Innovatingviastraegicapplications

Applications have become an integral component of an enterprise’s flexibility and maturity. Strategic application portfolio is the vehicle to implement business strategy.

Organizations are nowadays complex, inundated with exponential growth of information and overloaded assignment. They have limited resources, budget, and talent, any business initiatives should be viewed as an "opportunity" for solving business problems. 

With emerging trends such as personalization, IT consumerization, etc, it’s important to learn your business deeper, classify, or reclassify business information or knowledge; categorize or re-categorize business initiative portfolio to reflect your emerging strategic priority, take a logical scenario for integrating, optimizing and improving for realizing differentiated business value and developing competitive business advantage consistently.

Business value clarification: Running a successful business is about creating multidimensional value to stakeholders. To pinpoint the strategic initiatives for generating long term business value, business architecture is an important tool to clarify the direction of the company, and a high level of consensus which implies that an acceptable, transparent, and credible basis for evaluating, selecting, and resourcing top prioritized issues need to be solved, to ensure strategic initiatives can be constructed and implemented upon effective portfolio management discipline. In fact, effective business initiatives require the highest risk-taking at a strategic value chain; including investments and manageability. You need to use business architecture to provide the visibility of overall investment in projects portfolio and the expected or realized value to be achieved, set policies and governance improvements as well as application portfolio management best or next practices.

Highly responsive organizations leverage effective risk management or compliance tools to monitor business initiatives & portfolio, alert the organization to risk conditions, and enable accountability and collaboration around changes impacting each firm. A standard scoring model can be used to normalize across different benefits, and business value points used to demonstrate value delivered, not only financial value, but also including other stakeholder’s values. From a performance management perspective, the value should be estimated or demonstrated through the rate of productivity increases, the rate of new product/service/business model development, the rate of market share gains, the rate of customer satisfaction gains, etc.

The objective assessment of strategic application portfolio effectiveness: Strategic Application Development can add value to any organization if it understands the various business lines needs and wants- their top prioritized problems based on functional strategy, which is the sub-strategy of the organizational strategy. It can provide cross line synergies by understanding the various lines and providing efficient interfaces between lines; understands the direction of the vertical industry and of the organization's internal direction/goals and the organizations, industries future, expected direction, etc. The application portfolio management becomes more effective and easier to do when there is a consensus among the architecture and strategic management team and their reports about what is important for strategic execution and the priority versus keeping the lights on today.

Applications have become an integral component of an enterprise’s flexibility and maturity. Strategic application portfolio is the vehicle to implement business strategy. Good business case suggests that knowing an application's utilization and resource consumption is necessary to make an objective assessment of the application portfolio effectiveness; then, it helps to make good investment decisions based on a set of variables and measurement requirements. Usually, under a strong application portfolio governance, standard metrics can be established and those would usually not be based on processes (the HOW) but on the deliverables (the WHAT).

Customer-centricity: It’s the age of people centricity. Organizations have two sets of customers: end customers who consume business products/services; or internal users - treat your staff as customers to improve their employee experiences. Building customer-facing applications is both strategic to delight customers with new solutions, and also tactical to improve application success rate via building high-mature teams and experimenting with the best practices or the next practices of the management/governance. Many times, a lack of user adoption is one of the issues to fail new applications. It’s important to empower customers, get them to choose the ideal solution for their work.

The business has to continuously understand its customer needs and requirements and also have a clear understanding of how customer-centric approaches enhance the business model and extend profitability. Value creation means the company management knows enough about their customers, and takes action to fill that type of need, being transparent to an extent where you don't lose profits. The personalized solutions give customers an impression on how the organization can tailor their needs to solve problems and achieve higher-than-expected results. Having a strong sense of how to develop customer-centric app programs within the business means to build an integral and unique set of business capabilities to delight customers and build a people-centric organization.

Fine-tuned strategic application portfolio: Complication, duplication, legacy, dysfunctional systems, are all serious issues that bring frustration and cost organizations a significant amount of time and resources in maintaining and keeping the light on only. It’s the co-responsibility of business and IT to keep consolidating, modernizing, integrating, and optimizing the application portfolio, paying specific attention to quality, standards, regulations, etc. It’s the intersection area of management and governance in which cross-disciplinary teams need to understand the business holistically to ensure that the application ecosystem offers real value and also is necessary for future agility.

To improve business effectiveness, keeping track of business activities is surely helpful in being proactive. It’s important to check whether you have multiple applications doing the same thing in different areas of the business, or whether there are multiple applications providing the same service. Keep trimming the cost and eliminating unneeded stuff. Keep updating business knowledge, capture business foresight to evolving emerging trends for developing new strategic initiatives, and optimizing the overall portfolio quality. It’s also important to focus on proactive planning, process optimization or rule updating for collaboration, accountability, and most importantly, integration.

“Being strategic” is simply about keeping the end in mind, embracing emerging business properties. For strategic business initiatives, a vision provides the guiding light and direction. To develop and scrutinize a balanced portfolio of strategic application initiatives, it’s important to keep eyes on what matters, identify what generates the most value for the company and express that in strategic objectives, analyze potential pitfalls, and set the right priority. Only initiatives that support the achievement of strategic objectives should be implemented. And if implemented successfully, there is a significant impact on building differentiated business competencies.

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initiatingvisionaspointofhorizon

Vision leads us to the future step-wisely; and guides us to the tough journey thoroughly.

Vision is how you see the future unfolding, a future state of being; a well-established vision needs to be based on a realistic expectation, but also high enough that inspires people to excel.

Vision inspires: Strategy helps to realize the vision, and capabilities underpin the strategy. Visionaries see possibilities before others. A clear vision is circular, rather than tunnel-like; multi-dimensional, rather than single lenses; colorful rather than black & white. Vision should be vivid enough to tell a compelling story and clear enough to overcome barriers; it touches the heart and mind to steer us in the right path and drive actions confidently.

Vision vs. mission: An attainable vision is a mission possible. A vision is a noun. A mission is a verb. The vision is the picture. The mission is the yellow brick road that leads you to the vision. It's what you have to do to get there. Vision is what you see what you or your organization are becoming if you stay true to your mission. A mission is what you strive to do every day, to roll the vision into reality.

Vision bridges: Vision should be grand enough to unify; dynamic enough to be able to react to any change in business direction or context, and stable enough to make it worthwhile by taking concerted effort to attain it. Visionary leaders intuitively frame the fresh picture, draw on the timeless wisdom, and present vision in a new synthesis by identifying the gaps that you are facing or will be facing tomorrow. They can look ahead and imagine what’s possible, bridge differences, execute the right options and chart the new growth path logically.

Vision is the visual interpretation of your finest dream of, or what you desire to become. Vision is our point of horizon, our foresight to drive changes and make advanced movement. Vision leads us to the future step-wisely; and guides us to the tough journey thoroughly.

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Innovaingviablogging

Isn’t it a tough journey to celebrate 8000 blog postings - to pursue the digital way of brainstorming, innovating and sharing.

Blogging is just like you are designing and making your own jigsaw puzzles, to symbolize your professional journey. There are so many pieces with blended colors and shapes. You have to take a guess, discover the hidden clues, find missing pieces, rearrange it, paint it and glue it up. 

Blogging is a creative activity to brainstorm, share knowledge, deepen multidisciplinary understanding, convey unique insight to innovate leadership with the following perspectives.…slideshare

Go further: Leadership vision is to be a guiding light, giving people confidence on where to go and how to get there, supporting them and also stretching them to live to their full potential, both individually and as members of a high performing team. A visionary leader changes the course of the organization by seeing beyond what all others see or by charting new revenue or growth through the creation of new products, services, business models or market share, etc. With a clear vision, the effective leadership has great capacities of keeping the mind focused on the ultimate goal and understanding how to motivate multi-generational and multicultural workforce to achieve the “art of possible.”

Go deeper: Leadership is the journey of continuous learning; leadership insight is to serve as an enabler to make profound influences. Influence comes from progressive mindsets, deep understanding, and step-wise actions. Great leaders are great problem-solvers. The more complex the situation is, the more different perspectives, approaches and role gaming are needed to reach for in-depth understanding. Going deeper is truly about thinking beyond the surface and breaking through conventional wisdom. Going one inch deeper, the leadership can improve its maturity significantly.

Go cross-disciplinarily: Leadership really is a character and personal development, you must continue to learn and improve upon the leadership capabilities. Challenging beliefs, ideas, and strategies along with accepted ways of doing things are all hallmarks of leadership. Great leaders today identify, analyze, and mind multiple gaps with cross-disciplinary knowledge and holistic understanding.To solve many of today’s complex problems creatively, people often need to think out-of-the-box or in the bigger box, work cross-disciplinarily, expand the boundaries to allow their mind flow, and thus idea flow. The heterogeneous team with cognitive differences is more innovative than the homogeneous group setting, as good ideas are multidimensional, they take root in unsuspected places and they evolve with time and by unexpected connections.

Blogging is like writing a dynamic book, with many chapters in it, to share leadership, innovation, people management, change, etc. Contemporary "leadership" needs to be re-imagined, explored, understood and embraced for it to be of any value. In fact, the key to organizational success is to integrate the next generation of leaders, tap into their way of looking at the world, and solve problems in very creative and collaborative styles.

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initiateinformationmanagement

Information is one of the most critical pieces in the innovation puzzle. Given this assertion, there is no limit to the value of information in running a high mature digital organization.

Information is permeating into every corner of the business and every perspective of human society right now. Data is physical, information is mental. The information system as the backbone of the varying business management helps to optimize the usage of information and refine information into business insight, figure out a way to optimize processes or change the mechanism, grasp opportunities to expand products and services offerings and create new business models to drive business growth.

 

Quality information improves the “cognitive” ability of the company: Compared to traditional organizations operated a couple of decades ago, today’s companies are inundated with heavy information flow and digital context, some structural, some unstructural; some current, some outdated. Forward-thinking organizations across vertical sectors claim they are in the information management business. They intend to leverage the abundance of information and the latest digital technologies to open up the digital way to think and do things with people centricity.

The cognitive ability of the organization depends on how effectively they can process information and make data-based, on-time decisions in a consistent way to solve problems that really matter with logical steps. It means to capture business foresight via predictive analysis, and involve new ways of bringing together diverse thoughts and resources to create novel ideas. In fact, information management becomes a crucial component which is embedded into the variety of business management such as strategy, change, or innovation. Organizational management needs to concentrate on the business information requirements that support the company’s growth. it's the value (often undervalued) of corporate information as a resource and defining how it should be used strategically to best business advantage.

Information savvy leads to customer centricity: Due to fast growing information and convenience brought by digital technologies, many companies make a shift from inside- out operation drive to outside-in people centric. Customers today become more selective and less tolerant of transaction delays or unhappy purchasing experiences. Information allows businesses to perceive customers’ behavior patterns they have never seen before. Organizations dedicate their time and resources to digitizing touch points of customer experience, exploring growth perspectives and new ways of running business. It is important to convince the shareholders of information management initiatives with solid business justification by showing them the potential business benefits to meet the strategic goal and criticality for the business of the tasks.

Employees are internal users of information, they are also information generators themselves. Optimizing employee experience is to treat employees as internal customers, engage employees at every touch point and delight employees via empathy and understanding them deeply. Business professionals also need to become information savvy, that means having a discerning mind to sort through information, identify quality information, and use it wisely to develop their competency. In fact, becoming information savvy is like a hiking journey, individually or collectively, gaining new and wider views, discovering unusual dots and building unexpected connections between our starting points and its rich environment, the digital ecosystem, to spark innovation continually.

Information-enabled processes are more intelligent and information-based business is more innovative: Process is always one of the important success factors of running a successful business. The process perspectives consist of interrelated intelligence operations: planning and direction, collection and exploitation, analysis and production, dissemination and integration. Intelligent process is the one by which information is converted into intelligence and made available to users; whereas process intelligence is the information that is extracted from a process about the process; throughput times, bottlenecks etc., also means governance, the process to management processes, such as risks, control, etc. real-time information enabled processes become necessary blocks to build dynamic business capabilities which significantly improve the organizational ability to implement its strategy with high speed.

In the human context, information drives awareness and triggers a sense of confidence, confirmation, validation, verification; information savvy leaders and professionals are able to generate fresh ideas across-disciplinarily and advocate alternative ways to solve existing or emerging problems proactively. They are information agents who can convert quality information to fresh knowledge and unique insight to drive transformative changes. The insight abstracted from information not only fuels creativity but also makes creativity more tangible and embed creativity into key processes to produce new knowledge and unique perspectives. Cross the organizational boundary, information can flow freely to keep the organization fit from collective mindset-culture, to organizational actions and behaviors, so they can make wise investments and enhance business growth cycles.

Information is one of the most critical pieces in the innovation puzzle. Given this assertion, there is no limit to the value of information in running a high mature digital organization. It involves being part of a process of listening and telling; trial and error, learning and creating; sharing and criticizing, cleaning up and refurbishing; etc. The tricky bit with information is that, depending on the level of granularity and aggregation, you can use it for multiple purposes. Not only is information interesting economic goods, but the value is multifaceted, sometimes difficult to determine, depending on the organizational information manageability.

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innercycleofdepdendency

The tough work for an organization today is to manage its portfolio of relevant cross-border strategic synergies and organizational dependency-interdependency cycle with the appropriate mix of enabling organizational elements.

"Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity” is the new normal of the digital era, within this context, the organization must stay compatible and evolve in a compatible manner with its environment. 

There is the multitude of dependencies-interdependencies cycle businesses need to deal with, and there are both visible and invisible factors that companies should leverage to create proven synergy and run a high performance organization synchronously. 

Communication dependency: Communication is soft, but directly impacts the management effectiveness. Communication deficiency further causes decision inertia and decelerates business speed. The era of face-to-face, top-down hierarchical management, and communication – something that is reassuring to many traditional managers are beginning to change.

With the mixed bag of quality data and misinformation, truth and false, the message via top-down hierarchy is somewhat diluted by the time it reaches the employee responsible for making tactical decisions and doing their job. Therefore, to deal with communication dependency smoothly; it’s important to clarify communication, content, context, and style.  What’s the core message you need to deliver? What’s the relevant thoughts and perspectives? What's the best channel or multiple channels to deliver the message? Effective communicators are working to articulate and spread their messages throughout the organization in a diverse set of activities with mixed communication styles to improve their decision-making skills and problem-solving competency.

There tend to be definitely perceivable decision choke points due to the communication bottleneck and inadequate delegation. Management (change, innovation, strategy, etc.) often has a retrospective scenario, so the ultimate goal is the core message you need to deliver clearly. If you start with an inter-dependency of shared goals that are directly related to creating value for an organization, you have a great foundation for then working on the process of communicating down or up accordingly about how to make those goals a reality. C-level roles are supposed to be the guiding force in the enterprise, keep open communication, handle communication dependency by providing feedback to each other down to the hierarchy about the “why,” enforce cross-functional collaboration, harness decision coherence at the different levels of the company, for communicating shared goals and improving the multifaceted manageability.

Requirement dependency: Geographical, functional, or industrial boundaries are blurred, today’s organizations are at a crossroads where the segregation or siloing of business units are at a need to reach across the aisles and respectively work with each other to co-solve problems effectively. The top managers need to be specialized generalists with a holistic perspective and ability; dealing with organizational requirement dependency, or relationship interdependence carefully for solving problems cohesively. A formal business requirements initiative performing enterprise mission and stakeholder needs analysis.

Organizations deliver the best solution to the business problems which meet business’s requirements or tailor customer’s needs. When it comes to collecting the business requirements, varying functions need to take the traceability path of where the requirements come from; clarify where all the functional boundaries are and who is organizationally associated with each, to avoid the pitfalls such as misreading business requirements or lost in translation symptoms. Dealing with requirement dependency and enhancing functional alignment not only about conformity, but also include a close partnership to set the right priority, solve complex problems and come up with the right solution. There is a co-dependency that should be recognized in a mature - respectful manner that facilitates the strategic goals and objectives of the enterprise. It takes both disciplines and practices for prioritizing requirements and keeping things synchronized.

Capability dependency: Enterprise success is dependent upon few core and differentiating business capabilities. Capabilities may include dependencies, one is part of another or depends on another. A firm's capabilities today are the result of its history that constrains what capabilities the firm can perform in the future. To implement capability-based strategy, organizations need to discover their “innate strength” with a unique set of core competencies,

To provide an insight into condition and relationship/dependency of business capability, business executives are sufficiently aware of the "general condition" of the various capabilities and provide input into a qualitative assessment of capability effectiveness, adequacy, coherence, differentiability, resilience, or maturity.

The value of capability maps is to provide a useful tool to visualize the end-to-end enterprise, understand relationship/dependency between different capabilities, and make an objective assessment of their business capability maturity. The strong capability mapping also includes capability dependency identification, to ensure seamless capability integration and capability portfolio coherence, highlight the value of having a good understanding of current and future capabilities, and develop and improve the overall organizational competency.

Dependency, interdependency are the natural relationship between things, people or our hyperconnected world. Organizations are interdependent whole, and organizational interdependencies have a lifecycle. The tough work for an organization today is to manage its portfolio of relevant cross-border strategic synergies and organizational dependency-interdependency cycle with the appropriate mix of enabling organizational elements for balance effectiveness and efficiency; process and flexibility, design and standardization.

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innatecreativity

An essential aspect of creativity is authenticity - discovering who you are, having the ability to challenge assumptions, conclusions, and beliefs.

Creativity is an innate process to connect the dots and generate novel ideas. Creativity is infused with an inner cohesion and comes from a vision of uniqueness. Creative people define and create their own convention that they live by with intellectual curiosity, and idea flow.

Creative minds discover more viewing spots than the rest: Creativity is a combination of something currently non-existent, thoughts, acts and with or without constraints. To be creative, you need to be conscious, curious about things that surround you. Creative minds are able to contemplate multiple, even conflicting views of a situation; find angles to wiggle through where most are unable to even envision a place where there is an angle. It's not only about trying to "think outside the box," but also an intuitive expression and alternative path that takes you wherever it needs to go, without boundaries.

Creative minds with cognitive differences usually involve some level of discomfort and interdisciplinary transcendence: When the brain is able to seek out solutions outside of the domain knowledge, there will be a greater probability of success in creativity. The logic and creativity are not opposite, they are complementary: There are patterns or logic behind the magic of creativity. When all known avenues have been thought through, the logical mind will start the out-of-the-box thinking; put more thoughts into things and search for fresh ideas and widen the possibility of coming up with alternative solutions.

On the broadest level, creativity is embodied in the act of creating a self, through narrative: An essential aspect of creativity is authenticity - discovering who you are, being comfortable with your own skin; having the ability to challenge assumptions, conclusions, and beliefs. When we are courageous enough to follow the gut, and curious enough to understand the surroundings, we learn how to liberate the imagination and come up with a unique personal image and take a new approach to the world.

Every person has the ability to be creative, just tearing down the mental barriers they have and tapping in their inherent abilities. Creative people are inspired to think and work nearly every day on creating, they are not waiting for “Aha” moments, but proactively stimulating creative energy.

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innercompletenessinsolutionstrategy

For every existing or emerging problem, we need to contemplate the varying causes behind it; for each problem that is worth the effort, we should ponder multiple solutions to solve it elegantly.

Given the complexity and uncertainty of the digital business world and given the challenges of hyper-connected and interdependent dynamic ecosystems, business strategy management today is usually dynamic and has a lot of moving parts; you cannot pre plan everything, as emerging opportunities and risks keep evolving. It’s important to set the right priorities to solve well defined problems and it’s crucial to lay multiple action scenarios through an architectural lens.

Complex problems can be broken down to smaller ones, and every problem perhaps has multiple solutions. Sometimes you solve one issue, but cause another one or a few more. Can solutions to strategic problems be ever completed? What's the business logic to solving them effectively, is business architecture an effective tool to guide you through in shaping/overseeing solution strategy for improving the success rate of execution?

Scrutinizing the strategy and solving problems really matters: It is a continuously changing world with high velocity and unprecedented emergence is inherent in every venture of the business. Enhancing a healthy strategy management cycle is about setting the right course and pace to solve problems effectively. However, many organizations are inundated with too many issues: Some problems are the symptom; other problems seem irrational as they are caused by people’s emotional reaction to a set of circumstances. There’s the problem that the same word means different things to different people. No wonder they often get stuck at the state of “problem-solving impasse,” and suffer from strategy execution fatigue. Nowadays, no organization can afford to stick to its old ways of problem-solving and continue tolerating “incomplete solutions” without asking why and pondering a “solution strategy” for improving business effectiveness.

In reality, most organizations are overloaded and understaffed, organizational leaders need to keep scrutinizing their existing strategy, and business objectives to determine which problems are critical to solving and which competencies are crucial to implementing the strategy; whether they have allocated their resources and time carefully and solve problems that really matter. They don’t set priority in a vacuum, but open the dialogues to close blind spots and bridge cognitive gaps, go across the territories for collaboration. To come up with a logical solution strategy: First, identify the critical business problem and eliminate all non-relevant perspectives. Next, identify all relevant guided principles with regard to the business problem at hand. The combination of all guided principles defines a solution space for the business problem you are trying to tackle. At this moment in time, the prerequisites for the solution are widely known.

Through the architectural lens, solutions should only be complete enough to define and plan the solution strategies: Many problems today are complex and interdependent with interactive pieces and “conflict” goals. Multi-dimension and complexity are two key factors in the intrigues of large problems. There are no unsolvable problems, but there are complex problems that are those you cannot solve with given resources, knowledge and capabilities. And there is frustration if there is a lack of a solution strategy that helps to enforce logic and validate methodology.

Businesses are attempting to create, and improve the solution effectiveness of many strategic problems. Completeness is relative to the organization that is served by the enterprise architecture for defining a comprehensive planning, having identified and vetted solutions to all of the most significant challenges that the enterprise faces and that business processes, capability or systems can help to solve. Some or many solve certain problems in a certain area but create other problems in the other domains. Capability mapping can be an enormous help in understanding and prioritizing strategic problem-solving; allowing you to prioritize and focus on the “bigger picture,” and enabling strategic problem-solving. With the increasing pace of changes, new problems keep emerging, dynamic capabilities are the strategic routines by which businesses achieve new resource configurations as markets emerge, collide, split, evolve, etc. They are complex in design, requiring cross-functional collaboration, embedding agility into processes for enabling a solution strategy and shortening the cycle of multiplexes of problem-solving.

Orchestrating multiple solutions: For every existing or emerging problem, we need to contemplate the varying causes behind it; for each problem that is worth the effort, we should ponder multiple solutions to solve it elegantly-technically speaking, without too many side effects and spur innovation and boost positive morality. An effective solution strategy helps to address the pros and cons of each solution, make a distinction between obvious solutions and out-of-the-box solutions; and apply nonlinear logic to clarify cause-effect seamlessly. It involves multidimensional thinking processes such as critical thinking, strategic thinking, design thinking, strategic thinking, etc, to understand context and intangible variables, designing solution models, analyzing cost and benefit, and finding real solutions with amorphous options that delight customers and benefit communities/societies.

Besides “hard capability,” there is a soft culture factor for shaping a solution strategy. In order to cultivate a solution-focused culture, assess where the organization is regarding the impending change. Set a realistic timeline and some measurable outcomes. Look for creative, cost-effective opportunities to develop cross-functional teams for solving problems alternatively; bring together people who would not typically have the opportunity to communicate in the day-to-day operations. In practice, use an out-of-the-box method to identify unconventional solutions, and compare it to obvious solutions. Cross balance all comments into the solutions and you have probably touched all possible solutions. Orchestrating multiple solutions can spur innovation and harness partnership. With open-mildness and flexibility, two diametrically opposed parties sometimes end up working together on a solution that suits them both.

There is “completeness” in problem-solving if we can understand and scrutinize via a strategic lens and measure its effect objectively without ignoring the potential problems it might cause at the tactical level. Not to mention it sometimes brings more opportunities for growth and innovation. If it’s truly incomplete, we can always continue the journey to make improvements. Therefore, strategic oversight of problem solving is a crucial step in making sound judgement. The point is that humans should all have some humility and recognize the limitations of their expertise and partner them with the other experts to apply inferential logic for problem-solving and executing good strategies collaboratively.

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innatecapability

Developing talent and building capability should be ongoing practices for professionals today.

Professional capability is an individual’s ability to perform certain activities and deliver high quality results. Knowledge workforces change each day, they learn, grow, develop their unique set of capabilities, and improve professional (emotional, intellectual) maturity. 

Perhaps many will ponder: What is the thing referred to as talent, skill, experience, capability, how to develop talent and build capabilities?

Capability is built via well developed talent or unlocked potential: Talent is how much you can execute things uniquely, fast, accurately with more out-of-box thinking. Capability is underpinned by processes; talent, process, motivation, discipline, and other ingredients can be integrated into professional capabilities to deliver high quality and consistent outcomes. Talent is often raw, more artistic, though it can be sharpened continually into solid capability. Capability is more scientific - breaking it down, binding it up, with the right mix of elements to make achievement. Raw talent is innate, it takes the immense amount of time and hard work that most "naturally talented" people have committed to developing their talents, sharpening their skills and shaping a set of capabilities to deliver consistent results.

A set of professional skills and expertise can be integrated into a unique capability to make certain achievement in a consistent manner: Developing capability is to bring up the hidden potential of a candidate. Process underpins capability. Training is just giving a better understanding on adopting the process, learning, handling the process. So keep sharpening your skills can help to develop a certain level of capability. But for certain sophisticated capabilities, skills only are not enough. As often skill is more linear; and capability is more integral. For example, creativity is an innate ability to generate novel ideas. It’s a state of the mind often at the edge of things and being able to expand the boundaries of knowledge or conventional understanding. Being creative is not only about "being knowledgeable," or being skillful; it needs to have certain raw talent, as well as some other nonlinear skills such as critical reasoning, synthesis, observation, inquisitiveness, networking, etc.

To achieve capability coherence, choose how to improve the capability based on your talent/innate strengths: Learning, experiencing, training, are all important to keep improving capabilities, as well as integrate a set of capabilities into core competency. From a talent development perspective, it’s crucial to understand: What is innate, what is learned? Some can be trained, some perhaps cannot. Knowledge can be taught, but insight is unique for each individual, even though we could always share some wisdom. You can provide opportunities for someone to learn and hone a skill. Ultimately, it is up to the individual - talented or not, to decide whether to learn and to what extent he/she decides to learn and practice for building coherent capability to deliver high quality.

Developing talent and building capability should be ongoing practices for professionals today. Raw talent, accumulated experience, trained skill sets, plus soft elements such as inspiration, motivation, disciplines, persistence, time management, etc, all crucial to shape a differentiated capability and build core competency.

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Innovatecorporateboardwithphilosophy

Corporate board directors are wise advisors and top leadership roles who need to shape their philosophical perspectives all the time and share their vision and insight consistently.

The very characteristics of business new normal are nonlinearity, adaptability, unrepeatability, unpredictability, and denial of control. The corporate board as one of the most crucial governance bodies in the modern enterprise is less about control, more about steering the organization in the right path by providing strategic oversight, setting philosophical principles to encourage desired corporate attitude & behavior, monitoring performance and handling risks effectively.

Practicing “governance” as a philosophy for “the love of wisdom”: Philosophy is a Greek portmanteau of the love of wisdom. Plato used the term governance in a metaphorical sense to lead or rule strategically. The organizational environment today is constantly changing and forcing the business to “adjust” accordingly. Leadership is the adventure to explore the unknown, and have confidence and insight to navigate the business on the right path.

A philosophy will embed when great leaders understand themselves and have the empathy to gain an understanding of others, they have a story to tell. Corporate board directors as the senior leadership role today need to leverage their philosophical insight, to look ahead and imagine what is possible for their organizations. It is in the best interest of corporate boards and shareholders to have the moral and natural purpose of governance consists of assuring, on behalf of those governed, a worthy pattern of good while avoiding an undesirable pattern of bad, for steering their organization in the right direction.

Applying “Holding Accountability” in Agile philosophy: Agile is more a "direction," than an "end" philosophy and mindset at the board level. In real life, responsible people make mistakes or have invalid notions, many times driven by emotions rather than philosophical logic. Corporate boards are supposed to be the guiding force and equipped with an "agile mentality" to enforce collaboration, advise the management on the continuous improvement of the multidimensional shareholder’s value wisely. And hold their management team accountable to execute strategy. It is not uncommon to confuse accountability with blame. They are actually opposites. In the boardroom, true accountability focuses on learning as a core value in building an agile culture.

Agilists BoDs are phenomenally disciplined in focusing on value, prioritizing, executing, and collaboration. “You will be held accountable" is on the face of it, not a bad thing, the management has the freedom to do whatever needs to be done, and take the responsibility to ensure they do their best to bring about a good outcome. The larger the organization, the greater the distance between the top management and the frontline staff, and the more opportunity for the executives to feel the loss of control. Management at different layers of the organization needs to be fully engaged in agile philosophy: be comfortable with empowering teams to own the delivery of the work.

Following “simplexity” principles are in the realm of System philosophy: The digital ecosystem is complex, it becomes complex if things do interact, particularly in the case of nonlinear interaction, you can't separate things properly or you cannot predict the actual effect of interaction straightforwardly. It's important for BoDs to leverage System principles for understanding the interconnectivity and interdependence of the business, work closely with the management to outline the strategic intent and advocate “simplexity” principle to handle complex issues effectively in the realm of system philosophy - seeing the trees without missing the forest.

The corporate board proactively leverages its members as a diverse, high-performing team capable of providing global insights for forward-looking decision-making. Governance as a discipline is a living breathing entity. Don’t just see governance as constraints, but rather an opportunity. Corporate directors apply systems philosophy to understanding the business dynamics, work toward some common purpose or goal of the business system or subsystem, often including the continuing viability and renewal of that system. They encourage the management to step out of the daily busyness or step back from complexity, and appreciate many ingredients of simplicity such as manageability, robustness, comprehensiveness, clarity, or usability, etc.

Corporate board directors are wise advisors and top leadership roles who need to shape their philosophical perspectives all the time and share their vision and insight consistently. They intuitively draw on the timeless wisdom and cognizance and present it in a new synthesis and frame the fresh picture to meet the particular need of the times. Allow the difference to exist and leverage on the difference. From the board composition perspective, the board is responsible for ensuring an appropriate mix of cognitive abilities, skills, knowledge, and experience are present or available for it to fulfill its judiciary function effortlessly.

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Innatetraitsforgainingrespect

There is a blend of multiple elements to get respected, some are hard competencies; some are soft human touch.

Respect is based on being trustworthy and authentic. The liking has to be qualified and be able to garner respect. Whether getting respected or not depends on how you follow principles, make fair judgment, or make certain accomplishments. 

There are quite a few ways to get respected and there are many reasons we need to respect each other to improve professionalism.

 

People admire or respect those who can see further: There is a blend of multiple elements to get respected. Your mindset, actions and how the results you produce impact others, organizations, and societies for the long run. Visionaries gain respect because they are effective in manifesting their vision; it takes courage to convey a clear message about the future, embodies vitality, will, imagination, hope and sense of energy, initiates actions and enlists the participation of others to shape the future together.

Sound judgment and decision maturity gain respect: Judgment and decision making are often considered together. When a leader or a professional consistently makes sound judgments or the right decisions, and is perceived to be fair over the longer term, she or he earns the respect. We all have bias and limitations in our thought processes; understanding the filters that influence one’s unconscious biases is critical to the choice we make. To gain respect from the variety of people, we need to increase cognitive agility and cultivate empathy by exploring alternative viewpoints and cross-disciplinary interpretations to win the heart and connect the mind.

Respect is also based on being trustworthy, authentic, and accountable: People admire/respect those who have courage to do things the majority of people can't, either break the ceilings or overcome the bias, etc. People admire/respect those who take more responsibilities, and solve the large scale problems which make a significant impact. People respect those who have high work ethic and professionalism, strong credibility, & discipline, unique competency & talent, to get work done resourcefully. If you want to gain respect, mutual trust is important; respect for others' ideas, respect for truth, respect for process, respect for knowledge.

Modern society is sophisticated, gaining respect is a tough journey, besides position power, you needs to have knowledge power and influence power; you need to be both tough and nice; influential and adaptable; serious and humorous, creative and critical, empathetic and insightful, wise and likeable; listening and telling; questioning and coaching, etc. There is a blend of multiple elements to get respected, some are hard competencies; some are soft human touch.

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Innovationviaknowledgetransfer

Innovation implies growth and change. It’s more organic than mechanic.

If you take knowledge from one context and bring it over into a new context, you have knowledge or technology transfer innovation. The border of knowledge domains has a blurred scope and knowledge is expanded in the continual base. 

If information is the most time-intensive piece of the innovation puzzle, then knowledge - the refined information, is one of the most dynamic and intellectually-critical puzzle pieces to make innovation a phenomenon happening across our knowledge economy.

Knowledge flow leads to idea flow and knowledge-transfer innovation: Knowledge is not an isolated fact, but needs to flow and transfer for tapping innovation potential and achieving its multifaceted value. With the exponential growth of information, collective learning rejuvenates the culture of innovation. A learning organization is one in which the majority of the employees at all levels are open to new ideas, experimenting with new ways of doing things to spark innovation. High professionals with a growth mindset continue their learning cycle via learning-thinking-understanding-creating, asking-learning-sharing-criticizing, as well as connecting-collecting-collaborating-innovating, etc.

Knowledge assets are a blend of resources, not a single asset, and its integrity, availability, and confidentiality, accessibility can be crucial to how the organization functions, spur innovation, or maintain its competitive advantage. Having knowledge is a good thing, debating, sharing, and exploring what to do with that knowledge and connecting disparate ideas that don't seem to fit together naturally will lead to new knowledge or fresh perspectives. That means knowledge is not static, and easy to get stale. It’s a valuable commodity, and sometimes, it turns out to be the perished food. Thus, the digital workforce today has to learn and relearn all the time and then apply those lessons to succeed in new situations, streamline knowledge flowing, and foster knowledge transfer innovation proactively.

The logic of knowledge transfer innovation is to bridge cognitive/domain gaps and connect wider dots to generate great ideas: The original germ of a creative idea is often, if not always arrived through the interaction of ideas from different domains of thoughts, knowledge, experiences, or information without boundary. Knowledge is path-dependent. This means that to discover an opportunity, you should have previous knowledge in the field to be able to get recognized. Often knowledge transfer innovation requires specialized generalist facilitators who can bridge the knowledge gap between socioeconomic and cultural differences to make it happen. This allows the organization to facilitate the transfer of knowledge gained from one place to another and generate business value effectively. An innovative cross-disciplinary knowledge expert fits such a role for refining knowledge and spurring innovation smoothly.

Technically, knowledge basically involves the human factor and captures the benefit of someone's experience, then applying it and making it available to broader audiences who can benefit from the combined intellectual asset of the knowledge and experiences, to consider the interdependency of knowledge ownership. Always respect others' hard-work, knowledge is the asset, wise ones also think of it as the soft capital that you need to keep investing for reaping the benefit.

Organizations can work toward a knowledge ecosystem view, which incorporates the virtual aspects of the knowledge system, innovation, and intuitive behavior: The hyperconnected, expansive, and interdependent business ecosystem provides unprecedented opportunities to strike a dynamic balance between inner and outer elements, it expands when the components of the system consume all sorts of knowledge, resources, talent, and broaden their scope of influence. Knowledge needs to be managed holistically to overcome silo, context over content, global over local, cross-disciplinary over single thread. Knowledge is the means to the end. People are the masters who can use knowledge wisely, streamline knowledge flowing in the ecosystem smoothly.

Innovation happens at the intersection of people and knowledge, knowledge and process, information & technology, etc. An information-empowered knowledge ecosystem can reconfigure its own structure, reinvent its functions, and change its own behavior pattern with adaptation to environmental changes with synchronization. The ultimate goal is to keep tapping the innovation potential of such a system, which includes policies, structures, and programs, portfolios as well as the interwoven relationships between those elements, for benefiting our society.

Innovation implies growth and change. It’s more organic than mechanic. Scientifically, knowledge-transfer innovation is the creative mechanism through which you grow and evolve something to something great; artistically, innovation creates the new theme, generating particular momentum to enrich human society. Innovation is the bridge between art and science, to rejuvenate our beings individually or collectively.

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innatecultureperspective

If your culture embraces the future, inspires others, being a customer fanatic, then it forms a dynamic digital environment and creates business synergy.

Culture is how the organization thinks and does things collectively. Good culture can lift up a so-so strategy; but an ineffective culture will screw up a great strategy. Thus, organizational leaders should do research and validate a culture assessment instrument that measures culture from different perspectives; such as cultural constructs or dimensions of culture and cultural styles.

How is culture created? How is it operationalized & maintained?- How is it expressed? Can it be changed, & how? Corporate culture is created out of the systems, processes, human capital and associated continual development, organizational hierarchy, and strategy design of the organization. The prevailing culture- how in reality the organization behaves and acts, often reflects the personality of the organizational founders or the top leadership team. Culture may be rooted in values, but it is expressed in organizational practices and behaviors. A too strongly infused culture affects changeability of the organization. A too weak culture infusion affects the ability to walk in one direction. Culture is a collective organizational habit, it’s difficult to change. But if culture becomes the very obstacle for strategy management or turns out to be the very cause of change inertia, that must change, and it is changeable.

Culture is more of an anthropological concept. Everyone is influenced by culture but just a few can influence culture. A strong leader can influence/enhance the culture. A weak leader who is completely influenced by the existing culture would no longer have the ability to evolve it because their vision would be narrowed and blurred. It’s crucial to build a culture that willingly confronts tough issues and makes changes because the business leaders understand the driver of change and the psychology behind changes; they understand the inertia of old culture, and they can recognize the powerful advocates of new cultures. The culture will only be as strong as the behaviors of the senior execs and the way they use these to demonstrate their commitment to the values and vision on a daily basis.

How to integrate various subcultures of the organization to glue up a strong business brand? There are various subcultures in its different units, departments, geographical location, and sections that are the result of the group dynamics in each of them and their local conditions. Different teams perhaps also shape their culture to get things done in different styles. Homogeneous group setting perhaps advocates certain group values; whereas heterogeneous team setting is usually the fertile ground for nurturing innovative culture. When there is a need for a culture change, there are problems or ambitions, just as in every other strategy that has to be realized. When there’s intention to culture integration, it’s important to clarify: Among other considerations, culture stands as a key factor not only in attaining organizational goals but also in the attraction and retention of desirable employees, creating a public image that is positive and building respectful relationships with stakeholders.

There’s also a philosophical connection between wholeness and partness for integrating parts into the whole, regardless of whether it's about culture or other system integration. 'Wholeness' means the scientific belief in an object being 'whole'- a cohesive corporate culture is a blend of core values, belief, myth, that translates to the overall success of any company. 'Partness' means all things being linked together through their interdependent relationships. Fostering change and culture integration is always a collaborative endeavor, this dimension of network diversity is indeed needed to provide more teeth and speed to the change initiative in the rapidly changing times. Business leaders with contextual culture understanding of functional dialects and business cultures or subcultures can capture unique insight of the integral culture, and eventually lead to cultural change.

Culture Index actually measures the ability of people to influence culture: In a fast-growing company people tend to have similar ideal values that then get manifested in their corporate culture. When the company continues growing, the corporate culture tends to stay the same over time, the culture inertia is inevitable. Everything is moving around, the company and the culture could have been successful for years, but no longer be valued by customers or admitted by staff, or it turns out to be the very barrier to stop businesses from gaining agility and maturity. Culture is tough and can take a long time to change because it may require leadership and change management practices. So business leaders need to ponder around: What would the ideal culture look like? Is desired culture propagated intentionally by management or by employees? Do you have a culture index that can measure the ability of people who can influence culture and drive change to improve their organizational effectiveness and agility.

Culture change is multidimensional, often accompanied with structural change, leadership change or process change. As it involves developing and promoting a sound shared vision that everyone can buy into and make sure that changes you make are at the heart of the organization. Change agents are in demand, and the organizational management needs to design new culture models, and recognize their culture change agents: Who can come up with new ideas? Then, who can implement them? Who will embrace change, who will fight it? If you want an innovative culture, you need to create an effective culture index, empower your creative workforce for driving needed changes in different ways, for tuning both hard and soft factors to get digital ready. In practice, people are empowered, intrinsically motivated, creative to take initiative and self-confident to explore the better way. Knowing that walking, talking, questioning, listening, and helping people to see themselves in the new world is vital to the success of the new culture.

If your culture embraces the future, inspires others, being a customer fanatic, then it forms a dynamic digital environment and creates business synergy. Building a culture of learning and creating accountability in the ever-expanding workplace is a multi-layered and multi-dimensional management issue in today’s environment.

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Innovatinggloballeadership

The substance of leadership is about innovation and unleashing our collective human potential.

Contemporary leadership is sophisticated because there are many variables in it, and there is a delicate mix of expertise, interpersonal skills, along with a lot of different attributes. In brief, leadership is about making change and catalyzing innovation. 

We live in a hyperconnected and interdependent global society, what are emergent traits to bridge the global leadership gap and how to shape the new breed of world class leaders and managers to harmonize humanity?

As a global leader, you should cultivate a global mindset and versatile talent, look around to find out how to bring leaders closer to integrity and authenticity: Leadership is about the future for unlocking the collective human potential. If developing leadership is like growing a tree, then the root is the mindset. Highly effective global leaders are independent thinkers who can broaden their viewpoints based on enriched global content; and deepening their understanding with global contextualism. They present system thinking to understand the interconnected relationship between the parts and the whole; critical thinking skills to break down conventional wisdom or outdated traditions; creativity to explore new possibilities; and integrated thinking to manage opportunity and risks structurally.

The true global leadership roles usually require high level skills such as judgment, temperament, understanding global intellectual/social capital, managing diverse interests etc. The world-class leadership competencies also include such as self-regulation, empathy, inclusiveness, motivation to work in a global environment, versatility to attract global talent in creative activities, etc. The goal is to reinvent a highly collaborative and innovative global community.

As a global leader, you need to have a thorough understanding of the various perspectives and shape into world class insight: We live in a global society with enriched knowledge and diversity of talent; the variety of perspectives opens our mind, and harnesses the values that each of us can bring to the table. As a global leader, understanding the values of your audience will facilitate your ability to develop empathy, cohesion, and strategic alliance across boundaries, abstracting various perspectives into world class insight based on an updated global view.

Great global leaders are effective problem-solvers who can deal with complex problems or issues in such a way that a solution emerges through a collaboratively interdisciplinary approach involving multifaceted global capital. We are so different, but generally speaking, all human beings are more similar than different. It is possible to set the common principles to bridge the difference, and to enhance a diversifying (ideas)-clarifying (concepts) -unifying (beliefs) cycle for shaping world class insight. Well-blended insight and foresight can drive competitive value and global growth.

As a global leader, you need to be an effective influencer, an inspiring mentor, and a passionate coach worldwidely: In order to develop leaders who can effectively lead global dynamics, it is important to understand what makes leaders effective with a global context, Generally speaking, an effective global leader must be and strategic visionary to lead global progress, an influential communicators to facilitate world-wide dialogues, a passionate coach to cultivate more authentic global leaders. Focus on, convincing, persuasion, and collaboration at the global scope; knowing how to collaborate with stakeholders of all stripes, be able to facilitate and orchestrate the multitude of differences, values, cultures and gain a profound understanding of the global business ecosystem.

Leadership is a journey. A leader without character is a lack of authenticity; a leader without integrity is lack of credibility; a leader without a global mindset is lack of potential to make global influence. You must communicate, communicate and then communicate, to understand that not all of the associates will move through the change curve at the same speed. Leadership development is shifting toward grooming leadership skills embodying effective communication in networks of global conversations that inspire creativity in diverse domains of expertise.

The substance of leadership is about innovation and unleashing our collective human potential. There are many ingredients in leadership formulas, and there are all sorts of leadership flavors: local vs. global; thinking vs. acting, operational vs. strategic; rule setting vs. rule breaking, etc. It’s the great leadership capacity to embrace “inclusiveness” as the globe theme to drive collective progress at the grand level and make transcendental influence on the evolution of human species.

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Unveiltrustasleadershiptrait

Creating and nurturing that trust is one of those precious things that takes chunks out of our diminishing currency of time in the world of work.

Despite that knowledge and sincerity, mistrust continues to flourish in our personal and organizational lives. Trust is vital for the betterment of human existence and providing a competitive advantage for business. The key to trust is to establish trustworthiness as a character trait and the culture.

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. People may have different value systems for trust, leading or working in such a multigenerational, multicultural business environment requires acting in ways that provide clear reasons to decide to trust. The true trust is multidimensional. It encompasses trusting self, trusting others, and earning the trust of others. If you respect others and inspire their respect in you - appreciation, trust, etc, comes easier.

Communication is the very way to build trust: Communication is the very way to build trust, and lack of trust is an often overlooked barrier to communication. Trust enforces openness by embracing divergent thoughts and respecting differences. When there is a lack of communication, it is the lack of trust among people and management. And it significantly increases the probability for failure. Communicate, delegate, trust and hold accountable.

Mutual trust is paramount for effectiveness: TRUST is bi-directional. Reciprocity is an important part of building mutual trust and allows predictability and stability in the relationship. Reciprocity works because of shared goals, which create less stress on the relationship. Delegation is the trust. Help people not to fail, and if they do, show yourself to be trustworthy by supporting them.

Trust, but verify. Creating and nurturing that trust is one of those precious things that takes chunks out of our diminishing currency of time in the world of work.

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Innovativeinsight

Isn’t it a tough journey to celebrate 7900 blog postings - to pursue the digital way to brainstorming, innovating and sharing….

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with 7900+ 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.

Innovatingviahumansicence Will it be the beginning of the end, or the end of the new beginning of diversity of economy, variety of complexity, immersive personalization, or multicultural cognition? Perhaps all scientific domains have human ingredients in it; they all fit in the human science category, but need bits of refreshment,,,,In the long history of societal change, people are the cause and effect of evolution. As humans, we are the same and different; it’s...

Innovategovernance In an organization with agility, the effectiveness of governance is to encourage, actually orchestrate change, and enforce accountability. Upon the digital paradigm shift, we are experiencing at the moment, with the new characteristics such as hyper-connectivity and interdependence of the digital world we live in. The shift of governance is to focus on enterprise change. More organizations will make a bold step—reengineer or redesign the old...

ingredients of super execution Achieving the visibility of strategy management provides a viable pathway into process optimization and dynamic competency shaping. The blurring line of business border and the uncharted frontier of an organization bring both opportunities and risks on the journey of strategy management. That means the "right" strategy can't be completely defined by the planning space; nor being implemented via linear business logic only. The “super-execution”

Innerbusinesstexturedesign A digital organization is an organic system; the structural and aesthetic themes create business textures with inter-relationships between business elements and interdependence between success factors. The organizational design issue is about how to understand business texture and build the best mixture of organizational elements that enable the organizational interdependence and harness changeability through less hierarchy, frictionless processes,

Unified Framework A Framework as an ontology, or formal vocabulary is used to describe the relationships of strategy, systems, processes, functions, and roles within an organizationThe digital frameworks add value as they are implementations of the patterns to avoid having to reinvent the wheel, it helps the organization embed a digital culture into the very fabric of the business, explore digital in a structural way and laser focus on the most important things to get...

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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