Thursday, February 22, 2018

To Celebrate 4500 Blog Posting: The Thoughts and Quotes of “Future of CIO” Blog (Part II)

Blogging is 5% of inspiration +creativity with 95% of dedication + perseverance.

Blogging is to pursue the digital communication way for envisioning, brainstorming, sharing, and debating. It’s the journey to make the continuous leadership influence and connect the dots for spurring creativity and advocating digital innovation. It’s the time to celebrate 4500 blog posting of the “Future of CIO with all those alphabetic thoughts and quotes.



N- Niche:

The leadership niche is based on leadership substance + leadership strength + leadership style + Leadership brand.

Leadership is all about future and change. Leadership now becomes more open, trans-disciplinary, influential and innovative. The digital leadership effectiveness is not based on how loud you can speak, but how profound you can influence and what’s the leadership niche you can bring to the table. Leadership niche or strength is different from leadership style, the style is often at the skin level, but strength is built underneath. The leadership niche is based on leadership substance + leadership strength + leadership style + Leadership brand. The power of effective leader depends on a number of factors, the purpose to lead, leadership intelligence, the mix of knowledge and experience, the quality of information they receive and their collective leadership ability to operate as a team.

O- Openness

A mind is like a parachute, it works best when it’s open.”

Many say an open mind is more important than talent, as the state of your mind (open or close) will directly impact on how you make decisions as well as how you judge others. The people with the beginner’s mind are more open, they naturally treat each situation with freshness and novelty, no matter how many times they’d seen it or done it before, they would enjoy exploring the new possibilities or pursue the different way of doing things. In order to change anyone’s mindset, the individual must have an open mind. Some say, "the most expensive thing anyone can own is a closed mind.” We can look at changing our own mindsets in the context of ourselves; we are all part of social systems with both individual and collective mindsets. Everyone has the ability to change their mindsets. Because every person has degrees of both open and closed mindsets in different contexts.

P - Profundity
A profound mind is like a big ocean, deep, but also open.

Back to the root of the word “profundity,” it means insightful and understanding. Climbing Knowledge-Insight-Wisdom pyramid is important steps in gaining profundity. It’s not just about knowing, but in-depth understanding; it requires a person's ability to grasp or comprehend information. Indeed, profundity is one of the crucial traits to differentiate average, mediocre, good, great or extraordinary person. Assumptions and prejudices are due to lack of deeper understanding. It is the responsibility of each individual to examine themselves and to make sure they are open to true understanding. The maturity of both individuals and an organization as a whole depends on how thoughtful they are - to make effective decisions or sound judgments; and how deeply they can go - to gain the insight or cure the root cause of both existing problems and emerging problems.

Q- Quality
The most important thing is that you need to define the quality as leadership and quality as management.

As a degree of quality is in everything people do and experience. People are always the weakest link in organizations. What is required is clarifying the purpose and engaging all the people involved working together as a team to excel in the delivery of product/service, as quality management is to help them in doing what they are doing better, easier and so on. Quality employees are the ones who can think and work independently, have excellent problem-solving skills, well disciplined, have a "customer focus," and bring positivity and wisdom to the workplace. Therefore, high-quality people should also improve the quality of products, services, and overall organizational maturity.

R - Resilience
Resilience is a property of an elastic component of a person.

Resiliency is about bouncing forward- includes bouncing back. The thinking skill of "putting things in perspective” can support the person to bounce back from disappointments and thus will provide the bigger picture for the person to move on from any kind of adverse situations. Resilience is about B.O.U.N.C.E. It’s about regaining one's footing which could be bouncing back, forwards or restructuring your life integrating the change in some way that works. It's the ability to respond to change, to recover quickly from setbacks, as well as the capacity to respond to the unexpected in a way that increases gain and/or minimizes loss. Business resilience is the business capability to make organization more risk intelligent, not just controlling, but managing it effectively. Because businesses are faced with more opportunities and risks in the digital era, being resilience is about failing fast, failing cheaper, and failing forward, also recovering more promptly.

S - Simplicity

Innovation is progress, and progress is in simplicity.
Innovation is often to make things more intuitive and easy to use. As Einstein wisely put: “Things should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.” With simplicity, what we are adding is clarity and purpose. By nature, innovators often enjoy simplicity, though they also have the complexity mindset to come out creative ideas, because creativity is the high level of thinking via integrating multiple thinking processes. Progress is in simplification, which often follows complexity. When pioneering and solving problems, initial solutions are often more complex than required, and then adoption and progress come with simplification. Unnecessary complexity arises not from nothing. Humans create, though unintentionally in most cases their own problems. Therefore, they have to untie the knots they made themselves. People complicate the simple things when they don't have the answers. The masters decode complexity and make it simple, elegant, and purposeful.

T - Transdisciplinary knowledge
Dealing with the significant challenge of digital transformation requires accelerated digital mindsets, leveraging multidisciplinary knowledge and insight.

In the “VUCA” digital new normal, organizations and human society will be confronting a number of high-complex problems in the hyper-connected world, the solutions will require integration of different sets of knowledge and fluency across multiple disciplines. The purpose of managing business via interdisciplinary discipline is to ensure that the business as a whole is superior to the sum of pieces. The digital transformation is now spreading rapidly to enable organizations of all shapes and sizes to reinvent themselves. But dealing with the significant challenge of digital transformation requires accelerated digital mindsets, leveraging multidisciplinary knowledge and insight, taking an end-to-end response and a structural approach. It involves applied Science (Engineering), Art (Design), principle (Philosophy), Cognition (Psychology), Social norms (Culture) and group behavior (Sociology). To engage and function in complex environments, it requires fundamentally different mindsets and paradigms such as accepting that influence is attainable, but control is not. It needs to leverage information to overcome uncertainty and unpredictability, and it takes a holistic approach to unleash the digital potential of today’s organization.

U - Uniqueness
Every person is unique, put the right people with the right capability to the right position to solve the right problems.

Every person is unique, no two snowflakes are the same. Being unique means to be authentic. Because when you always play safe, afraid of being different, you might lose the character or block your creativity. Compete with uniqueness is more effective than competing for everything. Being real is much more important than being perfect. The next step for discovering professional uniqueness is investigating what’s your strength, your passion: defining your task, things you want to do and do better than others. Self-awareness is important for the recognition of one’s strength and weakness, cognition ability, and style, intellectual engagement, creative problem-solving capabilities, personalities, innovativeness, plasticity, pattern discovery, dots connection, adaptation, and emotional intelligence. Either at individual or business level, the unique set of capabilities will help you to achieve career or business goals.

V- Versatility

The professional versatility is not just separate skills, but onion-like cohesive abilities or integral & recombinant capabilities.

Having enriched knowledge or versatile talent is foundational to create more fresh ideas in today’s sophisticated digital world. Talent is neither just about "busyness" nor linear skills, you need to keep your hands on the wheel, eyes opened, and ears to the ground. It’s harder to build the robust and coherent ability which become an integral element of their unique professional capabilities to do things differently. Talent and versatility need to be measured in both quantitative and qualitative way. Work hard and work smarter need to go hand in hand.And sometimes, spreading time on doing too many things even turns to be a distraction from building their strength based on the innate talent. The digital workforce is more dynamic and digital workplace needs to be more people-centric. The competitions between machine and humans are intensifying. Thus, building integral capabilities such as multi-dimensional thinking abilities or creativity become imperative for digital professionals. To achieve success both as an individual and an employee, it is important that you understand your work environment, understand what is required to be done, have the right resources; and include the appropriate mindset. It takes versatility to shape new, new box, especially noted for transforming old mental maps or paradigms and creating strategies that are “outside the box” of conventional thought. They embody a balance of right brain and left brain thinking. "

W -Wisdom
Wisdom has something to do with making a sound judgment.

Wisdom is the full learning cycle: Learning, unlearning and relearning. Wisdom is not knowledge; one cannot have wisdom without knowledge, but one cannot substitute wisdom for knowledge as well. Wisdom is a full awareness of the situation and applying it right. Wisdom is to be understood within this context, wisdom is the ability to learn from every experience, to be able to gather small bits of information from all sources, and apply that to current or future challenges. Wisdom mainly consists of having experience and yet knowing when to discard that experience, when you come across new knowledge, new frontiers of existing knowledge. Plus an open mind. Wisdom is a function of knowing what you don't know and keeps curiosity to know more. Knowledge tends to be linear, but wisdom is multidimensional.

X- X Factor
‘X-factor’ has been defined as ‘a variable in a given situation that could have the most significant impact on the outcome, and it’s a noteworthy special talent or quality.’

Digital means flow, mind flow, information flow and business flow with a change management continuum. It is a healthy business life cycle to close the gaps of the industrial age and the new digital era, and mixing the “hard” and “soft” business key factors accordingly. In order to solve business problems effectively and unlock business performance, it’s important to analyze “CRAMPS” factors.

Cost — what are the costs of the solution, are they acceptable.

Risk — what are the risks associated with the solution. Is the level of risk acceptable to the enterprise?

Reliability, Robustness part of Availability Sensitivity, depending on how you mean this, it is an aspect of Availability, Performance.

Availability — what availability is required and does the solution provide it.

Manageability — is the solution manageable, and how would it be managed.

Performance — what is the expected performance of the solution, is it within acceptable limits

Scalability — what is the scalability of the solution, is it within acceptable limits.


Y - Youth in mind

Youth in mind is less about age, more about growth mindset and learning plasticity.

Youth in mind is in strong demand because it is audacious, adaptive, aggressive and digital imperative. The mind of the older generation is usually more rigid. Their "know it all" attitude is difficult to erase because they are deep-seated with the life experiences and beliefs. In fact, youth in mind is less about age, more about the ability to learn and grow. It’s important to be equipped with a learning mind because when you stop learning, you are stagnant; especially at the age of digital, information is only a click away, but knowledge life cycle is significantly shortened. Digital professionals with growth mind can step out of their own comfort zone easily, walk the talk and lead change confidently. If you only know two colors - Black and White; then, perceptions are filtered into one of those two dimensions. You can only know what you know, but there are more dimensions which you don’t know; there’s known unknown and unknown unknown, hence, the more you know, the more you feel humbled, because even human as collective species, the things we know, compared to what we don’t know, is just the tip of iceberg.



Z - Zest
A zest for learning and growing are contagious traits for improving digital maturity.

Energy and enthusiasm do fuel your imagination and creativity. On one hand, we have the level of curiosity, desire to learn and natural ability to maintain an open and inquisitive mind; on the other hand, we have the conditions of the environment in which we operate, with all the restrictions, the needs, the gaps and pressures that might push our creative minds to soar. A passion with a good positive chain of thoughts followed by positive actions often brings good results and leapfrogs progress. Optimism is built on a positive perception or a belief linked to one’s expectations some of which may take the time to turn creative thought and ideas into the reality. Be passionate about learning, the skills you develop will help you as your career evolves, having a passion and building a career around that passion would certainly help to discover “who you are,” fuel creativity, align your focus and therefore potentially aiding you in greater success.

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