goal. The larger the organization, the more and more isolated these goals become when considered in the context of the organization's enterprise goals. Each one of departments measures on their own success. Often in these environments one finds that the department actually rewards or incentivizes behaviors that enhance the appearance of performance of the department at the expense of other parts of the organization.

Forward-looking organizations have visionary leadership, highly trustful, highly collaborative workforce, refined culture of innovation, well-tuned business processes, technologies, and capabilities, and they not only measure efficiency - doing things right, but also measure effectiveness - doing the right things via holistic view, they can strike the right balance of short-term quarterly result with long-term perspective, and they can not only keep things functioning, but engage employees and delight customers as well, take the long journey with the goal to become a digital master from “good to great,” and “built to last”!

Digitalization is like a flywheel, and Digital Masters are the one riding above it. Surf more Information about Digital Master:Digital Master Kindle Version Book Order URLDigital Master Book URLDigital Master Author URLDigital Master Video Clip on YouTubeDigital Master Fun QuizFollow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

How to Adjust IT Management to Embrace Agility

Agile sees the world through the lens of change, and put emphasis on three “I”s: Interaction, Incrementalism 
Agile sees the world through the lens of change, and put 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?  The correct level of management control needs to be in place - essentially governance, reporting and change management" - Does your PMO live in the Agile world as well? Where does the PMO sit when the management model moves away from control and change management; toward, influence and prioritization?
PMOs move from a "controlling / governance / reporting" role to a "predominantly governing / supporting" role. It depends on the type of PMO it is. The term PMO is more aligned with Waterfall Methodology and it doesn't mean you shouldn't call yourself as PMO in Agile Organization. PMO defines the services/software methodology, enhances the Agile maturity of the teams, defines Metrics and governs software development life cycle. There are a few flavours. PMO's should provide "bespoke" tools for agile environments-something tailored to be fit for purpose for your project. Bespoke means something built for a specific customer, that nobody else uses. The main alternative is "off the shelf." Dependency management is a great way of managing deliverables in an agile world where most people think plans aren't required because we're "agile." Change control is also a great management tool, even if it is light touch to suit agile practices. User stories can be vague and mean different things to different stakeholders.
Multifunctionality of PMO:  Agile is a mindset. The change in mindset means that you regard this as a strength rather than a weakness; it helps IT managers not to make decisions too early. Often, organizations get traps in "decided to be agile without fully understanding what it means" - If you are not going to be agile, you might need a traditional PMO. Just don't call it being agile. If you are going to be agile, then everybody concerned needs to learn what it means. Establishing and maintaining a strategic project office, as an advisory committee to the CXO, will help facilitate and maintain the corporate Agile transformation to a new level of efficiency, productivity, quality and commitment to excellence. PMO is more to do with the IT program/portfolio delivery. This provides overall direction, control and transparency in delivery of various projects. Whilst the agile methodology allows for quicker sprints of activity/development being carried out across multiple different projects. There is a desire to try and give a high level senior view of progress and delivery milestones beyond the sprint cycles. There is also the personal programme element of conflicting resources, cost. The following functions may be considered for initial implementation:-Report overall and individual project status, issues and risks to upper management-Advise senior management on strategic project initiatives -Provide coordination between projects, eliminate silos and ensure effective communication-Provide mentoring, coaching and training in project management and methodologies- Allocate resources between projects- Implement and manage Best Practices and Lessons Learned databases to ensure the effectiveness of the program
PMO needs to adapt to the velocity and continuous delivery of Agile.The typical PMO may need to go through a transformation from a group supporting the PM and Project Executives to control the development and delivery process, to one supporting the whole delivery team to deliver through self organizing and working transparently. Agile development is characterized by frequent rapid delivery of useable software by self-organizing teams with regular adaptation to change. Working software is the principal measure of progress; and increased throughput (velocity), by reduction of bottlenecks, is the primary measure of efficiency. Such methods are not very conducive to authoritarian control by the standard PMO model. Currently many PMOs believe that Agile is a blip on the process radar that will someday go away. Agile isn’t going anywhere, mainly because customers love frequent deliveries (call it the Amazon conundrum). PMOs need to understand the Agile methods being used in their company, and manage strategic processes and decisions accordingly. Somebody’s got to be the agility leader; it won’t be the Agile Practitioner who has a manifesto and usually productivity metrics to back up their increase in productivity and client satisfaction. The successful PMO will be the one that understands the difference between a project schedule and an Agile roadmap, osmotic communication, and minimal documentation vs. maximum invisible documentation.
The PMO functions, regardless of the models are almost all challenged when dealing with an Agile project. However, there is still a role to play on quite a number of these functions. The PMO should be there to ensure the correct level of management control is in place. Essentially governance, reporting and change management. Processes should be developed to suit the agile environment and help inform decisions, not hamper delivery with process and documentation.
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How to Mentor Human Side of Business via Change Management

Change for all of us is inevitable, some of us get it quicker than others. So the challenge is for organizations to recognize who their people are and where these types can contribute to the business success and feel valued along the way. What’re the psychology behind the change? What would be a good way to empower change capabilities? And what are the principles to manage change? And how to mentor human side of business via Change Management?

A clear vision for the change needs to be established and then shared with the objective of getting people to sign up to it. One way to do this is to seek their active involvement so as to establish common goals and objectives, and hopefully support. Seemingly irrational behavior is mostly rooted in rationality. For some people change is easier than for others. But more importantly, you could learn from these people by going into discussion with them. One of the main reasons that so many change projects are not very successful is resistance and more in particular passive or hidden resistance of people who say yes, but think no and execute at 50% capacity instead of 150%; when people are enthusiastic and involved the output grows exponentially and vice versa.
You have to understand the pressure for change and whether it's desired or not. Some change might be driven by regulation, and therefore you have no other option than to comply. Overall though, it's important that the change initiative has senior sponsor support, otherwise the initiative will go to the bottom of the pile. Change managers need to very strongly identify with the project and its outcome and are often under enormous time pressure, and therefore they do not always have enough time or project margin to deal with negative voices as they can pose a serious roadblock. The measuring of resistance, even anonymous, is not always reliable as people who do not agree also tend to distrust this process and give socially acceptable responses. It is also important to recognize that change takes time and if time is against you, an additional stress factor is added to the whole process. There are some processes (like involvement, engagement, etc), if done effectively, generally have beneficial impacts on most people. But even in these cases there will be individual variability. Communication in a traditional, hierarchical, bureaucratic organization will only go so far no matter how well it is done. Fundamental structural and cultural change is critical in most cases.
Change Management is about mentoring the human side of the business through profound, unsettling change. In combination, the ideas tell the worker to, as a way to contribute to improving the business, take a positive-oriented initiative in crafting a good business case for their sticking around. If top management truly believes that their personnel are the true measure of their company's worth, then they'll hopefully do their utmost to make sure those personnel are educated, accepting and eventually invested in that change themselves. That means extensive training for HR itself, programs and policies to help all users learn what's needed, rewards for adopting the change and remediation programs to combat recidivism. And the best way for embracing a change tolerant environment is the employee who has been through it, it thriving and wants to see their peers thrive as well. Ultimately, you can only put the benefits of the new system in front of that group, give them the best tools possible including training / coaching, and keep evaluating and remediating their progress. So the right thing to do is:- Proactively communication: Very proactively communicate that it is normal for big changes to "not fit all" and to remind everyone that change is strategic and strategy is how the organization functions.- Getting feedback: Promote a "presumption of value" by asking "employees who don't see a fit" to volunteer their idea of what it is aside from the change that they think they "should" accomplish through.-Objective review: State that the nature of change is a key to business growth and always needs objective review, so a good option is to join teams that help measure the change for its risks and benefits.
Change Management = the human side of change!Change Management has a very wide scope and is a relatively new area of expertise. It needs to focus on coordination and facilitation, not bullying and forcing, follow the right set of principles and take the best practices.


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Three Aspects in Building a Digital Workplace

Digital workplaces are about building an environment with abundance of information and culture of innovation, to put people at the center of business, and both engage employees and delight customers. There are still many questions haunting around about:  Is it possible to have an effective digital workplace where the culture is more command and control, where the chosen solutions simply mirror / reinforce the way of working within that hierarchy, but do so very well? Or is it a prerequisite of an effective Digital Workforce to have that more open culture, and so "traditional" organizations are facing a culture change task alongside development of a more effective Digital Workforce, and in fact this is more a sustainable culture for them anyway? And could you be imposing the current values of collaboration and openness on an effective Digital Workforce, and discounting organizations who aren't making progress in developing their own Digital Workforce? When setting the workplace policy to enforce digital management, Are you thinking of guidelines for people? Do you have a basic business conduct policy that people sign when they join?
The most effective digital workplace is one where collaboration and sharing is the norm. The least effective culture at fostering this is traditional command and control environments. So digital technology such as enterprise social computing could be effective tools to breakdown  a hierarchical culture, and businesses have to figure out a more efficient way of bringing people together to follow a vision and "lead from the top." Is it possible to have a more “closed” organization successfully pursuing the Digital Workforce vision? Generally speaking, where you find an effective Digital Workplace initiative, regardless of the organization, you will also find some similarities in culture (open, visionary leadership, encourage an element of experimentation). To be most effective, information has to flow more freely, hence the issue with command and control management is that it stifles fluidity and agility due to its hierarchical structure or overly rigid processes.
At a truly digital workplace, people are climbing the social ladder more proactively, to complement the traditionally corporate ladder. We all know, the traditional career ladder is so narrow, and often cause people to compete unprofessionally. At digital workplace, talent people are encouraged to discover their own purpose and strength, well aligning with business purpose, and be equipped with a growth mind, this is the degree to which an innovation is perceived as being consistent with the values, an idea that is incompatible with their values, norms or practices will not be adopted as rapidly as an innovation that is compatible. One of the biggest obstacles to a successful digital workplace is that people (not just senior management but all employees) just don't see the value or importance of contributing digital content, posting or responding to questions, online discussions, writing articles, making videos, blogs, collaborating online or even simply just updating their own profiles. People are happy enough to 'lurk' or view content but when it comes to actually creating something, it's a real battle in many organizations to convince employees to do this. But to inspire thought leadership and encourage brainstorming the new ideas, employees need to climb up the digital ladder, from reading through, to commenting, and producing the digital content and building a professional brand which foster corporate brand as well.
The purpose of setting digital workplace policy is to harness cross-functional communication and collaboration, also enforcing information GRC. Because communication across the business is both a reflection of the culture and influences it. This is the same for a digital workplace - the tools made available, what is easiest to use, the options provided to help people talk, connect, share - all reflect and influence the culture of the workplace. It’s important in findings into common cultural characteristics associated with technology adoption and use, and early indications seem to show that cultures that have strong vision and leadership, are outward looking rather than insular, are willing to accept a degree of risk and experimentation, etc are those who are more likely to experience more successful adoption of new technology.
A digital workplace encompasses so much that it's hard to isolate it from other dimensions of the enterprise. And there is no such magic formula to fit in every situation, but overall speaking, digital organizations are all about people centricity, empathy, innovation, agility and high level business maturity.

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An Aesthetic Mind

According to the dictionary: Aesthetics is the philosophical theory or set of principles governing the idea of beauty at a given time and place. It is relating to the philosophy and science of aesthetics, concerned with the study of the mind and emotions in relation to the sense of beauty, relating to, involving, or concerned with pure emotion and sensation as opposed to pure intellectuality. Can Aesthetics be condensed into such a formula as simple as design = aesthetics + functionality...

Aesthetics is an important principle for doing designs. Where can you add or subtract from aesthetics, or even multiply, to make Design - being functionality such a solid concept when designing something, you must keep with the "regular" or "current" aesthetics! Even so,  in some aspect or detail, you can never detach from your own influences, visual culture, and in an unconscious level, you may be limiting the process of creation and the very response to the problem you are trying to solve. It is the subjectivity of art…A design guru who can predict what fashion or design trend will do, and, therefore, determine what will be considered aesthetically pleasing tomorrow rather than today! First - aesthetics as trends in public taste. Second - exposure to designed environment as a direct influence on those trends!
The golden ratio is 1:1.618 which captures the certain pattern of nature beauty. It occurs in nature everywhere from nautilus shells to sunflower seeds. It was used in architecture long before the Greeks though it may not have been specifically designed. So at a certain level, will eventually aesthetics becomes globally generalized. Neuroscientists try to find if the human brain is "hard wired" to respond to something in a positive way. Furthermore, we can change the structure of our brain by repeated exposure to similar objects. Meaning that indeed through the internet, each individual get more and more exposed to the same stimuli eventually resulting in similar notions of aesthetics. However, this process will take a long time due to a large number of stimuli available!
Beauty is in the beholder's eyes. Is beauty only about people? Isn't Nature beautiful too? Isn't Universe beautiful too? Isn't animal kingdom beautiful too? Aren't fauna and flora beautiful too? Isn't our planet Earth beautiful too? Isn't our Sun beautiful too. Beauty can not be defined it is visual+emotional. The definition will differ from person to person as it is in your heart. In this case, heart rules brain.  If you see beauty with your judgement comes into play. What is beautiful for you now is not there when someone has changed the opinion of that person's character that may make the same person ugly or not so beautiful any more. Beauty that is built on one's character is stable and is forever. Beauty is reflected in the expression of joy that overflows with gratitude abundant to the NATURE..No one can completely define what beauty is, beauty is such a wonderful world where it consists of appreciations, attractions, many more, it depends on individual soul where identification of beauty is a must.
Business is moving up the maturity from functioning to firm to delight; aesthetics is an important principle for either product design or business innovation. Though it is subjective in some degree, still, it’s possible to have some common criteria such as golden ratio to wow customers or delight audience.
Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it. ConfuciusFollow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

The Tale of Data Cleansing

Every forward-looking organization has its data analytics agenda. However, the challenge of cleansing data remains on hand though you have more efficient tools now helping out with that. Are you collecting good data and are you collecting data wisely? Are you trying to resolve problems much earlier in the ecosystem, and then pushes it further? Are you following the Data Governance and doing the due diligence? What are your tales of data cleansing?
The best data-driven organizations focus relentlessly on keeping their data clean. Cleaning the data is often the most difficult and time-consuming part of data science. Data cleansing, transformation and sorting are vital in the data world, because it helps put things in perspective for business to read between the lines with accuracy and clarity of information that is needed for making effective decisions. "Data" is scattered, and needs cleansing and improvement. This can be a major challenge at times depending on the size of the data.  '5 Whys' can still apply to big data. Data Cleansing has always been a challenge. So it’s important to know your business, know your data. It is best to solve the problem as early on as possible at the source that would be more ideal, but the reality is different.
Easy to use systems and automation are revolutionizing the way Big Data is being used. Implementing software to analyze data should make it easier to interpret results and help improve processes. This can help eliminate the struggles in dealing with too much data! However, manual data cleanup is, unfortunately, a necessary evil for some. Great advocacy for smart solutions. Data cleansing has been an issue for IT since data was collected. Without Hadoop and other tools, some data would be forever lost! With Hadoop or any other new technology, this is still a challenge. Though Hadoop has provided a platform where now data can be collected more rapidly and looked at.
The industry is changing, and most tools seem to be online SaaS. The old adage "garbage in garbage out" still holds true. Collecting data and trying to make sense of it later to meet your needs should not be the approach. Understand your data needs, remove redundancy, require referential integrity, ensure synchronization / timing and collect your data more responsibly. When trying to sort through unstructured data, build your data rules to catch possible false, positives and use to further understand your data and tighten your data rules. An enterprise data hub is a powerful new platform. In the future, most enterprise data will land first in an enterprise data hub, and increasingly it will stay there. In the near term, an enterprise data hub delivers unprecedented flexibility to comprehensively and economically analyze and process data in new ways. Organizations that deploy an enterprise data hub alongside their existing infrastructure will continue to lead in the world of modern data.
When you clean up data, you also change it. So, it's important to have an audit trail to show what was done.There is a notion that poor quality data is a result of broken business processes, so when you start your investigations, are you considering the scope of the business process, its architectural components and the associated information lifecycle across this, or just the focal point where poor quality data manifests itself? Uses an artificial intelligence platform to intelligently identify, analyze, categorize and classify sensitive and useful information contained within an organization’s Dark Data and enable management in place of the content. This only has to do with how you save historical versions of data that arrives in your system. It also has to do with how the system is sourcing the data. If the system sources internal data from "views" or interpretive extracts, then already you've lost traceability. For audibility and traceability, it is important to store historical snapshots of the facts in a Hadoop-based system, to accomplish this task - ensuring "re-constitution of the actual source system for a given point in time."
Messy internal data is due to a lack of proper data governance. Governance, but where to start? Good governance is as essential as storing raw data. Very important to know who, where, and what is accessing the data and what they are doing to it to make changes. Then, knowing the before and after pictures of the changes are all part of the governance plan. It’s not only important to be able to categorize your data, but also to be aware of the dangers of data with regards to legal and regulatory risk, intelligence risk, and reputation risk. Everybody knows that and not a single organization has solved it since the beginning of times. Trying to collect the data exactly as it 'should' be used/organized now and in the future is a bit difficult. Data governance at the point of impact produces the data set in a clean (and often disposable) view of the data. Working to keep all data everywhere clean is impossible given the rate of change and diversity of our relevant data sources and streams. And when you clean up data, you also change it. So, it's important to have an audit trail to show what was done. There are many analytical tools that can help solve this, but maybe not at 100% accuracy. It will only improve, but not make it entirely better.
Data cleaning and data management has a deep business purpose to turning data into information, the business side of making sense of the raw data, adding value and augmenting business systems. This is where the organizations that understand this true nature will really begin to see huge value gains. In short, Data Quality doesn't mean you pursue the perfect data, but the good enough data being transformed into information, business insight, and human wisdom.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu

The Digital Core of “Future of CIO”

The Blog is a dynamic book flow with your thought. It's not about writing, but about conveying the vision.
 The blog is a dynamic book flowing with your thought; growing through your dedication; sharing your knowledge; conveying your wisdom, and making influence through touching the hearts and connecting the minds across the globe. The pen is more powerful than the sword!
“Future of CIO” Blog has reached more than 1 million pageviews worldwide, with almost 2100 blog posting, hope the readers all over the world enjoy such knowledge sharing and content richness. Among 50+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. blog posting, here are a set of featured “Future of CIO” Blog categories, to highlight the digital core of this blog.
The Digital Core of “Future of CIO” 1.  Digitalization/Digital Master Tuning (250+ Blogs): Digital Master - Debunk the Myths of  Enterprise Digital Maturity was published in Jan. 2015, it is the book to envision the multi- dimensional impact that digital philosophy, technology, and methodology will have on the future of business and human society. It received overall great feedback in the IT community and beyond. After publishing, I also wrote more than 100+ blogs listed in the Digital Master Tuning category to continue advocating the best principles and the next practices to run a “Digital Master” - The organization that has rich digital insight and high level digital capability and maturity, not only to initiate digital innovation, but also to drive enterprise - wide digital transformation. Digitalization is the other blog category which strengthens the digital CORE, with about 150 postings to brainstorm digital leadership/management principles and practices.
2. IT Transformation/  Performance / Branding/ Practices/ Project Management (500+ Blogs): Future of IT is a “digital transformer,” a strategy catalyst, and an innovation engine for businesses across sector; it has to be transformed from a cost center to value creator; from an “order taker” to an “order shaker”; from “reactive to proactive” mode; from “the weakest link” to “the super glue”; from the “industrial mode” to the digital mode (Bimodal). And fundamentally, Information Management is all about having the right people to have the right information to make right decisions at the right time.
3. Digital Strategy /IT Strategy/Execution/System Wisdom (300 Blogs): With increasing speed of digitalization, Digital strategy, IT strategy are converging into corporate strategy. Digital strategy and execution are no longer linear steps, but a dynamic continuum. Systems Thinking (the way to see the forest for the tree) has become a mainstream thought process to craft a good strategy and also execute it smoothly. Through more than 300+ debates, we put emphasis on how to leverage Systems Thinking in bridging strategy and execution; how to craft an agile strategy; what’re the major challenges in executing strategy, and how to overcome them? etc.
4.  Digital Change Management /Culture Master(300+blogs): Digital is the age of Change, and the speed of Change is increasing. Culture eats strategy for breakfast. What’s your business culture expression? Culture management is an interdependent ecosystem that includes many business factors. And Change Management and culture management go hand in hand. The goal of Change Management is always to make improvement or innovations happen, and it's a progressive journey to keep business move forward. Change is inevitable, but more than two-thirds of change effort fail to achieve the expected results. The change shouldn't be treated as a singular occurrence when it is an ongoing, continued process and dynamic capability within the organization.
5. Digital Leadership (250+Blogs): The digital world today is much more complicated and that requires an ability to juggle multiple and competing demands and clear the vision under cloudy climate and uncertain circumstances. Leadership is first as an advanced mindset, then as a clarified vision and an exemplary behavior. Leadership is about FUTURE! Leadership is about CHANGE. Leadership is about FOCUS. It is about providing direction, both for oneself and others. It is a basic human ability to inspire self and others to look beyond limitations and make continuous improvement. Leadership is the art of persuasion and the science of disciplines; it’s about the inspiration and motivation; innovation and progression. By choosing to lead, you must have a vision and intention for making that choice, also strike the right balance to run, grow and transform your business seamlessly.
6. Talent Management (200+ Blogs): Digital is the era of people centricitty. People are the most invaluable asset in any organization anytime and anywhere. However, the traditional talent management treat people more as cost or resource, less as an asset or capital investment; performance management approaches more focus on measuring behaviors and quantitative result, with ignorance of qualitative assessment about character, mindsets, talent potential, multidimensional intelligence and culture effect. Talent competency is the digital lenses through which people managers ought to assess and manage talent in more strategic, analytical and creative way.
7. Digitizing Boardroom / GRC (130+Blogs): Corporate Board is one of the most significant governance bodies in modern businesses. Generally speaking, Boards have a couple of main functions such as strategy oversight (input, review, etc), governance practices (monitoring, risk management), service (providing advice & support to executives), and resource provision (opening their networks etc.). In this series of digitizing boardroom/GRC blogs, we intend to open the professional debates on how to bring wisdom, ‘deep common sense,’ balance, improved strategic thinking, digital technology and creativity to the boardroom, focus on shareholder and stakeholder communications, practicing better governance, better oversight, multi-dimensional value management, and better risk management with strong discipline and self-assessment.
8. Agile/Business Agility (150+ Blogs):  Agile Shift is a significant step in digital transformation. Many forward-looking organizations are moving from doing Agile to being agile, scale the agile philosophy, methodology and practices to run the business as an Agile innovator. Being agile" considers the entire enterprise, not just the project. "Being agile" is based on systematic principles - the discipline of seeing wholes, which facilitates the rapid creation of business value. "Being agile" is dependent on the appropriate amount of up-front architecture. "Being agile" acknowledges and encourages the dynamics and emergent properties of the project, the project team, and the environment; and business level agile transformation is a continuous journey. And being agile is a critical step in digital transformation.
9. Digital Gaps/Complexity/Capabilities: Digital organizations become more complex due to the accelerating speed of changes; non-linear connectivity, information explosion and hybrid nature of organizational structure. There are business strategy-execution gaps, Business-IT communication gaps, and talent gaps existing at people’s mindsets, the organizational culture, the business processes and capabilities, or the measurement & tools, etc. After identifying business gaps, organizations need to build a set of digital capabilities such as Change capability, agility and innovation, to build long term competency.
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

Digital Leadership as a Continuous Learning & Delivery Journey

With the fast pace of changes and abundance of information, digital leadership is no longer just a status quo with any static credential, but a journey of continuous learning and continuous delivery. Do you have what it takes, and are you determined to grow your knowledge?
We should never stand still and need to practice our learning much like doing exercise periodically.  All of us have talent, so build on the talent you have, seek to be apart from the crowd and set your own bar, preparation builds positive outcomes, practice daily and set demanding goals, remain coachable, do not let ego drive the outcome, your personal character will in the end drive your performances, your relationships, your accountabilities, and enable a team's attitude to all you do each day.
Digital leaders is a lifelong learner with a thirst for knowledge. The 'professional development’ is based on both the learning attitude and methodologies. You need to both learn from similar-minded mentors and the opposite minds as well: to read, listen and associate with those who think and act the way you want to be and share the learning.. People also learn most effectively through opposites. If you have experienced first hand the impact of mismanagement, you will be less likely to make those mistakes yourself especially if you take advantage of the experience to studiously analyze where it is failing and why. Conversely when you have a great manager you are less likely to analyze that carefully because you're just happy in the moment. In any case, learning is always a journey rather than a destination and this is one "training" where you get paid to learn about yourself rather than paying for the privilege. As always, it’s all about perspective.
Learning from hard lessons or bitter life experience. While suffocation is not the ideal environment, as a professional, we can learn to use every negative situation to our advantage. Working through this kind of situation can teach us a lot about ourselves and build our confidence rather than breaking it down. Learning from other people’s experience as well. Watch great leaders around you and that doesn't necessarily mean high profile leaders.Leadership has a lot to do with confidence and experiences are a very powerful teacher.
Build a culture of learning in the organization: Leaders not only learn themselves, but also advocate a culture of learning. They need to be innovative and really consider where there is value and real learning within an organization. Coach, mentoring, on the job hands on experience are the best forms of learning. Shift the focus from formal learning and look more to placing structure around the informal learning. It doesn’t mean the formal learning programs are not worth pursuing, just that the greater value add training is probably in other areas. Make your employees aware that this is the approach you are taking. It is about recognizing the experience you have in the organizations and having a mind shift about what is valuable. Every new situation presents a unique set of problems to solve, requiring a different approach no matter how slight from other situations. There is no doubt that leaders or managers use some common processes that are transferable across many situations, but taking a creative approach to dealing with this issue is helpful.
From business perspective, organizations not only need good managers to take care of today’s business; but also have to grow the future leaders to leapfrog their companies for long term prosperity. Leadership development has to be integrated with all other policies and procedures, also create a working environment in which the growth minds get encouraged, innovations get inspired. positive energy flows around, both individuals and organization as a whole practice autonomy, discover purpose, and achieve its higher level maturity.
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Can Agile Fail

At its core, agile is a collective mindset, the culture thing. “Agile” as a mindset can't fail - because it is essentially a philosophy defined by a very short manifesto. If being agile is an ultimate goal you are going to achieve, then doing agile is the intermediate step for continuous delivery. And Agile is failing sometimes, why, and how to learn from it?


Agile is not a process you can implement but rather a change of culture. It sometimes fails because this is really difficult to nurture and companies don't realize benefits quickly enough. It can also fail when a process such as Scrum is implemented without an understanding of the Agile values. In the context of moving from traditional (waterfall-like) to agile, failure happens always due to poor management: middle managers resisting to change and serious lack of commitment from top management. This results in bad implementation of agility and epic fails.  Regardless of the process, agile or not, to succeed in Agile, the entire organization has to be aligned. Agile is not a cure all and nothing in life is ever guaranteed. Agile is a way of delivery, it's not meant for solving problems and is not a shortcut to delivery either. Failure happens on any delivery model. At the end the right of team's skills and the right collaboration and alignment of talent professionals with team increases the possibility of success.
Agile doesn't fail, people do. They do so for all sorts of reasons. Nobody is perfect. As a result, there is no perfect score when it comes to project success. What is important is that the chances of scoring high are improved with agile if the people are trained, properly led, directed, motivated and marshalled towards achievable goals. Lots of meaning in a few words. One more reason for Agile to fail can be team members taking advantage of the process. Few interested people at the engineering level tend to try to implement, but don't really master things. They keep old process and add some agility flavour, because you know: "we need to change everything but not too much...", and they soon messed up. At the end nobody at the top management level wants to hear about agility anymore. Since Agile believes in trust, transparency and team commitment, exploitation of any of the three facets can and will bring a project to failure. Continuous improvement which means, changing your process and even making up new stuff to address observed problems is, so fundamental to agility. But rigidly following a set process (like Scrum) is a recipe for failure. So, the problem is neither people who think their process is "better" or deviation from a "set" of process. The problem is not knowing enough to assess what is actually better, and having a rigid process that's developed by people outside the team. Only the team can decide what's "better" for it, and the team's decision should be over any by-the-book rigid process created by outsiders.
Risk awareness and risk management: Software Development work inherently has "Unknown unknowns". There's always a risk that in among these will be something that causes the project to 'fail.. So even if you do everything right, there's still a risk of failure. And some of the teams who think they are "Agile" will not know how to do everything right. For them, the risk is greater, proportional to their level of ignorance. So there are two things you can do; 1) choose the level of risk that you want to work with; tame low-risk projects that are not much more than construction; challenging development projects where there is a real risk of failure; research projects where "success" in the conventional meaning for development work is very unlikely, but the chance of finding something really valuable is worth the risk. And 2) understand, in depth, the business, the mindset and the practices of modern software development.
Fail fast and fail forward. . Agile approaches can't guarantee you project will succeed either - however it can help you to "fail early" and minimize the cost, effort and waste involved. it's not Agile that is failing the business, just the people in the business failing to be Agile. So whether the project success or failure there will be transformational benefits to the team and those benefits can be stepping stones to build an agile organization. So instead calling failure, you can claim improvements needed, and will happen over the time and this will boost up team energy to move on and scale up. As a team, however, you can fail if :- you fail to produce valuable software for the clients- you obsess about processes and tools while ignoring individuals and interactions- you resent change, and want to stick to the (beautiful) plan- you ignore the "business people" in the organization- you fail to communicate effectively, and become stressed and angry as a result- you focus on what you want to do, not what the client needs- you work at a pace or with too much intensity - you ignore simple solutions in favour of more technically interesting complex ones-you can fail to be honest when we reflect on what we need to do to improve
"Agile is a silver mirror, not silver bullet," you can use it to identify behaviours you need to change, but making those changes, and making them stick is up to you. Being Agile is about continuous improvement. And this implies continuous change.
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How to Manage Multi-Generational Workforce Effectively

Harnessing the different experiences, perspectives and ideas of people from across multiple generations has enormous potential.
There is poor communication between generations within many organizations, which is a growing problem. The mindsets and priorities of each generation are different. Career development means something different to each group segment, and this becomes problematic when you have a company or organization with culture and values that do not reflect the most contemporary views. Companies that learn how to bridge this gap effectively will have many advantages. You must not stereotype based on a generation. But what are the principles and practices to manage today’s multigenerational workplace effectively?

Mind Shift: Judgment or a closed mindset is one of the biggest challenges of the human race. It's not a skills or education issue rather a mindset across the table that are root causes of many human problems.With the knowledge and the information on how to influence change --change can happen. Different generation groups don't all want the same thing. People's attitudes towards life, people, work, etc., are all influenced by what era they grew up in. Generations grow up with different beliefs and perspectives. The conditions of the economy, the state of the world, technology, and social trends all impact the overall behavior of the generation. A multi-generational team may have some challenges when it comes to agreeing from time to time due to the different generations they grew up in. Once you understand how they develop behaviours, unconscious biases, the role of childhood, early adulthood and early careers you can understand why certain behaviours (often clustered by age/generations) frustrate, annoy, confuse or stress you, you are then able to accurately interpret your observations of others, choose the most appropriate interaction or intervention and participate in the labour force, lead others, engage with people in the community with less stress and with much fewer resources. As employers, you need to recognize these differences, or people will not feel "heard." If they are not being valued for being unique or worthy at some level, you will lose them to someone else who does. Perhaps one of the best changes a company can make it provide a space, where learning can go on between people to connect, problem solve and learn. This is what the youth want, more than anything. Once you have a blend of knowledge and wisdom, they can put that into action, where the mentor can observe or get feedback on the experience of the mentee.

Collaboration: Leaders need to stress that they need to have inter-generational collaboration. Getting different generations to work together is part of team building. This is important to any enterprise because their clients and customers will also come from diverse age groups. The main theme in business now is collaboration. Knowledge and experience from different perspectives are powerful if utilized in the right manner. All generations need to realize they can learn from each other, instead of assuming they each know everything they need to know to run a successful business. Collaboration is critical for team building and reaching organizational goals. However, the process must be taught to all members. In inter-generational organizations, the behaviors are so varied; unless they each understand the company's vision, mission, value and buy into them, collaboration and higher performance is usually difficult and challenging. Working together harmoniously by respecting what each brings, ideally of course works for the overall goals of the company as well as individuals are crucial for business's long-term prosperity.

Inclusiveness: Organizations, managers and team leaders that leverage generational diversity will be successful. Those that divide people into groups by age or try to apply a new set of boxes to the ever-diversifying workforce will miss out! The biggest challenge for the team leader or manager is to understand each individual and recognize them for who they are and what they have to offer, and what they bring to the table. The individuals are shaped by so many other factors. Generalization is a slippery slope though multiple studies have shown that generational differences in values and behaviors do exist. For example, baby boomer generation needs to abandon their command and control approach to management and to make collaboration a priority. Changing your leadership style is not easy but necessary. Or the older generations believe they know best based on past experiences and technologies, so when the younger generations wish to try what could not be done in the past, they are not given the support, even though the technology has gone from a full room of computers, to the palm of your hand operation. In fact that different ages and worldviews learn differently and through different media and methods. All groups remain relatively intolerant of the other's way of communicating and learning.  If we are to be successful in the transition we all need to be more open to other's way of accomplishing common purposes. We all need a good dose of "both/and" instead of "either/or" if we are to learn and grow.

Innovation: It is a major advantage when cross-generational and cross-cultural workforce comes to brainstorming for ideas, thoughts, and ways to get creative. Each team player comes from a different background and wants to see the same outcome for their team, the fun part of this all is figuring out how one person gets from point A to point B in comparison to their colleagues. The biggest challenge is understanding what's important to each of those generations, from an employment standpoint, and try to incorporate strategies that will keep each generation engaged. The Millennials are a generation that is concerned about flexibility and social media, so trying to find ways to keep them engaged while offering employment programs that will allow them to learn new things. All four generations have their values to contribute to any organization, and they all have a positive attitude and the organization has a specific value based work culture. The oldest generation contributes to values, experience and practical exposure to all possible situations, and all these attributes can be learned from by the other generations given more opportunities to pass them on. Their personalities are tall, and their skills are unparalleled and they are the foundation and faith of organization. High in patience and low in enthusiasm, as such, the older generations might not be drivers of innovation, but they are the holders of institutional knowledge that can serve as the foundation for innovation. Finding how to keep them all motivated and on a mission is the biggest challenge as they might see each other as antagonistic and simply not on the same page.

Harnessing the different experiences, perspectives and ideas of people from across multiple generations has enormous potential. For instance, there are opportunities for the involvement of all generations in shaping both the employer brand and customer propositions in order to reach a much wider audience. Can your Change Management help achieve such organizational harmony? In order for change to be effective, it must come from the top down and be implemented at that level. Then the leadership at all levels must be expected to follow suit all the way down to the front line employee. The key is to follow through accountability from all levels within the organization, including top management. Clear and effective communication regarding the change with the expectation it will be implemented. All employees respect management when they are consistent and will perform better under those conditions. It's the time to harness the strengths of each generation! It starts with respect. Together only we will succeed.











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