The New Book “Digitizing Boardroom” Chapter 1 Preview: Twenty-Three Themes of Digital Boardrooms

The contemporary corporate boards play important roles in strategy advising, governance oversight, leadership exemplify, culture tuning, and talent management influence, they also have to shift from the industrial mentalities to the digital styles. A professional digital board is not only about filling with cool-headed, high-professional and high-intelligent BoDs, but also about tuning the structured process to digitize itself, optimize decision-making capacity, inspire innovation, and improve the board's overall effectiveness, agility, and maturity.

Digital Visionary Board: Vision is an integral part of the directorial role. A visionary board can navigate to the deep digital reality and lead the business toward the right direction. Vision doesn’t have to be exclusive or externally focused. In most cases, it must be a shared, collaborative vision, because the board of directors which is responsible for setting the vision for the enterprise is a plurality, not an individual. BoD leadership vision is to serve as a future shaper and strategy enabler, to clear the path, whether that be the elimination of obstacles or to provide coaching and guidance. BoD leadership needs to be future oriented. Leaders with the visionary mind have the ability to think the past, perceive what is now and foresee the future. Visionary BoDs can explore the vision and fresh ideas in a spirit of open-mindedness, learning, and respect.
Digital Fitting Board: The digital fitting BoD is about mental toughness, with fitting minds and fresh eyes. Every decision requires a different way of thinking. The best fit for the board depends on the Board’s current makeup and culture, as well as which gap needs to be filled. Every fitting board needs individuals who can think outside the box with “fresh eyes,” and “inquisitive mind.” Choosing someone based on only one criterion may limit the board. There is a need for both generalists who can give an overview and specialists who can “drill down” into specific topics. Overall speaking, the digital fit starts with mind fit. BoDs and top leadership teams make a significant influence on shaping the digital mindset, it requires that you move from mind SET to mind FLOW, from fixed mind to growth mind, with the purpose to build a high-performing board and direct the organization towards the digital journey with a clear vision, strong strategy, solid roadmap and effective oversight.
A Tech-Savvy Board: Based on the variety of industry surveys, the majority of BoDs think IT is critical to their companies, and forward-looking organizations cross-sector claim that they are at the information businesses because IT touches every facet of businesses today, and IT becomes part of the overall business strategy. Therefore, to oversee strategy effectively, Boards can no longer avoid, delegate, or ignore the need for technology competency amongst their ranks. More and more foresightful Boards also invite IT leaders at the boardroom. Directors are particularly involved in overseeing and understanding more traditional IT issues, such as the status of major IT project implementations and their companies’ annual IT budgets, as well as overseeing and understanding risks related to compromising customer data. Because information is the gold mine of the business and technology is the disruptive force behind business innovation. Innovation is increasingly technology dependent, the role of Board is to help and encourage senior management team to set an innovation climate that is sustainable and drives future growth.
…..There are many other digital themes of Boardrooms are described in the book.
The board needs diversity, or even more precisely, cognitive difference, to provide a perspective that goes beyond the gaps in board discussions. The BoDs need to incorporate their unique viewpoint on people, innovation, insight into their solid knowledge of overall business and technology. The high-quality Board leadership has the very characteristics such as multi-dimensional intelligence, openness, and wisdom.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu