Invaluable

Isn't it a tough journey to - celebrate 9800 blog postings to -pursue the digital way of brainstorming, innovating, and story-telling?

As the world involves-

having the right dose of -

creative tension,

interdisciplinary paradox to -

spark innovation.

How can we -

think big and small,

at the same time;

as big as -

our gigantic universe;

everything and everyone is-

part of -

such a hyperconnected,

interdependent system;

as small as a blue dot -

with concentration,

to solve critical issues,

overcome common challenges,

with focus…


How can we -

feel young and old,

at the same time?

be youthful in your heart,

keep creative energy-

flowing around, freshly;

be mature in your mind,

getting older, but not aged,

shape a growth mindset with -

ancient wisdom,

profoundly?.


How can we be -

confident and humble,

at the same time?

Being confident means-

the right dose of ego,

positive mental attitude;

believe in yourself;

focus on strengths,

opportunities,

optimistically;

be humble to-

empty your mind,

listen to -

diverse viewpoints,

learn surroundings,

fresh knowledge,

objectively.


How can we -

speak out and keep quiet,

at the same time?

voice up, speak out,

articulately;

provide feedback,

insightfully;

spend more time on

pondering deep;

nourish creativity,

in solitude;

improve focus,

through science,

carmly?


How can we be -

brave and cautious,

smart and foolish,

analytical and intuitive,

deep and broad,

at the same time?

How can we move towards-

a state of ebullience,

work more with and less,

against human nature,

be a disciplinarian,

but ruleless,

at the same time?


What we've done is to raise -

consciousness of balance,

expand cognitive threshold,

and that, in and of itself,

makes a world of difference,

to shape an invaluable innovator,

inspirationally.

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Initiategrcinsight

 For every corporation which should work and be effective and efficient, you need good governance; and the desire for more innovation will make governance issues more complex.

In dealing with unprecedented uncertainty and complex business dynamics, corporate governance will remain a difficult issue for today’s organizations with extended business boundaries in an increasingly flat world. It is a sophisticated process that if well executed, will lead to decision coherence and performance consistency; allowing not only to protect the existing business value but also to create new value for varying shareholders of the organization.

 In reality, what are the biggest problems for today’s governance, and how to improve its effectiveness and maturity?

Governance and risk management go hand-in-hand. They really cannot exist exclusive of each other: An important aspect of identifying and managing risks is to ensure that risks are identified, minimized, and controlled within acceptable "risk-appetite. The top business leaders need to contemplate: How robust was the organization's risk assurance system, all the way up to the management board? How could that business system miss something that has had a widespread impact? Was senior management too easily assured? Who was responsible for feeding unreliable information up the organizational food chain? What checks were there to test the reliability of such information? Etc. By clarifying those concerns, governance and risk management can mutually reinforce with each other to improve organization agility and resilience.

As long as risks have been identified and agreed with stakeholders as per business needs, then you can take risk models that effectively predict, optimize, and consider a continual and sustainable approach with multi-faceted perspectives, and the specific threshold for justifying opportunities and business outcomes timely. The holistic risk management should provide the strategic light and tactical angles to understand critical issues, in support of pending local, national and global efforts and mission/challenges of changing working environments, economics, regulations, and globalization.

Governance and risk management must be integrated and aligned with the business culture and processes to improve the overall GRC maturity: Risk governance as the guiding force behind risk management, ensures boundaries are appropriately set and adhered to achieve risk management effectiveness: In most of the organizations, there are clear processes for the interaction between management and the board. However, with "VUCA" reality, in some circumstances, the line between management and governance is blurred. To optimize risk governance effectiveness, the corporate board and management need to work more collaboratively to reinvent governance models, re-imagining management discipline, and rejuvenating their relationships to build high performance organizations.

In practice, take a consideration of your current governance maturity - where you are today and how far/fast you might change things, coupled with a good definition of roles/responsibilities wrapped around governance processes. An outside-in governance is a set of mixed flavor of event driven and goal driven processes to manage dynamic business processes, build an outside-in people-centric organization by doing better in well-embedding risk management mechanisms into key business processes seamlessly and enforcing GRC practices.

Governance definitely creates an impact on business performance: Business performance can be affected by numerous factors of which governance is one of them. The organizations with greater governance discipline usually result in significantly better performance than their competitors. The positive impacts come from corporate governance good practices on business performance. Reduce the performance drag of top-heavy management structures without giving anything up in terms of focus, effectiveness, and efficiency. The performance based governance disciplines need to connect interdisciplinary management dots with comprehensive business context, to reinvent performance management practices from micromanagement to macro-management, and from monitor based to a motivational style performance management.

Performance management coherence is achieved via cross-functional collaboration to achieve high performance business results. Look for the linkage between operation management and governance rather than compliance only, improve the quality of performance through governance improvement. Strong governance practices ensure seamless alignment and decision coherence across the organizational hierarchy, reinvent organizational restructure, and ensure the business as a whole is superior to the sum of pieces.

For every corporation which should work and be effective and efficient, you need good governance; and the desire for more innovation will make governance issues more complex. It presents a very real risk that governance as a discipline will begin to lose focus of its prime purpose if it does not address strategically important emerging issues. Governance is neither linear nor single dimensional nowadays, it should be understood via multidimensional lens and get enforced holistically.

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Initiatebodinquiries

The corporate board’s strategic oversight and agile governance practices are crucial to identify and strengthen the weakest link in strategy management.

Nowadays running business is complex due to rapid change and fierce competitions. Corporate governance and management are complementary disciplines to ensure business effectiveness and efficiency. Excessive management complexity enlarges functional gaps, limits performance and slows down change speed. It’s important to look for the linkage between management and governance to unlock business performance. 

The insightful corporate board makes a significant impact on running a high-performance business through their invaluable feedback for business management; influencing the values, mindsets, decisions, and actions undertaken by others. Their leadership influence is based on clear vision, learning agility, influential intelligence, and a high level of intellectual and emotional maturity. The solid governance disciplines need to be practiced through continuous reviewing by making deep business inquiries and enhancing strong management disciplines:

Is the strategy incomplete or flawed or both: Often there are disconnects between strategy and execution. It is illogical to plan and implement something you cannot do. The cause of incomplete strategy is either the assumptions in the strategy were not fully vetted or market dynamics wasn't anticipated. Strategy creep can be indicative of larger planning issues such as poor due diligence in the planning phase, lack of seamless alignment with vision or mission, lack of clear goals or objectives etc. Even when the strategy is appropriate, poor implementation will derail it. The cause of ineffective strategy implementation varies, corporate boards’ oversight of business strategy is critical to scrutinize the effectiveness of strategic planning or the logic of strategy implementation as the success of strategy execution is multipath, information-dependent and dynamic.

Corporate board’s governance practices help the management improve decision coherence by closing blindspots and bridging insight gaps. When there is no consequence for making mistakes, there is no point in investing the time needed to make sure that decisions are sound. Top leaders like board of directors go beyond a senior title, their leadership competency is based on their bigger and deeper thinking box and fresh insight to help the management understand that the execution was going to impact other areas of the business in ways they didn't anticipate. Even if you have a fair strategy, when mistranslating the good strategy into a set of unclear goals and objectives, it further causes the failure to implement a strategy.

Have you underestimated the competition, how to improve long term business competency: With unprecedented levels of uncertainty around a volatile marketing situation, emerging business properties, fierce competition, disruptive technologies and so many variables to consider, competition has different connotations and meanings under different situations or context. In recent days, technological advancement is pressuring the firms more than other factors. The economic factor is varying because an organization needs to understand the market in which it will be selling its product and service. The political factor also plays an important role in the external macro environment which keeps evolving. Insightful BoDs help the management gain deep understanding of business circumstances and deepen competitive analysis by clarifying what the demand is for its product or service, and what its competitors are doing.

With frequent disruptions and fierce competitions in the business ecosystem, individuals or organizations simply cannot stand still, never innovate or never make progress. To enforce governance discipline, you can also use scenario planning to explore how your current strategies will or will not help you against possible disruptions by establishing a set of “What-if” scenarios showing the potential scale of business benefit, as well as estimating risks and hidden pitfalls. It’s even more critical to embed predictive actions into repeatable business processes to improve business efficiency and speed. Organizations face unprecedented uncertainty and fierce competition, business differentiation can be accomplished by having a sustainable organizational competitive advantage to the market, rooted in operational or innovation excellence which makes it difficult or even impossible for competitors to imitate.

Are meeting the needs of our customers that have been validated? Forward-looking companies across the industrial sectors are inspired to run people-centric organizations. Customer satisfaction or some aspire to achieve customer delight is more a vision, along with a set of strategic goals, which can be characterized by indicators of short-term satisfaction, how they liked or disliked the purchase transaction they just completed; or the long-term satisfaction, more with product or service fit, form, function and aesthetics, and other elements of satisfaction such as cost/performance, available variation, service levels, and ease of use.

The BoD’s governance enhancement helps the management set a tone of customer-centricity, catalyze innovation and advocate personalization, assess customer satisfaction key performance indicators such as loyalty, delight, experience as lead indicators objectively. The level of increased customer satisfaction would be also based on both the industry and wherein the enterprise the innovation is occurring. The more customer-facing the innovation, the higher the customer satisfaction would be; the more loyal customers the company can cultivate. Because loyal customers help the business achieve objectives such as increasing revenue and build strong corporate brand.

High-performance BoDs are humble to learn, bring their professional competency and maturity to the next level which will make them more insightful leaders. The corporate board’s strategic oversight and agile governance practices are crucial to identify and strengthen the weakest link in strategy management. They set the priority to stay focused, identify promising big ideas for investment that will accelerate bold change, continue to prioritize and adjust the strategy, to leverage growth potential, enhance governance disciplines; laser focus on the most critical perspectives to steer the business in the right direction, and ensure business success in the long run.

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Initiativesofinnovation

To awaken innovation in the well-established organization, business leaders and professionals should think as an intrapreneur and act as a startup manager.

Digital is the age of innovation. And innovation is what leads to differentiation. There are many ways to differentiate and, therefore, there are many ways to pursue innovation. 

The purpose of the book “Unpuzzling Innovation - Mastering Innovation Management in a Structural Way“ is to demystify innovation puzzles in a structural way.

 

  Initiatives of Innovation

Initiatives Information is growing exponentially, the internet and collaborative platforms & tools flatten the world to a certain degree, harnessing information fluidity and cross functional communication. The business world we live in is heading the paradigm shift from silo to hyperconnectivity and interdependence; from inside-out process-driven to outside in people centricity. It is a strategic imperative for today’s leaders and professionals to embrace the broader view of global society, collaborate cross-disciplinarily, co-solve common problems innovatively and build an advanced global world harmoniously.

Initiatelevelsofinnovation Human society as an integral component of the natural world is dynamic, diverse, and keeps evolving and progressing. If the knowledge-scarce industrial age means a steep pyramid or silo mentality; then the information-abundant digital era implies a fluid knowledge cycle and transcendent up-levels.

Initiatives Business is nowadays complex, to manage business initiatives successfully, the logical scenario and different information are needed to achieve high performance. There are different flavors of business initiatives which require varying focal points, apply effective technologies, tools or methodologies to solve problems, optimize business management capability and capacity, unlock business potential consistently, and add value to corporate growth in the long term.

Initiativestoreinvent As the business world becomes hyperconnected, interdependent, surviving in today’s business dynamic requires structural flexibility, cross-functional collaboration, goal-driven, people-centric process, and intuitive user interface to reduce business friction, deal with conflicts or disruptions, and build competitive business advantage continually. Reinventing business to get digital ready is an evolutionary journey with ups and downs, promises and perils on the way. It’s important to know how to strike the right balance, enhance an iterative planning and execution continuum, make a stride toward the future and lead their organization forward smoothly.

Initiativetoinnovate Our business world is becoming more connected and interdependent, the crucial issue for many organizations though is that they don’t have an integrated approach to solve complex problems holistically. They haven’t reached the next level of business growth and maturity.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 7 million page views with about 9800+ blog postings in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify your voice, deepen your digital footprints, and match your way to human progression.



"Unpuzzling Innovation" Amazon Order Link

"Unpuzzling Innovation" B&N Order Link

"Unpuzzling Innovation" iBook Order Link

"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Slideshare Presentation

"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Chapter 1 Innovation Classification

"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Chapter 2 Innovation Principles

"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Chapter 3 Digital Innovators

"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Chapter 4 Connecting Innovation Dots

"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Chapter 5 Digital Innovation Best & Next Practices

"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Chapter 6 Innovation Paradox

"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Chapter 7 Innovation Gaps and Pitfalls

"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Chapter 8 Innovation Measurement

"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Conclusion Mastering Innovation in a Structural Way

"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Quotes Collection I

"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Quotes Collection II

"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Quotes Collection III

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Initiativeofarchitecture

Besides planning capability, process, can Business Architecture focus on soft-discipline such as planning & roadmapping, people delight, management best practices.

Business architecture is the visualization of the organizational strategy, competences and operation, as well as how they fit together to explore the macro-environment. 

The architectural views are any aspects of the enterprise concern to a stakeholder, help to estimate the magnitude of the impact of events which may occur in strategic/operational plans, deal with the variety of complexity effectively. It helps to restructure the digital company which is solid enough to give some sort of forms or meanings and open enough to its environment and allow the movement of people, ideas, and information frictionlessly.

Initiate business architecture design with do-it-self and drag-drop capability: Neither architecture nor design are “events” of creativity, but are in fact, innovative activities that extend over time. Is enterprise architecture design as simple as possible but not simpler? There is an emergence-vs-design-paradox thereon across the business complexities around the multi-faceted business world. The architect team has all the right skills to make the right architectural and design decisions and are authorized to do it. 

The focus is to manage and organize work with the theme of “Do It Yourself”; from self-service leadership, to self-managing team, and self-service data-based analytics, focuses on delivering work via culture of “pull”; such an agile team has the full authority on the practices, processes, tools, engineering methods they would like to use to design architecture by following three “I” principles: Incrementalism, Iteration and Improvement, well suited to adapt to the rapidly changing environment.

Initiate enterprise knowledge related conversations, understand how well do the architectural assets cover the entire scope of the organization, from scope through to the operations layer: With the exponential growth of information and hyper-connected nature of the business, the border of knowledge domains has a blurred scope, knowledge does not stand still, and it is expanded in the continual base. Knowledge as a soft business asset is more intangible, complex, and dynamic compared to the physical asset. It's practical to use architecture as a body of knowledge and experience in gaining a contextual understanding of the business, bridging a multitude of viewpoints, navigating critical business activities, and predicting opportunities and risks ahead.

Knowledge is one of the most invaluable assets to every organization and its availability, integrity, and confidentiality can be crucial to how the organization functions or maintains its competency. Knowledge doesn’t always inform you of true understanding, it is not an isolated fact but needs to flow and transfer for increasing the contemporary business consciousness and achieving its business value. Enterprise architects with solid domain knowledge can design an interactive knowledge architecture and take dynamic knowledge disciplines, allow knowledge to flow frictionlessly; and spur creativity. As we all know knowledge is power. In fact, more attention needs to be placed on the conditions that allow knowledge to flow, connect dots to create new ideas, and generate business value by designing an interactive knowledge architecture and taking dynamic knowledge disciplines, providing feedback for business betterment proactively.

Initiate business architecture activities to delight people: It is without a doubt that many organizations across the geographical or industrial boundaries have come to the realization that in order to be successful, they have to focus their efforts on building people-centric business. So lean on customers, engage employees, and focus on creating value for people in every step, instead of traditional top-down, inside-out business hierarchy. A digital era upon us is about choice, innovation, people-centricity, etc. A well-designed choice architecture helps to eliminate confusion, apply a holistic view, align resources and talent, orchestrate the business interrelationship between people and process, facilitate the planning and communication, make “tough choice” to improve decision coherence, and take customized approaches to solve critical problems with people as a focal point.

People-centric innovation often happens at the intersection of people, process, and technology. Business leaders should develop a people-centric organization so the creative energy can flow and collective human capabilities can really be transformed from architecture, design, and engineering perspectives to produce high performance business results.An architecture that integrates the art and science to unpuzzle innovation serendipity, plays a significant role in shaping contemporary enterprises as either a communication tool to facilitate continuous digital dialogues or a design tool to improve customer centricity.

Besides IT, capability, process, can Business Architecture focus on soft-discipline such as planning & roadmapping, people delight, management best practices to reflect vision, value and change from outside-in customer point of view, instead of today’s inside-out, to improve overall organizational effectiveness, agility, and maturity.

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Illustratebrillance

 The world is -far away from perfect; those brilliant are- kind, self-critical, empowering, unbelievably insightful, audaciously innovative;

We have come to-

this lovely beautiful planet,

being a human being is-

a unique journey,

we can imagine;

we can experience;

we can create,

we can appreciate-

many things, free-mindedly;

we have-

so many inspirations,

faculties,

meaningful things to do,

unlimitedly.

It is -

full of -

brilliant colors and fragrances.

with a strong experience of -

illumination and insight.

Look back,

it's the examples of-

positivity and brilliance,

that shines the brightest,

rather than those,

that left people feeling-

disappointed and wretched;

can we be-

an authentic self?

Shall we think,

multidimensionally,

feel optimistically;

act cool-headedly,

to reach the state of

Emotional Brilliance?

Isn't it true-

only a balanced mind,

 can take-

tough decisions,

make better choices;

only a balanced view can offer -

empathy towards others,

respectively.

Without the inner balance of-

energies,

one cannot reach-

the status of -

 emotional brilliance.

The world is -

far away from perfect;

those brilliant are-

kind,

self-critical,

empowering,

unbelievably insightful,

audaciously innovative;

to make-

our world shine through-

the darkness,

unify from division,

integrate, modernize, harmonize to-

unleash human potential,

unimaginably.

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Initiatives

How well your employees know, understand and are connected to the strategic planning and implementation will always directly correlate to its performance.

Nowadays, organizations face significant pressure to survive in a dynamic business environment with constant disruptions and fierce competitions. Traditional organizational management with siloed processes often causes bureaucracy which is criticized for its unresponsiveness, inflexibility, inefficiency, silo, stagnation, etc.

 Organizational leaders today should navigate through complexity, uncertainty or ambiguity and enhance an iterative strategy management cycle effectively.

Initiate digital dialogs, enhance feedback-feedforward cycle, and harness cross-disciplinary communication: Organizational planning-implementation is not restrictive linear steps, but an iterative continuum. Often, the communication bottleneck and the primary impediments to collaboration is a dissonance between upper and middle management, or dissonance between middle management and the frontline employees. To get things worse, these weakest links will break when change is intense and there is never truly an effort toward enterprise cohesion. Hence, communication is the bridge to strengthen the weak links of implementation. It’s always important to collect the cross-functional teams’ input and commitment to get the work well-done and accountable for high performance results.

All relevant parties need to be involved, at a certain point and at a certain stage of the strategy implementation. Involve all stakeholders right from the beginning; practice cross boundary communication, seek ideas/suggestions with the execution team and create a bonding within the team. Dialogues need to be relevant and communicating with business peers, partners, or customers, needs to be authentic and fact-based, so people can understand what is communicated and are able to translate it into action or expertise without “lost in translation.”, make effective decisions; take step-wise actions for solving problems and achieving high-performance results.

Guide and touch all aspects of the organization; close blindspots, bridge gaps in expediting implementation: It’s important for managers to take a holistic view of strategy, keep their eyes on the higher horizons, focus on what matters the most, identify both execution blind spots and capability gaps, The blind spots are usually caused by silo mentality, homogeneous team setting, outdated information or knowledge, etc. In fact, many traditional organizations can neither set the right measures to improve business agility nor sufficiently assess the business value in a multidimensional way, as a consequence, articulate their value to the organization’s shareholders clearly.

The role of the top leadership is to provide guidance; to clear the path, whether that is the elimination of obstacles, closing the blind spots, bridging gaps- so that the business as a whole can take a digital leap and unleash its full potential. Identify what generates the most value for the company, express that in strategic objectives with clarity, and take step-wise strategy scenarios to implement it smoothly. The goal of business management optimization is to eliminate unnecessary complications, improve operations to reduce the burden on the company, and increase the success rate of implementation .

It’s important to check if you're on course what adjustments are required, and where to go next by setting the right check point: Checkpoint = a point at which certain criteria are assessed or reassessed, so that a decision can be made about an initiative. Technically, a checkpoint is what you have in agile design or capability based strategy management at the end of each iteration or intra-iteration. The term is in tune with the risk-driven, adaptive nature of agile management. It’s a sort of governance mechanism embedded in business management processes and practices, to enforce accountability at different level of the organization, and enable business optimization.

Technically, in disciplined agile approaches to implement IT enabled business initiatives, the project team recognizes that there's more needed than just delivering potentially shippable software at each iteration. There are other risks that aren't well addressed by just doing that, and that you should have a more sophisticated governance strategy. It’s important to set up a checkpoint, conduct periodic follow-ups; make those checkpoint reviews comprehensively, take into account both financial and nonfinancial measures, internal improvements, past outcomes and ongoing requirements as indications of future performance.

How well your employees know, understand and are connected to the strategic planning and implementation will always directly correlate to its performance. Organizations need less process and more cross-functional connection, trust, and communication within the intangible assets of organization, to make a significant difference in the overall levels of business performance, responsiveness, and organizational maturity.

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Initiateleadershipinnovation

Isn’t a tough journey to celebrate 9800 blogposting - to pursue the digital way of brainstorming, innovating and story-telling.The future will become more complex and uncertain, leaders envision the better future, in their sphere of calling.

Leadership is about direction and change. As for change, every generation "redefines" the norms; both leadership and change have altered and will continue to do so. Modern leadership has to become more collaborative in nature, empowering others while guiding the group to align with the overall business strategy. 

There is no “one-size-fits-all” leadership format in such a diversified and dynamic world. But there are quite a lot of common ingredients in all sorts of leadership. Great leaders envision better ways to lead, capture the insight, grasp the substance, be creative, in order to lead the organizations effortlessly.

Leadership must be anchored to a full professionalism; also made of professional qualities such as critical thinking, independent judgment: Leadership is about influence. The deeper you can think, the more significant the leadership influence could be.It seems that more people today are willing to be leaders for the ability to influence rather than control others. Independent thinking is extremely important for business leaders and professionals in the digital era in which information only clicks away, but the true insight has been inundated with outdated knowledge, and the real signal is mixed with a lot of noise. Independent thinking allows you to appreciate others’ great ideas, but not just follow others blindly.

Critical thinking is an integral thinking ability for analyzing, evaluating, and producing coherent argumentation, seeking reasons, overcoming bias, or closing blind spots for making independent judgment and improving decision effectiveness. Real critical thinking has creativity embedded in it. Independent thinkers usually can keep their energy flowing freely and be mindful all the time. Being an independent thinker with creativity, often involves some level of discomfort and interdisciplinary transcendence. It’s how unusual dots get connected to create novel ideas, as well as how decision blind spots can be closed for improving problem-solving effectiveness .

Leadership coherence is about being consistent with what you think and do in order to deepen leadership influence: Logic plus consistency lead to coherence. With fast-paced changes, business leaders and professionals need to be able to think deeply, learn fresh knowledge, and relate what they have known in the past to the new application for producing high performance results with consistency. From linear skills to integral competency, people become more fluent, intuitive and consistent in what they are thinking and doing, they are more confident to keep building differentiated professional competency.

Growth mindset and cognitive intelligence are in strong demand to ride learning curves and make the progressive movement. The "development, enhancement, and coaching" cycle of leadership capability improvement focuses on shaping growth mindset, encouraging people to think differently and translate those thoughts into actions courageously. Coherent capability enables leaders to solve problems logically, make them antifragile, develop resilience, maintain focus and clarity, even under extreme pressure, to lead the team forward and generate high performance consistently.

Accountability is part of personal integrity, and one of important leadership qualities: Accountability is to be wise and brave enough as a leader to remove and change in time before the problem becomes overwhelming. Senior leaders with accountability will ask big “WHY” to clarify vision and strategic goals; they are responsible for setting strategic goals; and also hold others accountable for strategy implementation. Accountability goes hand in hand with the delegation of authority or power. If you ensure the individuals have autonomy within their tasks, you will be able to address performance on an equal partnership basis, and hold them accountable for producing higher than expected performance results.

Also, being a leader implies a certain level of responsibility. It doesn't matter at what level one is leading: the team, department, corporation, nation, globe. There is no leadership where there is no responsibility. Leaders at different levels are decidedly different and are held to a different magnitude of expectations. Effective leaders have the responsibility to lead their team effectively to produce premium results coherently. Professionals are responsible for their actions; they should be accountable to themselves, to the team, and to their company consistently.

The future will become more complex and uncertain, leaders envision the better future, in their sphere of calling. Their role is then, to crystallize the vision and mobilize resources towards its purposes. Leadership as a bridge needs expanded vision, a set of quality ingredients, and inclusive coaching style to advance society in which all various areas of human endeavor continue to evolve, and collective potential can be maximized unbelievably..

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Unleashpotential

The "view of the talent potential landscape” has many dimensions intellectually, psychologically, philosophically, and sociologically.

We live in a time of rapidly changing technology and business dynamics at the dawn of the Digital Era, the knowledge life cycle is significantly shortened, and a huge skill gap in the workforce needs to be filled due to the continuously updated technology and regulation, digitalization and globalization, etc. .

The book “Talent Master - 199 + Questions to See Talent from Different Angles“ is the guidebook to help digital professionals shape their digital fit mindset, improve multidimensional digital intelligence, build a unique set of digital capabilities, inspire creativity, improve professionalism, and unleash their full talent potential.

       Unleash Potential

Innovativepotentiality With the digital evolution and innovation taking place in organizations globally, the management must be mindful that the driving force behind the success and prosperity of organizations are employees.

Unleashpotentiality Human Capital is about potential, if unleashed, can transcend the organization or our society to reach the next level of maturity. It’s the individual, culture, circumstances, and society that sets a limit on that unlimited potential. Either individually or collaboratively, potentiality includes the overall ability to perform in the future unlocking potentiality; talent development should be consistent efforts and ongoing practices to unleash potential and improve professionalism.

Unleash Human Potential Human potential is both myth and truth. On one side, the condition of being human is the endless search for the conditions that allow the human to maximize human potential. On the other side, not only there's known upon the unknown, also unknown upon the unknown. There are physical potential, intellectual potential, and spiritual potential. The "view of the talent potential landscape” has many dimensions intellectually, psychologically, philosophically, and sociologically.

Unlock System Potential Digital is the age of information overloading and fierce competitions, either individually or collectively, potentiality includes the overall ability to perform in the future by discovering the strength and building their core competency.

Oftentimes, potentiality is “raw,” but it’s the worthy investment and hidden dimension to build unique capabilities, explore the emerging opportunities, design new business models, and investigate hidden paths for accelerating growth.

Unlockpotential We live in the modern society in which knowledge is only a few clicks away, learning and education helps people develop their cognitive ability and professional competency scientifically.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 7 million page views with about 9700+ blog postings in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify your voice, deepen your digital footprints, and match your way for human progression.

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Initiativeofriskintelligence

Risk management is important but should be handled and prioritized in such a way that it’s inherent in the way that it doesn't negatively impact business flexibility to deliver premium solutions.

With rapid change and hyper-connectivity, people and organizations are becoming more interdependent with each other. Risk management is not just about risk mitigation, every risk has opportunities, which leads to new strategies. 

Risk management has strategic dots that need to be connected; it’s important to lift risk management from risk control to risk resilience, and then, to risk intelligence. As financial performance is highly correlated with the level of integration and coordination across risk, control and compliance functions. The efforts on managing risk holistically or in a more integrated fashion are critical for the long term business success.

Organizations must have solid risk management disciplines, make objective risk assessments: It is a crucial step to initiate risk identification in planning processes for managing risks; embed risk identification and assessment in operational processes and multiple management disciplines. The good managers see that risk can provide very exciting opportunities for business growth. Besides identifying risks, they can spot opportunities, and put in place a mandated risk tolerance structure via escalation requirements based on current risk ratings.

There’re a growing number of organizations shifting their risk management orientation from bottom-up to top-down, with more senior management and board involvement. For leading organizations, enterprise risk management is already an integral compe­tency and top priority for C-Suite executives, providing the company a holistic process for connecting the right dots on risk management across the orga­nizations. They push the responsibilities of day-to-day risk ownership out to business managers, who can improve controls around key processes, using analytics to optimize the risk portfolio and improve decision-making coherence.

It is important to identify vulnerability in the control via risk assessment, and determine the potential range of consequences (finance loss, business interruption, reputation damage, etc.): The inevitable range, breadth, depth, and pace of uncontrollable factors acting on any organizations mean identifying business vulnerability is essential to improve business agility, performance, and maturity. Organizations need to have the right dose of risk appetite and high risk intelligence. As long as risks have been identified and agreed with stakeholders as per business needs, you can take information driven risk models that effectively predict, optimize, and consider sustainable approaches with multifaceted perspectives.

In reality, ineffective decision-making, especially at the strategic level will make their business vulnerable to emerging events, or even mislead their business in the wrong direction. The larger the organization and inputs are, the larger the amount of 'rules' are necessary for its functions. If not handled well, organizations are overly rigid, inflexible and become so vulnerable to the dynamic business environment. Thus, enhance a healthy cycle of feedback-feedforward, improve business consciousness, flexibility, and organizational agility.

It's important to harness leadership, enhance information-based decision-making, cultivate an open culture to prevent risks or problems from happening: The organization is not always the one paying for the risk. Stakeholders ranging from investors to customers, to ordinary citizens, to peer companies might all benefit or suffer from the risk attitude of a company. In order to prevent or solve a problem, you have to get an agreement that a problem or risk exists. Preventing problems, managing risks and enabling continuous improvement require the power of information, integrated data-based insight, as well as strong leadership support. It’s about applying quality information to forecast what will happen in the business and how to prevent risk timely.

Preventing problems, managing risks and enabling continuous improvement require the power of information. Instead of risk management being viewed as the role of a few people in risk management, it needs to be viewed as the responsibility of every person in the organization. It’s about the culture thing. Meaningful enterprise risk management is as much about changing organizational culture; all people must support it if they want to create risk management effectively in organizations, and prevent a problem from happening in a timely manner,

Risk management is important but should be handled and prioritized in such a way that it’s inherent in the way that it doesn't negatively impact business flexibility to deliver premium solutions. An effective approach to strategic risk management is to integrate risk identification mechanisms in multiple management disciplines, enhance the detection of future strategic risks and predictions of future performance, improve risk intelligence and business resilience.

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Investmentroi

Return On Investment value proposition should be an overall measurement based on the combination of cost, schedule, quality, performance, and satisfaction of varying stakeholders, to ensure business long term success.

Venture investment is a complex business activity to catalyze business growth. The corporate investment management needs to ensure that they are investing in the right business initiatives by taking a scientific approach, creating headroom for innovation and business growth. 

The logical investment scenario helps an organization assess whether the business improvement or people delight associated with emerging trends is the right investment to be done in the first place, and ensure the expected return on investment.

Investment management presents the value proposition as an “asset under construction”: Without investment, without business growth. One of the crucial tasks for business management is to make objective investment justification, evaluate return on investment, identify where budget, talent, and other resources & assets are focused vs. neglected, to ensure that the organization spends the money in the right way.

It's important for the management to clarify what investments you should direct more assets to by identifying and evaluating investments in a way that solves problems with priority, driving business value in terms that business stakeholders understand. Return on investment tells the business management how well an investment repays the company. Solid investment portfolios help the business open up new channels of revenue and monetization within the enterprise and their ecosystem, to get higher than expected business results.

Investment management evaluates the impacts of investment decisions by presenting a "strategic leverage” to maximize the business's benefit from their investment: Great investment managers ask insightful questions about the impact of ideas, the practicality and scalability of business models, cost/risk analysis, return on investment, etc, oversee the full set of business requirements to ensure the cohesiveness. So they can make wise investments and improve return on investment by articulating what the pros and cons of each investment option are for today and the proposed tomorrow, and to determine all the customers, users, and stakeholders and obtain their involvement, to make better investment justification.

The challenge for business investment management is to reinvent business continually by looking forward, looking ahead and being proactively looking for opportunities for business growth. Ensuring visibility into each investment is established to provide ongoing investment health information as well as enable understanding overall portfolio health. For all critical business investments, generate clearly defined business cases, look for investments to be justified and governed on the basis of business benefit delivery.

Investment management needs to ensure that they are investing in the right business initiatives as “change/innovation catalyst”: Organizations not only need to survive today, but also thrive for the future. It's Important to create headroom for innovation and business growth. Invest in great ideas and generate unique business value to fit for the strategic goal of the company; invest in people with talent, invest in the trend - the new technology, advanced knowledge and practices. All those investments, like seeds, can grow innovation fruits, rejuvenate corporate culture, enhance effective idea generation-selection-implementation cycle, lift the organization up to growth trajectories, etc.

Great investors advocate entrepreneurship/intrapreneurship activities, strike the right balance of short-term gain and long-term perspective, and put emphasis on investing in people-centric innovation. It’s important to make an objective assessment of their investment portfolio, achieve business initiatives portfolio agility to anticipate and respond to changing market conditions, and build unique organizational competency. An innovative organization needs to discover the new path for business growth by taking entrepreneurship activities, continues to generate fresh ideas, moves ideas through their life cycle to achieve first to market, and delivers innovative solutions to tailor customers’ needs.

Investment is both art and science. Organizations need to make sure that enough resources are available to deliver the programs, talented professionals are put in the right positions, the processes are goal driven, to ensure higher than expected results. The Return On Investment value proposition should be an overall measurement based on the combination of cost, schedule, quality, performance, and satisfaction of varying stakeholders, to ensure business long term success.

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Illuminatedata

Are we seeing - data ocean like- blue gem, shining, under the sun, brilliantly? or gray limestone, rolling through- the shadow, mysteriously?

Data is growing,

exponentially;

information is-

permeating,

everywhere,

in our society;

when we look at-

the Big Data Sea,

what do we see,

how to perceive it,

in a profound way?

Are we seeing -

data ocean like-

blue gem,

shining, under the sun,

brilliantly?

or gray limestone,

rolling through-

the shadow,

mysteriously?


Can we see-

the ebbs and flows,

beauty of -

ocean creatures,

swimming, freely;

or the danger of -

whirling tides,

rising & falling,

stormingly?

Shall we look for -

those enchanting pictures of -

big data,

or the missing pieces of -

Big Data puzzle,

thoughtfully?

Can we capture -

the color theme,

uncover the myth of -

pattern and

hunt treasure in -

Big Data sea,

adventurously?

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Initiatebodleadership

BoD leadership strength is both innate and can be developed with the right mix of leadership mindset, skillset, and toolset.

Organizational board of directors as one of the top leadership pillars steers their companies in the right directions with the right speed. To improve directorship effectiveness, there are quite a lot of things corporate boards need to shape up, and there are so many issues the boards have to deal with. 

An innovative board has a broader view of looking ahead, unique insight of looking deeper, and distinguished leadership competency of looking beyond, to improve organizational long term advantage.

Initiate corporate board leaders’ navigation practices based on their clear vision, profound understanding, and empathy to steer: Board directors are not just the followers to chase the tidal waves blindly, but are able to capture the invaluable business insight to make sound judgments and effective decisions in a consistent way. The board leadership effectiveness is based on their leadership substances such as vision and purpose with digital leadership styles such as participation, coaching or delegation.

Corporate boards play a significant role in steering the business in the right directions under business dynamics with “VUCA” reality, and lead the business forward smoothly. Besides strategic planning and innovation oversight, Boards also oversee other broad areas such as governance, investing, and enterprise architecture, etc. How to leverage accurate information from a reliable resource in making a sound judgment? To reach the high level of governance maturity, effective boards ensure that management has put in place an effective risk-management process, and the directors assess whether risks are undertaken and managed consistently with the right dose of risk appetite.

Initiate BoD’s global leadership influence based on their world class leadership competency: We live in such a diverse world with high velocity, unpredictability, uncertainty, exponential growth, and fierce competitions. It’s a global ecosystem of stakeholders that is going to determine whether or not your organization can thrive. It is the top leadership teams such as BoDs, who need to set the tone for building a high-performance global organization, in order to lead changes step-wisely and create the momentum for the digital paradigm shift effortlessly.

The corporate board’s global leadership influence is based on their world-class leadership competencies such as self-regulation, judgmental intelligence, empathy, motivation to work in a global environment, cultural cognition, understanding of complexity and its contradictions, the tolerance of ambiguity or uncertainty, learning agility, flexibility, and consistency. It is important to identify and close the gap between knowledge and insight in the boardroom. An insightful corporate global leader as a change agent demonstrates global cognizance to reach the state of knowledge proficiency, spread expertise influence, connecting wider dots to drive global scope innovation.

Initiate corporate boards’ oversight of the performance of the management team and the performance of the business: If the business results are lacking, then the corporate board effectiveness must be questioned. The corporate board’s business performance monitoring is not limited to financial performance only, but also to the firm’s performance in creating value for employees, customers, or societies. Instead of simply saying that an assigned work was completed successfully, but giving time for evaluating how the work was achieved in terms of planning, use of available resources, clarity of direction, as well as how teamwork was achieved. So the BoDs need to review important capital allocation and monitor the important investment performance. Business performance measures are numbers in context, results related to your strategy. It's not only about the performance now, but also about the future performance with a long-term perspective.

Senior leadership such as board directors makes influence from mindset to behavior, and evolving to what is needed next for transformative changes and societal advancements. Corporate BoD leadership strength is both innate and can be developed with the right mix of leadership mindset, skillset, and toolset. Their leadership maturity directly impacts the overall business competency and maturity.

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Initiatives

We are experiencing the paradigm shift in the global society, from division to integration; silo-based command & control to information-led mass collaboration.

Information is growing exponentially, the internet and collaborative platforms & tools flatten the world to a certain degree, harnessing information fluidity and cross functional communication. 

The business world we live in is heading the paradigm shift from silo to hyperconnectivity and interdependence; from inside-out process-driven to outside in people centricity. It is a strategic imperative for today’s leaders and professionals to embrace the broader view of global society, collaborate cross-disciplinarily, co-solve common problems innovatively and build an advanced global world harmoniously.

It’s important to generate a set of common values, clarify objective perceptions of crucial issues at the global scope, share holistic view of advancement in humanity : Compared to the industrial era with static information and overly restrictive boundaries in the last century, today’s global world is much more open, hyper-diverse and interdependent. There is abundant global knowledge, enriched cultural heritage, religious beliefs, etc. It requires us to be willing to listen to diverse viewpoints, broaden the perspective to fix misperceptions, develop a set of common values (such as inclusiveness, respect, trust, empathy, innovativeness, fairness, etc.), establish certain common standards, and share a holistic view of the global problem-solving and progression.

Global professionals today need to articulate a set of values that they can bring to the table, present the mindset, attitude, and behavior consistency in conveying those values. It’s strategic imperative to frame the new mind to see the ever-changing world via the multi-dimensional lenses; deepening understanding of how others think and value empathetically; gaining an in-depth understanding of your environment proactively. The new breed of global citizens today have a diversity of thoughts, characters, cognitive differences, skills, styles, etc. Global organizations give people the voices, tools and experiences of how to communicate across the world more effectively even if they have cognitive differences, subjective perception, language obstacles, etc, in order for them to work collaboratively and innovate relentlessly.

It’s strategic to develop compelling global business cases for making proposed investments with global context: The purpose of developing global business cases is to clarify vision and strategy behind initiatives, solve some problems with global context cross disciplines such as innovation, education, sustainability, etc. Business initiative management with a global perspective does require not only interdisciplinary understanding to connect the dots and see what's possible, but also technical expertise to solve problems smoothly.

Strong universal business cases enable organizational leaders to streamline people and process management, gain competitive advantages and generate options for providing future business competencies to solve problems with large scopes, etc. From a business initiative portfolio point of view, the management needs to deal with cost/revenue/regulatory/risk issues cautiously. It should encourage doing better pre-work, defining key performance indicators and the "success criteria," enabling consideration of the range of options, rather than the traditional "jump to solution" problem-solving methodologies and practices.

A global society has a huge potential to become a highly innovative system in which all sorts of ingredients are integrated dynamically to achieve innovation fluency: A system is an organic thing that keeps evolving, with this side, that side, and interactions in between. An integral global system helps organizations recognize challenges, share global insight, understand boundaries, deal with constraints, frictions, bridge a variety of gaps seamlessly; lead radical change, orchestrate structural innovation in the global scope, and make a significant impact on societal evolution.

Our co-shared global world still has quite a lot of boundaries. In many traditional organizations with lower-level of maturity, the business is the sum of pieces, not running as a premium whole. Information technology can work on the system and across the systems; it is the glue to integrate key ingredients into differentiated business competency for solving problems holistically. Hence, today’s leaders and professionals need to connect interdisciplinary dots across the global scope, embrace the broader view of human society, spur & implement fresh ideas, scale up, and achieve innovation fluency.

We are experiencing the paradigm shift in the global society, from division to integration; silo-based command & control to information-led mass collaboration. The key elements that future leaders and professionals in all realms of the global perspectives should acquire to familiarize themselves with multifaceted effects of globalization. In the world-wide scope, cognitive intelligence, cultural empathy, talent mobility, risk tolerance, professional sophistication, intellectual influence, etc, are all unique themes in shaping the global workforce, solving common problems, and building an advanced global society.

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Initiativesoflubrication

Unify people’s differences, enforce trust, transparency, respect, ensure the business ecosystem is able to communicate, negotiate, reciprocate, and cooperate to harness change and lead transformative changes.

The purpose of the book “Digital Hybridity: How to Strike the Right Balance for Digital Paradigm Shift” is to shed some light on how to strike the right balance of stability and changes; being transactional to keep spinning and being transformational to leap forward for making a seamless digital paradigm shift. 

Digital organizations should apply the hybrid management approach, focus on building a diverse, networked, and extended modern working environment in which the powerful digital platforms and computing technologies enable seamless conversations, delayer overly rigid organizational hierarchy, inspire idea sharing and brainstorming, and engage employees and partners to achieve the high-performance result.

Initiatives to Lubricate

Initiatetolubricate The very characteristics of digital new normal are rapid change, exponential growth of information, constant disruptions. Increasingly, enterprises find themselves enmeshed in "ecosystems," full of nonlinearity, unrepeatability, unpredictability. While businesses can influence and get influenced by these "ecosystems," they have limited "control" over these ecosystems. What are the lubricants for the organizations to deal with conflicts, fricions, unexpected events smoothly, how to improve organizational agility, create strategic synergy and synchronize business speed?

Initiativetoinnovate Our business world is becoming more connected and interdependent, the crucial issue for many organizations though is that they don’t have an integrated approach to solve complex problems holistically. They haven’t reached the next level of business growth and maturity.

Inclusiveunification Business world is full of uncertainty and ambiguity. In order to deal with today’s complex problems and overcome challenges, individual work and group work cannot be done without horizontal unification and vertical penetration. Gone are the days where organizations can dictate the parameters of the working relationship via top-down, businesses today need to make shifts from static to dynamic; inside-out to outside-in people-centric. Unify people’s differences, enforce trust, transparency, respect, ensure the business ecosystem is able to communicate, negotiate, reciprocate, and cooperate to harness change and lead transformative changes.

Initiatebalancedapproach Due to exponential growth of information and emerging digital technology, today’s workforce is a technology savvy, hyper-diverse and super-connected with the characteristics of multi-generation, multi-culture, and multi-devicing. There is a risk in investing in your people, but what is the risk of not investing?

Innovation The business needs innovation as a silver-lining. Compared to nimble startups, many well-established organizations are struggling with innovation because of command-control management styles, overly rigid business processes, legacy technologies, inflexible workforce, etc. To improve innovation effectiveness, set guidelines to ensure that innovation efforts are steered in the right direction.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 7 million page views with about #9700+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. blog posting. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom, to inspire critical thinking and spur healthy debates. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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