Tuesday, October 15, 2019

Develop the Corporate Board with Digital Acumen

The corporate directors need to be diverse by mindsets, industry background, skills, experience level, and perspective.

Digital organizations are complex systems that are dynamic, self-evolving, self-adaptable, and self-perpetuating. Digital dynamic with “VUCA” characteristics create many blind spots in decision-making and generates quite a few gaps for change and digital transformation. Thus, digital corporate board directors with strategic acumen are in strong demand for helping the business in strategy development and performance monitoring..




With strong digital acumen, BoDs can sense emergent opportunities and predict potential risks: The corporate strategy is definitely a different beast nowadays because the speed of change is accelerating. Digital Board of Directors with strategic acumen are in demand for helping the business in strategy development, not just overseeing the strategy. The traditional strategy is the view via considerably narrow frames with static timelines, but digital strategy view is broader to oversee the entire business ecosystem and has to embrace the emergent digital dynamic with continuous disruptions. Thus, the linear strategy-execution management needs to become nonlinear iterative strategy management continuum. The corporate board directors often present an in-depth knowledge about the business and expertise in multiple domains. So, they can see things from different angles and provide invaluable feedback to business management teams for steering digital transformation in the right direction.

Improving digital acumen requires significant changes in leadership thinking and corporate culture: Digital makes a significant impact on every aspect of the business from people, processes to technologies, both horizontally and vertically. The corporate board directors can learn a lot from different mindsets (thought processes), cultures and positions, to make good policies so that the organization as a whole can be competitive enough to keep surging further. The multidimensional digital effects provide impressive advantages in terms of the speed of delivery, the quality of information for decision making, and the wisdom of the digital workforce. The corporate board is responsible for ensuring an appropriate mix of skills, knowledge, and experience are present or available for it to fulfill its function and advise leadership team wisely. The Board of Directors with digital acumen can both drive changes and adapt to changes effortlessly.

Digital acumen is dependent on how effectively the corporate board can leverage information in decision-making: Leadership is all about change and directorship is about steering the business toward the right direction. The matter of fact is that the changes sweeping the business are hugely disruptive and there is nowhere to hide. Organizations with corporate boards of more diversified BoDs often outperform organizations with homogeneous boards. Keep in mind though, information and decision-making are intimately connected and interdependent. The corporate board should optimize their decision-making processes in the presence of an "outsider," and leverage information to the context and environment in which decisions are made. Information drives awareness, which can include all of these characteristics, uncertainty, surprise, difficulty and entropy, although it can also trigger a sense of confidence, confirmation, validation, verification..

The corporate directors need to be diverse by mindsets, industry background, skills, experience level, and perspective. Insightful digital BoDs with digital acumen can laser focus on using energy and resources strategically, have better chances to figure out the “secret sauce” of directorship, in order to make positive leadership influence and achieve the progressive outcome.

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