Listening with Empathy

As managers and leaders, you may have to guide, and that is fine after you "seek first to understand." Empathy is one of the most crucial elements in leadership effectiveness, due to the complexity, ambiguity, and the paradox of the world we live in. On one side, the world has become so hyperconnected and interdependent, the physical barriers such as the oceans and the mountains can no longer divide us; on the other side, due to the cognitive...

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Is Culture the Pathway to the Changes

The vivid metaphors for describing culture include the layers of an onion or the visible and invisible levels of an iceberg. Culture is perhaps one of the most invisible, mysterious, but critical success factors for business strategy execution. Who does create the corporate culture? Is it the top leadership team who unilaterally in a willful act establishes a particular corporate culture? Or is it that at the beginning of a company, there are just...

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How to Shift from a "Finger Pointing" to a Problem Solving Culture

The good leaders focus on solutions, not on blame. Businesses "fail" for a multitude of reasons including economic conditions, vendor management, performance or production, industry regulations, expansion costs and the list goes on. Look at the primary causes behind the fall of the business. So which failure are you talking about here? Is it a functional failure? Or a major capital project failure? Is it the strategic organizational level failure...

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How to Learn from Feedback and Move toward the Future

The value of feedback is to effectively connect our past learning to our future operation. As Einstein wisely said, "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results." We can live in a split second, or we can extend our presence to include the instance of our previous experience and also the opportunity of our future action. This is a different perspective on feedback because we effectively connect our past...

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The STRATEGY Focus of “Future of CIO”

Strategy is a Laser Focus for the "Future of CIOs"!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 “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.5 million page views with the 2121th blog posting. Among 50+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization,...

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How do you Set the Right Priority in Strategy Management

The challenge is to prioritize what you know about and keep an eye open for signs of things you don't know about. Due to the overwhelming information and increasing speed of changes, one of the biggest challenges for leaders and managers is how to set the right priority for strategy management. Many times, managers focus more on the symptom, not the root cause of the problems; or by management we usually imply a hierarchical arrangement, and...

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Three Characteristics of Being Agile

Doing Agile is only an engineering practice, but being agile is the multidisciplinary challenge from top-down and bottom-up. Many organizations are transforming from doing Agile to being agile, applying agile philosophy, methodology and practices to scaling up and building a truly agile organization is an important aspect of digital transformation. But many such initiatives fail to achieve the expected result, and most of the businesses still get...

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