The Popular Quotes of “Digital Master” Series about Learning to Celebrate #5200 Blog-Posting Nov. 2018

Learning is a way to keep your mind flowing, and hence your life flowing.

"Digital Master” is the series of guidebooks (26+ books) is to perceive the multifaceted impact digital is making to the business and our society, help forward-thinking organizations navigate through the digital journey in a systematic way, and avoid “rogue digital.” Here is the set of popular quotes about learning to celebrate #5200 blog-posting.

1 “An adaptive mind has better learning capability.”

― Pearl Zhu, Thinkingaire: 100 Game-Changing Digital Mindsets to Compete for the Future


2 “Innovations succeed when failure is seen as a learning step to great success.”

― Pearl Zhu, 100 Creativity Ingredients: Everyone's Playbook to Unlock Creativity


3 “Learning is the way to keep your mind flowing, and hence your life flowing.”

― Pearl Zhu, Digital Valley: Five Pearls of Wisdom to Make Profound Influence


4 “Be humble, desire insight, squash arrogance, and be cognizance of unknown.”


― Pearl Zhu, Thinkingaire: 100 Game-Changing Digital Mindsets to Compete for the Future


5 “Leadership in itself is a purpose-driven, a constant learning process that requires the leader to build experience and to share insight.”


― Pearl Zhu, Leadership Master: Five Digital Trends to Leap Leadership Maturity


6 “Learning a new language, just like opening a new window, allows you to see the world with intimacy.”
― Pearl Zhu, Thinkingaire: 100 Game Changing Digital Mindsets to Compete for the Future


7 “Learning agility means to learn, de-learn, and relearn all the times.”

― Pearl Zhu, Digital Agility: The Rocky Road from Doing Agile to Being Agile

8 “Learning becomes the knowledge builder and we can define learning through the information it absorbs and the capability it builds.”

― Pearl Zhu, Digital Gaps: Bridging Multiple Gaps to Run Cohesive Digital Business


9 “If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more & become more, you are a leader.”
― Pearl Zhu, Leadership Master: Five Digital Trends to Leap Leadership Maturity


10 “When you learn something new, the structure of your brain changes.”

― Pearl Zhu, Thinkingaire: 100 Game Changing Digital Mindsets to Compete for the Future

11 “Assumptions and prejudices are due to a lack of deeper understanding. It is the responsibility of each individual to examine themselves and to make sure they are open to learn and gain the true understanding.”

― Pearl Zhu, Thinkingaire: 100 Game Changing Digital Mindsets to Compete for the Future

Read More

Set a Viable Path to Shape the Impulse of the Digital Organization

With "VUCA" digital new normal, organizations have no choice but setting a viable path by making dynamic planning, taking calculated risks, and adapting to emerging changes with speed.

The digital transformation is now spreading rapidly to enable organizations of all shapes and sizes to reinvent themselves. The emergence of potential opportunities for exploring digitization is likely to follow a nonlinear pattern with exponential speed. Going digital means that you have to strike the right balance between chaos and order, stability and changes, and set a viable path to shape the impulse of a digital organization.

Touch on the notion of change in simple terms to start with, from different perspectives: Change is supposed to happen, with high frequency and broader scope. If the organization understands itself in relation to its context, it should be able to determine whether it requires changing something to become viable. The perspective of change unfolds into a wider multi-dimensionally systemic business continuum, which would perhaps invoke further reflections of the focal scope and purpose of changes, as well as the generic perspective of running a business. From Change Management perspective, there are psychological, structural, and behavioral perspectives of change. There are both hard processes and soft emotions impacting change management effectiveness. The chain of change needs to starts at the mindset level. In practice though, Change Management intends to change employees’ behavior. Behaviors are driven by attitude. Attitude results from thoughts, assumptions, and preferences. Thus, from a psychological perspective, it means that the management needs to challenge convention and break down people’s natural resistance to change or new ideas and reinforce digital thinking and the culture of innovation. From an organizational structural perspective, the overly rigid organizational hierarchy will stifle change and decelerate business flow. It's worthwhile to actually consider changing the structure model to meet what the future may be bringing, explore the new organizational structure and be congruent with the words "change management." When the management is able to see through changes from different perspectives; when people are comfortable with the changes with a set of digital minds; when change processes are robust, change can happen smoothly, and the organization is able to set the viable path to make a leap of digitalization.

Design the future of organizations to maintain viability and deliver tactical actions for strategic effect: With the exponential growth of information and continuous disruptions, the highly complex and dynamic organizational system needs to be elaborated in a well-organized effort enables emergent business changes in its own behavior, function, and structure. The digital transformation efforts need to be undertaken as the means of getting to develop the differentiated business competency to accomplish defined change management goals. The digital convergence of devices and services are creating new business models and revenue source as most companies across industries are being forced to become information & technology business. For either individuals or businesses today, you need to be versatile for adapting to changes, be informative to decide, be nimble to adjust and be able to set the viable path to go digital and thrive in today’s digital dynamic. High mature digital organizations build the digital premium into the very foundation of their companies such as digital thinking, culture, structure, processes, etc. They can develop a creative workforce to maintain viability and deliver high-quality business results for strategic effect and reach the digital zenith as the business world continues to expand and diversify. 

Drive the systemic digital transformation through steering, influencing, and orchestrating: The digital organization today is hyper-connected and interdependent, as the switch in its digital ecosystem, keep connecting with its environment. Digitalization implies the full-scale changes in the way business is conducted so that simply adopting a new digital technology is insufficient. The radical digitalization brings organizations dynamically into the full-spectrum of transforming an organizational mixture of systemic-intensity-related capabilities, business maturity challenges, strategic paradoxes, organizational structure pathologies across individuals, teams, looser groups, organizations, network-enterprises, and holistic digital ecosystems. Therefore, to effectively respond to the new dynamics, companies must begin thinking about ways to broaden their ecosystems and revenue streams while becoming more responsive and innovative. Digital leaders with system wisdom understand that the purpose of their business is to serve the purpose of its containing system. They look at their business as being part of a larger system, the socio-economic system; which is part of a larger system - the natural ecosystem. Thus, they can leverage strategic planning and structural methodology to steer and influence changes, as well as they can orchestrate the digital transformation by setting digital principles and taking continuous digital practices.

In the world where change is significantly speeding up, that business leaders couldn’t predict the future with a certain degree of accuracy. Organizations have no choice but setting a viable path by making dynamic planning, taking calculated risks, and adapting to emerging changes with speed.

Read More

The Monthly “12 CIO Personas” Book Tuning: CIO as “Chief Innovation Officer” Nov. 2018

The digital CIOs have to wear different colors of hats and master multiple leadership personas and management roles effortlessly.

This book “12 CIO Personas: The Digital CIO’s Situational Leadership Practices” is the extensive brainstorming and logical content expansion of my book “CIO Master: Unleash the Digital Potential of IT,” to reimagine and reinvent CIO leadership via practicing multitudes of digital influence. The important thing is that CIOs as the top leadership role must have a strong mindset, a unique personality, and a clear idea of what needs to be done, yet creative enough to not hold the company back from growth. Regardless of which personality they have, digital CIOs need to be both transformational and situational, innovative and tactical, business savvy and technology insightful, communication-effective and operation-efficient. Here is a set of blogs to brainstorm CIO as “Chief Innovation Officer.”

Creating Digital Pathways to Innovate IT: Organizations rely more and more on technology, technology needs will only expand. IT a lightning rod for change and innovation. Digital CIOs are uniquely qualified to envision technological trends and take risks above the status quo, take on a new set of activities that are involved in defining, developing, and differentiating their organization to get digital ready.

Running Digital IT Organization Through Associationism, Evolutionism, and Professionalism: The overwhelming growth of information brings both opportunities and risks to the organization; continuous disruptions often driven by technologies force businesses to improve their responsiveness, adaptability, flexibility, and resilience. IT provides competitive leverage to the business’ long-term growth. To keep IT relevant, IT leaders need to get really creative on driving changes and running digital IT organization through associationism, evolutionism, and professionalism.

Running IT as Business in the Business by Taking Innovative Approach: The digital world is so data-driven and information-intensive. Organizations rely more and more on technology, technology needs will only expand. IT is being used more and more around the globe for revenue generating initiatives and the business is becoming IT. IT has also to be run as the business in the business by taking varying innovative approaches.

The CIO as both Creative Theorist and Innovative Digital Practitioner: Digitalization is the evolutionary business transformation which evolves production, adoption, assimilation, exploitation, and exploration of value-added novelty in the business. The purpose of digital businesses today is to advocate better ways to do things, amplify collective human capability and business capacity in order to compete confidently and keep the business growth momentum.

The Contemporary CIO’s Digital Innovation Agenda: Digital is the age of innovation. Innovation, in general, is surely a management discipline. IT shouldn’t act as a controller only, limit the business’s creativity. To keep relevant, IT has to shift its reputation from a cost center to the innovation hub of the organization. In fact, IT plays a crucial role in expanding the creative side of the business, and scale the innovation effect of the organization. The contemporary CIO's responsibilities are to understand the business's collaboration needs and innovation demand today and into the future, in order to build an IT-led digital innovation agenda which covers innovation management, knowledge, technology transfer, entrepreneurship, people-centricity, and it is closely related to several other disciplines as well.

Modern organizations have their own sophistication with silo functions, the sea of information, and the pool of talents. The CIO is an inherently cross-functional role, to bridge the business and IT; the data and insight, the business’s today and tomorrow. The digital CIOs have to wear different personas and master multiple leadership and management roles effortlessly. They need to lead at the strategic level for conducting a complex digital orchestra; they should be handy managers to plumbing information and keep it flow smoothly; they also have to be like the diligent gardeners, to build a unique IT landscape via tuning technology, removing waste, nurturing culture, and empowering people.

Read More

Does Trust Harness Creativity and Innovation

To develop and maintain trust requires respect, repeat or predictable behavior, dependability, and the fulfillment of promises. 

There is a full cycle of emotions behind innovation. Trust is one of the positive emotions to harness creativity and innovation. Trust is a measure of the quality of a relationship between people, groups, or between people and an organization; and trust is a two-way street. Trust is multidimensional. It encompasses trusting self, trusting others, and earning the trust of others.

It's trust that is the key determinant of any collaborative effort, such as innovation: Nowadays, innovation is often the team effort, thus, mutual trust is crucial to improving its success rate. Trust can create a great positive impact on team members and encourage creativity. Conversely, the lack of trust can accurately predict the demise of any collaborative effort including innovation. Communication is the very way to build trust, and lack of trust is an often overlooked barrier to communication as well. Trust enforces openness by embracing divergent thoughts and respecting differences. Trust is based on credibility. Credibility requires competence as one of the factors that encourage where credibility emerges. Not all people have the same motivation to innovate. Trust through a deep understanding of people motivates them to develop themselves and become more innovative.

Trust starts with respecting which means open-door approach to value new ideas: Trust and respect go hand in hand. It is very difficult for someone to trust you if they do not believe you respect them, and probably vice versa as well. Mutual trust becomes much easier if one of the two or more parties give trust by respecting each other. Trust harnesses creativity because respecting to individual means open-door approach to value new idea. Trust reciprocity works because of shared innovation goals, which create less stress on the relationship and harness creativity. Leaders need to show staff that you respect them. Always appreciate the members’ contribution. First, understand what they care, trust them in a safe environment to encourage creativity. Help them not to fail, and if they do, show yourself to be trustworthy by supporting them. Communicate, delegate, trust and hold accountable.

To be able to trust you must also have the courage to learn when you fail: How much will you tolerate mistakes as part of learning and creating? Does your staff feel safe to try something innovative? Building a creative environment with a trustful relationship means that people take responsibilities for failures, be inclusive, and focus on learning and experimenting with better ways to do things. We all do every now and then, take responsibilities for the failure, learn from it and move forward. Blaming others instead of recognizing and taking responsibility for a failure in any affair one is involved in will ultimately destroy any existing trust. When a leader acknowledges and takes responsibility for his/her failures, the followers dare to fail as well by knowing that if they take responsibility for the failures, the leaders will continue to support them in harnessing creativity and innovation.

Trust takes the breadth and depth of collective cognizance and collaborative effort for building up a  creative working environment. To develop and maintain trust requires respect, repeat or predictable behavior, dependability, and the fulfillment of promises. All these things take time, but it is worth the effort to harness creativity and innovation.

Read More

The Next Phase of Digital Refinement Cycle

The emergence of potential opportunities for exploring digitalization is likely to follow a nonlinear pattern with accelerated speed.

We live in the exponential digital era. The digitalization paints an excellent picture of the business interaction and interdependence of the expanded digital ecosystem. Forward-thinking organizations are in the state of introducing new business concepts, experimenting with something new or exploring better opportunities to grow their business, balancing the main elements impacting change such as people, processes/procedures and Information Technology, tuning key business success factors to reach the next phase of digital refinement.

Planning - adjusting - evolving digital refinement cycle: With the faster paces of changes and continuous disruptions, digital organizations today have to enable desirable emergent property. Thus, planning and forecasting become challenging, and planning fallacy turns to be a business reality. It’s important to figure out the “right level” of planning, or take the dynamic planning to keep iterating, adjusting, evolving, and working on a rhythm of sustained products or services deliveries. To put another way, it ’s important to get you off the ground and running, make the proper adjustment when new events come up, also ensure that there is sufficient time to prepare the stakeholders for the changes on the way. To make planning effective and practical, it is important to get the bigger picture and be clear on what, who, when, and how to achieve business goals through iterative communication, incremental goal implementation, and make a necessary delegation implementation plan collaboratively and seamlessly. The healthy planning-adjusting-evolving digital refinement cycle creates the business synergy to strive vigorously in leading digital transformation.

Learning-acting-improving digital refinement cycle: With the exponential growth of data and the mixed bag of new information and outdated knowledge. Digital organizations and their people must learn through their interactions with the business environment continually. High organizational learning relates to high response in recognizing and addressing system constraints. Learning agility at both the individual and business level is a differentiated digital competency and the organizational culture shift. It will directly impact the speed of the digital transformation. A learning organization is one in which leaders encourage learning-acting-improving as an iterative business continuum. They apply their learning, act, observe the consequences of their action, make inferences about those consequences, and draw implications for future actions. Such adaptive learning in a collective way helps the business not only survive but also thrive, to ensure the organization knows the tasks and knowledge required to sustain itself and create an environment and business systems to support those tasks being done and build the organizational competency. Moving to the next phase - generative learning allows employees at all levels are open to new ideas, co-create fresh knowledge, experimentation with alternative ways of doing things, learning from instead of condemning or punishing mistakes, errors. And reach the next level of innovation blossom.

Simplifying, optimizing, and energizing digital refinement cycle: Simplicity is an optimal level of complexity. The fundamental of the management discipline is to simplify things. Refresh the core business processes to make sure changes are not only predicted but also fully prepared. It is also important that many companies approaching the next phase of digital refinement, have objectivity and humility to realize that their system or processes are out of date and work on upgrading them step-wisely. Digital refinement focuses on people centricity and adaptability, to ensure businesses are built to changes, and ensure people can have the right information and tools to get their job well done. The successful process refinement often goes hand-in-hand with organizational structure management. The challenge for any business is to explore successful organizational structures that help to empower people, enforce iterative communication, and harness cross-functional collaboration to accelerate business performance and unleash the full digital potential. Companies that are skilled at simplifying, optimizing and energizing the business can gain competitive advantages by pushing the boundaries of a more sophisticated business mix.

The emergence of potential opportunities for exploring digitalization is likely to follow a nonlinear pattern with accelerated speed. The high mature digital organizations are highly conscious about what’s happening in their environment, well prepared to move into the next phase of digital refinement with the ability to adapt to changes promptly, grasp opportunities timely, and prevent risks effectively.

Read More

The Monthly “100 Digital Rules” Book Tuning: Less is More Nov. 2018

A well-defined set of digital rules are not for limiting innovation, but for setting the frame of relevance and guide through changes and digital transformation.

The purpose of “100 Digital Rules: Setting Guidelines to Explore Digital New Normal “ is to establish digital principles and update business policies that can be applied holistically and guide the digital transformation systematically. Digital rules are based on a set of fundamental beliefs behind the methodologies and they help to shape mindsets behind behaviors. Digital rules encourage mindfulness, authenticity, creativity, inclusiveness, and discourage static thinking, silo, and bureaucracy, help to accelerate collective human progress.

                         Less is More

Three Digital Trends: “Less is More”? Digital disruptions are inevitable, and digital transformation is unstoppable. The digital world is dynamic, nonlinear, uncertain, and volatile. As we all know the only "Certainty" or a "Constant" is "CHANGE." Uncertainty is a given, just as it has always been and always will be. Digital makes the business flatter and the world smaller because of its nature of hyper-connectivity and interdependence.

Digital Management Principle: "Less is More" Modern businesses become over-complex every day, they also add to such eco-system complexity! If we accept it is complex, somewhat unpredictable or not completely predictable, we have to accept uncertainty. Uncertainty comes with complexity. Simplicity vs complexity is an age-old dilemma even in English Grammar! Logically, simplifying the complicated thing is an optimal and smart choice either for running the business or solving a problem. "Less is more." So, what are the principles to follow in pursuit of just right simplicity?

The Best Enterprise Architecture: “Less is More” Enterprise may need to follow the same mantra: “Less is More”, Enterprise Architecture survey reveals that it is unlikely that only one enterprise architecture framework will provide a complete solution. Two-thirds of respondents have developed a hybrid framework, with about one third indicating that they use more than one framework.

Improving IT maturity via Practicing “More & Less” As technology influences every aspect of the business and the CIO continues to become a critical and integral member of the C-suites, IT holds the key to make the company more competitive and successful in the long-term. In reality, business opportunities and risks coexist, disruptions, roadblocks, and pitfalls are around every corner. IT leaders must develop their own set of best and next practices for adapting to the business new normal. Here are three pairs of “More & Less” practices to overcome barriers to improving IT performance and digital maturity.

How to Apply Simplicity Principle in Change Management Change is simply a shift from the “Old Way - Chaos - New Way.” Simplicity is a behavioral attitude to see things as and what and where they are and be content and cool as it is. Philosophically, simplicity is the source of complication, and complications are the source of simplicity. Often human cannot live the life with simplicity and keep making it complicated. So does Change Management. Can we make change simpler?

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2.8 million page views with about #5100th blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The “Digital Master” book series includes 25 books to share insight from the multidimensional digital lens and perceive the multi-faceted impact the digital era upon us is making to the businesses and society. 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 and innovating the 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.

Read More

Creating Digital Pathways to Innovate IT

Digitalization is not just about technology, innovation is not always equal to the latest gadget. It’s about people, process, culture, partnership, and manners, etc.

Organizations rely more and more on technology, technology needs will only expand. IT a lightning rod for change and innovation. Digital CIOs are uniquely qualified to envision technological trends and take risks above the status quo, take on a new set of activities that are involved in defining, developing, and differentiating their organization to get digital ready.



Creating options and pathways to digitize IT: Traditional IT is inside-out operation-driven, but digital IT is outside-in business oriented and customer-centric. Focusing on customers' needs should be an easier path to digitize IT and grow innovation fruits. Thus, it’s important to get IT staff engaging in open dialogs with business people, sharing ideas and learning, and make those sort of informal conversations a regular habit, identify the most innovative companies in the sector and learn how they leverage information & technology to create business value. Digital organizations have always been parts of simple and complex business ecosystems, to function seamlessly, IT needs to be the linchpin for connecting the enterprise to the varying touch points between itself and the dynamic digital ecosystem. IT, thus, is also at a unique position to explore the digital pathway for recharging itself and energizing the entire business. If CIOs don’t realize that stifling IT innovation will set back the business, their IT organizations would continue to be perceived a cost center. Think like customers and let the business know how digital technologies can change the way to do business and delight customers. Businesses that facing fierce competitions and demanding customers, love to see IT getting deeply immersed in new apps, devices, and business solutions which make internal users productive and collaborative or improve end customers’ satisfaction.

The digital race of business model innovation: Emerging digital technologies bring huge opportunities to reinvent business models and create a new revenue stream. The available digital technology just makes innovation easier to do now than in the past - less costly, more easily accessible. What CIOs can do is to share their technological vision and educate business about IT capacity and complexity and marketing IT-enabled business capabilities & opportunities within the company. They should educate IT teams on the business context and encourage them to engage with business counterparts in value-oriented manner. In practice, intrapreneurship activities can improve business growth and profitability, and depending on the company’s competitive environment, their impact may increase over time. Thus, it’s important to develop a deep understanding of the company’s existing business models, competitive landscapes, enterprise architectures, P&L drivers, and balance sheet strengths and constraints. Then, you should identify core competencies and critical business elements early enough to catch the wave before its crest breaks, explore new opportunities to grow the business and develop new business models.

Leverage IT to solve critical business problems: From information management to insight management to innovation management, being able to become innovative or close is being able to think, discover, and create new things based on its own needs, true knowledge is an optimal solution. Innovation without a direction or purpose is building technology for technology sake. Innovation is the core of what makes IT strategic in any company, but it is critical that the creativity is focused not on the technology but on how it can be used to solve critical business problems and advance business goals. Therefore, CIOs need to gain insight into the business problems, provide pieces of advice and recommendations to the business on how to leverage information and technology to find a proper solution to that problem. The role of IT in the current business environment should become a digital solutionary and be able to enable business outcomes. Keep in mind though, problems does not exist in isolation, but, as an interacting system of problems. A good IT-woven problem-solving framework helps to leverage structured methodologies and efficient tools, which allow you to frame problems systematically and solve complex problems with a step-wise approach.

Digitalization is not just about technology, innovation is not always equal to the latest gadget. It’s about people, process, culture, partnership, and manners, etc. Every organization needs to develop tailored practices for creating digital pathways by leveraging effective technologies, tools or methodologies and applying them wisely with the expertise to really add value and drive digitalization systematically.

Read More

The Monthly Food for Thought to Celebrate Holidays Nov. 2018

Holiday is not just the time for shopping or relaxing, but also the time to recharging and doing some introspection.

It’s the Thanksgiving holiday week, it’s not just the time for shopping or relaxing, but also the time to recharging and doing some introspection.  Here is the collection of quotes and blogs to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday week.

The Monthly Food for Thought to Celebrate Holidays

The Popular Quotes of “Digital Master” Series about Gratitude, Love, Creativity, Change to Celebrate Holiday Nov. 2018 "Digital Master” is the series of guidebooks (26+ books) is to perceive the multifaceted impact digital is making to the business and our society, help forward-thinking organizations navigate through the digital journey in a systematic way, and avoid “rogue digital.” Here is the set of popular quotes about gratitude, love, creativity, change to celebrate the holiday.

Happy Thanksgiving with “Positive Thinking” It’s another Thanksgiving Day approaching, it’s not just the time for shopping or relaxing, but also the time to recharging and doing some introspection. It is not just the time to gain a few pounds but also doing more PONDERING. In the other word, happy Thanksgiving with mindfulness. Although you can’t control every event of your life journey, through the power of digital mind-crafting, you can adapt to the change and cultivate the new sets of mind. Indeed, the mindset is far more important than talent. Talent can always be developed by those with an open and right mindset. In the book of “ Thinkingaire,” we introduce the 100 game-changing digital mindsets, here we sum up a set of positive thinking mindset.

The Popular Quotes of “Digital Master” Book Series to Celebrate Holidays: Thinking, Change, Innovation Nov. 2017 “Digital Master” is the series of guidebooks (26+ books) is to perceive the multifaceted impact digital is making to the business and our society, help forward-thinking organizations navigate through the digital journey in a systematic way, and avoid “rogue digital.” Here is the set of popular quotes about thinking, change, and innovation to celebrate the holiday.

Happy Thanksgiving with “MINDFULNESS” via Dot-Connections It’s the Thanksgiving holiday week, it’s not just the time for shopping or relaxing, but also the time to recharging and doing some introspection. It is not just the time to gain a few pounds but also doing more PONDERING. In the other word, happy Thanksgiving with mindfulness. Although you can’t control every event of your life journey, via the power of digital mind-crafting, you can adapt to the change and cultivate the new sets of mind. Indeed, the mindset is far more important than talent. Talent can always be developed by those with an open and right mindset.

Happy Thanksgiving with “MINDFULNESS”: It’s another Thanksgiving Day approaching, happy Thanksgiving with mindfulness. Although you can’t control every event of your life journey, through the power of digital mind-crafting, you can adapt to the change and cultivate the new sets of mind.

The blog is a dynamic book flowing with your thought; growing through your dedication; sharing your knowledge; conveying your wisdom, and making influence through touching the hearts and connecting the minds across the globe. The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2.8 million page views with about #5100 blog posting. Among 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating the 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.

Read More

The Amplification of Innovation Effect

 Highly innovative organizations can balance innovation with the order, change, and stability to improve business vitality.

The definition of innovation is simple - to gain benefit by doing something different. Innovation has to result in something which leads us to a better state than where we are today. Digital innovation has a broader scope with a full-color spectrum. In the hyperconnected and interdependent digital ecosystem, innovation can happen anywhere, anytime, it expands both horizontally and vertically. How to amplify innovation effect to benefit the widest audience of the digital ecosystem though?

Setting innovation principles: Innovation follows fundamental principles or basic rules, which are adapted depending on the company's situation and ambition. Generally speaking, to scale innovation and amplify its effect, innovation management needs to establish clear and shared business goals and set good principles to follow. The core principle of the system-based innovation is the scientific methodology, leverage the design of experiment type approaches where a portfolio of options are pursued and knowing there will be pruning as new facts emerge. Further, innovation is the most desired change. You cannot do innovation management successfully without grounding in change management or following a set of change management principles and having the top management sponsorship or people-buy-in. Change Management is essential so that individuals and organizations can benefit from the value of innovation. To scale up, it’s practical to create a set of digital innovation principles which are based on collaboration and co-creation, and set common criteria to evaluate, apply, adapt and optimize ideas for maximizing their business value.

Tuning a digital fit structure to nurture innovation: Many organizations fail to capitalize on their great ideas because there was no structure in place to manage ideas. The rigorous innovation structures are supported by the right policies and programs. Keep hierarchy as low as possible, cut the politics, and encourage creativity. A defined structure is essential to managing innovation in a corporation, but there's no single structure that will work in every organization. From an organizational structural perspective, the right structure allows the right mentality and culture to bloom. Within a well-aligned structure, dedication and effort will be spent on innovation efforts rather than overcoming organizational hurdles and pushing against structural boundaries. The structure carries inherent capabilities as to what can be achieved within its frame. But a misaligned structure might reinforce a non-innovation friendly climate. Thus, the challenge for any business is to find a successful structure that helps to empower people, enforce iterative communication, and harness cross-functional collaboration. More precisely, you don't structure innovation, you apply principles of approach, vary the resource and tool mix to amplify innovation effect.

Scale up innovation practices: Due to the complexity of modern businesses, within the organizations, innovation nowadays is rarely an individual action; rather, it is a team effort, often needs to work across multiple functional silos, and even collaborate with a business ecosystem. The challenge is to understand where and how you can and should improve to get the biggest effect and scale up across the digital ecosystem. Highly innovative organizations depend more heavily on their technological knowledge transfer and market capabilities to develop and commercialize innovations. To scale up, it’s particularly important for businesses matching their vision and tailor their own need to develop a set of best or next practices to build innovation as the differentiated business competency and amplify its effect. These innovation practices might be different across organizations, the key is “context.” If the best practice you want to adopt is to be implemented in the same context, it could work.

The success of the high-innovative organization is not accidental because innovation is a high mature digital capability which needs to be built through a multitude of disciplines, structures, processes, and practices. Highly innovative organizations can balance innovation with the order, change, and stability to improve business vitality and ensure future business growth and organizational maturity. To start the next cycle of digital innovation management and amplify innovation effect, businesses just have to learn from experimenting, scale up the best practices, cultivate innovative climate, and improve the innovation management success rate.

Read More

The Weekly Insight of the “Future of CIO” 11/22/2018

Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking, brainstorming, innovating and sharing.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2.8 million page views with 5100+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The “Digital Master” book series includes 25 books to share insight from the multidimensional digital lens and perceive the multi-faceted impact the digital era upon us is making to the 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 digital leadership, IT Management, and Talent Management.

Develop a Learning Organization and Build Breakthrough Innovation Competency With increasing pace of changes and cutting throat competitions, to effectively respond to the digital dynamics, companies must begin thinking about ways to build their innovation competency, broaden their ecosystems and revenue streams. In reality, the true innovation always spurs certain disruptions otherwise it is not innovation. Nowadays innovation can occur anywhere in the organization, and frankly, it has to occur in every aspect of the organization, information is the most time-intensive piece of digital innovation. How can companies develop a learning organization and take a structural way to manage innovation, especially breakthrough innovations which are disruptive and will change your organizations in many fields? You need new technology, new processes, new knowledge, maybe a new business model. All that makes them very risky but on the other hand, you will get very great chances and opportunities for achieving leapfrog results.

The Monthly “Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As” Book Tuning: IT Oversight Nov. 2018 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 digitizing boardroom.

Shaping an Effective IT Digitalization Agenda IT becomes so critically, many times, it is a determining success factor for building long-term business competencies. However, many traditional IT organizations are still perceived as a cost center and get stuck at the lower level of business maturity. At the dawn of the digital transformation, IT faces unprecedented opportunity to refine its reputation, also needs to take more responsibility as a true business partner. Information Technology should be seen by any business as a “digital game changer.” But from here to there is not some spontaneous activities, IT leaders need to clarify the following mysteries for shaping an effective IT digitalization agenda, set the right priority to run a high-performance digital organization.

The Monthly “100 Creativity Ingredients” Book Tuning: Dare to Be Creative Nov. 2018 All humans are born with raw creativity ability. Creativity has many dimensions, with multi-faceted truth and myth, manifold knowledge and multidimensional insight. Creativity is wings of our mind and the tempo of our heartbeat. Creativity is a constructive disruption, not so bad addiction, and a sensational phenomenon. The purpose of “100 Creativity Ingredients - Everyone’s Playbook to Unlock Creativity “is to classify, scrutinize, articulate, and share insight about one hundred special creativity ingredients, to paint the picture with them, to add colors on them, to embed the music into them, and to make the story via them, in order to unleash our collective creativity potential.

Three Questions to Assess IT Maturity Organizations today are over-complex and hyper-competitive, the management continues to keep their business running, but lack of insight on how well the organization is doing for the long term. IT is the business inside the business. As businesses embark on the “Digital Era” of computing and managing by taking logical but iterative steps for reaching the next stage of business maturity, IT assessment is a great way to help identify what is right and wrong in your environment and how you can make continuous improvement, to improve overall IT manageability, performance, adaptability, flexibility, and maturity.

Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating the 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.

Read More

The Monthly Organizational Structure Tuning: Fine-Tuning a Learning Organization Nov. 2018

Digital organizations are like the living systems that can self-renew in thriving as high-performance businesses. 

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?

        

Fine-Tuning a Learning Organization

Develop a Learning Organization and Build a Breakthrough Innovation Competency? Every organization is different, every innovation initiative is also unique, there is no one size fitting all formulas or practices to build breakthrough innovation competency. With increasing pace of changes and cutting throat competitions, to effectively respond to the digital dynamics, companies must begin thinking about ways to build their innovation competency, broaden their ecosystems and revenue streams.

How to Fine-Tune a Digital Learning Organization Digital means the increasing speed of change and hyper-connected, always-on businesses. Change Management in high mature organizations are no longer just a one-time business initiative, but an ongoing business capability. Change Management and Strategy Management need to go hand-in-hand. But more specifically, how to manage change effectively to improve its success rate, and how to fine-tune a digital learning organization?

Three Characteristics of Digital Organization? Digital organizations are like the living systems that can self-renew in thriving as high-performance businesses. Digitalization means that companies need to infuse digital into every aspect of the business, expand to every dimension of the organization. It is the movement from static to flow, silo to holistic, mechanical to organic, and command & control to self-management for shaping the digital-empowered workforce with the following characteristics.

Three Aspects on How Collective Learning Fosters Innovation We live in the information and knowledge economy, today’s digital professionals are hard workers, knowledge workers, and creative workers, who are exploring, innovating and evolving to new digital paradigm proactively in a continuous way. To create the new requires not just one skill, but many, not just old experience, but new perspectives. Collective learning rejuvenates the organizational culture and foster innovation.

A Learning Organization A learning organization is one in which the majority of the employees at all levels are open to new ideas, experimentation with new ways of doing things, learning from instead of condemning or punishing mistakes, errors and, perhaps most importantly, where knowledge is shared instead of hoarded, thus, expanding power instead of confining it. What Systems Thinking models are called up when organizations "learn"? Can you recognize the interconnectivity between employee learning and organizational learning? What are the characteristics of a learning organization? And does "Learning" trait differentiate Digital Masters from the digital laggards?

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2.8+million page views with about #5100+ 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 the 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.

Read More

The Popular Quotes of “Digital Master” Series about Gratitude, Love, Creativity, Change to Celebrate Holiday Nov. 2018

Be grateful to understand others and be understood.

"Digital Master” is the series of guidebooks (26+ books) is to perceive the multifaceted impact digital is making to the business and our society, help forward-thinking organizations navigate through the digital journey in a systematic way, and avoid “rogue digital.” Here is the set of popular quotes about gratitude, love, creativity, change to celebrate the holiday.

1 The most ADVANCING thing in the world is the advanced mindset.

― Pearl Zhu, Thinkingaire: 100 Game Changing Digital Mindsets to Compete for the Future


2 Be kind both from the bottom of the heart and the top of your mind, to reach the uplevel of kindness.

― Pearl Zhu, Thinkingaire: 100 Game Changing Digital Mindsets to Compete for the Future


3 Holiday is not just the time to spoil your appetite, but also the moment to open your mind, recharge the energy and connect more dots to spark creativity and advocate profundity

― Pearl Zhu, Digital Valley: Five Pearls of Wisdom to Make Profound Influence


4 “A positive mind reflects many of the Sun’s characteristics: brightness, nourishment, and vibrance.”
― Pearl Zhu, Thinkingaire: 100 Game-Changing Digital Mindsets to Compete for the Future


5 Love is harder than a diamond and softer than a flower!

― Pearl Zhu, Digital Valley: Five Pearls of Wisdom to Make Profound Influence


6 “Learning a new language, just like opening a new window, allows you to see the world with intimacy.”
― Pearl Zhu, Thinkingaire: 100 Game Changing Digital Mindsets to Compete for the Future

7 The condition of being human is the endless search for the conditions that allow the human to maximize the human potential.

― Pearl Zhu, 100 Creativity Ingredients: Everyone's Playbook to Unlock Creativity


8 “Being inclusive means to appreciate differences and enjoy the diverse viewpoints.”
― Pearl Zhu, 100 Creativity Ingredients: Everyone’s Playbook to Unlock Creativity


9 “Creativity needs encouragement as food, and conflict to spark it.”
― Pearl Zhu, Digital Valley: Five Pearls of Wisdom to Make Profound Influence


10 For humans to move to higher ground, we must have a different view, but share the common ground as well.

― Pearl Zhu, Digital Valley: Five Pearls of Wisdom to Make Profound Influence

Read More

The Characteristics of Digital Management

Integral digital management competency = Holism + Interdisciplinarity + Innovation

With very nature of hyperconnectivity and interdependence, the exponential growth of information and frequent changes, the digital business today is not just working within the industry, but also permeating cross-ecosystem which is dynamic, continuous and interactive. Perhaps we need to consider the digital organization as the self-organized but interlaced and hyper-connected ecosystem. The traditional management discipline based on linear logic and reductionistic thinking is outdated somehow. Because the high mature digital organization today needs to be sophisticated enough to act intelligently and nimble enough to adapt to changes promptly. Organizations that thrive on consistency and predictability are excellent at maintaining business growth momentum by taking integrated digital management practices which are based on interdisciplinarity, holism, and management innovation experimenting.

Interdisciplinarity: The digital business dynamic is full of uncertainty, velocity, complexity, and ambiguity, fierce competitions and continuous disruptions. Organizations today are at the crossroads where the segregation or silo of business units are at a need to reach across the aisles and work with each other respectively in order to understand complex business problems holistically and solve them systematically, without causing too many side effects. Unlike the traditional organizations often being perceived as mechanical systems keep spinning; digital organizations are the living things keep growing and evolving. Thus, the linear business system perception needs to be replaced by the adaptive digital system; the mechanistic production metaphor needs to be replaced by an organic service metaphor, and the technical organizational behavior is replaced by the socio-technical business behavior. Applying interdisciplinary digital management to gain an understanding of nonlinearity as the very characteristic of the digital organization and dynamic business ecosystem could be at the tipping point for the digital paradigm shift.

Holism: Digital disruptions are inevitable, the organizational management short-sightedness, silo, and running the business in a transactional mode to “keep the lights on,” or “keep the functional wall up” will cause digital ineffectiveness for the long run. It's important to leverage systems thinking to understand the variety of business relationship and manage the business in a structural way. A holistic digital management approach is about leveraging nonlinear processes and interconnectivity between problems in a managerial context, to ensure that the business as a whole is superior to the sum of pieces. The digital transformation is like a gigantic juggernaut puzzle with many misplaced pieces. It is important to involve not only putting different pieces together but also blending them in such a way that the emergent whole is somehow more than the sum of its parts. It means that business managers need to have a contextual understanding of the interconnectivity of both visible and invisible business success factors underlying the surface, break down silos, flatten organizational hierarchical layers, and enforce inter-organizational linkages, to improve digital management maturity.

Management innovation: Innovation, as an individual process or collective process, helps people or the organization adapt, improve, grow, integrate, and thrive. Digital innovation has a broader spectrum which includes both hard innovations such as products/service/process/ business model innovation or soft innovations such as communication innovation, culture innovation or management innovation. Management innovation means how to leverage creative thinking to innovate management processes or discipline. From an innovation management perspective, management innovation also means how to take a new angle to orchestrate a broader spectrum of digital innovations. Management innovation could change the way managers do what they do to improve the organizational capability to change or innovate. It's important to create the space for innovation dialogues and debates about why innovation is important for their organization, developing a common understanding of it, creating the necessity and motivation for it. Corporate environments with the right set of tools, structures, and mentalities, are better equipped to generate innovation within themselves, by allocating time and resource to the people in charge.

For business management, especially at senior management level, practicing digital management is about taking a holistic view, experimenting with better ways to lead and manage, applying interdisciplinary management approach for planning and taking actions, which are always based on rough estimations of what the future conditions of business execution would be. The goal is to run a highly responsive, high performance, high-innovative, and thus, high mature digital organization.

Read More

The Monthly “Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As” Book Tuning: IT Oversight Nov. 2018

The contemporary boards play the directory role in driving changes, overseeing business strategy, and monitoring business performance. 

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 digitizing boardroom.

              

  IT Oversight

The Digital Board’s IT Inquiries The digital world is so information-intensive and technology driven. Organizations rely more and more on information & technology. IT becomes so critical to the success of the organization nowadays. Many times, it is a determining success factor for your business strategy to achieve fast growth and long-term sustainability. Further, IT is not a function that can be handled only inside the IT department or by IT managers only, it takes brainstorming and empowerment from the boardroom to the collective effort and collaboration cross-functionally to run a highly effective and high-performance digital IT and improve overall IT manageability and maturity.

The Digital Board’s IT Inquiries (II) The contemporary boards play the directory role in driving changes, overseeing business strategy, and monitoring business performance. They are also the “mastermind” behind the digital transformation. The matter of fact is that the change is inevitable and the speed of change is increasing due to the exponential growth of information and robust digital technologies. Given how applying IT is becoming so intrinsically important to so many different enterprises across industrial sectors, digital BoDs need to become information friendly and technology-savvy. While directors bring many competencies to the table, most do not have access to information about technology-driven innovation and its potential related to the businesses they oversee. Here is a set of digital board's insightful inquiries about information & technology.

Three Insight of IT-Savvy Board? The corporate board is moving up their directorship maturity from compliance focus to performance-driven, from “keeping things in order,” to “advocating change and innovation. “ Nowadays, the contemporary digital boards play the directorial role in driving changes, overseeing business strategy, and monitoring business performance. They are also the “mastermind” behind the digital transformation with information savvy and technology friendly attitude.

IT Savvy Board’s Five Oversight The corporate board in a high-level leadership position plays a crucial role in strategy oversight, business advising, and monitoring, as well as setting key digital tones in organizational culture styles, talent management trend, and leadership quintessential. Nowadays, information is overwhelming and becomes one of the most invaluable assets of the business, technology is often the disruptive forces behind digital innovations. Forward-looking companies across the industries declare they are in the information management business. Therefore, Digital Board today need to become IT friendly and technology savvy, with a comprehensive IT oversight on how to run a highly intelligent and high mature digital business?

Who is exactly Responsible for Overseeing the level of IT Risk in an Organization? At the age of digitalization, opportunities and risks are co-existing; therefore, the optimal governance and risk management structure is more critical than ever, who is exactly responsible for overseeing the level of IT risk in an organization though?

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2.8 million page views with 5100+ blog posting 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.

The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As" Slideshare Presentation

The "Digital IT: 100 Q&As" Amazon Order Link

The "Digital IT: 100 Q&As" B& N Order Link

The "Digital IT: 100 Q&As" Lulu Order Link

The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As"  Introduction

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

Read More