Wednesday, September 2, 2015

Three Aspects to Differentiate Digital Leaders from Laggards

Digital masters are dynamic, high-agile, high-innovative, and high-mature business leaders or champions with their own unique strengths and styles.

Digital transformation is a journey, compared to the change, TRANSFORMATION is definitely the more ambitious sounding term, and organization’s digitalization is surely a transformation journey, it has to permeate into the business vision and strategy, mindset and culture, communication and action, process and capability. In the book of Digital Master, I defined the tree-level of digital maturity: Level 1: Digital Laggard, Level 2: Digital Mediocrity. Level 3: Digital Master. What are the important factors to differentiate digital leaders from laggards? Why are there so many companies not taking advantage of customer-facing opportunities to digitize interactions with digital technologies? Even during the journey, shall you continuously check: Are you doing the right things? Are you doing them the right way? Are you doing them well? Are you achieving the desired outcomes? Are you shaping the good digital strategy about the future and positioning appropriately for your place within it? Do you have enough resource to implement the digital strategy? Are the assumptions and risks understood and manageable smoothly? Here are three aspects to build a Digital Master.

Change capability: Digital transformation is the leapfrogging scenario with accumulated steps of changes. Change turns to be one of the ongoing strategic capabilities which underpin successful execution and move an organization from efficiency to agility. However, no change is for its own sake, there's always a clear business purpose behind it, and people are the core of changes. Developing change capability in those who'll help drive and deliver the change, consider also the capability or ability of those impacted by the change to handle its impacts; their resilience will be massively increased if they are involved, included and educated as to what they should expect. Many people across the organization are either directly involved in contributing to the change effort, or they have the opportunity to participate and choose to hold back but know they had the chance to contribute, or, at least, they regularly hear about the key change effort, the design, and progress made even if they have no direct involvement at all. The key trait is credibility at every level of organizations. It is imperative to find a progressive executive sponsor, but you must also find other like-minded, well-respected individuals throughout the organization, to take accountability in the change project or any transformation effort. They will serve the organization with more energy and determination.

Innovation: According to Drucker,” Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship, the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.” From a business perspective, innovation is how to transform novel ideas into products and services to achieve its business values. At the individual level, what matters now is creativity. Creativity can manifest in a collective environment: While the individual contributions provide the building block of creativity, it is the collective consensus on what to do with them that is exciting. Develop employees entrepreneurially, let them do things and problems solving in their own way to meet good results. Though the guide is needed at that crucial time, you will see the innovations in your company pipeline. Management should direct workflow, support the health of the team, create an environment where people want to work, encourage brainstorming. If management is successful, innovation will follow. Business innovation is bravery - it may take you to a whole other place. And it’s the success factors to grow into a digital master.

Learning agility: Learning agility is the willingness and ability to learn, de-learn and relearn, and then apply those lessons to succeed in new situations. People who are learning agile continuously seek new challenges, solicit direct feedback, self-reflect, and get jobs done resourcefully. They see unique patterns and make fresh connections that others overlook. At the organizational level, learning organizations are comfortable with complexity, ambiguity, paradoxes and they have a penchant for candor. So high organizational learning relates to high response in recognizing and addressing system constraints. Unless constraints are addressed, a range of employees’ frustrations, risks, stress, and poor organizational performance examples can increase. This means, in turn, understanding levels or approaches at which organizational systems operate, and recognizing how and why they should change, and how they learn. As a result, this can influence employee and group learning and development. Thus, for a learning organization, it is not enough to survive only, but for thriving; not just for running a business today, but for growing and transforming the business to reach a high level of digital maturity in the long run.

Digital Masters are the high mature digital leaders in their vertical sector and business ecosystem. The digital transformation does not mean only to adopt the latest digital technologies or tools; it refers to modification and internalization of new values, behaviors, and culture when the need for the significant digital shift is identified. The business capabilities are also different from the mere sum of individual abilities and skills of its members; processes underpin business capabilities; and culture nurtures capability coherence. It’s about what we do as a company, how we do it, it’s collective capabilities to ensure organization as a whole can achieve more even it is consist of a group of normal people, and the well set of optimal capabilities can be cultivated via cultural coherence and continuous process improvement. Digital masters are dynamic, high-agile, high-innovative and high-mature business leaders or champions with their own unique strengths and styles.

Digitalization is like a flywheel, and Digital Masters are the one riding above it. Surf more Information about Digital Master:


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