Innovationbreakthrough

An innovation system to relate spirituality with science is through philosophy.

Breakthrough Innovation is disruptive and will change your organization in many fields with high return and high risks. You need new mindsets, new technologies, new processes, new customers, new knowledge, and maybe a new business model. The differentiation between incremental and breakthrough innovation relates to the degree to which a particular innovation changes the competitive landscape or the degree of impact it makes to its vertical industry. All that makes them very risky but it perhaps worths the effort because it significantly increases return on investment.

 Methodologically, discovering and managing breakthrough innovation is an interdisciplinary approach with multiple perspectives-scientifically, philosophically, and spiritually.

Science provides the control part of the knowledge system for breakthrough innovation: Besides the art of creative ideas, innovation, even a breakthrough innovation isn’t a serendipity, it is a scientific process which can be managed systematically. Science is the methodical process of identifying logical reasons, experimental methods, stepwise procedures, concrete scenarios, and bringing up provable outcomes. However, Radical/Breakthroughs/Transformational Innovations are not something everyone can accomplish. You have to systematically craft a unique set of capabilities to execute it successfully, that is something you cannot accomplish overnight. How successful that organization can manage “disruptive ideas” and manage breakthrough innovation depends on how those ideas are recognized, filtered and dealt with.

Scientifically, innovation is the mechanism through which you grow and evolve something to something great. However, breakthrough innovation has bigger risks so most companies don’t want to spend all their resources on radical innovation. To manage breakthrough innovation and control risks systematically, the scientific processes should be in place. The systematic structure provides the shell within which individuals can collaborate to create transparency to manage innovation. The challenge of leading and managing innovation is an overly conservative approach itself, or the company limits their organizational capability to only focus on small incremental innovation and fail to result in significant steps of capturing revenue opportunities by evolutionary innovation and breakthrough innovation.

Philosophy as the influence part of generating “big ideas” or looking deeper into breakthrough innovation: Fundamentally, innovation is the scenario to solve problems. Breakthrough innovation is usually about solving complex problems to make a significant impact and jumpstart the next chapter of innovation. We need more people pursuing truth, reality, and wisdom, asking” big why” questions and digging through the root cause of many problems. Philosophy is methodical and has deliberate processes for identifying questions, reasoning, identifying faulty reasoning, and thinking outside the box. However, we are living in an economic system that was created a few centuries ago and many companies are still run in silo with overly rigid hierarchical management disciplines. Often a problem is seen very differently by different parties. The radical innovation creates a chain of innovation, meaning it necessarily leads to new innovation and enhancements to solve a series of problems creatively.

Philosophy is the compass of human civilization and the foundations of “big principles” behind breakthrough innovation. Philosophy is abstract, but it could provoke the chain of thoughts to stimulate fresh ideas. Philosophy is the foundation upon which science has been built and continues to put forth the questions which help to scrutinize innovation purposes, principles, or processes, and move science onward and upward. By applying a philosophical lens to understand thorny issues and identify opportunities to initiate breakthrough innovation, business leaders and professionals can step outside their own box - assuming a box is a mental model, the key is to find the right new boxes, think in new boxes, or shape a bigger box by making connections between different boxes; rather than thinking outside of one particular box, to see alternatives and solve complex problems with creativity and collaboration.

Spirituality as the appreciative part: The world is a melting pot of languages, religions, races, genders, and the life journey has, but only one purpose, to push human society forward. All artistic, scientific, philosophical knowledge of mankind is inspired by Nature. We are truly connected to the world around us - our surroundings, our interactions with others via mind connection, heart touching, or spiritual sensitivity, all of which influence human consciousness as if our consciousness at every stage of evolution is synchronized with the spirit of nature. It’s important to gain a pervasive appreciation and work on a fairly comprehensive innovation management model that views innovation and transformation as different points along a continuum with very different tools and competencies needed along the way.

We come together in an effective way catalyzing creativity, bringing about breakthrough ideas, and accelerating the change we want to see in the world. Spirituality, not based on doctrines but true introspection and connectivity of nature, does have a practical role in that it could help to inform us to see the bigger picture, sense the invisible and stimulate breakthrough ideas. It helps to perceive the complexity of all things from this side, that side, and the interaction of both sides while simultaneously reflecting on how the expanded worldview influences the understanding of what it is people are inquiring about. In the organizational scope, culture is an invisible “spiritual thing.” Because most of the radical innovations need a lot of time to launch into the market. Therefore, most of the organizational culture, especially in large companies are not inclined to radical innovation. To nurture innovation, especially breakthrough innovation, it’s important to appreciate risk taking, develop resilience, build competency, and encourage collaboration.

Breakthrough innovation is the collaborative effort and a leapfrog to societal evolution. An innovation system to relate spirituality with science is through philosophy. In fact, Science, philosophy, and spirituality are crucial angles to see through breakthroughs. In theories, the cross disciplinary approach (science, spiritualism, and philosophy) makes a triad of the highest levels of human knowledge to drive breakthrough innovation. In practice, interdisciplinary science applied to management with integrating multidisciplinary methodology, enables leaders to frame bigger thinking boxes, and motivates creative workforce to approach problems via multifaceted ways for accelerating business performance.

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Influentialleadership

Leadership is about moving forward-like water; developing a strategy-like a blueprint; setting an example-like a diamond...

We live in a complex reality, and most of the things appear to be "beyond our control" as we become aware of our limits. This is not necessarily bad. The leader is in control in the face of adversity based upon the principles that the world's finest leaders move forward with some substance of caring, consideration for the current external/internal conditions and plan for recovery.

 Metaphorically, what does leadership look like? A test of our leadership skills-who is in control in the face of adversity? Are you a “Choosy Water” or a “Rough Diamond”?

Choosy water- character is nature, but can be refined: Water is liquid under given conditions of temperature and pressure, the volume, purity, the seasons of the river, the melting of snow and the dropping iceberg...Lao Tzu says that “superior virtue is like water.” “Water attitude” is a good analogy to depict leadership. Authentic leadership comes with the “natural” attitude. Those who react in hard times are those who are “like water”: Water is not choosy, has no judgmental attitude, does not strictly rely on procedures to take actions. At any time water naturally knows what the best place and the best way are, so water is obtained without effort and despite all efforts we produce against. Such metaphor drives us to think about flexibility, adaptability, ability of interaction, motivation skills, problem solving and resilience. Those are all great qualities of high-effective leadership.

In the big ocean, water is perhaps struggling - the rolling waves or seasoning tides...Crisis and disasters have a way of letting us know that there are times in life that we can't control the events nor outcome; the only thing we can control are our thoughts, attitude, and how we react and respond to each moment at hand. Water acts “naturally,” occupying any free spot and place, while indeed, Lao Tzu would probably have said “we that are earth,” do need techniques, procedures, policies and engage rules to operate with waters. With the latest technologies and methodologies, we build reservoirs or dams, to preserve or use water in a smart way. In fact, leadership is perhaps also like choosy water, we set principles, optimize processes, and develop the best and next practices to improve leadership maturity.

Character as our heart blueprint and mind mirror: The intensity of darkness varies with each of us and so is our understanding and action under the same conditions. Character is developed through adversity. That whatever challenge, crisis or disaster comes our way in life, we may find ourselves standing alone, left in charge to pick up the pieces. In those defining moments, when we stand alone, helpless over circumstances surrounding us, with no checklists of leadership to follow, no people to count on, we better know who we are, who we trust and believe in. Those very moments define our character - who we are, character is our heart blueprint and mind mirror.

People have different characters (half perception, half personality). It is human nature for each of us to trip/stumble over our own ego throughout life to keep us humble. Some are more resilient, they face the difficulty, and stand again. Such people would stand by their principles, are focused and live with a positive attitude. Crisis and disasters have a way of letting us know that there are times in life that we can't control the events nor outcome; the only thing we can control are our thoughts, feelings and how we react and respond to each moment at hand. Our character makes us who we are, but we always can keep learning, reasoning, and sharpen it to be strong.

A person’s character is as hard as a diamond, but will shine through when it gets polished: The beauty of a rough diamond is unrevealed to most viewers, awaiting a polishing by a master who has wise eyes to be able to see what lies beneath and technique skills to make it shine. It is only when it goes through the process of being cleaned, cultivated and refined, does it acquire the brilliance and elegance, and is considered of high value. In-depth understanding and character development are tested during periods of difficulty. The person then shows how strong his/her character, and the cognitive understanding of circumstances.

The leader should be authentic; the leader should be able to be rough (Character); the leader should be able to take responsibility and be accountable. Leadership growth comes from identifying opportunities, tailoring development and putting the appropriate level of effort into the process. Guidance and assistance along the way is critical, however, it is often missed or under emphasized. The brightness of character-based leadership is not flamboyant, but through the simple words with deep insight; the clear vision with laser focus, no intention to appear, but shining through substances: influence, intelligence, creativity, confidence, humility, accountability, resilience, etc.

Leadership is about moving forward, like water; developing a strategy, like a blueprint; setting an example, like a diamond...But leaders are humans, not perfect, with emotions. We all are human with human traits. Humans are great at improving their skills. We can learn through our own process, or learn from the examples of others. To be memorable as the catalyst for concerted efforts to achieve a common goal or achievement is a trait of leadership. Leadership is the influence, and a right mix of art and science.

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"Universe"quotes

Universe is expanding, and with that, time is marching forward!

Digital Master” is a series of guidebooks (28 + books) to perceive the multi-faceted impact digital is making to the businesses and society, help forward-thinking organizations navigate through the journey in a systematic way, and avoid “rogue digital.”

It perceives the emergent trends of digital leadership, provides advice on how to run a digital organization to unleash its full potential and improve agility, maturity, and provide insight about Change Management. It also instructs the digital workforce on how to shape a game-changing digital mindset and build the right set of digital capabilities to compete for the future. Here is a set of “Universe” quotes in “Digital Master.”

Everything and everyone is part of one huge system: our universe. and things are also interdependent in such an amazing system.

Life is serendipitous; some life are straight; others are curvilinear; but every life is special, unique, and precious; every life has complexity in it and is an abstraction of the universe.

As life is bits and bytes of the whole Universe, add some colors and make certain signals, every bit of positive influence count.

"Science =What" from wiki: Science (from Latin scientia, meaning "knowledge") is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.

Science is what we know for sure, it can prove through existing laws of the natural world, spirituality is what we know through our connections to the universe, carried largely through unconscious instincts, motives, and intuition.

Thinking = Endeavor to finding ways to rationalize a system. World = Universe that holds systems in different contexts across different times and spaces. System = something. Thinking = coherent (logical and operational) construction of a selection of aspects, judged relevant by the thinking agent, with the purpose to predict with selected observable aspects of the system, and hopefully open enough to question the selection.

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Improvecorprorateboardmaturity

The Board of Directors as top leadership roles should have multi-intelligent wisdom, to envision and bring a new perspective on improving business maturity.

Leadership or directorship is about setting directions and inspiring changes; when necessary, break down the old rules, and establish digital principles and landscapes. Senior leadership should represent a high level of leadership maturity via profound thinking and sound judgment.

 BoD leadership needs to be future oriented, steer the organization towards the digital journey with a clear vision, a solid strategic roadmap and effective feedback system.

Analyze the needs of the board, its strengths and weaknesses, and determine what skills are needed: Senior leadership is neither the status quo, not a ceremonial role only. The corporate boardroom composition will directly impact on how they lead and which tone they will set for the entire organization to follow. Most corporate board directors are top seasoned executives with decades of experience. They should be the specialized generalists with “T” shaped expertise and embrace the seemingly paradoxical point of views, stay on strategic focus in order to gain a deep understanding of varying strategic topics holistically. To amplify leadership influence, digital leaders including corporate board directors need to be constantly visible by sharing vision and enabling others to share it.

Leadership is about developing people not managing them. Senior leaders have a personal and moral obligation to develop more leadership. The majority of directors and boards do not understand or are reluctant to face the probability that is their board's culture, is the reason, their organization and their board performs poorly. Far too often the term "leadership" is thrown around loosely and without any regard of true meaning. The high-effective and high mature leadership at the board level is based on vision, learning agility, and influential intelligence.

Strengths are reinforced and extended through delegation and mentoring. BoDs should analyze the needs of the board, its strengths and weaknesses, and determine what skills are needed. The new generation of leaders understand the difference between influence and authority, and therefore are completely at ease in influencing and participating in shaping high performance teams. The organizations need to embrace and display to make training/development programs not only value-added, but also inspiring.

Become well versed on the latest trends and well rounded to drive transformative change: There’s known unknown, there’s unknown unknown, everyone perhaps has some blind spots blocking the way. The vision thing matters in the boardroom as a clear vision is a good combination of perception, prediction, and precision. Visionary BoDs help to predict and co-develop a good strategy and overcome the challenges and uncertainty on the way to the future. They have a clear choice among future scenarios that advocates future trends from an expanding global marketplace to the rapid pace of technology change that must be considered. They set digital principles and trends, oversee a winning strategy and ensure its smooth execution.

With “VUCA” digital new normal, as a senior business leader such as BoDs, the blind spots will cloud your vision, trigger your negative emotion, and cause your ineffective decision-making. Often the answer to many business questions is not just “right” or “wrong,” but there are many shades in between. The corporate board needs to be able to leverage diverse viewpoints via listening, brainstorming, and questioning to be well rounded for driving transformative change and leading effectively.

Monitor business performance by understanding and agreeing on the company’s key performance metrics: The corporate boards not only oversee the strategy, but also monitor the performance. The corporate board’s business performance monitoring is not limited to financial performance only, but also to the firm’s performance in creating value for people- employees and customers. The struggle for performance measurement or key performance indicator selection is that they sometimes need a number of measures around the same issue to gain a complete picture. Thus, BoDs can help to participate and agree on KPIs selection and measurement to ensure business management effectiveness.

High performing corporate boards oversee and advise management so as to ensure the best fit between (short term) profitability (shareholders) and long-term sustainability. For a corporate board to monitor performance, it is critical to enforce multidimensional shareholder value by looking at all sorts of business success factors such as leadership, culture, processes, and make improvements if necessary, then determine whether new approaches/methods/tools would be a good addition to the mix, to ensure high performance of management practices.

The Board of Directors as top leadership roles should have multi-intelligent wisdom, to envision and bring a new perspective on improving business maturity, set inclusive culture tone and shape the world class talent management, steer changes and ensure the business to develop a creative workforce and a fair workplace to maintain viability.

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UsingbusinessarchitecturetoUnleashpotential

The real value of business architecture is about keeping the priorities in balance and facilitating the strategic communications within the business executives.

Business Architectures are supposed to answer strategic questions and help to define the direction for organizations. It is not just for knowledge collection, but for capturing business insight/foresight. 

To dig deeper: What is the role Business Architecture may play to design and manage future businesses that can respond to such multidimensional factors impacting business model, business operations, and business reputation? Which skills the architect of the future should sharpen in order to design the future of business?

Change Navigator: Running business is about managing changes large or small, organizational change becomes common practice within an organization, it turns to be one of the ongoing strategic capabilities which underpin successful execution and move an organization from “keeping the lights on” to strategic responsiveness. Technically, to change an organizational system, you must first understand the concept of the true meaning of the organizational system and the interdependence of varying components. To actually facilitate change or movement in a company, you need a business steering instrument such as business architecture that gives you a holistic view to highlight changes with standardization, coherence, and visualization of business improvement initiatives so that the business problem can be seen from every relevant perspective and every perspective has a whole world behind itself to be described.

High mature organizations use business architecture as a body of knowledge and experience in guiding and managing knowledge and change. It is important to envision a “To-Be” state first, because it creates a digital paradigm shift in your change management approach. It is a series of methods and industry standard practices to describe what you do, why, how, where and who derives or contributes the value of such interactions. As the digital world becomes hyperconnected, interdependent, and dynamic, the industrial silo and old boundary has been broken down, it’s no surprise that we will leverage a cross-disciplinary approach to solve complex problems and overcome common change challenges.

Strategic Differentiator: The capability-based strategy is to well bridge ‘as-is’ and "to-be" states. Many organizations do not have alignment between strategic intentions and their ability to execute those intentions. Business Architecture is a discipline that helps organizations define their strategic differentiator and deliver organizational capabilities aligned with their strategic goals and objectives. It can be taken as a mapping tool in providing the visibility and defining the roadmap for strategic alignment. Prepare the strategic plan points the company in a direction where it can maximize its market position and reap as many benefits as possible.

Organizational capability maturity is an important digital business differentiator to improve the effectiveness of strategy management. The multitude of organizational capabilities expands the business horizon to take a different path for reaching the “to-be” state. What matters is capability maturity, the high-mature set of business capabilities can make organizations more adaptable to fulfill their strategy, as the key business differentiator. With business architecture as an effective tool, the capability maturity can be assessed by measuring the technology impact on capability effectiveness; the process impact on capability effectiveness, and the people factor about the collective capability effectiveness and maturity.

Process Conductor: The organization stagnates because the business systems are no longer able to accommodate changing needs or too fragile to speed up. It requires some kind of rethinking and reinventing the corporate processes and creating the sense of support for adapting to emerging events. Business architecture can be very valuable for performing a wide array of additional services, including strategic positioning, segment analysis, process optimization and measurement, a wide array of other business functions, leveraging repeatable processes, and mastering expectation management.

Business Architecture should have the capability to transform the manual process and the business requirement to process design and process governance. It is good to look at processes in terms of the very characteristics such as flexibility, resilience, value contribution, reproducibility, reusability, etc. The process of preplanned change shouldn’t be too rigid or overly prescribed, otherwise, it could create the bottleneck for streamlining change scenarios. Important business processes need to be reviewed regularly, refined regularly and are transparent across the business. It should help to bring into alignment most of the key parts of the business such as Sales, Marketing, Operations, Customer Service, Purchasing, Warehouse all come into play. The ultimate goal of Business Architecture is to architect business in transition to the strategic state, a holistic approach would be to look at the purpose of the business, then look at the function (products and markets), processes required and the structure, resources, authority of the system.

Empathetic Communicator: The Business Architecture is an effective communication tool at C-level to facilitate the varying business dialogue which is neither one-way street nor “once in a while “event. It needs to be continuous, iterative, and multi-channel because change occurs on a continuum. It helps to keep all executives at the same page by walking through discussions about strategy planning, governance, or business transformation, etc.

The real value of business architecture is about keeping the priorities in balance and facilitating the strategic communications within the business executives. The business architecture equivalent takes a look at balancing the business priorities and forcing conversations that are otherwise difficult to have. It enforces cross-divisional communication and collaboration, and makes strategic alignment, for advising, monitoring, deliberation, and sustaining a balance of diversified viewpoints. It’s an effective communication and governance tool to blueprint the future of business.

Business Architecture brings the systems understanding of relationships, ecosystems, market dynamics, and the connections between related business functions. It contains the organizational context, provides guidance that does not make it tactical by nature, and is strategic in that it gives direction to the large-scale business transformation while tactical realizations are underway.

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Innatevalueofscoreboard

The rule of thumb is: That metric needs to be “SMART,” so people can see what the outcome will look like throughout their transition.

Corporate Performance Management is a management control from strategy till shop floor. A good balanced scorecard measures key strategic measures along with the things that drive those measures. A KPI Balanced Scorecard is a great idea, however, the success of that scorecard will be determined by the components of the scorecard and how meaningful those components are to the successful implementation of the change.

 Scorecards translate your strategy into concrete terms and help you track its implementation. The well-designed scorecard allows you to focus on the most critical issues, and put all things in context.

What KPI would you recommend to determine the value an employee adds to their department and how would you implement it? There are two aspects, first what the individual adds to the department, and second what the department adds to the business. Taking the second one, in a maintenance department you' ll be aware of the various measures of reliability, availability, utilization and the Turnaround KPI's like safety and cycle time. At an individual level, it comes down to the annual assessment of how he or she did against the objectives that were set, or if they had ownership of a particular section of plant or set of equipment then failure modes, mean time between failure, overdue inspections etc come into play.

Set “SMART” goals to link the individual performance to the strategic initiatives. An effective scorecard helps to connect KPIs on the strategic level to the operational KPIs so that there is a coherent truth in the company connected to the strategy. Measuring/improving effectiveness and delivering value from your resources is more about having visibility and insight into the non-productive time (NPT) and focusing on reducing that. Resources waiting on materials, permits, tools, plant lock-out/availability are not effective and to improve management behaviors need to be proactive rather than reactive.

The Balanced Scorecard framework is a great way of selecting, scoping, and aligning specific projects to overall strategic objectives and the budget: Sticking to the plan/schedule has been shown to deliver double the work. Better organizations measure the important issues as they go along and adjust the plan/objectives /goals accordingly. Logically, it is as simple as achieving the execution of the strategic initiatives and the benefits arising from them.

People’s performance is an important perspective of business projects or portfolio performance. The employer's revenue benefits when performance improves and the employee benefits because becoming a better performer makes the employee more marketable. Employee benefits because understanding what it takes to be engaged makes them even more valuable to potential employers in the event of reductions in force or business realignment. The same thing applies to increasing performance, an issue totally separate from engagement.

Review the critical success factors on balanced score cards: We need to determine what role to expect our employees to become. After that, we can build measuring systems according to these besides warming up individual development systems for particular demand. It is also important to provide a “balanced” view of tradeoff variables. A well designed balanced scorecard helps to measure things that really matter, and ensure that these measures are quantitative, and implement whatever mechanisms you need to be able to gather the information and measure them in an objective way.

Without scorecards, it will become like searching for a needle in the haystack. People can see what the outcome will look like throughout the transition, and then there should be a consideration for a balanced scorecard that measures the progress of the goals you want to achieve. The balanced scorecard measures key strategic performance indicators along with the things that drive those measures. If these values have not been clearly identified at the outset, you cannot get the true alignment of your organization and all working toward the same goals and outcomes, you lack clarity and purpose of direction for changes.

The rule of thumb is: That metric needs to be “SMART,” so people can see what the outcome will look like throughout their transition. Second, there should be a consideration for a balanced scorecard that measures the progress of the milestones you want to achieve during the change transition, this keeps people focused.

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Innovative-Insight

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

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with 7700+ 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 digital leadership, IT Management, and Talent Management.

Unconventionalproblemsolving Solving complex problems today requires perceptive intelligence, multidisciplinary knowledge, profound insight, enriched experiences.We live in a world in which change is the norm and we confront a number of high complex problems across business disciplines and knowledge domains. The problem-solving logic is just so simple - diagnose the real problem and solve it in the right way. However, the problem-solving thought process and practices...

Cultural Savvy Corporate Board Culture is not a mythical "thing" that comes automatically. Culture results from a lot of factors such as the business endeavors, goals of the leaders and their personal philosophies to reach the goal, their emotions in various scenarios and so on. Digital means to break down the past and lead toward the future with a quantum leap. Culture is the "fabric" of an organization and habits/behaviors/practices being woven into that fabric.

Initiatingconstructivecriticism Constructive critics are like a mirror, providing the management an important alert of forthcoming challenges they are facing, pinpoint their blind spots and improve management effectiveness and professional maturity. When people in the organization are too “fit in,” they think the same and act the same, without challenging each other’s point of view; no wonder that the feedback gaps are enlarged, more blind spots are created to cause decision ineffectiveness.

Unimaginablecreativity The updated and interdisciplinary knowledge enables wider dots connections and develops creative intelligence. Creativity is, by nature, unique to each person. As we each have different cognitive styles, personality, knowledge or life experiences, there is no template which we can apply and suddenly become creative. There is the inclusiveness of the various facets and factors of creativity. Thus, cross disciplinary knowledge to connect wider...

Inquiriesaboutorganizationalmaturity To think critically and change progressively perhaps more often than not, involves some level of discomfort and interdisciplinary transcendence. Digital management is fundamentally an iterative cycle to design, build, scale and optimize business competency and achieve the desired effect under specified performance standards and conditions. There’re a growing number of organizations that shift their risk management orientation from bottom-up.

Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking about 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.

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UnitifytoPlanIntegrate

What can be unifying is looking at each function in the enterprise as a subsystem and then finding a unified means of looking at the essence- modern digital organizations are not just the sum of functional pieces, but an integral whole.

The digital era upon us is people centricity, people are the most invaluable asset in any business. At the heart of digital, it is people and how to build a people-centric organization. Going digital is an evolutionary path of pursuing the next level of organizational maturity and collective human progress via empowerment and democratic meritocracy. 

To improve the organizational maturity, what can be unifying is looking at each function in the enterprise as a subsystem and then finding a unified means of looking at the essence- modern digital organizations are not just the sum of functional pieces, but an integral whole.

Encourage customers to co-design the products, services, and communities, to share the thought and feedback, to enhance customer responsiveness and satisfaction: The digital era upon us is about people-centricity. Creating positive change and building a delightful working environment is a strategic imperative to embrace people centricity as a trend and build a high mature digital organization. You might produce the most-sophisticated- in-the-market products, but no one needs and buys it. That will waste the talent and resources. A customer empathy map provides the simplicity of selection, usage, and incredible reliability. It requires not just things to work but be delightful and innovative to improve people’s productivity and engagement. The journey is the path customers take; the journey is for awareness, the journey is for service received, and the journey is for retention, etc.

Engaging customers directly on an ongoing basis to see how their goals are changing is a good way to architect customer-centric organizations. Therefore, you have to put people- the customer and the employee at the heart of everything that you do as a business. That is a critical aspect of our future and a significantly underutilized competitive advantage. Technically, the key factors in Customer Experience may include products, prices, distributions, availability, convenience and branding, etc.

Inspire employees to make more contributions and drive a learning-doing continuum: Nowadays, we live in an information-rich, knowledge-abundant, and technologically advanced society, knowledge work is more purpose-driven and self-management. Overly restrictive hierarchy will lose its steam as it perpetuates bureaucracy and causes stagnation. Expanding the boundary is about learning and gaining new knowledge continuously, being open to different thoughts, beliefs or alternatives to do things. Openness, trust, sharing, and collaboration are the new normal. It’s important to encourage the culture of learning and embed it into the business process and strategy seamlessly.

The effects of an increasingly digitized world are now reaching into every corner of businesses and every aspect of organizations. To improve business productivity and reinforce good behavior, it’s important to provide people with sufficient and updated information, navigate people through new experiences, expose them to additional data through those experiences, and do that purposefully. The key point is to understand the elements that interact with each other and build the environment to produce good behavior, design a delightful workplace with fully taking advantage of resources effectively and bringing fruitful innovation and top-notch business performance.

Revitalize the GRC Enforcement: Almost everything in an organization should have both management and governance as interdependent components, as governance needs to focus on effectiveness, to ensure business doing the right things, as management is about doing things right. GRC is not about a single role or reporting structure, as there are separate functions/roles. It’s imperative to enforce GRC practices at daily business activities such as iterative communication, and continuous improvement.

The governance mechanism needs to be well embedded in business processes to encourage desirable behavior. If it isn’t, the strategic planning of the business perhaps becomes a synonym for wishful thinking. Effective governance mechanism is a critical leverage point for the business to facilitate successful business functioning while ensuring there are adequate controls in place to operate responsibly in accordance with its business values and strategic goals.

Digital leaders today not just reactively look through and respond to the business ecosystem; they actually proactively plan and architect the digital landscape. It is useful to define the business as a system then look for or at its outcomes, learn from its historical roots, keep the lights on and make a long term plan for the future.

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Innovation”three-leg”system

Being able to engage in the successful creation of innovations is very hard work and does include a good strategy, a lot of skills and abilities as well as processes and theories.

The essence of innovation is made of trying new combinations of known things. It's the essence of problem-solving and progress. Innovation management is a “three-leg” system: An innovation strategy, a culture to support or even drive innovation, and an innovation management mechanism. 

In practice, the innovation strategy is not a thing or even a state, but a process of lining up the culture of creativity. People would like to take the calculated risks in experimenting with a new way to do things, as well as having the business model they create to get it done.

A good innovation strategy as leverage points helps the business structure innovation to stay focused: Due to the complexity of modern businesses, within the organizations, innovation nowadays is rarely an individual action; rather, it is a strategic discipline and systematic effort, often across multiple functional silos or even breaking down the industry boundaries. A good innovation strategy enables the business to focus on the business goals, develops the innovation best practices and builds business innovation competencies by shaping the best point of view to see innovation as a system and be capable of delivering organization-wide capabilities.

A well crafted strategy ensures that the results of an innovative approach will have a positive impact for the clients, partners, end users, and the marketplace. In some circumstances, an organization has developed a wonderful innovation strategy, but it does not apply to the environment mainly due to its organizational capability in executing it timely with agility, etc. Innovation strategy management provides coherence between actual capability and the strategic goals that have been defined, and addresses in outline how the strategic objectives will be achieved, which includes exploiting your center of gravity. Highly innovative organizations usually have a good innovation strategy to frame effective constraints and facilitate digital dialogues to diagnose problems and generate fresh ideas by tapping the business ecosystem.

It’s critical to cultivate a culture which inspires creativity, accepts external ideas and rapidly integrates them into innovative ideas: With an ever evolving business ecosystem, a corporation needs the culture to sustain cross-boundary engagement to discover external ideas, as well as interdisciplinarity to harness a creative culture. Can you impose a culture of innovation, or shall you build, cultivate, or foster it, and how? Culture is like soil, the organization is like land. The more fertile the soil, the better nourishment the crop and plant products will be.

Innovation can occur anywhere in the organization, and it has to occur in every aspect of the organization. The right kind of mind helps to build the right type of skills and the right dose of risk-taking attitude to innovate. Good ideas nearly never emerge spontaneously but from interactions, not single individuals. Silos, rigidity, inflexibility, static mindset, or bureaucracy, etc, create gaps and slow down idea flow and stifle innovation. The appropriately configured innovation platform creates a scalable means for brainstorming, designing and building ideas throughout the enterprise. As a result, innovation becomes a persistent, shared reality even across silos and geographies.

Embed innovation management mechanisms into the corporate DNA: Unlike many other types of operational business processes which are strictly based on hierarchical management discipline, innovative ideas should be reviewed, selected and developed by leveraging simple empowered processes. To embed innovation management mechanisms into the corporate DNA and align the implementation processes with an innovation strategy, it needs to lay out different thinking, structures, and solutions to develop into the business potential where organizations are combining all that is available to them in imaginative or advantageous ways. While organizations can innovate without clear systems of innovation, the ability to achieve sustained innovation results probably does require at least some degree of a 'hard-wired' innovation system with embedded mechanisms, not speaking about disciplines that are related to technologies implemented by the particular innovation. Priority, process, and resource framework can be a tool for managing innovation effectively.

Highly innovative organizations have a powerful innovation navigation system to detect opportunities for innovating and a highly effective IT system to integrate important business elements into innovation competencies. The level of guide and process needs to be right. If you don't have the right level of Innovation Management process in place, it is substantially harder and less likely to be an innovative company for the long run. Methodologically, innovation becomes more people centric; the need-based innovation depends more on customer focus groups and “idea workout” sessions, leverage the mechanisms that can provide deep insights into the end-users of the products, and make a point of engaging customers directly to generate new ideas.

Being able to engage in the successful creation of innovations is very hard work and does include a good strategy, a lot of skills and abilities as well as processes and theories. How well the organization management innovation is based on the varying factors, such as the speed of decision-making, attitude toward risk, how effective for the allocation of resources; what’s the altitude of innovation impact and the aptitude to manage innovation; how efficient of the innovation processes or lack thereof; when to follow the digital principles, and when to break rules. In brief, innovation management is more science than art.

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Initiatingcapabilitybasedbusinesstransformation

The organization has to build an impressive road-mapping, explore multipath digital gateways, and change to the fundamental business model, culture, or other critical business factors for reaching the next level of organizational growth and maturity.

Forward-thinking organizations today aim to move into a more advanced stage of digital deployment by tailoring their own unique strength and business maturity.

 It’s important to understand what drives cost and what drives value, ensuring they have both vision and passion, a set of coherent capabilities and capacities entering into the ever-changing business dynamic, as well as a solid roadmap to take the long journey for reaching the high level of organizational maturity.

Strategic capability-roadmapping: Products/services are becoming more commoditized and there is a lot of pressure on pricing, margins, and investable budget dollars. Business leaders today need to look ahead and be proactively looking for opportunities to improve, develop differentiated business capabilities to make continuous deliveries. To improve business performance and reach a high level of organizational maturity, a missing but necessary capability must be created or purchased, or the strategy must be revised.

Capability mapping can be an enormous help in understanding and prioritizing business efforts that organizations are attempting to create, and improve the success rate of strategy execution. The viewpoints of strategy-capability mapping would be selective, not comprehensive. There are multiple perspectives of organizational capabilities, the top tier is a common executive view of the condition or suitability of capability to support the intended future operating model and implement a well-defined business strategy. The strategic capability mapping helps to visualize the end to end enterprise and bridge the “gap of opportunity” between where you are and want to become. Perhaps you also have to go down to a second-tier - the program portfolio tier, or even a third tier, at the operational level, to get to the point where there is enough differentiation between capabilities that you can build the map against different roles in the organization to achieve business objectives and make continuous deliveries.

Intelligent process mapping: Processes underpin business capability. The relationships of business processes in the context of the enterprise systems (architecture, organizational structure, strategies, etc.) create greater capabilities when analyzing and planning enterprise changes. The goal of process management is to understand every workflow process, eliminate redundancy, complications and reduce the burden on the company while trying to stay current with ever-changing technologies and dynamic business environments, keep optimizing the organizational competency and capacity. The smart process needs to have dynamic aspects to it. It is rigorous; but not overly rigid, it can handle ad-hoc and exceptional matters smoothly and it ‘knows’ enough to be able to handle failures effectively.

The question is how does an organization look at the process maturity which will give real-time or near real-time view to business performance. Smart business processes should actually be born out of a strategy, when applied strategically saves much cost, allowing you to become more competitive to achieve business goals. Outlining the major business processes at the highest level helps to build business capabilities. Process maps should be well aligned with application portfolios as well as partners or customers application portfolios. Unused or under -utilized applications that consume a disproportionate amount of resources when compared to their value, need to be addressed.

Contextual governance mapping: The purpose of the GRC is to improve business performance through the creation of value to stakeholders. Governance can begin with frameworks and policies to be put in place, depending on the nature, scale and complexity of the organization, understanding one's risks and conducting Risk Assessment remains the core exercise before any controls are put in place in the overall context of GRC. GRC Mapping assists in assessing what additional system and controls you need compared to what you already have in order to mitigate risks. The regulatory compliance mapping phase is about defining requirements and tying them back to an "authority document." Once that is done for one area of concern, then the organization can start to define where requirements overlap.

There are often disruptive processes or technologies that need some relaxation of the old governance models during the changeover. It makes sense to have governance processes that are more lightweight and continuous, and focus more on results rather than detailed plans. Furthermore, governance mapping helps to identify interdependencies and streamline governance processes. Think big (holistically) and small (focus), think lightweight, think incremental, and most of all, think about how GRC can be delegated and even automated when possible.

Business transformation is the change on a grand level and it is a thorny journey full of uncertainty, velocity, complexity, and ambiguity, with many curves and bumps, roadblocks and pitfalls on the way. The organization has to build an impressive roadmapping, explore multipath digital gateways, and change to the fundamental business model, culture, or other critical business factors for reaching the next level of organizational growth and maturity.

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uncoveringbusinessvulnerabilityformulas

Many business changes or transformational efforts are symptomatic of not having a comprehensive understanding to identify business vulnerability.

The inevitable range, breadth, depth, and pace of uncontrollable factors acting on any organizations across vertical sectors mean identifying business vulnerability and constant fine-tuning are essential to improve the organizational maturity. Surely there is no one size fits all formula to manage a smooth digital transformation. 

However, it’s important to identify business vulnerability patterns, share lessons learned, deal with pitfalls, amplify the best practices and experiment with the next practices to improve business maturity.

Action without option = inflexibility: The digital age upon us is about people, options, and innovation. People are at the center of a digital organization, being customer-centric is the ultimate goal for any forward-looking business today. Business users and consumers are selective nowadays due to the unprecedented convenience brought by digital technologies. Digital leaders need to become the “Choice Generator,” providing choices for talented employees on how they would like to get the work done; provide choices for users and customers on how to solve their issues from their lens; re-imagine the new possibilities and alternative ways to do things.

The Digital Era upon us is about people's centricity, choice, and empathy. The more customer contact points an organization has, the more difficult it is to meet and hopefully deliver on customers' expectations. Thus, it’s important to provide choices for them on how to solve their issues by listening to their feedback and improving their experience. Business management needs to overcome the tendency of micromanagement, clarify the “why” and “what” part of the business goals, but encourage the individual or the team to figure out “how” on their own, encourage creativity and enable autonomy.

Jumping to the “how” without “keeping the end in mind” = ineffectiveness: When organizations heavily focus on “how” - the action part of changes without clarifying big “why,” they lose sight of the purpose of business management. Running a business is a problem-solving continuum; frame the right questions before answering them, ensure doing the right things before doing things right, and know how to drive an iterative planning and execution continuum,

Many business changes or transformational efforts are symptomatic of not having a comprehensive understanding and taking a stepwise approach to manage transformative changes. The digital leaders who are equipped with strategic thinking can inject passion by exploring the “why” factor, make a stride toward the future and keep things on track to ensure that every process, every expenditure of time, money, energy and every assignment of resources should directly relate back to the “WHY,’ to improve organizational effectiveness and lead their organization to become a competitive differentiator,

Hierarchy without efficiency= bureaucracy: Many organizations today are running in between - the mix of old and new; the different departments or divisions within an organization have different speeds. Overly rigid organizational hierarchy perpetuates bureaucracy and causes stagnation. The organization must step out of the “comfort zone,” battle bureaucracy. Digital leaders should encourage and facilitate empowerment of their teams and develop the digital workforce to achieve the higher than expected business results.

There is silo spreading in the different layers of the organization; and the overly rigid hierarchy creates bottlenecks which prevent information flow. To improve business flexibility, flatten the overly rigid hierarchy, the hierarchy must balance the freedoms, welfare, and responsibilities of the subsystems and total system and enforce vertical accountability. A hyperconnected organization can approach the flow zone when the positions in its hierarchy have clear and accountable tasks. Business leaders do not focus on hierarchy but on ideas, information, creativity, flexibility, openness and curiosity. They can lead a flexible team with extensive experience and expertise to figure out alternative ways to do things and improve the overall business manageability.

Delegation without collaboration = silo: From top down, effective delegation improves strategic alignment and enforce management maturity. However, unclear or ambiguous delegation inevitably leads to unsatisfactory results, and further enforces silo thinking and causes business stagnation. Silo thinking sets barriers to organizational strategy management, and stifles growth and innovation. There is a logical scenario to good delegation practice. Find the right person to do the job, breaking down silos and being intentional about developing processes that encourage collaboration is a great first step in running a successful digital organization.

In many organizations with lower-level of maturity, the business is the sum of pieces, such as silo functions, incoherent processes, overly rigid hierarchy, fractal structure, or bureaucratic management style, unengaged employees, etc. To improve business maturity from functioning to delight, oogically, break down silos and be intentional about developing processes that encourage cross-functional collaboration and enforcing business flexibility. A highly adaptive organization is a system which is able to reflect its business mentality and personality, re-configure its own structure, recharge its energy, reinvent business models, and change its own behavior during the execution of its adaptation to environmental changes.

Problem-solving without comprehensive reasoning = illogic: In an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world, business and social problems become over-complex and interconnected. Many problems exist because they are either ill-defined or the concept cannot be adequately captured contextually. Problems didn’t get solved through logical reasoning. People use linear logic to deal with multifaceted business dynamics, or take linear steps to handle an iterative business continuum perhaps only fix symptoms, and create more problems later on. Wise problem-solvers would ponder around: What’s exactly the root causes of problems? How is your current problem/goal related to your team/ departmental/ organizational/industry context? Practice lateral, nonlinear or multi-dimensional thinking, understand people or things from different angles and be inclusive to appreciate cognitive differences and different points of view.

There are observable behavioral changes in focus from 'better understanding of solutions” to 'better understanding of problems.” Smart problem-solving requires being close to the problem, understanding context and intangible variables, peeling back the layers to discover the real cause and address it, and seeing things from different angles to gain different perspectives. For the large scope and complex issues, it’s important to leverage Systems Thinking to understand the “scope” of the problem, see a larger system with interactive pieces and “conflict” goals; understand the interdependent pieces, provide the insight into the emergent properties, gain an accurate understanding of the overall situation and hence better defining the real problem structurally in order to solve it without cause more issues.

Today’s digital businesses are nonlinear, volatile, interdependent, uncertain, and they face fierce competition and ambiguous digital environments. Many business changes or transformational efforts are symptomatic of not having a comprehensive understanding to identify business vulnerability formulas, it’s important to refine business capabilities through a combination of talent, resources, processes, and technologies to perform a set of activities and take a stepwise approach to managing a seamless transformation.

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Inquiriesaboutorganizationalmaturity

To think critically and change progressively perhaps more often than not, involves some level of discomfort and interdisciplinary transcendence. 

Digital management is fundamentally an iterative cycle to design, build, scale and optimize business competency and achieve the desired effect under specified performance standards and conditions. There’re a growing number of organizations that shift their risk management orientation from bottom-up operation-oriented to top-down strategic focus, with more senior management and board involvement. Organizational senior leaders today should ask insightful questions, and make an objective assessment of the organizational capabilities to improve overall business effectiveness and manageability.

How to assess and measure leadership vs. management tangibly: Leadership is both hard and soft, management is both art and science. Leaders guide, and management controls. Great leaders not only have great vision but are realistic towards making it happen, and have a great manager to compliment the execution process to achieve measurable results. There are numerous circumstances that organizations “get lost” in the “VUCA” reality, great leaders tell data-based stories and initiate information driven conversation via questioning, pulling, debating. Demonstrating tangible value brought by either leadership or management is important.There are both tangible and intangible factors which should be scrutinized by top business leaders by applying systematic views and disciplines. There are quantifiable elements such as inefficiencies which can be brought to light by leveraging the right management system.

Great leaders unleash business potential, good managers focus on organizational performance. Good leaders navigate the organization in the “VUCA” reality towards the right direction; good managers practice scientific discipline, enforce the right dose of controlling, improve business efficiency with measurable ROIs. Thus, measuring leadership vs. management in a tangible way helps the organization to strike the right balance of long term goal achievement and short term quick win. And the business can build their competitive advantage in a stepwise manner. They should make measurement easy and enjoyable to monitor progress and outcome of business initiatives.

How to identify and empathetically listen to various stakeholders, and what should you do with the information? When trying to initiate business planning or take strategic moves, business management needs to be able to recognize the priorities and struggles of the company by understanding the business, identify stakeholders involved, and listen to them empathetically. Different stakeholders such as peers, subordinates, co-workers, clients, and vendors all have their various observations. Their respective viewpoints can indicate useful areas for further exploration and confirmation. But they rarely know the mandates imposed by management, nor do they understand the constraints and circumstances under which the subject must operate.

To initiate transformative effort, business management needs to encourage creativity and constructive criticism to build a highly innovative working environment. They should ask questions around which of the stakeholders would be impacted positively and which of the stakeholders would be impacted negatively by the change. Accept input from any source but weigh it accordingly. Once you have collected feedback and identified the impact on various stakeholders, you need to ask how you can modify the process, or how you can execute the rollout so that the positives are enhanced and the negatives are reduced, refine information to capture the business insight of growth opportunities or customer insight.

Do you have the right mix of people to achieve strategic goals, and what are your top prioritized goals to begin with? The critical thing for effective business leaders is to identify significant problems and set the right priority to solve them smoothly. Prioritization starts with a right mindset to focus on the most critical challenge business needs to overcome. That could be macro problems which directly impact on the business strategy or that could also be the micro problem which impacts the business’s bottom line for surviving. Organizations must identify the talent bench strength and weakness, address their common and unique skills requirements and map that out through skills/competency matrix, put the right people in the right position to solve problems that really matter, to achieve organizational goals at a technical, behavioral and attitudinal level.

Technically, it’s important to install the value systems which are reinforced through celebration, storytelling, communications, rewards and recognition then these get embedded into the unconscious psyche of all associates, and also engage employees by co-setting their work goals From talent development perspective, what you can and should do is to provide the opportunities (talent development) for people to hone their talents and develop their skills, train them well and well align the employee’s professional goal with the strategic business goal, so they can become highly engaged to achieve high performance results. Always attempt to identify areas in which measurable improvements can be realized, providing demonstrable value is essential, in some instances, these areas have been low-hanging fruit.

Are you simply surviving in your industry, or are you innovating? As the business and society expands, it becomes more complex and instead of remaining a society more complex, it reverts to chaos hence the struggle for survival more intense. Forward-looking organizational leaders should make objective assessment of their core business competency by asking: are you simply surviving in your industry, or are you innovating? The problem is that if the manager gets stuck in the day to day activities and remains happy with compliance, then there is no room for creativity to do better than expected. If we don't take risks, try new methods and challenge the traditional approach and follow innovative leadership, then the task gets boring and not effective, and the business gets stuck.

Different organizations have different strengths, capacity, and capabilities to innovate, innovative skills and capabilities an organization always needs depend on the circumstances the business is in. More and more firms are learning and implementing industry best practices in innovation, perhaps it is a better approach to strive for using good innovation practices. There is a recognizable core of approaches and activities that produce profitable innovation, and there are companies that use them. Highly innovative teams do not focus on hierarchy but on ideas, information, creativity, to unleash their full business potential.

Due to frequent disruptions and unprecedented uncertainty, there have been enough abysmal failures to prompt some caution. To think critically and change progressively perhaps more often than not, involves some level of discomfort and interdisciplinary transcendence, continue to see the importance of dealing with blind spots and overcoming challenges. The business should try new methodologies and next practices when there are clear returns that can't be found in the existing management practices, of course with great care on the potential risks, build up the new set of core digital capabilities in transforming itself and business as a whole to get digital ready.

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Unimaginablecreativity

The updated and interdisciplinary knowledge enables wider dots connections and develops creative intelligence.

Creativity is, by nature, unique to each person. As we each have different cognitive styles, personality, knowledge or life experiences, there is no template which we can apply and suddenly become creative. 

There is the inclusiveness of the various facets and factors of creativity. Thus, cross disciplinary knowledge to connect wider dots enable us to gain a clearer understanding about the cycles of incubation and illuminations of creativity,

Culture does affect thinking, with respect to creativity: Thinking is what the brain does, and culture is a collective mindset. The praxis of creativity seems to be so heavily dependent on cultural lineage and life experiences that to attempt to translate this protocol from one unique individual to another, appears fraught with complexity. Truly, we are all creative individuals; it’s only that creativity has been ‘trained’ out of us by way of education and social conditioning. Notions such as ‘conformity’ and acceptance of the ‘status quo’ are pervasive to delimit the acceptable lines of intellectual meanderings.

On one hand, creativity is a social phenomenon, it is a cultural thing. It seems that our social order has a lot to answer for; the demonizing of being ‘too creative’ or to put it in the acceptable vernacular ‘a bit odd, eccentric even’. These labels codify the behaviour of constructing questioning that follows through all creative thoughts. On the other hand, creativity is an ability to solve problems. It is thus a thinking process and therefore not cultural. The choice of problem could be cultural and any action to test the thinking is in an environment of some kind which also could be cultural. Of course there will be variables such as; sensitivity to cultural issues, experience and reflection, mental capacity, cultural immersion etc.... Critical reflection and Practitioner Based Enquiry into the nature of human creativity has revealed a great deal about the interims and interconnections of our mental associations.

Neuroscience offers scientific perspectives and models to describe different reasons that creativity emerges or happens: Creative expressions of individuals are difficult to manifest in ways that are neither conducive nor controversial to their culture: Neuroscience generally would be of the view that the brain has no cultural differences. All brains in humans operate the same way everywhere. The input to the brain may have cultural differences, but not the brain itself. What it does is the same in any human being. Neuroscience is a new science. It can offer models to describe different reasons that creativity emerges or happens, but the tools for electromagnetic imaging of stimulated or active brain regions are limited in scope or detail. The machines can image brain regions and may track some general network paths but most of the research finds correlations, not causation.

Great discoveries are being made in understanding how individual neurons work though, eventually a combination of many sciences, like mathematical models, molecular biology, brain imaging, and computerized systems will increase neuroscientist understanding of thinking, mental imagery, problem solving, volition, creativity, as well as self/mind, and will even stimulate creativity, a creative process can be trained and consistently replicated, but the outcome cannot be consistently replicated nor predicted. Not the capacity to think, rather the manner in which those thoughts are expressed.

Creative people can see old things in new ways from different angles: Creative people define and create their own convention that they live by in comparison to everyone else who just accepts or inherits their convention to live by. Therefore, creative people can see old things in new ways from different angles. To simulate not just all the possible combinations but the added complexity of emotional states as well, would be a mammoth undertaking - were it even possible. however it is still quite elusive to 'consistently replicate'...

Creative people not only take the conscious application of what they know, and at the same time stay open to the unknown, so creative thinking and knowledge can emerge. The complexity of connections, associations and combinations offered up by the subconscious is bordering on the unimaginable. At present days, we cannot separate creativity, logic and intelligence if we want to stay competitive, the updated and interdisciplinary knowledge enables wider dots connections and develops creative intelligence.

The very goal of creative intelligence is to solve problems; creativity is about figuring out alternative ways to solve them; and logic is to make an appropriate order - arrange, rearrange, or shuffle up, to solve them in the right way. The constant negotiation between our essence and our projection leads to growth, creativity, and human evolution.

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Knowledge Governance Practices

Data, information, knowledge, and wisdom are the different stages of the information life cycle that organizations need to manage more effectively by enforcing governance practices.

Fundamentally, knowledge is the product of the human mind, the power of knowledge can be released only when it’s used to create value. For the digital workforce, knowledge is the power; for digital business as a whole, knowledge is an asset. An essential role for Knowledge Management is the need to enable knowledge flow, connect ideas but also people, and crucially management.

 Unfortunately, many organizations still take a very reactive attitude to manage knowledge, how to manage such intangible assets more effectively, and more importantly, how to enforce knowledge governance discipline?

Establish the governance discipline in managing knowledge effectively: A simple example is the knowledge that people acquire and maintain. We hire people with their experiences, skills and generally their knowledge. An essential role for Knowledge Management is the need to enable knowledge flow, connect ideas but also people, and crucially management disciplines.

Knowledge is the soft asset, the firm does not always own the asset, therefore, the deployment has to consider interdependency of ownership. It is crucial to validate and establish cohesive governance and risk management for data, information, knowledge, and wisdom. The valuation of such assets is crucial to the process so that knowledge is an asset and it has value.

Be fully cognizant of the complex nature of knowledge assets: Knowledge assets are a blend of resources, not a single asset, and, while you might deploy a person as an asset, they are limited by capability, which is more often than not ignored when taking an asset management approach to knowledge. Knowledge is an asset to every organization and its integrity, availability, and confidentiality can be crucial to how the organization functions or maintains its services and products. Complexity requires the exploration of the interdependencies that contribute to the value of critical knowledge.

The problem is that you cannot scan or treat knowledge as you would treat other "assets" via a reductionist/rationalist approach - a problem inherent to "resources" within the resource-based view of the firm. Knowledge asset scanning is vulnerable to the context of time and place, the value is emergent and not always known at the time of a reductionist scan. During the stage of knowledge as tacit or implicit, it is extremely volatile.

Knowledge Management is not just a technological problem, but a business and human problem, thus, knowledge governance needs to be people centric: Knowledge is the product of the human mind. The true value of people, especially today’s knowledge workforce include many tangible and intangible factors, and their value can be increased when knowledge management focus is people- how to engage, empower and inspire them to improve productivity and develop creativity. For any company to succeed in the long term, how resources, such as knowledge sharing and management, is determined should be understood by all important parties and governed effectively. 

Sound governance is to improve knowledge management effectiveness and eliminate risks and harness people centricity. It is essential for the entire company to be pulling in the right direction by allocating resources, time, and assets scientifically, policies and standards can be put in the right time and place, and the governance process/mechanism can be embedded into the business process seamlessly.

There is no hard asset that you can buy today that will guarantee the success of your organization. Data, information, knowledge, and wisdom are the different stages of the information life cycle that organizations need to manage more effectively and improve knowledge governance effectiveness, with the goal to reach the next level of digital business maturity.

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Unlocking Performance via Overcoming Barriers

Nowadays, business dynamics are intense, even stressful, it’s crucial to understand many things underneath the surface of the business, and sense dysfunctional business reality.

We live in the digital era with exponential growth of information, the speed of change is significantly increasing. The business system is complex and the organization is multifaceted. Decentralization, globalization, and diversification can all be practical reasons for communicating barriers or changing pitfalls. 

Most organizations are grossly dysfunctional, despite often noble attempts at change by the leadership team. How can forward-looking organizations overcome varying challenges and build high mature people-centric organizations?

Communication from the "leadership" is disregarded, ignored, viewed skeptically: Nowadays, there is a mix of old and new, physical and virtual, order and chaos, misinterpretation or miscommunication are the big causes of many human problems. Communication regarding integrity and commitment to the people starts at the top. But organizations need to make a concentrated effort to connect the dots for everyone and provide clear communication about the goals at each level. If communication has to develop fully and authentically, it is essential that the business leaders communicating should be aware of what they want to communicate, how they communicate and above all ensure that they communicated correctly. Leaders, or those who are sending the message, must have integrity, openness, and insight to allow free expressing the creative potentials.

To keep digital flow across the business and its ecosystem, it is important to keep communication open and creative, and leverage the richness of multiple digital communication channels. To overcome communication barriers, it’s important to embrace inclusiveness and diversity, including different thinking-styles and cognitive differences, become excellent in communication-both interpersonal and organizational to enforce trust as the two way street to build relationships across all parties.

Low morality and culture of mediocrity, low employee engagement/employee dissatisfaction, erosion of integrity, professional values, work ethics, etc: Many managers still apply old silo management mindsets and take classic management practices. Disconnect occurs when the wishful thinking at higher levels detaches from the reality at lower levels. When business systems are dysfunctional, silo thinking or bureaucracy is propagating; when value proposition fails to be translated into meaningful operational deliverables; when the work is not done right and needs to be redone, then business disasters emerge. When workers are asked to be "engaged" inside and outside the company environment, at the same time, many companies don't have the mechanisms or interest in engaging employees outside the work environment or enable personal growth. When dealing with complex business management that involves a high level of change at process, people, product, or technology level, but businesses lack governance structures and disciplines to improve business effectiveness.

To trace and cure the root causes of all those mismanagement symptoms, managers at all levels need to have integrity for this to work, be truly committed to their team’s success, and be willing to let their teams do the work. A company with a culture of openness, innovation, high standards in ethics and merit based compensation can motivate team members to work towards a common goal. Manage not only risks but more importantly, opportunities to ensure personnel is not only being engaged, but their focus on energy aligned with the organization strategy. When employees know that you believe in them, that they can perform and do their roles at the risk of failing, they will always give you their best effort. In order to influence others, one must have skills in implementing and character that displays high levels of ethics, responsibility, and empathy, and integrity. When you "believe" in someone, you show it through giving them control to do what needs to be done and thanking them for achieving results, create synergy by putting the right talent at the right position, invite employees to brainstorm and unlock the potential of the business.

Misalignment of "do what you say, say what you mean, mean what you do": Either individually or collectively, lack of systems thinking perspective, inconsistent thoughts or behavior would cause unprofessionalism and lead to culture inertia. Being a digital professional also means consistency. Consistency means what you think and what you do are coherent. From a talent management perspective, consistency means perhaps you can do a lot of different things in your career but keep consistent with having intellectual curiosity, a growth mindset, a learning attitude; a set of effective decision-making or problem-solving skills, and a cohesive professional competency. Sometimes, it’s not easy to bring all talented people and mold them into an effective team. And people need to be intentional about who they are and how they enter the role. Be self-aware, be able to see your strengths and weaknesses without self-judgment is possible and healthy. Knowing who you are and how you react and respond in different situations can help you understand and improve cognitive, relational and assertive actions you take on a day to day basis, and build constant and consistent integrity.

The team fit or the organizational fit manifested in accepted and expected behavior, has a way of neutralizing differences. Try to encourage, motivate, and support people to success on a daily basis. Higher levels of engagement come from recognition, feedback, growth, and opportunity. The organizations with the culture of empowerment will reap the benefits of knowledge workers who are willing to give discretionary effort and are always looking for ways to improve their own and team performance. If you want measurable business results and outcomes, then performance management is a key system that runs alongside the business processes

Nowadays, business dynamics are intense, even stressful, it’s crucial to understand many things underneath the surface of the business, such as value, process, culture or behavior, etc, and sense dysfunctional business reality. One of the key determinants of whether an organization can move to the digital new normal is the digital maturity of its people. People have to be ready for gaining in-depth understanding of themselves, the organization they work for, get used to the complex digital ecosystem, and drive desired changes at the steadfast paces.

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