Innovatingviapersonalization

Business leaders and professionals have to frame a new mindset, learn to use the new lens of the new era, to understand each other, provide personalized products/services, and develop people-centric organization.

It just turns out that, as human society gets more and more complex, dynamic, nonlinear, uncertain, volatile, and ambiguous, the continued use of the old paradigm, the old-world-view-lens, creates ever-increasing problems. The very natural attempt of humans to take the technical aspect of science is also not sufficient to run a hyperconnected and interdependent world. 

The inquiry of human nature - thinking, attitude, behavior, necessitates an approach which is transdisciplinary and practical to great personalization for designing tailored applications or solutions to delight customers and operate people-centric organizations.

Thinking and embodying the quality of human thoughts to envision the meaning of personalization: Thoughts come before the words. In the customer-centric organizations, businesses do data mining to gain insight of customers and understand what they need even before they know themselves. Through brainstorming to stimulate future mining, a group of futuristic minds can come up with a clarified vision on the direction of their business. Architecture = Thinking and embodying the quality of human thoughts. From top down, leadership is the ability to influence the values, mindsets, decisions, and actions undertaken by others. From outside in, does your organization collect quality feedback from customers or partners, so you know what they think about? Do you search for power for your own sake or to contribute to the greater good of those you would share this powerful knowledge with? Communicate extensively, focus on information refinement and adoption, understand customers at a deep level, so you can design and produce personalized products/services for their needs and to achieve the multifaceted business value effectively.

In practice, to make better decisions and solve crucial problems for customers or associates, brainstorming can deliver great results if it is applied in the right context, putting emphasis on sharing, involvement and innovation. In fact, personalization and User Experience informs or influences a company's core strategy. That is a critical aspect of the business future and a significantly underutilized competitive advantage. By brainstorming and embracing the quality of human thoughts, the deep problem that reveals at the societal level is to understand what are the evolutionary pathways implied by those mind switches and how we can leverage different thought processes to stimulate novel ideas, tailor customers’ needs and solve their problems creatively.

Unleashing human potential by empowering users/customers with personalized products/services: Human Capital is the largest intangible asset of a company. Real societal progress is made through the work of progressive and foreseeable minds who can figure out how to trending the future and capture the great opportunities to unleash human potential. Does the reference to "human potential" begin and end with one individual? Or does it encompass collective potential? Forethoughtful companies equip their internal users with powerful tools to get their work done creatively; insightful leaders grow their talent by empowering their team to be self management for discovering themselves and align their career path with the strategic goals of the company. They encourage individuals to step outside the box and push their limit, so they can also provide unconventional solutions to serve end customers, optimizing customers’ experience by digitizing touch points or gaining their trust.

Both employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction are indispensable elements of an organization’s "strategic information architecture." From the outside-in viewpoint, the customer is the focal point; from the inside-out, employees are the key to execute strategy. The successful organizations should look at both lenses, understand their perceptions. For end customers, understand who they are and their preference, you gain their loyalty, and keep developing great products/services to meet their needs, even unlocking their potential; so they become the advocate of your brand. For internal users, businesses think of their people as precious human capital they can invest in, investigate their passion, discover their strength, make them feel special via personalized management style, and integrate their capabilities into differentiated business competency to achieve strategic goals. So their organizations are driving the seamless paradigm shift from process driven to people centric.

Apply human science to using positivistic, scientific methods for studying human phenomena and build on a harmonized society via the lens of personalization: Human science is an inquisitiveness to know about our being. When a new stage emerges in the progression of society and advancement of technology, the very goal of developing and studying human science is to solve human related problems large or small. Science = logic of “what, at, & how.” It has embraced more holistic approaches, studying social phenomena through qualitative and quantitative means to create meaning. There’s convergence of hard and soft sciences of humans, such as neurology & psychology; biology & sociology; technology & anthropology, nature science & philosophy, etc. People are complex systems, so Classical science defines complexity in terms of the multiple parts of a system while systems science defines it based on multiple interactions with the environment and the interactions among parts within the viewed system.

With all those advancement academically or practically, we are in fact, stepping into the era of personalization with cross-disciplinary understanding. We need more creative talent who can think beyond their own domains, experiment with new ways to solve problems, pursuing truth, reality, and wisdom by taking multi-logical path, keep motivated and build nonlinear professional capabilities via sharpening their unique talent, accumulating enriched experiences, and making transcendent changes. Leadership is a hard discipline and soft science which involves taking a structural approach to understand, assess and recognize human nature and culture, fine tune their organizational structure to improve cross-boundary communication and collaboration, innovate the multitude of management disciplines to truly make people as the center of things they do, either for achieving strategic goals or driving transformative changes.

Human science provides a foundation to study human phenomena and improve the overall qualification and maturity of our beings. Business leaders and professionals have to frame a new mindset, learn to use the new lens of the new era, to understand each other, provide personalized products/services, and develop people-centric organization that matures itself via continuous brainstorming, architectural blueprinting and thoughtful behaving and acting.

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Initiatingchangeviainterdisciplinarity

Organizations have to strike the multitude of digital balances which impact each other in order to achieve a state of flow, a state of zest, a state of innovativeness, and a state of harmonization.

Everything is interconnected, and enterprises have always been parts of simple and complex ecosystems. To function seamlessly, an enterprise has to be linked to the many and varying touch points between itself and its dynamic business environment. 

In order to effectively respond to the business dynamics, companies must begin thinking about ways with strategic and systematical perspective to broaden their ecosystems understanding while becoming more sensitive and responsive to changes, and apply interdisciplinary approaches to solve problems at the strategic level in order to move up to the next level of organizational maturity.

Emergence: Emergence is a characteristic of all complex systems which are not always predictable. The challenges, competition & complexities may be on the increase but along with it comes the increase in opportunity and in the form of demand for the best businesses and great talents. The emerging activities, events, or disruptions bring an unprecedented level of uncertainty, and enhance the variety of complexity. For most organizations, they still do have contexts of relative certainty, while simultaneously having contexts reflecting both complexity and chaos. So to make a strategic alignment internally or across the business ecosystem, it’s important for management to capture a holistic understanding of business strategy and its subcomponents, make certain adjustments for adapting to changes, clarify the interrelationships of many pieces of moving parts, as well as varying scenarios of intended or unintended sequence-consequence scenario accordingly.

From an organizational management perspective, the positive approach comes from attempting to isolate and understand the dynamics of the individual functions in the enterprise, some of which for the time frame will be as good as linear, but more often, the organization as a whole has to function more coherently. Organizations as organic systems have what is known as "emergent properties," properties of the whole that are not properties of the parts. So to create business synergy, it’s important for the management to understand what a system is to what it does to its context, see the interconnectivity between parts and the whole, develop system insight, manage both opportunities and risks accordingly, frame the right problems or solve them effectively.

Interdependence: The collaboratively interdependent organizations are complex, they become complex if things do interact, particularly in the case of "nonlinear" interactions, with interdependent relationships, as well as the mix of structural or nonstructural processes. What works and what does´t, depends on the nature of the organizational interdependence that needs to be enabled. To improve organizational agility, business management has to apply the interdisciplinary lens to scrutinize process, capability, talent, to ensure that an overly restrictive hierarchy has been broken down in order to enhance a creative working environment in which the free flow of ideas and their prompt implementation is a key element of long-term business success.

Technically, the organizational design problem has varying components, such as structural design, capability design, product/service/business model design. Business management must see interrelationships rather than isolated things, understand patterns of changes rather than static “snapshots”; increase business learning plasticity and flexibility, and practice balancing act to lead by influence, not brute force. Running business is about solving numerous problems with interdependent pieces, it is necessary to integrate their interdependencies if they exist, hence, holism, avoid enlarging gaps or cause business systems dysfunctioning. To improve knowledge and idea flow, it’s also important to ensure that the enterprise is connected to all appropriate ecosystems, lattice or otherwise, touch points, for adapting to changes promptly.

Interdisciplinarity: Unlike the traditional organizations often being perceived as mechanical systems keep spinning; digital organizations are the living things that keep growing and evolving. With nonlinear complexity such as hyperconnectivity, interdependence or emergence, business management needs to take an integral information and knowledge management approach, encourage knowledge exchange cross-functionally, allow people to be self organized, and do things with autonomy. The most challenging one is to understand how the people factor affects the business system--and then managing the complex system and the people of the complex system.

Interdisciplinarity expands the bigger thinking boxes for the management to understand issues holistically, bridge the multitude of gaps and integrate varying components into dynamic business capability by taking the multi-faceted approach, technically, scientifically and culturally, Change Management and strategy management go hand-in-hand, so to drive change smoothly, business management needs to understand the psychology behind the change; set disciplines based on philosophical principles and improve organizational agility and maturity smoothly. The goal is to orchestrate a smooth strategy management and ensure the business as a whole is superior to the sum of pieces.

The business ecosystem becomes more interdependent and dynamic than ever. A complex and dynamic business system needs to be understood through holistic understanding, synthetic perspective, and being elaborated in the well-structured effort. It is imperative to explore different views, fresh knowledge, and interdisciplinary practices to gain a better understanding of certain topics or problems that may occur and develop a systematic approach to overcome the challenge. And organizations have to strike the multitude of digital balances which impact each other in order to achieve a state of flow, a state of zest, a state of innovativeness, and a state of harmonization.

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innovatingviacredibilitytrustcycle

To deliver high quality results, business professionals should demonstrate confidence based on their fitting mindset, professional competency, accomplish their work resourcefully and innovatively, to enhance credibility-trust cycle consistently.

As the business ecosystem becomes hyper-connected, over-complex and interdependent, leadership and people are the key determinant of the business’s long term success. People Management is about improving talent competency by identifying, developing and renewing the right talent, streamlining positive energy flow, and building harmonized work relationships. 

From a leadership development and talent management perspective, here is the logical scenario to develop the credibility-trust mutual enforcement cycle.

First direct the team, lead by example, and demonstrate leadership credibility: Leadership is the capacity to influence others through vision birthed by a conviction of a sense of purpose, motivate the team by a passion, and lead teams by example. With frequent disruptions and high velocity, leadership is about change, the purpose of change is to create a better future or get an optimal solution to emerging or existing problems, especially at the strategic level. It's about showing leaders confidence, because you know you are able to positively adapt in any given situation. Highly effective leaders have a very high comfort level with change and understand standing still is not an option in today's world. They are path-finders who can direct the team in the right path; and they are insightful and resourceful, able to make the most out of what they have to achieve their vision.

Leadership is also about role modeling, demonstrating leadership credibility by doing by what they say and saying what they do. While there are many components of leadership, one of the most important ones is the ability to adapt, model and influence, demonstrating leadership credibility. They trust their team members, empower them with effective collaboration platforms and efficient tools, so they can do their work creatively and productively. Hence, knowledge, insight, and wisdom are the best soft assets to build leadership brand and reputation.

Then, supervise and delegate-help the team become independent and gain confidence: Organizations with a command & control type of organizational culture indifferent to external innovations. You can't build trust or motivation effectively if you don't engage with people or leaders themselves lack credibility. Good leaders delegate, encourage independent thinking and recognize teams’ achievement, help people gain confidence. People's confidence is based on their knowledge, insight, and capability. Feedback and positive reinforcement are vital tools for leaders to use in order to influence their followers for the better.

"Generic" leaders probably existed in the past when the complexities in life were less, technical competencies required minimal, and those being led were less intellectually challenging to lead, motivate and manage. Highly effective leaders today are specialized generalists who understand their staff with professional empathy and practice effective leadership with proper delegation. To deliver high quality results, business professionals should demonstrate confidence based on their fitting mindset, professional competency, accomplish their work resourcefully and innovatively, and enhance credibility-trust cycle for making continuous improvement.

Then, mentor, guide, and nurture the culture of trust: Great leadership includes mentor capabilities. By mentoring, leaders are showing that they value others, and in order to add value to others, they need to hold people in high regards, not only for who they are but also for the potential that lies inside of them. Mentoring relationships range from loosely defined, informal collegial associations to structured, formal agreements between mentors and mentees. Mentorship inspires the culture of learning. There should be a balance between the organization and the individual where the responsibility for learning is concerned. Today’s business leaders and professionals need to be open-minded, resourceful, and develop the culture of learning and trust.

There is a different talent requirement to fit in different positions. By enhancing a credibility-trust cycle, mentors can allow the mentees to lead the agenda, avoiding being too prescriptive or manipulated. 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 align the employee’s professional goal with the strategic business goal. So the team can align with goals while using independent thinking- show individual or team’s cognitive credibility, tell staff what & when, but encourage them to pursue why and how, and deliver what they promised, show team credibility.

Trust but monitor; lead, not micro-manage: Most of these organizations with real teamwork are headed by strong leaders with original ideas. It's all about communication - influencing, listening, understanding your team, knowing the purpose of your communication efforts, choosing the right modality, giving and receiving feedback, negotiation. The team's creativity is inspired and motivated by the leaders, who see, understand, and appreciate the merits of different people. "Trust but monitor," active monitoring of management for transparency and analysis of potential long-term consequences must become the agenda, trust the team with clear deliverable and alignment.

However, in reality, misinformation or lack of true understanding and trust often make human society more decisive and less collaborative. Mistrust is also caused by a lack of contextual understanding, presumptions or illogical reasoning. Trust gap further creates innovation barriers and makes businesses or the society as a whole getting stuck at the low level of maturity. Thus, if business leaders can build trustful relationships with their teams who can make a unique, valuable, independent contribution to the business outcomes, and they can demonstrate in these terms, they will enforce trust and credibility cycle and improve the organizational manageability.

In the physical or business world, most relationships are nonlinear, change is continuously happening and spiraling up in such a dynamic environment. The organizational leaders need to develop a healthy cycle of credibility-trust continuum; the organization should be able to identify fundamental skill requirements at different levels of management and the individual must self-assess and identify what they lack to move forward and seek to learn through whatever means are made available. Thue goal is to build a high performance culture and drive desired change consistently.

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innateresilience

In order to survive and thrive, we must present resilience to fail fast and fail forward.

Resilience is the ability to respond to change, to recover quickly. We all have suffering time; trial and suffering expose one’s character for who you really are. 

Many people say that trial and suffering builds character. It does not build character as much as it exposes one's character for who you are.

Resilience is a property of an elastic component of a person: Resilience indicates the person can undergo high dynamic stress and yet he/she is able to recover smoothly to he/her original situation without much degradation of him/herself. In short, we call this person a tough person in all predicaments. People have different perceptions and personalities; some are more resilient, they face the difficulty, and stand again, with survival's mentality; some are more vulnerable; few might face difficulties, bounce back and transform into a rock solid character.

Resilience is about B.O.U.N.C.E: It’s about regaining one's footing which could be bouncing back, forwards or restructuring your life integrating the change in some way that works. Part of the issue of resiliency is how significant the adverse situation is to the person. It could be a relatively minor event or it could be something that turns their life up-side-down. Those events can fragment their life. The ability to respond to these events are impacted by many things such as how they cope with loss, their history with the loss, their support systems, their ability to "understand" what has happened, their faith, etc.

Resilience enables people to press on and persevere despite difficult circumstances: It's about human or organization being able to maintain its recognizable essential characteristics in the face of "disruption" - that could look like "bouncing back" or it could look like "growing around" obstacles. Nature is resilient, a tree is still recognizably a tree even if it's all crooked to get adequate light or soil and we can be recognizably "us" even if we adapt to a difficult situation.

To survive and thrive, we must present resilience to fail fast and fail forward. It's the ability to respond to change, to recover quickly from setbacks, as well as the capacity to respond to the unexpected, being able to keep working and focusing, to make continuous progress.

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innercenterofgravity

A high-performance organization is the company that can explore their center of gravity, align all critical elements of business success factors seamlessly, quickly and safely assess all of the consequences of a possible change.

High velocity and fierce competition are the new normal. Many organizations are struggling with initiating strategic business efforts to break through stagnation and reach the next cycle of organizational growth. 

The management needs to provide coherence between actual capability and the objectives that have been defined, and addresses in outline how the strategic objectives will be achieved, which includes exploring your center of gravity to build momentum and shape long term organizational competencies.

Increasing tempo of operations on building real-time capability and capacity: Running a high performance organization means high-responsiveness and high speed. Achieving operational excellence is fundamental but not so easy. Business management needs to make an objective assessment of their organizational strength and weakness, capability and capacity, functional gaps and talent shortage, so they can explore their center of gravity to improve organizational performance. In reality though, many companies are overloaded and understaffed, with frequent disruptions, there’s nothing to be done about an uncontrollable situation, but real-time data-based business insight can help to identify internal inconsistency as well as external emerging activities or event, and try to work around and manage interventions smoothly. Leading organizations have strategic responsiveness to process business information almost real-time, communicate and collaborate with business counterparts timely to increase the tempo of operations.

Both business capabilities and capabilities are a fundamental building block with which companies can achieve operational excellence, create new business models, and accelerate business performance. The arrival of capacity and capability on demand helps to move closer to enhance organizational efficacy and harmony. It’s important to keep trimming wastes and redundancy, set priority to bring transparency and keep optimizing business structures and processes. High performance companies can retool the management to ensure that business capacity plans are in line with the corporate direction, and business capability development is a cohesive part of strategy management. They can create liaison and business partnership, wrap physical organizational structures, relationships, and virtual platforms and connections seamlessly to ensure clear responsibility and business agility. The periodic management check needs to be done at intervals, help in re-assessment of objectives and appropriate realignment, to ensure on time and on value delivery consistently, and realign the efforts to stay focusing on making strategic movement collaboratively.

Increasing intensity of innovation on lifting up the horizon of business strategy: Nowadays, innovation is the only path leading to business prosperity. As you innovate, you might find helpful changes to your strategy and you will differentiate your organization from competitors on the way. Innovation is costly most of the time, that is why you should really concentrate innovation on the direction of your strategy - intensify innovation with focus. Technically, complexity both drives innovation and also hinders it. Effective innovation requires a well-managed process as part of a holistic system and a strategic alignment, encompassing many key business aspects, and implementing via the right mix of process, technology and people.

Often, the lack of variety of things or point of views makes organizations stagnating in innovation. Since innovation is fundamentally about breaking assumptions, having more assumptions uncovered will lead to greater innovation. In a creative environment, people are encouraged to become independent thinkers, search for fresh concepts and simpler methodologies, which need to take innovative initiatives. Innovation management is an ongoing business continuum with multi-stepped processes that include both innovation resolution and management disciplines.

Improving plasticity of the organization: The neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to rewire, connect, and adapt; the business plasticity is the organization’s capability to learn, connect, and adapt to the business environment with speed. We are living in a complex world where developments, disruptions, and conflicts are continuously happening and that makes it impossible to have a complete knowledge and understanding of many issues facing the business today. Changing, adapting to or mitigation is a "practical" way for the existing change plan to bring about the goals of tomorrow. Business management needs to ponder around: Can businesses and their people learn fast enough to rise above the change curve? Can their organizations connect the right dots to spur innovation? Can the current business system handle a shock in the business tomorrow and demonstrate resilience? The shock could be either positive or negative, such as a strategic business shift, a new large customer, new vendor relationships, scale up or down business.

Business management needs to deliberately improve the organizational plasticity by improving organizational learning agility, process agility, talent versatility. And it also involves the application of technologies and processes of capturing, developing, sharing, and using knowledge timely, with the aim of optimizing the business value that is generated. A key element in self-adaptive organisms is people. Listen to people and help them improve learning plasticity, achieve their goals and objectives by overcoming barriers and more importantly, help people navigate through difficult changes. So the dynamic workforce today continues to depoliticize working culture, dismantle bureaucracy, solve business problems via multiple choice of solutions effectively.

The multidimensional digital effects provide impressive advantages in terms of the quality of information, the responsiveness of the business, the speed of delivery, and professionalism of digital workforces. Collaboratively, a high-performance organization is the company that can explore their center of gravity, align all critical elements of business success factors seamlessly, quickly and safely assess all of the consequences of a possible change and devise effective plans to provide a combination approach to drive transformative changes.

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influenceviafairness

The fairer you are, the wiser you become.

Fairness means to be impartial, equitable,  objective, dispassionately examining, and open-minded. Fairness is a concept with two characteristics to be judged by each individual for her/himself to be fair or unfair towards others.

“Being fair” is a mentality which takes multilevel thinking practices to gain wisdom: Being fair starts with being objective. Being objective means you are not influenced by personal feelings, interpretations, or assumptions; but make judgment or decisions based on unbiased fact. Relative objectivity is a continual process in which we skirt the edge of what is possible. In fact, we are social beings with individual histories built upon both our own experiences and the life stories of those around us. See differences as just different and not as a confirmation of some preconception. To be fair and less judgmental takes self-awareness and insightful observation, tolerance and inclusiveness.

“Being fair” demonstrates a positive mentality and attitude: The very thought of unfairness comes into our mind when we face some sorts of challenges. Life acts unfairly many times by rewarding someone else for our achievements; one’s reputation gets tarnished by rumors or gossiping; or the old rules from the outdated customs or cultures limit our life opportunities and choices; even worse, the man-made mistakes cause many damages to the innocent people. We as the most intelligent being on this planet must acquire the ability to contribute in a positive way in unfavorable circumstances, and overcome barriers to become fairer.

“Being fair” is to gain empathy and treat the way people want to be treated: Be intellectually curious to understand how people think, not how they look, be insightful to understand people from different angles and be inclusive to appreciate cognitive differences and different points of view to approach problems. People have different preferences and interests. Sometimes in order to be truly fair, you need to treat others the same by treating them differently. The mentality, action and behavior to reflect fairness need to be encouraged via open communication, let individuals embrace their bias by sharing it with others in a non-threatening context.

Fairness is one of the most significant traits in wisdom, the fairer you are, the wiser you become. Set common principles for looking beyond the surface, and continue to improve your ability to be fairer and improve professional maturity.

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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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