The Monthly Insight of the Board Room: Running a Digital-Ready Boardroom Nov. 2016

Modern corporate boards play significant roles in guiding businesses toward the right direction and achieve expected business results. Due to the “VUCA” characteristics -Complexity, Uncertainty, Ambiguity and Velocity of the Digital Era, the directorship in any organization must have the agility to adapt to changes, and build abilities to advise, inspire and motivate a group of people toward accomplishing shared visions and goals. .
            Running a Digital-Ready Boardroom The Digital Board’s Journey from Good to Great? Due to the complexity, uncertainty, ambiguity and volatility of the digital age, the directorship in any organization must have the ability to inspire, guide, and motivate top management team toward accomplishing shared visions and goal. The level of the board accomplishment may vary but the essential competencies will remain the same, BoDs need to be insightful, influential, strategic, and highly effective, and the board as a whole needs to be able to create the cohesive vision, holistic view, and transform from compliance-centric to performance-driven. This also implies that Boards of the future will need to work much more closely and collaboratively to take the digital journey from good to great.
A Tech-Savvy Board: Forward-looking organizations cross-sector claim they are at information businesses, as IT touches every facet of business today, from strategy to operation; from key processes to competitive capabilities. Based on an industry survey, the majority of BoDs think IT is critical to their companies, and more and more organizations also put IT oversight in their boardroom agenda, does it mean it is the right timing to shape a tech-savvy Board, if so, what shall they focus on?
The Digital Savvy Board with High “Tech IQ”: Although Information Technology nowadays makes significant impacts on almost every aspect of the business, there is still a propensity to try to make the technology changes "go away" or to ignore them. The matter of fact is that the changes sweeping the world are hugely disruptive and there is nowhere to hide. While directors bring many competencies to the table, most do not have access to information about technology driven innovation and its potential related to the businesses they oversee. So how to build the board with high “tech IQ,” to produce a wave of response at board level, improve directorship effectiveness and innovate digital leadership??
A Progressive Board -Setting the Top Leadership Tone to Drive Digital Transformation: At today’s “VUCA” digital dynamic, organizations face both unprecedented opportunities to grow and hyper-competition or great risks to survive. Therefore, the corporate board plays a more significant role in overseeing business strategy, setting principles and policies, and making the judgment on and assurance of corporate action within a framework of practical knowledge. The digital fitting BoD is about mental toughness, progressive perspective, and in-depth business understanding in order to set the right digital leadership tone and lead change effortlessly. Leadership is all about future and progression, so how to build a progressive board to catalyze digital transformation?
Twenty-Three Themes of Digital Boardrooms: The contemporary corporate boards play important roles in strategy advising, governance oversight, leadership exemplification, culture tuning, and talent management influence. BoDs 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.

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