Innovation

Innovation management needs to lay out different thinking, structures, and best practices, connect more meaningful dots to allow business to develop into its potential.

The most advanced businesses and societies are diverse mixtures of peoples that can spark creativity and amplify innovation. Building an ideal digital workforce won’t happen overnight, it takes planning, experimenting and scaling up.

 Surviving and thriving upon exponential growth of information, fierce competitions, and continuous disruptions requires connecting the right dots to enhance innovation, apply interdisciplinarity to improve management effectiveness and resilience.

Innovation & observation: Innovation is to transform novel ideas for achieving their commercial value. Observation, inquisitiveness, experimenting, etc. are all important stages of innovation. The best observation is about trying to understand what you're observing; keep fresh eyes and stay a novice of some sort. Observe your people, are they satisfied and fully engaged with the work? Can they bring fresh ideas/insight to the table or provide constructive feedback? Who are high performers, who have high potential?

Observe corporate culture - the collective mindset, is it positive and innovative, or the opposite is true? Observe how things get done in the organization, observe how people are doing when the managers are not around; observe how decisions are made across the organizational hierarchy. Observe how ideas are generated; observe the processes that are used to implement ideas. Observe, observe more, through your cool head and sharp eyes; clarify the relationships interwoven surrounding the system- either people or organizations, discover patterns or hidden clues, connect more dots to generate fresh ideas.

Innovation & Learning agility: With the exponential growth of information and shortened knowledge lifecycle, a learning organization is more comfortable with complexity, ambiguity, paradoxes, and fierce competition. In fact, learning agility at both individual and business level is a critical capability and culture shift, it will directly impact the level of innovation maturity and the speed of digital transformation. From a workforce management perspective, growth mindset and learning agility are not “nice to have,” but must have digital professional quality to build an innovative organization.

You simply can't resolve the 21st-century problems with the mindsets shaped half-century ago or the outdated information or knowledge. The emerging digital technologies such as social platform provide a flexible way to learn, share, collaborate and innovate. All humans have an insatiable curiosity that leads us to learn, learning further nurtures creativity because what you learn selectively further stimulates your imagination. Developing people’s innovative mindset and business innovation competency raise awareness about different "learning" issues that organizations must deal with smoothly. It is important to cultivate a learning culture to develop a creative workforce and build a highly-innovative organization.

Innovation & antifragility: The digital world is dynamic, nonlinear, uncertain, volatile, and ambiguous, the organizations with “antifragile” characteristics can better survive and thrive in the volatility and uncertainty of digital dynamic, improve organizational agility, catalyze innovation, drive business transformation. The difference between the antifragile and fragile lies in optionality. The fragile has no option. But anti-fragile needs to select what’s the best. Look for optionality: providing customers choices and delighting them with premium products/services; putting right people to do the right work by empowering them with customized tools; developing talent with personalized solutions.

The optionality is preferably with open-ended, not closed-ended, payoffs, encouraging fresh perspectives and renewing innovation. Innovation has high return and high risk. Antifragility implies self-healing, going beyond resilience or robustness. The resilience resists shocks and stays the same; antifragility gets better, antifragility loves randomness and uncertainty, which means crucially, a love of errors, allowing organizations to deal with the unknown, taking innovation adventure with the right dose of risk appetite. Organizations with antifragility invest in their people, encouraging risk-taking and nurture a culture of innovation.

There is no magic formula to cultivating a high-innovative and high-professional digital workforce as well. Innovation management needs to lay out different thinking, structures, and best practices, connect more meaningful dots to allow business to develop into its potential in which organizations are combining all that is available to them in imaginative or advantageous ways to keep generating fresh ideas, reinventing and renewing themselves smoothly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Innerhybridity

Forward-looking organizations experiment with different types of organizational structure design to enforce business alignment, enablement, communication, collaboration, and harmony.

Digital makes a significant impact on every aspect of the business from people, process to technology, both horizontally and vertically. Digital becomes the very fabric of high performing business, being outside-in and customer-centric is the new mantra for forward-looking and high mature digital organizations today. 

 From an organizational structure perspective, how can you fine-tune the digital dimensions of your organizational development to harness innovation?

 

Hybrid Organizational Structure

Learning Organizational Structure To survive in the “VUCA” digital era, dynamism consists in being able to break away from being static, and becoming proactive to ever-evolving changes. The more difficult challenge is not just launching successful teams, but maintaining their motivation and focus, tuning an organizational structure and creating a dynamic environment in which learning is the new norm and happens the whole time. Unlike the closed mechanical system, the digital organization keeps growing, generates patterns, tunes organizational structure, initiates business activities, and above all, creates novelty and builds knowledge over time.

InnerHybrid Digital Management Disciplines The digital paradigm has many dimensions, it is like to solve a jigsaw puzzle with thousands of pieces, easy to get lost when trying to capture the big picture. Digital transformation is the journey for solving problems caused by "conflict," "out of balance," and “lack of logic.” It has to expand into every dimension of the organization with a structural approach. Thus, digital management is a hybrid and holistic discipline with mixed management styles for managing everything that is necessary to get people to adopt new ways of working such as cross-functional communication and collaboration, organizational structure design, change management, talent development, digital business readiness, and stakeholder management, etc.

Innate Fine Tune the Organizational Structure for Breakthrough Innovation Innovation is to transform novel ideas and achieve its business value. However, for most of the organizations, innovation, especially breakthrough innovation, is still serendipity. There are many factors that determine innovation success. From an organizational structure perspective, how can you get well organized for managing innovation more effectively?

Organizational Structure Design Maturity The organizational structure carries inherent business capabilities as to what can be achieved within its frame. The pyramidal structured organization brings up a certain level of efficiency, but an overly rigid hierarchy becomes the very obstacle to stop the digital flow. Misaligned structures or disconnect functions reinforce a non-innovation friendly climate and stifle business changes. With increasing changes, horizons and speed are crucial for business success today. Organization development is to help organizations get better by providing an environment within which employees at all levels are inspired and allowed to commit their best in the organization's long term success.

Digital Workforce Hybridity As our digitized world becomes hyper-connected, over-complex and interdependent, digital system themes with all the aggregates-spanning business challenges, paradoxes and opportunities bring organizations further towards the challenges of constructing and enacting "hybrid realities" across individuals, teams, looser groups, organizations, network-enterprises, and holistic digital ecosystems. The digital paradigm that is emerging is the sociological organization which is alive, holistic, vibrant, energetic, responsive, fluid, innovative and resilient with hybridity of knowledge, processes, workforce, and competencies.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with about #8700+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. blog posting. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom, to inspire critical thinking and spur healthy debates. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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Innatearchitecture

Business architecture brings the systems understanding of relationships, ecosystems, market dynamics, and the connections between related business units.

The digital organization is hyper-connected and interdependent; the very characteristics of digital organization are about openness, responsiveness, fluidity, hybridity, and innovativeness, etc.

 Enterprise architecture contains the organizational context and is strategic in that it gives direction to the business design and innovation, for shaping real-time, extensible, complex adaptive systems.

To get timely & meaningful business intelligence: Architecture and intelligence mutually reinforce each other. Business architecture is an effective planning tool; big data predictive analysis improves planning accuracy. When you include Big Data as an essential business driver and guiding principle to develop the architecture for a business capability, it has a great impact on the way the capability is designed, developed and enabled. It is important to understand how data reflects reality by doing information investigation or any attempt at understanding the business context and balancing multi-facet of facts and data such as five “Vs”: volume, velocity, variety, veracity, and value.

The point is that humans should all have some humility and recognize the limitations of their expertise and partner them with the other experts to apply the analytical algorithms to planning, decision-making or problem-solving. Enterprise architecture needs to comprehend the "so what" factor and make a concerted effort to extract the business value behind big data and fuel its impact on planning, communicating, and innovating. Without the ability to repurpose and extract intrinsic value from the data and content to facilitate social innovation, the big data premise is useless.

To do business process optimization: Business Architecture is an effective tool for gaining visibility across the core business processes as well as helping to optimize business processes for improving business effectiveness and efficiency. In fact, business process management is a holistic business management philosophy and practice. It requires senior management understanding and strategic involvement. Many different capabilities are required to achieve enterprise-wide business process management with connections to enterprise architecture. There are varieties of process improvement initiatives from incremental to the larger process re-engineering to the largest are truly transformational in nature.

Business process management is a methodology and business architecture is a big-picture - the visualization of the organization strategy, competences and operation layers, and how they fit together. The relationships of business processes in the context of the rest of the enterprise systems create greater capabilities when analyzing and planning enterprise changes. Business Architecture should have the capability to transform the manual process and the business requirement to process design and governance so that the organization’s mission, vision, and goal can be realized. Business process management is related to the design, development, analysis, understanding, test, and improvement of business processes, ensuring the alignment between strategy and culture.

To envision customers’ perspective, deliver customers’ outcomes efficiently and reliably: Being customer-centric is one of the most important business goals in any forward-thinking business today. Business Architecture is a great tool for business leaders to orchestrate the organizational interrelationship between people and process. Integrating customer experience with business design should be a critical aspect of planning and architecting future businesses. By leveraging architecture as a planning and design tool, people-centric businesses are fluid, flexible, and intelligent in knitting all necessary elements together into great customer experience and drive a seamless paradigm shift.

Business architecture helps to envision customers’ perspective, deliver customers’ outcomes efficiently and reliably Customer experience maturity is dependent on how brand values, promises, and architectures need to be defined in order to deliver exceptional customer experiences. Customer satisfaction and customer reputation should be tracked diligently and managed continuously. Business architecture can offer viewpoints or approaches for modeling total customer experience and improve people-centricity.

Business architecture brings the systems understanding of relationships, ecosystems, market dynamics, and the connections between related business units. It helps to orchestrate organizational interrelationship by bridging gaps, enforcing communication, fostering collaboration, building trust, ultimately leading to greater autonomy, "self-generated" engagement, organizational effectiveness and maturity.

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Innovation

Real societal progress is made through the work of foreseeable leaders and business professionals who can figure out how to trend the future, capture the great opportunities to unleash collective human potential and build a highly innovative society.

In the face of “VUCA” new normal, individuals or businesses across boundaries evolve digital transformation with different speed. From here to there takes planning, actions, developing building blocks as well as making continuous adjustment. Rapid change and abundant knowledge bring both opportunities for business growth and chaos as pitfalls. 

Digital organizations and their people must learn through their interactions with the business environment, understand tales of changes, and make multifaceted shifts from mindset to attitude to behavior. They apply their learning, act, observe the consequences of their actions, make inferences about those consequences, and draw implications for future actions, with the ultimate goal to make a smooth digital transformation.

From industrialism to holism: In the considerably static industrial age, organizations usually have an overly rigid hierarchy with functional silo setting, people are more compliance driven rather than potentiality-pursuing, getting stuck at the comfort zone with “we always do things like that” mentality. Often companies cannot reach the high level of business maturity with full speed. To make a smooth business transformation, it’s important to build the great mix of business elements that enable the organizational interdependence, enforce cross-functional communication and collaboration, keep information, ideas flowing frictionlessly to reach the higher state of business maturity.

To deal with a new normal with hyper-complexity, hyper-diversity, and interdependence, people need to think holistically, apply interdisciplinary knowledge to solve problems thoroughly. Business management should apply holism philosophy -transcending an adding or combination of thinking ways, to fix the silo misperception by integrating quality information, exploring multiple thought processes, willing to listen to the diverse viewpoints, and seeing both the forest and the trees.

From traditionalism to contemporarism: Traditional mindset is usually homogeneous, conservative, thinking “in the box”; or living in the past; traditional management is to apply reductionist methodology to achieve a certain level of business efficiency; however, with rapid change, such mindset and management discipline can only fix the symptom perhaps, but the real problems continue coming back. Contemporary means “living or occurring at the same time”; practice “out of the box” creative thinking, make continuous progress.

Traditional professionals are usually educated in the traditional classroom, take linear steps in working by holding common beliefs or taking some traditional practices. Contemporary leaders or professionals are perceived as modern, open-minded, informative, creative, heterogamous, and changeable to adapt to the digital new normal. They think globally and live digitally. They are equipped with digital mindset, having agility to adapt and create momentum, presenting unique and impressive digital footprint to build their contemporary digital persona; demonstrating digital fitness based on recombinant core competencies with continuous deliveries.

From conventionalism to adventurism: In the static society with the scarce knowledge and traditional cultures, most of the people are educated to be compliant with conventional wisdom and most traditional companies discourage innovation. Conventional wisdom has a negative connotation about sticking to outdated knowledge or concepts, traditions or cultures, or simply the old ways to think or do things. Modern leaders and professionals are bold digital adventurists, who can craft and cast a clear vision, spur creativity, and explore alternative ways to solving either existing or new problems effectively.

Strategically, it will be effective to surface, examine, challenge and perhaps, even shift the underlying paradigms. Digital business leaders today should nourish the excitement, learn how to walk the innovation talk, start to expand the collaborative innovation process, create sustainable business value, draw from the experience and expertise of those around them, and take an adventurous journey of digital transformation.

Change is inevitable, compared to changes, the business transformation is more radical, with all sorts of ups & downs, opportunities & risks, bumps & curves. Real societal progress is made through the work of foreseeable leaders and business professionals who can figure out how to trend the future, capture the great opportunities to unleash collective human potential and build a highly innovative society.

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Innernextpractices

Not every innovative company uses every best practice. Not every authority agrees on every best practice. One size doesn't fit all.

Change becomes the new normal, and the speed of change is increasing significantly. Dynamism consists in being able to break away from being static, and becoming proactive to changes. 

To capture trends and create business synergy, organizational management should strive to scale up agility, innovation, business transformation efforts by exploring the "best and next practices" throughout their organization to accelerate digital transformation.

Best practice is something one does or meets expectations in a positive way: Whatever the activity, there is one best way of performing it; one way that uses the least resources takes the least time and still meets quality standards. That method is the best practice. Every organization should strive to explore the "best practices" throughout their organization. These practices might be different across organizations, across departments, divisions, and affiliates within an organization and can change over time. In fact, they should change and evolve over time.

Best practices should be institutionalized across the organization. One of the benefits of the phrase "best practices" is that it is aspirational. Every organization should strive to explore the "best practices" throughout their organization. With effective tools or methodologies, the best practice can be used wisely and with the expertise to really add value; gain advantage from the "wisdom of crowds," share best practices across the organizational hierarchy, and improve business management efficiency and competency. To scale up, we can identify individual, group and collective best practices that we can then choose to implement in our own societies, with the goal to advance human society systematically.

The practices that are "best" today are almost always not "best" in the future: Organizational management is a set of principles, processes, and practices. The practice is always a combination of people and how they are used to doing things. Often, the best practices were industry-specific and evidence-based, meaning they were based on data. Developing the best practices help to standardize solutions to some common problems usually within the industry.

However, with an increasing pace of changes, technologies and markets are constantly morphing under pressure from the waves of creative destruction that keep the business in innovation mode. Therefore, the best practices perhaps make people get stuck in the “we always do things like that,” mentality, and become the very obstacle to progressive changes. Thus, it is always critical to develop the next practices for both stimulating new ideas and optimizing the innovation process to reach the next level of maturity.

Some "next practices" continue to emerge: Not every authority agrees on every best practice. Best practices are contextual, and no best practice is perfect. The best practices might be different across organizations, across departments, divisions, and affiliates within an organization; it can change over time. Perhaps it is a better approach to strive for using good practice, good enough for a certain organization and for the specific situation and challenges that are faced and that actually requires different priorities or approaches as compared to others.

The key is context. If the best practice you want to adopt is to be implemented in the same context, it could work. It actually leads to a better solution for your environment, to improve efficiency and productivity. Taking the best practice from one environment into another could turn out to be the worst practice, as so-called best is now out of its benchmarking context. The real problem with best practices is that sometimes it stifles creativity and innovation, works against creating competitive advantage and creates the illusion of continuous improvement.

One size doesn't fit all. The best practice is more about setting principles and standards for driving markets change and shift. For each company attempting to deal with these changes, there is a different path to follow. Next practice is a recommended way of doing things. Digital is the era of innovation, every organization should strive to explore "the next best practices" throughout their organization continually.

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Innovation

Innovation involves new ways of bringing together ideas and resources to create something novel and then transform those novel ideas to achieve business value.

Innovation is not serendipity, but a management process and discipline. The broader the scope, scale, and impact of the change, the more one leans towards calling such change an innovation. Applying discipline to innovation is to figure out how to manage innovation in a structural way.

 Digital innovation has a broader spectrum and comes in many flavors; there are many opportunities in an enterprise to do so, innovation implies high return and high risks, etc. The essence of innovation is made of trying new combinations of known things or leveraging the variety of perspectives, methodologies, practices, etc., initiate thought-provoking conversations, to achieve high performance results.

Shift the “bits and bytes” talk to innovative conversation: The big concern in most of the organization is to deal with change, handle complexity, as the current business environment changes so fast for the business user to cope. Thus, the value of information is not isolated, focusing on the information aspect of the role in the context of the business is part of the innovation. Companies that leverage information to explore potential or use technology to create key differentiation among the competition are usually much more successful than those who don't.

To run an innovative organization, information-based forecasting is crucial to bring both insight and foresight to the business. Not only does the daily transaction of business involve information, but the value of information is also to empower the business with real-time insight across the organization in ways never possible before, for making transformative change. The management needs to shift the “bits and bytes” talk to innovative conversation for inspiring, motivating, persuading, negotiating, or clarifying, encouraging knowledge-sharing, generating and implementing great ideas continually.

Slice and dice the portfolio in a variety of ways - by geography; by line of business; by sponsoring executive; by delivery unit; strategic theme; and so on: Without innovation, organizations cannot thrive for the long term. Managing a healthy innovation portfolio should be integrated with strategic and financial investment. Planning & processes. There are incremental or breakthrough innovations. Effective categorization helps to highlight the real value of an innovation portfolio. Some elements that may help to identify what factors could result in short-term revenue-generating business initiatives being set aside in favor of another considered more strategic, or vice versa.

Innovation portfolio management plays a significant role in portfolio prioritization and optimization. In order to make the portfolio executable, an organization needs to make sure that enough resources are available to deliver projects and programs, and also manage the interdependencies of the initiatives. Innovation has a very low success rate. Clarified categorization is also important to have enough visibility about how the projects/programs are performing in order to monitor progress in a structural way. Without effective categorization to clarify the goals for fitting your circumstances, perhaps, resources/assets/time would be misused and talent could be misplaced.

From “under-governance, over-governance” to nonlinear governance: Digital innovation has to connect the wider dots within the business ecosystem. Innovation has higher risk than any other types of business initiatives. The governance aspect and innovation don't immediately come together depending on the context in which innovation is used. Applying a single layer of governance, as a lot of businesses do, will either enforce over governance or under governance. Over-governance stifles innovation; under-governance makes innovation risky.

Innovation governance is neither linear nor single dimension. Innovation governance is less about control, more about enablement and intelligence. The value proposition of good governance and brand should be integrated within and across operations. High mature companies adopt social-technical-ecological perspective of governance models, to deal with uncertainty and complexity enable innovation management to understand business ecosystem dynamics, combining different ecological knowledge systems to aid in interpreting and responding to ecosystem feedback, in order to improve innovation effectiveness and efficiency. 

Innovation involves new ways of bringing together ideas and resources to create something novel and then transform those novel ideas to achieve business value. Innovation is doing something better than it currently is. Digital organizations should build innovation as a differentiated business competency, learn how to solve problems creatively and manage a balanced innovation portfolio systematically.

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Unhealthycompetition

Competition has different connotations and meanings under different situations or context.

Digital makes a significant impact on how we think, live, and work. There is the mix of old and new, physical and virtual, order and chaos. We are in a time of tremendous change, the dawn of the digital age, the path to the next level of digital maturity, also in the era of confusion and information overload. 

Therefore, it’s critical to identify, understand, and avoid pitfalls, discover strategic and predictive pathways to change, increase confidence, position a brand and leverage resources to make the digital paradigm shift effortlessly. Slideshare Presentation

    Unhealthy Competition

Unhealthycompetitions In reality, the workplace competition is not always positive, it is the energy behind the competition that matters sometimes. The goals or motivation behind competition can be unhealthy and the competitive arena can produce a myriad of unwise mentality and negative externalities. How to encourage professionalism and healthy competitions for innovative problems-solving and transformative changes?

Innerrootcausesofdigitalstagnation Change becomes the new normal, and even the speed of change is accelerating. Either for individuals or businesses today, change is inevitable, some of us get it quicker than others. But too often changes are made as a reaction to outer impulses, crisis. From a change management perspective, what's the psychology behind the change? What are the possible change pitfalls on the way? What would be a good way to empower change agents and develop changeability? Many organizations are on the journey of digitalization, what are the root causes of digital stagnation?

InnerBarriers on the Path of Going Digital Organizations large or small are on the way to going digital, it is not an overnight phenomenon, but a well-planning journey which will not be flat. It's a bumpy road with ups and downs, curves and blocks all the way. Digital transformation is worth its weight, not just because of its high cost, but because of its high impact on the business’s long-term prosperity. It represents a break from the past, with a high level of impact. From a change management perspective, what are barriers and pitfalls on the way and how to lead change successfully?

Innatecompetition Competition has different connotations and meanings under different situations or context. Competition is part of the natural dynamics of life and societal evolution. Good competition pushes us to grow, innovate, and mature; bad competition causes confusion, frustration, and downgrades humanity.

A “Corpetitve” Mind: Is Competition Good or Bad Competition may have different connotations and meanings under different situations or context. 'Competition' in biology means the cutthroat struggle for life's essentials. Competition is part of the natural dynamics of life. It is part of the genetic bias of every living thing in nature as a survival-seeking mindset. There are ample examples of competitive behaviors in the animal world. That is the basis for their survival and thriving lives. However, humans are intelligent beings, if we really are as intelligent as we claim to be, we shall have principles and disciplines to discern the positive motivation or negative energy behind the competition. Whether we like it or not, as long as humans are unique, their mindsets, opinions, cultures, lives, and views etc are equally unique and diversified. That results in both collaboration and competition depending on the context and situations. But many times the competitions turn to be the "one-upmanship, superiority" battles. With today’s digital hyperconnectivity and interdependence, is it time to step into the new hybrid era of corpetition (cooperation + competition)?

The blog is a dynamic book flowing with your thoughts; 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 7 million page views with about #8700 blog postings. Among 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes the time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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Innovativeleadership

The purpose of leadership is to drive changes by conveying the vision, updating the outdated viewpoint, and getting the work done promptly.

The business and world become over-complex and hyper-connected than ever, there is no “one-size-fits-all” leadership format in such a diversified, divergent and dynamic world. There are many informal ways to grow leadership and amplify their leadership influence. 

Effective leaders need to have knowledge to deal with complexity and ambiguity, insight to make sound judgment, competency to accelerate performance, and influence to drive progressive change.

 

Adaptive leadership: In face of “VUCA” new norm, with rapid changes and continuous disruptions, the business agility based on self-adaptation is the capability to adapt to the change and make "conscious" business choices seamlessly. Adaptive leadership teams comprising a diverse range of individuals with the cognitive difference will be able to listen to diverse voices across the organizational hierarchy, de-emphasizes hierarchy and accelerates strategic change. Running a highly responsive organization sometimes needs to have the adaptability to meet the business’s expectation, leverage tailored approaches to fit specific circumstances, and ultimately respond to the external environment with speed.

Intentional leadership: Leadership is about future and direction. The industrial style of relation-based leadership via “who you know” shifts to the digital style of intentional leadership based on “who you are”- the mindset, expertise reflected through their omnipresent digital footprint. The intention to change is to make a better future; making self-assessment and evaluating the past can certainly lead us to a good insight towards the future. Company strategy flowing from culture is intentional leadership at its best. Good intentions with differentiated competency enable the organization to drive desired changes they would like to see. Purpose and intention mutually reinforce each other. The organizational purpose and employee purpose ties in with the leadership development and who we are as people and as leaders perceive it as the right purpose to lead changes.

Character-based leadership: Character-based leaders are based on authenticity via both heart and mind, understand trust is a two-way street, win respect via their character, and such trustworthy leadership will motivate teams to be open-minded and perform better. The human being needs to be enthused to participate and achieve goals courageously. It takes the character to be confident, courageous, energetic and persistent. Being courageous is not the absence of fear, but acting in spite of it. Also, be intelligent to take calculated risks. Making leadership influence requires leaders to share insight & wisdom, gain mind space of their peers, teams, and followers;

Innovative leadership: Business leadership has to understand that innovation is a process which can be managed, instead of maintaining hierarchy or status quo. It's critical to shaping an organization. Leadership innovation is a prototype practice, organizations need to keep experimenting, exploring with clear goals and continuous practices, clarify the opportunity and articulate the vision, develop and manage the process of innovation, and promote a healthy climate for creativity. The best innovative leaders are well-disciplined, they should focus on the strategic business goals skillfully, and navigate innovation management in the right way. set the tone for change & innovation, and represent the overall quality and maturity of leadership.

Global leadership: The world-class leadership competencies include versatility, interdisciplinarity, empathy, inclusiveness, motivation to work cross-boundary. It’s important to comprehend just how complex it can be to do business around the world, gain intellectual understanding of the global business context. Leadership effectiveness in a global context comes into play with reciprocating awareness and cultural influence. High-influential global leaders are in demand to focus on convincing, persuasion, and collaboration at the global scope; passionately coach to cultivate more authentic global leaders.

The purpose of leadership is to drive changes by conveying the vision, updating the outdated viewpoint, and getting the work done promptly. It’s a cohesive effort to fulfill the purpose of leadership which is to awaken possibility in people to deliver extraordinary results.

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Innovativeit

IT plays a significant role in managing information-knowledge-insight cycle and fostering innovation by leveraging disruptive technologies and enriched information flow.

Within abundant information and emergent digital technologies, IT is a key component of holistic business mindset to re-imagine “what is possible” - unleashing business potentials and improving business efficiency, effectiveness, agility, and maturity. 

The “art of possible” to reinvent IT in the digital age is to deliver the value of information in helping businesses grow, delight customers and do more with innovation.

Innovative IT

Innovativeit Nowadays information technology is permeating everywhere in the organization; Information is useless if it cannot transform into business insight or foresight, and technology by itself is the means to the end, not the end itself. The power of information technology management is to deal with the mountain of information with both technology and human know-how, convert information into invaluable knowledge or real-time insight in handling “VUCA’ new normal and solving business issues effectively.

Insightfulinvestment Running a business is about solving problems, with continuum. Corporate strategy management is about diagnosing critical business issues, setting choices, making investment, and taking actions to solve them smoothly. There are both opportunities and risks for every investment, it’s important for the management to identify and evaluate investments in a way that solves problems with priority, clarify what investments you should direct more assets to by driving business value in terms that business stakeholders understand.

Itapplicationassessment IT is an enabler of current and future capability for both the organization and its ecosystem. IT management should have a strong sense of how to develop customer-centric business initiatives/programs for building an integral and unique set of business capabilities by combining technology and business tactics. IT shouldn’t just run the company today, but help to “grow the business” for tomorrow.

IntegrationIT is well known as an engineering discipline and an isolated back-office function with a set of mysterious hardware boxes to keep the business wheel spinning. With emergent lightweight digital technologies and overwhelming growth of information, IT management shouldn't just practice some transactional activities, it has to discover both the art and science of digital management discipline. Because technology is often the disruptive force of digital transformation, and information could be one of the most time intensive pieces to innovation puzzles. Here are three aspects to understand the creative side of IT.

Innovativeinitiatives With the increasing pace of organizational changes and digital disruptions, innovation is the unique path to build business advantage. The available digital technology just makes innovation easier to do now than in the past, less costly and more easily accessible. Every organization needs to develop the best or next innovation practices, apply effective technologies, tools or methodologies to drive innovation for really adding value to corporate growth in the long term.

The blog is a dynamic book flowing with your thoughts; growing through your dedication; sharing your knowledge; conveying your wisdom, and making an influence through touching the hearts and connecting minds across the globe. The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 7 million page views with 8700+ blog postings. Among 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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Innovation

Innovation management is a scientific discipline with a set of best or next practices to perfect the art of creativity through progressive thinking and continuous improvement.

Artistically, innovation implies a fountain of creativity to come up with abundant fresh ideas. Scientifically, innovation is a managed process and the mechanism through which you grow and evolve something to something great. 

The good or bad innovation would depend on the business’s attitude to nourish a culture of creativity, its aptitude to manage ideas and improve the success rate of innovation.

 

Innovation & synchronization: Every forward-thinking company declares they are in the information management business. With fierce competition and more selective customers, the power of information is to empower the business with real-time insight across the organization in ways never possible before for enabling real-time decision-making. Organizations acquire the information-based synchronization abilities to reinvent innovative products, services, and customer engagement almost real time for gaining competitive advantage.

It’s information technology and knowledge management synchronization for envisioning the future, capturing customer insight to achieve innovation synchronization. The large-scale synchronized collaboration in the business ecosystem can be achieved via strategic agility and organizational structural flexibility. It starts to leverage powerful technology tools to boost social engagement, inspire creativity to establish multiple pathways for information flow and collaborative problem-solving in a synchronous manner.

Innovation and pattern Thinking: Pattern Thinking is a hybrid thinking to combine multidimensional thought processes such as design thinking, system thinking, architect thinking and visual thinking to capture deep insight for solving complex problems innovatively. Each pattern is useful to address some specific problems. The more patterns you discover, the more alternative solutions could emerge.

To be creative, you have to continue discovering new patterns. It requires you to keep your eyes open and keep your mind out of the box in order to actively seek out new meaning or fresh ideas wherever you could discover them. Patterns are often defined as solutions to problems in a context, enabling you to capture profound insight into complex problems in order to solve them in a creative way.

Innovation and phenomenon: Creativity is all around us, it is infused with an inner cohesion and comes from a vision of uniqueness. We just need to get connected with it. Creativity is a phenomenon. It needs conflict to spark it, encouragement as the spirit of food, etc. Innovators are usually proactive, inquisitive, proficient, and progressive. They are passionate to explore new possibilities; they pursue creative solutions to a problem. They find better ways to do things.

Creativity is not an addiction; it is a beautiful phenomenon. Innovators practice creative thinking almost every day, deepen their thought processes, Creativity is the discovery of what has not yet been seen nor manifested, innovation is the journey of exploring alternative solutions consistently. Innovation breakthrough is not an overnight phenomenon but a stepwise business evolution.

Creativity is art; and art is driven by our wide imagination and unlimited creativity. Technically, innovation involves new ways of bringing together ideas and resources to create something novel and then transform those novel ideas to achieve business value. Innovation management is a scientific discipline with a set of best or next practices to perfect the art of creativity through progressive thinking and continuous improvement.

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Innovategovernance

The flavor of GRC practices depends on the nature of the business and the level of the organizational maturity.

The important characteristics of digitalization are over-complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity. Hence, GRC (governance, risk management, and compliance) becomes more critical than ever. Here's the context; how should GRC programs be approached? Should technology be a driver? Can you achieve any level of GRC without automation? Can you achieve any level of GRC without people? What is the real driver of GRC?

Modern corporate boards play significant roles in guiding businesses in 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. Here are the multiple perspectives of shaping a strategic boardroom with digital acumen.

Innovative GRC

Innovationgovernance The goal of organizational governance is to ensure that businesses work as a whole to improve management effectiveness, harness multifaceted value and improve business maturity. It is important to emphasize that governance is fundamentally about having a systematic approach to improve decision effectiveness and risk intelligence within the corporate entity. Corporate governance discipline can fulfill its purpose as a high-level business enabler by providing a structured communication bridge between shareholders/investors and top business leaders such as corporate directors.

Innovatecompliance In the digital age, with overwhelming growth of information and fast pace of changes, the knowledge life cycle is significantly shortened. The digital workforce today has to practice real critical thinking, learn and relearn all the time, and then apply those lessons to succeed in new situations.

Innovategovernance Due to the overwhelming growth of information and dynamic business environment, there is a shift of governance to focus on enterprise change and improve organizational maturity. Good corporate governance highlights that the board of directors is ultimately responsible and accountable for developing and sustaining the culture for an enterprise to prosper.

Innateadherence The digital paradigm shift is multidimensional expansion, whether it’s organic or acquisitions depending on the nature and culture of the organization and the stage of its business maturity. There is a myriad of information, conflicts, tensions around the corporate environment, adherence is an ability to consistently execute, focus on doing things that really matter, rejuvenating passions, and unlocking organizational performance smoothly.

Innatearchiectureaspect Modern corporations are massive, complex, interdependent dynamic ecosystems. In many of them, organizational inertia is considerable. Business Architecture is an important steering instrument to provide you a holistic view of business problems seen from every relevant perspective and every perspective has a whole world behind itself to be described; enabling corporate leaders to re-imagine the future of business, embrace high velocity and drive transformative change seamlessly.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 7 million page views with 8700+ blog postings in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify your voice, deepen your digital footprints, and match your way for human progression.


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The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As" Chapter 1 Introduction: The Digital Board's Composition Inquiries


The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As" Chapter II Introduction: The Digital Board's Digital Inquiries


The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As": Chapter III Introduction: The Digital Board's Strategy Inquiries


The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As" Chapter IV Introduction: The Digital Board's IT Inquiries


The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As" Chapter V Introduction: The Digital Board's Leadership Inquiries

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Initiatepolicy

Forward thinking business leaders experiment with policies and practices that create a favorable and sustainable outcome.

Generally speaking, the policy is a set of principles or guidelines to shape collective mindset, attitude, drive behaviors, influence culture and collective performance. 

The policymakers such as board directors should have abstract thinking skills, multi-dimensional intelligence, interdisciplinary knowledge & understanding, as well as empathetic communication skills to convey the accurate insight via the brief messages and improve policy-making effectiveness. How does the organization ensure policy coherence across the portfolio?

Policies need to serve a purpose: Good policies are not “shelfware,” but the “shareware,” all parties should benefit from following them, to make the working environment more open and fairer, easy to do good things, and to make collective progress. The worst thing to do is just about putting the policy in place to mandate it, but no one really follows it. There are some organizations out there that have a plethora of policies and many of them are nothing more than that, just a policy. In practice, making a good policy is actually part of governance discipline.

The policy is implemented via a protocol, process or practice: The policy is focused on supporting business processes, etc. A process in and of itself must be governed or it won't be followed and the best procedure or program cannot enforce it, without policy. No process works without policy. A process in and of itself must be governed via a set of policies or rules; otherwise, it won't be followed and the best procedure or program cannot enforce it. Establishing policies and procedures help to ensure understanding, enhance ownership, and accountability by management and employees.

When circumstances change, policies need to be updated to ensure people continue to do the right things: Implementing policy is a management activity, and monitoring policy compliance is a governance activity. Policies are communication from the top. A set of good principles or policies guide the strategy management of the business. Policies need to be updated when circumstances change, so people can continue improving performance and doing the right things. By following a right set of updated good policies, the digital workplace can be provocative, passionate, focusing on solving problems effectively and making progressive changes.

Good policies make good things easy to do, and inspire progressive change. Forward thinking business leaders experiment with policies and practices that create a favorable and sustainable outcome. However, the policy is still on the surface, and only one of the important pillars to run a progressive organization. It’s important to build a high performance culture, build compelling teams and drive desired change to achieve higher-than-expected business results.

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Insightfulstrategy

A good strategy which supports the proven and interdependent business growth model will provide visibility, capability, and agility.

Given the “VUCA” normality of contemporary business and given the challenges of ever-evolving dynamic ecosystems, business strategies today are usually dynamic and have a lot of moving parts.

 Digital strategy crafts upon how, in an interconnected world where everything talks to everything, where values, behaviors, and expectations are shifting all the time. Strategy management is not a linear step scenario, but an iterative strategy making and implementation continuum.

 

Strategies need to be forethoughtful: Every organization is on the journey of business evolution. Learn to stay alerted, observe with subtlety and move fast. The strategy is about overall direction, and the direction from the current market to the future market is anything but a straight line. Admit those disruptive events may occur. Vision and strategy are interconnected. Vision is on the horizon; strategy is about how you will get there.

Visions inspire; strategies compel; vision comes first, strategies along with a set of roadmaps enable the company to realize the vision stepwisely. A vision describes the desired future position of the company. A strategy is an action or ways chosen to move into the desired future. Strategy formulation is a combination of planned and emergent thinking. You formulate a strategy and then encounter the real world of implementation, which provides you feedback that allows you to continuously adjust the strategy on the move

Strategies need to be descriptive: Strategy is directional and needs to allow for the organization to move forward coherently in the described direction. However, strategy in many companies is the shelf ware no one understands; or in some organizations, there are many versions of strategy or sub-strategy with conflicting or infeasible goals. Miscommunication and misalignment are one of the root causes to fail the strategy execution. The mistake that most organizations make in this regard is to fail to translate the high-level language of strategy into the professional language of the various staff specialties.

Infeasible or conflicting business strategies perhaps never get resolved but drive wasteful or conflicting behavior. A good strategy has clarified logic and well set prioritization to achieve business goals and objectives. Because they outline the areas where possible conflicting priorities may lie and outline how they are able to be handled by the organization in terms of resource allocation such as time, budget, people, etc. Ultimately a strategy has to end up expressed in people's job descriptions and workloads.

Strategy needs to be prescriptive or customized: There is no “one size fits all” strategy formula. At all levels, the strategy can always be crafted via collective insight. The creation of a corporate strategy, or even sub-level strategy, also depends upon where the company is in its life cycle. It perhaps takes a few weeks to craft a good enough strategy. But in some cases, it can take years or even a decade for a company to build the knowledge, relationships and/or business partnerships that are required in order to successfully implement a long term strategic planning.

The strategy is how that state is realized externally. The road to somewhere can be reached by many different routes. Strategy needs to be prescriptive because different companies have their own set of differentiated capabilities. Capability-based strategy has a significantly high success rate. It’s also important to strengthen the strategic alignment of projects and programs to prevent business initiatives being undertaken that do not support the enterprise strategy and prioritizing the top programs that can make a significant impact on strategy execution.

A strategy is the light to guide you through. In the strategy-making process, one must assess the environment, competitions, other threats and opportunities and devise contingencies accordingly. A good strategy which supports the proven and interdependent business growth model will provide visibility, capability, and agility.

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Innovation

The world becomes more dynamic, innovation is for reinvention and renewal.

Innovation is not serendipity, but a management process and business competency, the core activities of the digital revolution and collective human progress. Environment either encourages or discourages innovation; there is more flow of information, knowledge, more flow of creative ideas, the better opportunities to reap the benefits from innovation management. 

The multidimensional digital effects provide impressive advantages in terms of the business speed, the abundance of information, the quality of the digital workforce, and the high probability of innovation success.

Innovation & advancement: Innovation is not for its own sake, but for advancing humanity. Modern society is a dynamic continuum with collective human progress. To be truly creative, it's important to challenge the status quo, conventional wisdom, and outdated beliefs; innovators have the ability to think about the past, perceive what is now and foresee the future in pursuit of advancement. The most advanced thing in the world is an advanced mindset, the most advanced mind with great vision, not just perfectly following the rule; in fact, they can change the rules or co-create new rules to encourage creativity and make collective progress. There is a correlation between learning, innovating, and advancing. The advanced learning journey gets to the inflection point when you not only absorb knowledge, but also criticize old knowledge, co-create new knowledge, invent new concepts, and share a fresh perspective.

To identify a person’s potential, look for strong evidence of a desire to learn, grow and innovate. Real societal advancement is made through the work of forwarding-looking minds, with great vision, innovative ideas and strong disciplines. We are moving knowledge economy to creative economy when people are in the state of openness, innovativeness; when life is shifting from surviving to striving and thriving; when the world is catching up with the most advanced mindsets, stepping into the further-looking perspective, generating-implementing great ideas; fitting into the new digital dynamic, and integrating into upward movements consistently.

Innovation vs. efficiency: There are incremental innovation and radical innovation. Innovation is about experimenting, implementing great ideas to achieve commercial value; efficiency is about doing things right with minimum inputs and resources (do it right the first time). On the surface, it seems that efficiency and innovation are the opposite; as in many organizations, there is an emphasis on efficiency rather than innovation or creativity, in pursuit of operational stability. Overly focus on efficiency may easily screw up the seed of innovation which is not quite ready to be analyzed for its profit margin.

Efficiency and innovation have to learn to live and function together seamlessly. To think long-term, efficiency and innovation are complementary characteristics to improve organizational competency for the long run. If an organization is inefficient, it will be inefficient with new ideas implementation. Efficiency will extract the maximum benefit from a new idea. Process innovations will be concerned with increasing and optimizing efficiency and maintaining existing linkages. The greater the efficiency of an organization, the greater the need is for creativity to maintain high performance in the long run. When the business management can

Innovation vs. discipline: Innovation is not serendipity, but a process to manage innovation in a structural way. Applying discipline to innovation is to better align innovation management with strategy, to justify the initial investment in building a balanced innovation portfolio with both breakthrough innovation and incremental innovation. Innovation management should set principles to cultivate a culture of change and creativity, develop the best and next practice in idea management and process management, and evaluate innovation performance effectively.

Innovation becomes more complex due to abundant information and fierce competition. Applying discipline to innovation is to figure out how to manage innovation in a structural way. It is important to note that within the organizations, innovation is rarely an individual action; rather it is a team effort, often across multiple organizational silos or geographical/industrial boundaries. You need to manage innovation in a structural way via a good alignment of innovators, the disruptive technologies, and rigorous, but not rigid processes.

The world becomes more dynamic, innovation is for reinvention and renewal; it is equivalent to sustainability and resilience for an increasing number of hyper-connected enterprises and industries. Innovation is a managed process with a strategy as a constraint, to stay focused on building the innovation capacity of the business, unlocking a new market or revenue stream.

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Innovativeinsight

It’s a tough journey to write #8700 blog posting. Blogging is a practice to frame a growth mindset, update knowledge, converge multidisciplinary understanding, convey insight and share wisdom, to make continuous leadership influence. 

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 7 million page views with 8700+ blog postings in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. 

The “Digital Master” book series includes 28 books to share insight from the multidimensional digital lens and perceive the multi-faceted impact the digital era upon us is making to businesses and society. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Here is the weekly insight of innovation leadership, IT Management, and Talent Management to celebrate 8700 blog postings.

Innovativeness Blogging is a type of thought flow, energy glow; it is the flow that casts its glow, sparkling a radiance all around. Blogging is for growth and sharing. Blogging is not about writing, but about brainstorming, innovating, and problem-solving.

Innerlogicofstrategicproblemsolving  It is a continuously changing world with “VUCA” a new normal, unprecedented emergence is inherent in every venture of the business. No organization can afford to stick to its old ways of thinking and problem-solving. And effective strategy management is an iterative strategic problem solving continuum to bring up higher than expected business results.

Innovativeleadership To "influence" means to be able to shape other people's views or opinions towards one's own views or perspectives. Influence is thought-provoking, insightful, and unimaginable. The power of influence has many dimensions and depends on a number of factors such as multidimensional intelligence, the mix of knowledge and expertise, the quality of information received, etc, all held together by a collection of confidence.

Initiatearchitecture Contemporary companies become overly-complex and interdependent. Business architecture's role in designing and planning future enterprise is to gain the long term strategic-choreography perspectives, and understand the dynamic business ecosystem.

Innovationobstacles Innovation means to solve old or emergent problems in alternative ways. It takes principles, processes, or practices to be fluent in innovation. Innovation needs to lay out different structures, thinking and solutions to develop into its potential where organizations are combining all that is available to them in imaginative, advantageous ways.

Innovativeleadparameters You can only manage what you measure. The goal of innovation assessment and performance is to keep track of innovation management effectiveness. Are you intending to evaluate the capacity/potential to innovate, or the level of past innovation performance?

Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking of new ideas; sharing and innovating. It’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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Innovativeperspectives

As everything is a judgment based upon the perspective that is influenced by our own mentality, experiences and also belief systems.

We are experiencing major societal transformation from the industrial machine age to knowledge and creative economy. The digital paradigm is an emerging ecosystem of principles, policies, and practices, with many dimensions. The digital perspective defines the business level view of the organizational ecosystem. 

To drive change and make deep influence, the business leaders are pondering: Which perspectives should we consider? What makes perspectives/models what they are? What perspectives are we taking that might blind us to see the other side of the coin?

Scientific perspective: Business management is both art and science. Management is a science as it is precise, exact, can be accurately, logically represented and reused. There is art embedded in scientific design, construction and optimization, etc. Specifically, science is about design, construction, operations, discipline, process, practice based on the principles of logic and the patterns of nature. Organizations can set priority to bring transparency, keep trimming wastes and redundancy, optimizing business structures and processes to achieve operational excellence by following a set scientific management principles, a shared body of knowledge, and a collection of methodologies & tools.

Science is not always rigid, there is a variety of categorization, generalization, specialization, inference & deference logic in it, to keep reinventing business for getting digital ready. Business assets and resources need to be centralized, reallocated, updated or replaced if needed to improve business agility and efficiency. Business capabilities should be consolidated, integrated and optimized if needed to improve business competency for reinventing business models or exploring great opportunities for business growth.

Paradoxical perspective: Leading complex digital organizations is a challenge as there is a mindset shift from silo to holism; from transaction to transformation. Transcending rational management to innovative management requires paradoxical capabilities and cognitive/behavioral complexity and competencies that distinguish great leaders from others. In management essence, the paradox fluency is about the balance of asking and answering; induction & deduction, analysis & synthesis, simplicity and complexity, creativity and process, candor and diplomacy, standardization and customization.

It is important to have a heterogeneous group setting to encourage unique viewpoints, allow people view an idea from different perspectives, brainstorm diverse thoughts and ideas, apply paradoxical thinking techniques to understand problems systematically, recognize innovators, discover the connectivity and common ground from the difference and dig into the paradoxical intelligence between seemly two separate views. An impartial or paradoxical perspective can help business leaders identify and close blind spots by looking around the corner and beneath the surface, advocating inclusiveness to solve real problems innovatively.

Global perspective: We live in a diverse global society with a multigenerational workforce, multipolar knowledge centers, multi-cultural wisdom, and multifaceted innovation, etc. The geographical, functional, industrial territories are blurred, global professionals today have to continue sharing their viewpoint about things or events happening in the surroundings, their perspective of future global society; their roles in making desired changes. It's a strategic imperative to keep updating knowledge, gain cultural empathy, frame the new mind to see the ever changing world, find a diversity of perspectives, break down outdated traditions or common beliefs, to not just survive, but thrive, and unlock unlimited human potential.

The internet and collaborative platforms and tools flatten the world to a certain degree, it requires us to be willing to listen to diverse viewpoints, broaden the perspective to fix misperceptions, and develop a more enriched profile that advocates inclusiveness and progression. Insightful global leaders facilitate enriched conversations to harmonize the worldwide differences of values, cultures, philosophies, knowledge, etc, so that they can build a highly competitive team to complement each other’s expertise for co-solving common problems collaboratively.

Today’s internet-based world is much more hyper-connected and interdependent, with dynamic aspects, stacking of tolerances, variability, etc. Business leaders and professionals need to continue learning, broaden their perspective on varying issues, and improve decision effectiveness. As everything is a judgment based upon the perspective that is influenced by our own mentality, experiences and also belief systems. Organizations not only need good managers and professionals to take care of today’s business; but also have to grow global professionals to leapfrog their companies for long-term prosperity.

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