Pearl Zhu's Blog, page 1439
May 1, 2015
Happiness is a State of Mind
Happiness is personal, but also universal, sometimes bigger than self.
Many perhaps think happiness comes from heart: the joyful moment to cheer you up or the enchanting time to touch your soul. Happiness, according to psychologists, is a state of one's mind.
Happiness is a state of mind where one hunts for pastures even in a desert. You would make time worthy if you were to ask an intelligent question why feel happy at certain instances or moments and why not at other times? It is a necessity to know about oneself, about one's own individual personality, so as to think with clarity in life. It’s the moment when one looks at the flowers of roses with ignoring the thorns underneath it. And it's the journey to pursue happiness, not just a destination.
Happiness is the state of mind to find meanings. One of most people’s missions in life–whether they realize it or not – is to find meaning. Break free is true happiness. it breaks the lower boundaries to achieve something of the higher order. It is a connect for a larger purpose. Feeling that life is meaningful is important because:
(1) People who feel life is meaningful are more likely to be in both good psychological and good physical health.
(2) People who feel life isn't meaningful are more likely to be depressed or feel empty inside.
(3) Along with feeling like we belong, coherence in our environment also promotes meaning. When we experience things that don’t make sense, we feel life has less meaning.
The happiness goes beyond mind. You can experience life as a human only through your senses. And senses are directly connected to mind where the stimuli is sent. When happiness becomes a state of mind, and then one is able to let natural emotions arise based on the triggers and handles them to get back to the happier state, it is becoming normal. People sometimes confuse pleasure with happiness. They always seek out pleasure, and in the process try to seek out happiness too. But the thoughts and feelings are generated from within, based on your deep inner impressions. It can only be picked up to a certain extent at the surface, to soothe your mind, but cannot be eradicated. And there’s something called inner happiness which is much more stable in one’s personality, and free from worldly exuberance.
You don't go looking for happiness following other’s path. You use this flow of happiness from inside to make moments a lot lighter. From where this comes, each one has to follow one's own path to get in touch with the source. Nothing is wrong with liking money. Money gives us a great quality of life. But it’s not the only thing worth pursuing to bring you happiness, and should not allow it to override humanitarian considerations. Happiness means different things to the different people at the particular moment of their life. Happiness does not necessarily mean absence of sadness, but sadness is definitely absence of happiness. Happiness as a human emotion is all around us, but it depends on each individual as to what he or she consider happiness to be. It is purely personal for everybody to consider what they think happiness is. Happiness cannot be an absence of sadness any more than light can be an absence of darkness. Happiness is a very positive emotion that arises out of any manner of positive stroke that is given to us. It could be appreciation, support, money, anything that improves our state of well being.
Happiness can be as simple as tasting a drop of water, or as heavy as lifting a mountain. Happiness is personal, but also universal, sometimes bigger than self. Happiness is not simple, because that needs a mind of wisdom to consider all equal. Happiness is the fulfillment in life of personally real needs and is the pursuit in life of personally real inspirations. “Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.” ~Nathaniel Hawthorne
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
Many perhaps think happiness comes from heart: the joyful moment to cheer you up or the enchanting time to touch your soul. Happiness, according to psychologists, is a state of one's mind.
Happiness is a state of mind where one hunts for pastures even in a desert. You would make time worthy if you were to ask an intelligent question why feel happy at certain instances or moments and why not at other times? It is a necessity to know about oneself, about one's own individual personality, so as to think with clarity in life. It’s the moment when one looks at the flowers of roses with ignoring the thorns underneath it. And it's the journey to pursue happiness, not just a destination.
Happiness is the state of mind to find meanings. One of most people’s missions in life–whether they realize it or not – is to find meaning. Break free is true happiness. it breaks the lower boundaries to achieve something of the higher order. It is a connect for a larger purpose. Feeling that life is meaningful is important because:
(1) People who feel life is meaningful are more likely to be in both good psychological and good physical health.
(2) People who feel life isn't meaningful are more likely to be depressed or feel empty inside.
(3) Along with feeling like we belong, coherence in our environment also promotes meaning. When we experience things that don’t make sense, we feel life has less meaning.
The happiness goes beyond mind. You can experience life as a human only through your senses. And senses are directly connected to mind where the stimuli is sent. When happiness becomes a state of mind, and then one is able to let natural emotions arise based on the triggers and handles them to get back to the happier state, it is becoming normal. People sometimes confuse pleasure with happiness. They always seek out pleasure, and in the process try to seek out happiness too. But the thoughts and feelings are generated from within, based on your deep inner impressions. It can only be picked up to a certain extent at the surface, to soothe your mind, but cannot be eradicated. And there’s something called inner happiness which is much more stable in one’s personality, and free from worldly exuberance.
You don't go looking for happiness following other’s path. You use this flow of happiness from inside to make moments a lot lighter. From where this comes, each one has to follow one's own path to get in touch with the source. Nothing is wrong with liking money. Money gives us a great quality of life. But it’s not the only thing worth pursuing to bring you happiness, and should not allow it to override humanitarian considerations. Happiness means different things to the different people at the particular moment of their life. Happiness does not necessarily mean absence of sadness, but sadness is definitely absence of happiness. Happiness as a human emotion is all around us, but it depends on each individual as to what he or she consider happiness to be. It is purely personal for everybody to consider what they think happiness is. Happiness cannot be an absence of sadness any more than light can be an absence of darkness. Happiness is a very positive emotion that arises out of any manner of positive stroke that is given to us. It could be appreciation, support, money, anything that improves our state of well being.
Happiness can be as simple as tasting a drop of water, or as heavy as lifting a mountain. Happiness is personal, but also universal, sometimes bigger than self. Happiness is not simple, because that needs a mind of wisdom to consider all equal. Happiness is the fulfillment in life of personally real needs and is the pursuit in life of personally real inspirations. “Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.” ~Nathaniel Hawthorne
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
The Psychologies behind the Changes
You don't need to be a psychologist to manage change; but you need to understand psychological emotions behind changes.
Change is the only constant, the speed of change is accelerated. Organizations have to manage change effectively in order to implement their strategy cohesively. However, more than two thirds of change management fail to reach the expectation. Why do people resist to changes? Relevantly to the strategic context and its necessities, what limit is this "collective worker" able to reach? To what conditions? What would be a good way to empower change capabilities. What’re the psychology behind the change, and how do you manage change not as a one time project, but an ongoing capabilities?
Five domains of human experience: It would do good for Change practitioners to have a reasonably good understanding of neuroscience; since it does help understand people's responses to change. People respond in different ways to different situations, and some people perceive less risk when compared with others. The fear of consequences; the perception / response to consequences vary from person to person, and that's what makes change interesting and challenging. Hence, change practitioners need to have good critical thinking skills, high level of adaptability, communication and engagement skills. If look at changes via social neuroscience, you see that (1) People are naturally predispose to maximizing rewards and minimizing threats, (2) the part of the brain that are involved in organizing the “approaches” (perceptions/action/ response toward rewards) or the “withdrawal/retreat” (backing away action/response, from threats) in five domains of social (human) experience, namely: STATUS, CERTAINTY, AUTONOMY, RELATEDNESS, and FAIRNESS.
Life evolves and revolves around Hope, Fear and Expectations. It is natural in human nature to fertilize Fear of loss much more than the Happiness of gains. Fear bridges Hope and Expectations. We build ourselves and events in our life on Hope and predict positive Expectations. People change when four conditions are in place: "we understand it, we like it, we can act, and we want to act." People love change but fear loss. Take away the 'losses' (or perceived ones) and make people feel safe, they will do anything. The fear of change is common and rational. People do feel very uncomfortable and vulnerable in the face of "uncertainty" (their perception at any moment in time) - it is essentially this FEELING inside them that they are resisting - they do not want to experience it within themselves and so they push back on their own reality in the best way they know how. It is directly proportional to the perception of the potential impact and your ability to control the change. Fear is a ''natural'' reaction to risk existing in our imagination. Risk is the potential of losing something weighed against the potential of gaining something. Worry is all the hard work of working against the fear. The announcement of a change process causes a natural reaction (Fear) of losing something against the potential of gaining something ( Risk) and people Worry to allay the Fear and the cycle repeats until the potential of gaining exceeds the potential of losing. The effort converges toward persuading people to embrace or like what they do not naturally have spontaneous emotional tone with respect to situations or other people's actions; the self-help propaganda tries to stimulate people kindness, trust, benevolence and by utilizing the themes of nobleness and character building, manages their thoughts, or more correctly, have them to change their thought to conform to what is needed as potentially arbitrarily defined.
People likes to change, but do not wants to be changed and there is the difference. By nature we resist the changes, however, if we are part of it, is easier to shift to the new behavior. So the more transparent about a change effort, the less uncertainty (and consequently less fear) there will be about the effort. But that takes planning, decisive leadership, and the intestinal fortitude to be honest with people when the truth might not be pleasant to deliver. Too often than not, the hard choices are kicked down the road and when that happens, the "change effort" becomes a Petri dish that breeds angst, concern, cynicism, and contempt. People resist change mostly because they have experienced disasters around previous efforts that they do not trust their leaders. Poor change experiences (unclear expectations, lack of compelling rationale, poorly designed implementation plan, unworkable designs created in corporate, changes that have stopped in the middle) all have created extra work and disruption for little or no gain. They hate thus resist being forced into senseless or avoidable sacrifices, having to restructure based on a shallow or ill-defined problems or transform without their assent, being cheated and being treated as objects.
Besides sound strategy, hard process and psychological understanding about people’s emotions, an important “soft” factor is TRUST: When you have the trust of your people, they will express their needs and wants for themselves and their job. This involvement and collaboration then opens a door for them to accept the change.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
Change is the only constant, the speed of change is accelerated. Organizations have to manage change effectively in order to implement their strategy cohesively. However, more than two thirds of change management fail to reach the expectation. Why do people resist to changes? Relevantly to the strategic context and its necessities, what limit is this "collective worker" able to reach? To what conditions? What would be a good way to empower change capabilities. What’re the psychology behind the change, and how do you manage change not as a one time project, but an ongoing capabilities?
Five domains of human experience: It would do good for Change practitioners to have a reasonably good understanding of neuroscience; since it does help understand people's responses to change. People respond in different ways to different situations, and some people perceive less risk when compared with others. The fear of consequences; the perception / response to consequences vary from person to person, and that's what makes change interesting and challenging. Hence, change practitioners need to have good critical thinking skills, high level of adaptability, communication and engagement skills. If look at changes via social neuroscience, you see that (1) People are naturally predispose to maximizing rewards and minimizing threats, (2) the part of the brain that are involved in organizing the “approaches” (perceptions/action/ response toward rewards) or the “withdrawal/retreat” (backing away action/response, from threats) in five domains of social (human) experience, namely: STATUS, CERTAINTY, AUTONOMY, RELATEDNESS, and FAIRNESS.
Life evolves and revolves around Hope, Fear and Expectations. It is natural in human nature to fertilize Fear of loss much more than the Happiness of gains. Fear bridges Hope and Expectations. We build ourselves and events in our life on Hope and predict positive Expectations. People change when four conditions are in place: "we understand it, we like it, we can act, and we want to act." People love change but fear loss. Take away the 'losses' (or perceived ones) and make people feel safe, they will do anything. The fear of change is common and rational. People do feel very uncomfortable and vulnerable in the face of "uncertainty" (their perception at any moment in time) - it is essentially this FEELING inside them that they are resisting - they do not want to experience it within themselves and so they push back on their own reality in the best way they know how. It is directly proportional to the perception of the potential impact and your ability to control the change. Fear is a ''natural'' reaction to risk existing in our imagination. Risk is the potential of losing something weighed against the potential of gaining something. Worry is all the hard work of working against the fear. The announcement of a change process causes a natural reaction (Fear) of losing something against the potential of gaining something ( Risk) and people Worry to allay the Fear and the cycle repeats until the potential of gaining exceeds the potential of losing. The effort converges toward persuading people to embrace or like what they do not naturally have spontaneous emotional tone with respect to situations or other people's actions; the self-help propaganda tries to stimulate people kindness, trust, benevolence and by utilizing the themes of nobleness and character building, manages their thoughts, or more correctly, have them to change their thought to conform to what is needed as potentially arbitrarily defined.
People likes to change, but do not wants to be changed and there is the difference. By nature we resist the changes, however, if we are part of it, is easier to shift to the new behavior. So the more transparent about a change effort, the less uncertainty (and consequently less fear) there will be about the effort. But that takes planning, decisive leadership, and the intestinal fortitude to be honest with people when the truth might not be pleasant to deliver. Too often than not, the hard choices are kicked down the road and when that happens, the "change effort" becomes a Petri dish that breeds angst, concern, cynicism, and contempt. People resist change mostly because they have experienced disasters around previous efforts that they do not trust their leaders. Poor change experiences (unclear expectations, lack of compelling rationale, poorly designed implementation plan, unworkable designs created in corporate, changes that have stopped in the middle) all have created extra work and disruption for little or no gain. They hate thus resist being forced into senseless or avoidable sacrifices, having to restructure based on a shallow or ill-defined problems or transform without their assent, being cheated and being treated as objects.
Besides sound strategy, hard process and psychological understanding about people’s emotions, an important “soft” factor is TRUST: When you have the trust of your people, they will express their needs and wants for themselves and their job. This involvement and collaboration then opens a door for them to accept the change.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
The Characteristics of NoSQL
NoSQL means NOT ONLY SQL.
Big Data has its own fame and is stable in the market. Due to increase in data volume and scale out functionality, there is problem with database flexibility. Hence, NoSQL is emerged as “the next generation databases mostly addressing some of the points: being non-relational, distributed, open-source and horizontally scalable.” (NoSqlDatabase.Org). Is SQL to NoSQL an evolutionary or revolutionary journey? What’re the characteristics of NoSQL databases?
Historically, database has been through a few evolutionary shifts. In the 1990s, there’s a trend toward consolidation in the relational direction. At first relations databases were targeted toward query processing for reporting. The style had been to do the transaction systems in hierarchical or network databases, and then to extract data into a RDBMS for more flexible reporting. Then the RDBMs vendors drastically improved performance on the transaction side and for many organizations, everything was moved to relational. Then businesses tried to manage other content such as Word documents and other unstructured sources. This caused a problem. To solve the problem, a number of "content management" systems were developed. Then comes the Internet explosion and the drop in the price of storage and processing, and the emerging trend of Big Data with five “V”s characteristics. So you have to be open to using multiple technologies in an organization driven by the requirements of an application, you need to look at each application and match its requirements to the technology.
Data Distribution: First, the term distributed database is very correlated with NoSQL, because most of them either use partitioning or replication. So, in a certain way, most NoSQL databases are distributed. This is known as data distribution. Some RDBMS also have it, but when talking in Big Data (volume, variety, velocity), the relational databases are not very adequate, not only in terms of read speeds (because of its related nature and all the joins), but also in terms of scalability and fault-tolerance. A cluster of NoSQL databases for example have no single point of failure, so there is no master node, if one of the machines fail, the cluster is intelligent enough to allocate other machine until the problem is resolved, automatically.
Scalability: In a simple manner, it's the ability of a certain system to accommodate the growth of a certain request (such as storage and processing). Most of NoSQL databases are storage scalable by nature, because they are partition, replication and fault tolerant, with minimal human interaction. In most of NoSQL databases, besides the data distribution to achieve dirty read scalability (for example, divide the requests by multiple nodes in the cluster), you have a very important type of distribution, processing parallelism. This means the processing of a query can be distributed by multiple nodes, and merged at the end.
Different types of NoSQL databases: NoSQL isn't here to replace RDBMS, there is a place for each one of them. However there are certain applications where RDBMS are not adequate, due to its related nature that makes data read difficult and slow, also because of the infrastructure costs and licensing costs, and because it is hard to achieve distribution and scalability. NoSQL databases or Hadoop are designed to operate on a big cluster of commodity hardware, so it's more cost efficient. NoSQL’s model-less architecture is much more flexible than a relational one, meaning you can make changes to the structure without having to rethink the all model. That’s the main "selling point," because this makes the development of applications and analysis much more easy. There are four types of major NoSQL databases, which are commonly being utilized by the industry these days. These are:
(1) Document oriented Databases
(2) Column Family Databases
(3) Key-Value Databases
(4) Graph Databases.
DOMBA (Distributed Objects Management Based Articulation) is Cluster-Oriented NoSQL database. It has combined Graph and Document oriented Database features. DOMBA allows users to distill smaller units of related data without using complex structured query languages. DOMBA is human-oriented NoSQL, it will allow to write queries to distill both relationships in a graph structure. You can use DOMBA to manage Big Data, because your data will grow on everyday basis, and DOMBA is scalable and does provide eventual consistency to work with.
– DOMBA is schemaless NoSQL database. In reality, all objects have a certain identity and a relationship with another object.
– DOMBA allows to explore these relationship in human-oriented way.
– DOMBA has added ACID features within CAP theorem.
– Data Recharging is utilized in DOMBA.
NoSQL means NOT ONLY SQL. The emergence of NoSQL is to solve the data processing problems caused by Big Data. Organizations are much more willing to work with a multitude of DBMS that each meet a particular set of requirements. This requires more skilled people to development and maintain systems. For transaction data, you can still use an RDBMS. With all the variants of NoSQL, you just have to look at them in detail to see which might work for you.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
Big Data has its own fame and is stable in the market. Due to increase in data volume and scale out functionality, there is problem with database flexibility. Hence, NoSQL is emerged as “the next generation databases mostly addressing some of the points: being non-relational, distributed, open-source and horizontally scalable.” (NoSqlDatabase.Org). Is SQL to NoSQL an evolutionary or revolutionary journey? What’re the characteristics of NoSQL databases?Historically, database has been through a few evolutionary shifts. In the 1990s, there’s a trend toward consolidation in the relational direction. At first relations databases were targeted toward query processing for reporting. The style had been to do the transaction systems in hierarchical or network databases, and then to extract data into a RDBMS for more flexible reporting. Then the RDBMs vendors drastically improved performance on the transaction side and for many organizations, everything was moved to relational. Then businesses tried to manage other content such as Word documents and other unstructured sources. This caused a problem. To solve the problem, a number of "content management" systems were developed. Then comes the Internet explosion and the drop in the price of storage and processing, and the emerging trend of Big Data with five “V”s characteristics. So you have to be open to using multiple technologies in an organization driven by the requirements of an application, you need to look at each application and match its requirements to the technology.
Data Distribution: First, the term distributed database is very correlated with NoSQL, because most of them either use partitioning or replication. So, in a certain way, most NoSQL databases are distributed. This is known as data distribution. Some RDBMS also have it, but when talking in Big Data (volume, variety, velocity), the relational databases are not very adequate, not only in terms of read speeds (because of its related nature and all the joins), but also in terms of scalability and fault-tolerance. A cluster of NoSQL databases for example have no single point of failure, so there is no master node, if one of the machines fail, the cluster is intelligent enough to allocate other machine until the problem is resolved, automatically.
Scalability: In a simple manner, it's the ability of a certain system to accommodate the growth of a certain request (such as storage and processing). Most of NoSQL databases are storage scalable by nature, because they are partition, replication and fault tolerant, with minimal human interaction. In most of NoSQL databases, besides the data distribution to achieve dirty read scalability (for example, divide the requests by multiple nodes in the cluster), you have a very important type of distribution, processing parallelism. This means the processing of a query can be distributed by multiple nodes, and merged at the end.
Different types of NoSQL databases: NoSQL isn't here to replace RDBMS, there is a place for each one of them. However there are certain applications where RDBMS are not adequate, due to its related nature that makes data read difficult and slow, also because of the infrastructure costs and licensing costs, and because it is hard to achieve distribution and scalability. NoSQL databases or Hadoop are designed to operate on a big cluster of commodity hardware, so it's more cost efficient. NoSQL’s model-less architecture is much more flexible than a relational one, meaning you can make changes to the structure without having to rethink the all model. That’s the main "selling point," because this makes the development of applications and analysis much more easy. There are four types of major NoSQL databases, which are commonly being utilized by the industry these days. These are:
(1) Document oriented Databases
(2) Column Family Databases
(3) Key-Value Databases
(4) Graph Databases.
DOMBA (Distributed Objects Management Based Articulation) is Cluster-Oriented NoSQL database. It has combined Graph and Document oriented Database features. DOMBA allows users to distill smaller units of related data without using complex structured query languages. DOMBA is human-oriented NoSQL, it will allow to write queries to distill both relationships in a graph structure. You can use DOMBA to manage Big Data, because your data will grow on everyday basis, and DOMBA is scalable and does provide eventual consistency to work with.– DOMBA is schemaless NoSQL database. In reality, all objects have a certain identity and a relationship with another object.
– DOMBA allows to explore these relationship in human-oriented way.
– DOMBA has added ACID features within CAP theorem.
– Data Recharging is utilized in DOMBA.
NoSQL means NOT ONLY SQL. The emergence of NoSQL is to solve the data processing problems caused by Big Data. Organizations are much more willing to work with a multitude of DBMS that each meet a particular set of requirements. This requires more skilled people to development and maintain systems. For transaction data, you can still use an RDBMS. With all the variants of NoSQL, you just have to look at them in detail to see which might work for you.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
April 30, 2015
The Agile “Simplicity Principle” - How to Dig it Through
One of the reasons to see improved productivity in Agile is because of the simplicity principle.
“Agile principle -Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done” is essential for Agile project success. Simplicity is also a general principle to run digital business today. Contextually, how do you define and apply it to run project and business more successfully?
Simplicity enforces agile values: In general, it’s a call to scrutinize your working practices to ensure they are contributing towards agile values such as early and continuous delivery, responsiveness to change, close and frequent collaboration between business people and developers. By prioritizing your ability to change course, this scrutiny will plainly favour the stripping down and reduction of overheads. The most important part of the context is that the work you are "not doing" is the work that hinders the agility, your ability to respond to changes. So unit tests aren't thrown out with the bathwater, because they are a key practice in maintaining agility. On the other hand, it challenges a practice such as 'literate coding' because that would introduce a level of redundancy to the code which makes it more costly to change the code.
Simplicity emerges synergistically from the reduction. But it is not in itself a goal. Indeed, "Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility" can drive the team towards complex, but efficient, low overhead practices, rather than just simplicity. Avoiding waste is better than eliminating waste. Eliminating waste is about eliminating something which is not used and saving effort on maintaining it. Avoiding waste is more about not building, non value adding features. There are always constraints, so simplicity implies to build as little as possible (as little output as possible, to maximize the amount of work not done) and maximize outcome (benefit for users/customers).
Simplify, Integrate, then automate. So it is important to put simplification and integration (bigger picture up front planning) ahead of working software. Another definition could be to make sure the system you build is not so complex from an architectural deployment and testing perspective that you end up repeating the same tasks (fixing the build, manual testing tasks, etc.) over and over. This is tightly coupled to the principle "Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility." You need the feedback loops anyway; if they are working well you can afford to trim things very fine because you know you will detect when you cut them too fine, and be able to correct the shortfall. Many people want to adopt Agile because they think it will help them deliver software faster because of process improvement. But in reality, one of the reasons to see improved productivity is because of the simplicity principle.
Generally speaking, simplicity is the design principle of looking for what is common for maximum, reuse. Simplicity is the building blocks. Complexity is the content put in the building blocks and the outcomes from interactions with the building blocks. Most of times, simplicity can improve flexibility, and flexibility is often contrasted with "adaptability" -- the ability easily and quickly change or adapt according to circumstances without necessarily anticipating them or adding anything explicitly for that circumstance. As Einstein wisely put: make things as simple as possible, not simpler.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
“Agile principle -Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done” is essential for Agile project success. Simplicity is also a general principle to run digital business today. Contextually, how do you define and apply it to run project and business more successfully?
Simplicity enforces agile values: In general, it’s a call to scrutinize your working practices to ensure they are contributing towards agile values such as early and continuous delivery, responsiveness to change, close and frequent collaboration between business people and developers. By prioritizing your ability to change course, this scrutiny will plainly favour the stripping down and reduction of overheads. The most important part of the context is that the work you are "not doing" is the work that hinders the agility, your ability to respond to changes. So unit tests aren't thrown out with the bathwater, because they are a key practice in maintaining agility. On the other hand, it challenges a practice such as 'literate coding' because that would introduce a level of redundancy to the code which makes it more costly to change the code.
Simplicity emerges synergistically from the reduction. But it is not in itself a goal. Indeed, "Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility" can drive the team towards complex, but efficient, low overhead practices, rather than just simplicity. Avoiding waste is better than eliminating waste. Eliminating waste is about eliminating something which is not used and saving effort on maintaining it. Avoiding waste is more about not building, non value adding features. There are always constraints, so simplicity implies to build as little as possible (as little output as possible, to maximize the amount of work not done) and maximize outcome (benefit for users/customers).
Simplify, Integrate, then automate. So it is important to put simplification and integration (bigger picture up front planning) ahead of working software. Another definition could be to make sure the system you build is not so complex from an architectural deployment and testing perspective that you end up repeating the same tasks (fixing the build, manual testing tasks, etc.) over and over. This is tightly coupled to the principle "Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility." You need the feedback loops anyway; if they are working well you can afford to trim things very fine because you know you will detect when you cut them too fine, and be able to correct the shortfall. Many people want to adopt Agile because they think it will help them deliver software faster because of process improvement. But in reality, one of the reasons to see improved productivity is because of the simplicity principle.
Generally speaking, simplicity is the design principle of looking for what is common for maximum, reuse. Simplicity is the building blocks. Complexity is the content put in the building blocks and the outcomes from interactions with the building blocks. Most of times, simplicity can improve flexibility, and flexibility is often contrasted with "adaptability" -- the ability easily and quickly change or adapt according to circumstances without necessarily anticipating them or adding anything explicitly for that circumstance. As Einstein wisely put: make things as simple as possible, not simpler.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
Does UX Fit in Strategy Team or Creativity Team
UX works best if it is part of the company's culture as a whole.
Being customer-centricity becomes the mantra for forward-thinking digital organization to out beat competitors. But how do you equip with the set of new digital minds to incorporate UX at both strategic and design level to present great business value, improve bottom line and build company brand cohesively? Does UX more fit in strategy team or creativity team?
UX is all about putting practice led thinking into strategy. Think about how important is contextual research and prototyping in helping you think strategically. Putting yourselves inside the silos will disassemble your approach, weakening your effectiveness, both at the strategic and creative levels. UX is related to strategy and it should be integrated in business decisions to truly deliver value. The best practices can be deployed to persuade stakeholders and executives to incorporate UX inputs at an earlier stage. So despite how UX team is structured in real life, the best practice is to have it connected to a strategy or business unit. It can directly belong to that unit or at least have a dotted line there.
UX works best if it is part of the company's culture as a whole. UX is a disruptive force in business culture, and is at odds with traditional models of organization that break projects into stages in a production pipeline. It should be a more cross-disciplinary team that work to develop a product or service over its lifespan. In that model, UX would play an equally important role throughout the life of the project. If it must be one or the other, then UX is part of the strategy team. That way the strategy and findings during discovery phases can be applied to not only the creative but possibly other customer touch points in the business. Delivering great experiences starts with research and strategic insights, with the findings and ideas flowing through concepting, design, development, production and quality assurance .
It really depends on how UX is framed within your organization. For some, UX is closer to commerce and strategy in the process, in others it is closer to creative and design. It's all about board level buy-in. Where can your UX activities gain most support and ultimately revenues? This means that UX professionals, either need to exist and practice within those multiple business areas, or be centralized (internally or externally), and able to interface with those areas on an equal footing. UX needs to live and be free to work with any group at any time. Either put in creative group or strategy team, it needs to work very collaboratively cross-functional border. But based on UX best practice, it'd be great UX has its own organization, has a clear way to measure its business impact, and consequently can better serve the business by integrating superb experience into the core business model.
UX is an integral part of the success of a business, especially for business models centered around influencing customer behavior. One of the major problems that businesses are facing right now is this outdated need to put everything in its proper silo. Almost no one, in any field, in any capacity can be as productive, innovative and effective as possible if they are limited by definitions of what their particular slot is which inevitably leads to definitions of what they are supposed to think about or not think about and so forth. In today's business world, that kind of limitation can be fatal.
It is important to remember that UX is practiced in many different guises and that fitness for function is ultimately important. To incorporate UX inside an organization successfully, you have to work on different levels, management has to understand the value to become supportive, the project teams needs to understand, to be able to work effectively together, cross-functional collaboration is the key for UX to bring value for their organizations.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
Being customer-centricity becomes the mantra for forward-thinking digital organization to out beat competitors. But how do you equip with the set of new digital minds to incorporate UX at both strategic and design level to present great business value, improve bottom line and build company brand cohesively? Does UX more fit in strategy team or creativity team?
UX is all about putting practice led thinking into strategy. Think about how important is contextual research and prototyping in helping you think strategically. Putting yourselves inside the silos will disassemble your approach, weakening your effectiveness, both at the strategic and creative levels. UX is related to strategy and it should be integrated in business decisions to truly deliver value. The best practices can be deployed to persuade stakeholders and executives to incorporate UX inputs at an earlier stage. So despite how UX team is structured in real life, the best practice is to have it connected to a strategy or business unit. It can directly belong to that unit or at least have a dotted line there.
UX works best if it is part of the company's culture as a whole. UX is a disruptive force in business culture, and is at odds with traditional models of organization that break projects into stages in a production pipeline. It should be a more cross-disciplinary team that work to develop a product or service over its lifespan. In that model, UX would play an equally important role throughout the life of the project. If it must be one or the other, then UX is part of the strategy team. That way the strategy and findings during discovery phases can be applied to not only the creative but possibly other customer touch points in the business. Delivering great experiences starts with research and strategic insights, with the findings and ideas flowing through concepting, design, development, production and quality assurance .
It really depends on how UX is framed within your organization. For some, UX is closer to commerce and strategy in the process, in others it is closer to creative and design. It's all about board level buy-in. Where can your UX activities gain most support and ultimately revenues? This means that UX professionals, either need to exist and practice within those multiple business areas, or be centralized (internally or externally), and able to interface with those areas on an equal footing. UX needs to live and be free to work with any group at any time. Either put in creative group or strategy team, it needs to work very collaboratively cross-functional border. But based on UX best practice, it'd be great UX has its own organization, has a clear way to measure its business impact, and consequently can better serve the business by integrating superb experience into the core business model.
UX is an integral part of the success of a business, especially for business models centered around influencing customer behavior. One of the major problems that businesses are facing right now is this outdated need to put everything in its proper silo. Almost no one, in any field, in any capacity can be as productive, innovative and effective as possible if they are limited by definitions of what their particular slot is which inevitably leads to definitions of what they are supposed to think about or not think about and so forth. In today's business world, that kind of limitation can be fatal.
It is important to remember that UX is practiced in many different guises and that fitness for function is ultimately important. To incorporate UX inside an organization successfully, you have to work on different levels, management has to understand the value to become supportive, the project teams needs to understand, to be able to work effectively together, cross-functional collaboration is the key for UX to bring value for their organizations.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
The Digital Theme of Board Room: An Engaging Board
A heterogeneous board with cognitive difference outperforms organizations with homogeneous boards.
Corporate board is one of the most important governance bodies in modern organizations to oversight strategy, manage and accept the custodial responsibility of managing shareholders’ benefit. There is a lot that can and should be expanded upon regarding board selection and strategy. In a world of well defined problems, directors are required to exercise influence over volatility, manage uncertainty, simplify complexity and resolve ambiguity in a 21st century digital environment. So what’re the principles and practices to build an engaged board?
An engaged board has complimentary expertise with cognitive difference: The board is appointed to practicing governance discipline. In achieving this role, the board needs to be talented enough to vet strategy, work together as a group to speak in one voice, and delegate and monitor operational issues they decide not manage. An engaged board is composed with the specialized generalist type of BoDs to complement each other’s expertise, but work as a team. The greatest success is achieved on the engaging boards that added directors with cognitive difference, diversified experience and T-shape expertise. Shareholders need to have a way to measure the board's performance, which currently is virtually impossible to do for most shareholders. Over time, changes are made and more specialized generalist type directors are added to improve learning agility, to fill blind spot, to mind cognitive gap and to complement each other’s capability and skills. It is the difference in thinking and perspectives that diversified BoDs bring to group decisions; as well as how members of a somewhat homogeneous group modify their decision-making processes in the presence of an "outsider," that causes organizations with boards of more diversified BoDs to outperform organizations with homogeneous boards.
The increased sensitivity to liability in most cases leads to a truly engaged board. There is no one size fits all for building a highly engaging Board. What works for the boards in one industry might have serious negative implications for another. Although anecdotal, that increased sensitivity to perceived or actual liability does have some effect on how board members conducted themselves. In most cases it is positive and led to a truly engaged and well informed board. In a few cases, it led to paralysis on specific board motions, unnecessary legal and research fees and possibly missed opportunities. The role of the board is simply to see to it that the management of the company operates to accomplish its mission without jeopardizing the interest of employees, customers, other stakeholders and most of all the shareholders. Sometimes, the perception of a problem could occur even where none exists. That's why it's important to have complete and detailed minutes from board and committee meetings and make sure they are reviewed completely and corrected as needed. There's nothing worse than having an important discussion resulting in a significant decision and not having it properly or accurately memorialized. That opens the door for liability even though everything was done properly. It's also clear that good governance does not ensure success and success should not be the standard. The board spends time being involved with the development and monitoring of the organization's strategic plan. At a reasonably fundamental level, and at the risk of diverting the discussion, rules set boundaries and terms of engagement.
The central piece to any institution's enduring capacity and sustainable value creation is its purpose. Without purpose, companies’ Boards or management are living in hope with the moving parts operating in completely different directions and no control over their destiny. With purpose comes strong value systems, common beliefs and shared objectives. Purpose creates a well aligned and central axis that strings together a firm's vision, business structure and execution excellence which goes on to create long term value and define its brand. Primacy of any institution should not be top focus on outcomes alone, but the process through which one ensures successful outcomes. And measure of these outcomes need to be seen through the lens of purpose. When designed around purpose, businesses create enduring presence. This can only happen when Boards establish ground rules of governance and accountability - and this comes through the firm's purpose. Everything else is fleeting and will fail litmus tests repeatedly.
The boardroom culture is engendered by board leaders. It’s all about leadership from the top which sets the tone and governs board room behavior. More often, an engaged board will work more harmonized as a team to achieve governance effectiveness.
Read more about the Digital Theme of Modern 'Boardship'
An Engaging Board
A Board beyond Compliance
A Culture-Savvy Board
A High-Performing Board
A Global Board
A Big Data Savvy Board
A IT Friendly Board
A Motivational Board
A Harmonized Board
An Informative Board
A Mindful Board
A Measurable Board
An Objective Board A Cognitive Board A Decisive Board A Strategic Board A Competitive Board An Effective Board A Fitting Board A Tech-Savvy Board A High Performing Board An Innovative Board A Learning Board Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
Corporate board is one of the most important governance bodies in modern organizations to oversight strategy, manage and accept the custodial responsibility of managing shareholders’ benefit. There is a lot that can and should be expanded upon regarding board selection and strategy. In a world of well defined problems, directors are required to exercise influence over volatility, manage uncertainty, simplify complexity and resolve ambiguity in a 21st century digital environment. So what’re the principles and practices to build an engaged board?
An engaged board has complimentary expertise with cognitive difference: The board is appointed to practicing governance discipline. In achieving this role, the board needs to be talented enough to vet strategy, work together as a group to speak in one voice, and delegate and monitor operational issues they decide not manage. An engaged board is composed with the specialized generalist type of BoDs to complement each other’s expertise, but work as a team. The greatest success is achieved on the engaging boards that added directors with cognitive difference, diversified experience and T-shape expertise. Shareholders need to have a way to measure the board's performance, which currently is virtually impossible to do for most shareholders. Over time, changes are made and more specialized generalist type directors are added to improve learning agility, to fill blind spot, to mind cognitive gap and to complement each other’s capability and skills. It is the difference in thinking and perspectives that diversified BoDs bring to group decisions; as well as how members of a somewhat homogeneous group modify their decision-making processes in the presence of an "outsider," that causes organizations with boards of more diversified BoDs to outperform organizations with homogeneous boards.
The increased sensitivity to liability in most cases leads to a truly engaged board. There is no one size fits all for building a highly engaging Board. What works for the boards in one industry might have serious negative implications for another. Although anecdotal, that increased sensitivity to perceived or actual liability does have some effect on how board members conducted themselves. In most cases it is positive and led to a truly engaged and well informed board. In a few cases, it led to paralysis on specific board motions, unnecessary legal and research fees and possibly missed opportunities. The role of the board is simply to see to it that the management of the company operates to accomplish its mission without jeopardizing the interest of employees, customers, other stakeholders and most of all the shareholders. Sometimes, the perception of a problem could occur even where none exists. That's why it's important to have complete and detailed minutes from board and committee meetings and make sure they are reviewed completely and corrected as needed. There's nothing worse than having an important discussion resulting in a significant decision and not having it properly or accurately memorialized. That opens the door for liability even though everything was done properly. It's also clear that good governance does not ensure success and success should not be the standard. The board spends time being involved with the development and monitoring of the organization's strategic plan. At a reasonably fundamental level, and at the risk of diverting the discussion, rules set boundaries and terms of engagement.
The central piece to any institution's enduring capacity and sustainable value creation is its purpose. Without purpose, companies’ Boards or management are living in hope with the moving parts operating in completely different directions and no control over their destiny. With purpose comes strong value systems, common beliefs and shared objectives. Purpose creates a well aligned and central axis that strings together a firm's vision, business structure and execution excellence which goes on to create long term value and define its brand. Primacy of any institution should not be top focus on outcomes alone, but the process through which one ensures successful outcomes. And measure of these outcomes need to be seen through the lens of purpose. When designed around purpose, businesses create enduring presence. This can only happen when Boards establish ground rules of governance and accountability - and this comes through the firm's purpose. Everything else is fleeting and will fail litmus tests repeatedly.
The boardroom culture is engendered by board leaders. It’s all about leadership from the top which sets the tone and governs board room behavior. More often, an engaged board will work more harmonized as a team to achieve governance effectiveness.
Read more about the Digital Theme of Modern 'Boardship'
An Engaging Board
A Board beyond Compliance
A Culture-Savvy Board
A High-Performing Board
A Global Board
A Big Data Savvy Board
A IT Friendly Board
A Motivational Board
A Harmonized Board
An Informative Board
A Mindful Board
A Measurable Board
An Objective Board A Cognitive Board A Decisive Board A Strategic Board A Competitive Board An Effective Board A Fitting Board A Tech-Savvy Board A High Performing Board An Innovative Board A Learning Board Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
April 29, 2015
Five Capabilities of Digital IT
IT is the digital brain of modern organizations.
Embracing digital is inevitable as that is now part of the reality... IT is no longer that island, or back-office as a silo specialist function, businesses need IT as a strong partner who is passionate about exploiting information enabled by technologies to work at the heart of the enterprise. IT needs to transform itself from a service provider to business solutionary, from a cost center to an innovation engine, from process driven to capability oriented. What are the most needed digital capabilities IT can provide, and how to build them.
Operation Capability: Keeping the light on is still fundamental for any IT organization to gain a good reputation. IT operational capability can be built through IT-business alignment: the arrangement and enablement. Those organizations that have a more mature alignment outperform their competitors and tend to be more responsive to these changes. Alignment goes beyond conformity and order taking, it needs to include close partnership with interpersonal communication, value analytics and governance. IT with strong operational capability helps business achieve efficiency and reliability.
Innovation Capability: More often technology is the innovation disrupter and information is life blood of organization. Either disrupt or being disrupted. IT is at 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 the key element of business innovation, either for catching customer delight or achieving business optimization. IT innovation capabilities directly impact how it helps business gain competitive advantage and capture upcoming trend to compete for the future.
Project Portfolio Management Capabilities: The balanced IT application portfolio can deliver lots of value for the business in many ways. It is apart from the basic automation, availability of information and reports. This is the digital arena, IT applications and its dynamics are totally different. The right IT applications blended with current digital trends can deliver the significant benefits to the business, such as customer satisfaction, business optimization and change adaptability, etc. Portfolio management is also essential to successful corporate governance and as such, a comprehensive fusing of a firm's strategic capabilities.
Analytics Capability: Digital IT is all about how to deliver the right information to the right people at the right time to help them make right decision. IT is the steward of business data & information. Data by itself is meaningless until it’s interpreted and analyzed. Technology enables large data sets to be captured and presented for analysis, but the value hidden in data is only revealed through intelligent reasoning. Information is raw material, when you manipulate the raw material in meaningful ways, which give you business insight to interpret and utilize, then you have established a value. IT plays the critical role in information lifecycle management to transform raw data - information - insight/intelligence - wisdom. As the tech matures and the technology becomes better understood by most of the enterprise, Data Analytics will get better and become more valuable, and it will become a digital business capability IT can build on.
Change Capability: IT is always at the center of change. Change maybe mechanical, but transformation is radical. "Change" can be a somewhat mechanical implementation of new or different ways to doing something, while 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. That said, it is referring to a modification and internalization of new values, behaviors and culture. 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, as organizations that do not respond to external environmental changes will quickly be out competed, and IT also plays pivotal role in leading digital transformation in their organizations.
To put simply, IT is the digital brain of modern organization. Compared to traditional service- driven IT, capability-based digital IT is more value oriented, laser focus on business goals, and improve IT maturity from efficiency to effectiveness to agility; from functioning to firmness to delight.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
Embracing digital is inevitable as that is now part of the reality... IT is no longer that island, or back-office as a silo specialist function, businesses need IT as a strong partner who is passionate about exploiting information enabled by technologies to work at the heart of the enterprise. IT needs to transform itself from a service provider to business solutionary, from a cost center to an innovation engine, from process driven to capability oriented. What are the most needed digital capabilities IT can provide, and how to build them.
Operation Capability: Keeping the light on is still fundamental for any IT organization to gain a good reputation. IT operational capability can be built through IT-business alignment: the arrangement and enablement. Those organizations that have a more mature alignment outperform their competitors and tend to be more responsive to these changes. Alignment goes beyond conformity and order taking, it needs to include close partnership with interpersonal communication, value analytics and governance. IT with strong operational capability helps business achieve efficiency and reliability.
Innovation Capability: More often technology is the innovation disrupter and information is life blood of organization. Either disrupt or being disrupted. IT is at 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 the key element of business innovation, either for catching customer delight or achieving business optimization. IT innovation capabilities directly impact how it helps business gain competitive advantage and capture upcoming trend to compete for the future.
Project Portfolio Management Capabilities: The balanced IT application portfolio can deliver lots of value for the business in many ways. It is apart from the basic automation, availability of information and reports. This is the digital arena, IT applications and its dynamics are totally different. The right IT applications blended with current digital trends can deliver the significant benefits to the business, such as customer satisfaction, business optimization and change adaptability, etc. Portfolio management is also essential to successful corporate governance and as such, a comprehensive fusing of a firm's strategic capabilities.
Analytics Capability: Digital IT is all about how to deliver the right information to the right people at the right time to help them make right decision. IT is the steward of business data & information. Data by itself is meaningless until it’s interpreted and analyzed. Technology enables large data sets to be captured and presented for analysis, but the value hidden in data is only revealed through intelligent reasoning. Information is raw material, when you manipulate the raw material in meaningful ways, which give you business insight to interpret and utilize, then you have established a value. IT plays the critical role in information lifecycle management to transform raw data - information - insight/intelligence - wisdom. As the tech matures and the technology becomes better understood by most of the enterprise, Data Analytics will get better and become more valuable, and it will become a digital business capability IT can build on.
Change Capability: IT is always at the center of change. Change maybe mechanical, but transformation is radical. "Change" can be a somewhat mechanical implementation of new or different ways to doing something, while 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. That said, it is referring to a modification and internalization of new values, behaviors and culture. 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, as organizations that do not respond to external environmental changes will quickly be out competed, and IT also plays pivotal role in leading digital transformation in their organizations. To put simply, IT is the digital brain of modern organization. Compared to traditional service- driven IT, capability-based digital IT is more value oriented, laser focus on business goals, and improve IT maturity from efficiency to effectiveness to agility; from functioning to firmness to delight.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
April 26, 2015
Is Digital Boundary a “Sharp Line” or a “Fluid Wave”?
Digitalization means hyper-connectivity and over-complexity; it blurs the functional border, the organizational border, the industry vertical border and knowledge domain border, it blurs the border between professional life and personal life, the local and globe, etc. So does digital still have boundary, what does the digital boundary look like? A “Sharp Line” or a “Fluid Wave”? “Black & White” or the “Full Spectrum of Color”?
Digital boundaries are no " sharp" lines; they are fluid; and responsibilities overlap each other. Groups of people can and do often change from one "set" of responsibilities to another one ( they moved from one territory into another). The problem with setting all of your boundaries in black and white is that others don't and it can lead to limited learning and tunnel vision. A corporate example: A company sets up a decentralized organization using its own management requirements to set the boundaries. Those boundaries tend to become black and white and much like country borders. Unfortunately, their customers have not all agreed to organize their companies in accordance with those guidelines. Service to customers suffers because the boundaries are different. To accommodate this, you have to have at least two sets of boundaries, one for geographic responsibilities and one set to serve your customers. The point is that too restrict boundary will cause silo thinking, overly rigid business processes, and negative internal competition for limited resources, with ignorance of ultimate organizational goals. So digital boundaries are not sharp lines, they are fluid to adapt to changes.
Digital boundary is not for dividing, but for enforcing mutual understanding. Boundaries is indeed a very broad term that encompasses all sorts of things and strict or fluid; boundaries can be good, bad, or indifferent depending on the application.This is space for learning, an opportunity to examine our own thoughts, beliefs and actions, to experience what it is like to agree to disagree and still remain engaged, an opportunity to change our own perceptions, to recognize that we cannot change other people only ourselves, before making influence on societies, to recognize that we are responsible for promoting or dissolving our own thoughts, emotions and actions. So we have to have the ability to ask the hard questions and engage in meaningful dialogue even if we do not agree with one another-we can indeed-agree to disagree-yet, stay engaged with one another because the dialogue is important, yet, the harmony is priceless. We do not have to agree with one another in order to learn from and with one another. We need these types of relationships so that when we find ourselves blinded by negative emotions (hate, prejudice, anger or fear, envy, etc,); we don't impulsively react in such a way that adds to more harm and suffering.
Digital boundary shall not be set by personal interest, but for solving problem with effectiveness and efficiency. We are living in a complex world where inventions, developments and conflicts are continuously changing and that makes it impossible to have a complete knowledge and understanding of any issue. We all bring different perspectives and our boundaries might have changed based on the open conversations and taking time to thoughtfully think about the specific issue of boundaries. Sometimes we define boundaries for ourselves based on what we feel we are skilled at or capable of. If we don't feel adequate for the task, we might dismiss ourselves from responsibility. Anywhere in the world, the systems and procedures apply and impose boundaries between those who teach and those who learn, those who lead and those who follow, those who have power and those who are powerless. Many come to believe that boundaries are not tangible places of resistance, but are only self imposed limitations we place on ourselves to hide our own fear to move forward.
There’s “emotion boundary” during the journey from decision making to strategy execution. At every point in the organization, people need to be the key element in decision making. However, in order to stick to the issues and get things done, the emotion has to be taken out. This, of course, is after an empathetic review to come to a decision reflecting the best outcome possible. Emotions play a huge role at the front of the decision process to reflect the humanity of the organization, and not so much in the execution, keeping things on point. Since organizations are about people and digitization means human-centricity, and the execution is about driving efficiencies.
The black and white boundaries continues to diminish in the 21st century due to the occurrence of increased economic integration among nations, characterized by the movement of people cultures across national/international borders, and the advanced digital technology such as social computing. Still, the digital boundary with fluidity is a necessity for responsibility, problem solving and efficiency. There is much in the world we do not know nor understand and because of that limitation, we need to choose to continue to learn, grow and empower people to learn and grow too. It would be easy to get hooked into anger, outrage and revenge over all the inhumanities of humanity; but that would be repeating the same old habits of history. There comes a time when we each have to hold ourselves accountable for our own actions, thoughts and beliefs. If we want inclusion, peace, harmony, love, respect and acceptance, then, we cannot be exclusionary, hateful, vengeful, retaliatory of "other people". That would not be leading by example. Digital is the age of empathy, people-centricity and change.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
Is Glass Ceiling one of the Roadblocks in Digital Transformation?
Hammer (the brute force) only is not enough to break the glass ceiling, it takes wisdom to dig the cause, and it takes creativity to break it through.
Digital transformation is imminent, and digital competition is hyper-fierce. Which company will be successful in the future? What kind of leadership or management do they need? Which culture shall they build on? From talent management perspective, how to unleash the potential of their talent employees? How does digital effect the leadership pipeline? And it also triggers the decades-long debate: How to break through the invisible glass ceilings in various forms?
It’s important to equip with a positive mind. First, the career ceiling in one form of the other is reflective of strong biases in individuals and groups, and had been with us from time immemorial. Almost all (irrespective of gender, origin, beliefs, status, ethnicity etc.) Secondly, glass ceiling gets solidified more when you perceive it as a limit, and just grudgingly accept it and keep on justifying the failures and shortcoming on this unfortunate calamity. With this negative mindset, you make glass ceiling more self-inflicted and you become utterly helpless. Hence, it is important to equip with a positive mind to be courageous for breakthrough; to be creative for alternatives, to be wise for digging to the root causes, not just fixing the symptom.
Digital is the age of inclusiveness. At digital organizations, you will see inclusiveness, because it directly matters with your long term vision, either for digitalization or globalization, it also impacts the corporate culture you intend to shape. To assess the “culture healthiness,” acknowledging whether or not you're in an organization that encourages the diversity of thoughts and healthy competition, or is fostering narrow-minded view or extremely negative competitiveness is a vital starting point. As a leader, you need to be more confident and conscious rather than threatened by growth minds or strong characters. Whereas glass ceiling can’t be uprooted overnight, we can always make a serious dent in it by accepting the reality of this phenomenon, by proactively acting to minimize the biases in individuals and in organizations by our own example, and by treating it as not an inflicted limitation, but, a challenge to inspire ourselves and others to make a positive change for its minimization.
The spirit comes from the top: For any organization to thrive, it must have meaningful contribution from its people. There is no contribution without commitment, there is no commitment without involvement, and there is no involvement without feeling genuinely good. Once the leadership starts to understand this basic fact, its mindset changes from that of the limitation to the possibility, and it becomes ready to create or nurture an inclusive environment in which people will genuinely feel good, willingly get involved with commitment, and will demonstrate unimaginable contribution. And the leadership's responsibility is to not to use them as a justifications of limitations, but to create an environment where people truly want to get involved and engaged. The net result is that many of the complex issues (glass ceiling, favoritism, and exploitation) will look relatively small to tackle. Top management needs to be more approachable, more involved, more interested in its people and their work, more willing to create career paths, rather than shove people in boxes for the duration.
Many forward-thinking organizations are on the way for radical digital shift, it is not just about adopting the advanced digital technologies or playing with the latest gadgets and tools; more importantly, it’s about how to shape the open-minded leadership team and build the culture of inclusiveness.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
Digital transformation is imminent, and digital competition is hyper-fierce. Which company will be successful in the future? What kind of leadership or management do they need? Which culture shall they build on? From talent management perspective, how to unleash the potential of their talent employees? How does digital effect the leadership pipeline? And it also triggers the decades-long debate: How to break through the invisible glass ceilings in various forms?
It’s important to equip with a positive mind. First, the career ceiling in one form of the other is reflective of strong biases in individuals and groups, and had been with us from time immemorial. Almost all (irrespective of gender, origin, beliefs, status, ethnicity etc.) Secondly, glass ceiling gets solidified more when you perceive it as a limit, and just grudgingly accept it and keep on justifying the failures and shortcoming on this unfortunate calamity. With this negative mindset, you make glass ceiling more self-inflicted and you become utterly helpless. Hence, it is important to equip with a positive mind to be courageous for breakthrough; to be creative for alternatives, to be wise for digging to the root causes, not just fixing the symptom.
Digital is the age of inclusiveness. At digital organizations, you will see inclusiveness, because it directly matters with your long term vision, either for digitalization or globalization, it also impacts the corporate culture you intend to shape. To assess the “culture healthiness,” acknowledging whether or not you're in an organization that encourages the diversity of thoughts and healthy competition, or is fostering narrow-minded view or extremely negative competitiveness is a vital starting point. As a leader, you need to be more confident and conscious rather than threatened by growth minds or strong characters. Whereas glass ceiling can’t be uprooted overnight, we can always make a serious dent in it by accepting the reality of this phenomenon, by proactively acting to minimize the biases in individuals and in organizations by our own example, and by treating it as not an inflicted limitation, but, a challenge to inspire ourselves and others to make a positive change for its minimization.
The spirit comes from the top: For any organization to thrive, it must have meaningful contribution from its people. There is no contribution without commitment, there is no commitment without involvement, and there is no involvement without feeling genuinely good. Once the leadership starts to understand this basic fact, its mindset changes from that of the limitation to the possibility, and it becomes ready to create or nurture an inclusive environment in which people will genuinely feel good, willingly get involved with commitment, and will demonstrate unimaginable contribution. And the leadership's responsibility is to not to use them as a justifications of limitations, but to create an environment where people truly want to get involved and engaged. The net result is that many of the complex issues (glass ceiling, favoritism, and exploitation) will look relatively small to tackle. Top management needs to be more approachable, more involved, more interested in its people and their work, more willing to create career paths, rather than shove people in boxes for the duration.Many forward-thinking organizations are on the way for radical digital shift, it is not just about adopting the advanced digital technologies or playing with the latest gadgets and tools; more importantly, it’s about how to shape the open-minded leadership team and build the culture of inclusiveness.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
How Does a Senior Leader Deal With Blind spots?
The blind spots, are perhaps inevitable, the point is how business leaders or managers shall learn to deal with them seamlessly.
There’s knowing unknown, there’s unknowing unknown, so it's not a new topic about “Blind Spots,” everyone perhaps has some, but as a senior business leader (or any kind of leader), the blind spots will cloud your vision, trigger your negative emotion, cause your decision ineffectiveness, and screw your leadership competency. So what're the causes of blind spot, and how to deal with them logically?Ego clouds the vision or leads the mis-judgement: First, you have to be humbled to realize you don't know what you don't know, and dig through something you know you don’t know as well. Until that happens, you will continue on the lives in blindness. Secondly, you have to have trusted business advisers with cognitive difference, who you allow to be like mirrors. They mirror back to you the things they see. Then you have to have intentional times when receiving messages is highly likely to occur. Finally, you need to listen, accept, and act upon the blind spot, whatever it is and get reflection from "mirrors" that you appreciate the huge favor and gift they have provided us. If you shoot the messenger, you won't get any feedback again from that source. Best to honor others to the point, you need to become a better communicator.
Low EQ causes blind spot: As a manager, especially a senior leader, it is importance of dealing with the blind spots by learning how to be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger. Your "signal light" behavior illustrates the value of maintaining self-control when you face hardships in business or your personal life. There are many 'REACTIONARY EXECUTIVES' who are impatient and get easily angered, lose trust and respect from their peers and their employees which sabotages personal growth. There are also many senior leaders who failed to deal with blind spots because arrogance clouded their eyes; or they have a very homogeneous team who always “think the same.” If you feel like you have lost the the virtues of trust and respect, go now and be humble yourself, and be ready to deal with another blind spot opportunity.
Silo thinking creates blind spot: The senior leader should have ability to see the big picture, to complement team’s viewpoint. Most teams operate with an incomplete and relatively small view of the world. Thus, too often in an effort to keep moving forward, they jump to the wrong conclusions. Since critical projects will be loaded with unforeseen obstacles, as a senior leader, your response maybe more significant than you may realize. Do you add fuel to the fire with an over reaction or do you provide calm inquiry clearing the blind spots to help find out what is really happening. As the person that can see the bigger picture and is not living the day-to-day activities, the team needs you! If the project is failing, it could be because the company project management support system failed in some way, such as, failed to capture the right data, failed to stay in touch with the team, failed to see warning signs. The senior manager "owns" the PM process (how it is done around here), so a project failure is as much the senior managers fault as the team, thus, that senior manager should adopt the posture of "we are in this together," to manage the collective insight and clear up the blind spot, to ensure the pieces of puzzle can be integrated into a clear business picture.
Leadership misunderstanding: There are certain mis-concept about leadership which will also cause blind spots in either strategy making and execution. -Leaders need to lead from the front rather than the rear.-Seeing employees as workers and not innovators.-Leaders have all the answers. A leader needs to have passion to keep learning and, for what he/she is doing. - Top-down communication only. A failure to communicate via two way-street creates an environment of suspicion, fear and loathing. Be transparent. Keep employees informed of the good, the bad, and the ugly.
The blind spots, are perhaps inevitable, the point is how business leaders or managers shall learn to deal with them seamlessly; how to build a heterogeneous team which can bridge the cognitive difference, complement capability and skill set. It takes the attitude to keep learning; and it takes the insight to frame the right questions and answer them in “mindful” way via collective wisdom.
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