Welcome to our blog, the digital brainyard to fine tune "Digital Master," innovate leadership, and reimagine the future of IT.

The magic “I” of CIO sparks many imaginations: Chief information officer, chief infrastructure officer , Chief Integration Officer, chief International officer, Chief Inspiration Officer, Chief Innovation Officer, Chief Influence Office etc. The future of CIO is entrepreneur driven, situation oriented, value-added,she or he will take many paradoxical roles: both as business strategist and technology visionary,talent master and effective communicator,savvy business enabler and relentless cost cutter, and transform the business into "Digital Master"!

The future of CIO is digital strategist, global thought leader, and talent master: leading IT to enlighten the customers; enable business success via influence.

Sunday, October 30, 2016

The CIO’s Digital Agenda: Digital IT Best/Next Practices

10:26 PM  Pearl Zhu  2 comments

Besides building a set of principles to follow, it’s also important to develop a series of best/next practices to scale up and amplify digital effects.
IT is the foundation of data, information, and modern knowledge. The biggest misnomer regarding IT is that it is "just technology." The most powerful and differentiating tool in all of today's businesses is INFORMATION and that is provided by IT systems. How to continually fine-tune IT and get digital ready?

Digital IT Best/Next Practices

  • Three Best Practices to Run a Frictionless Digital IT?  Businesses are transforming from an industrial era with knowledge scarcity to the digital era with information abundance. Technology plays a pivotal role in such a paradigm shift, and the information is penetrating into every core process of the organization. Companies that lacked the skills to manage information technology effectively suffered compared with competitors that had mastered those skills. Besides setting digital principles to follow through, which best/next practices should IT leaders develop and practice for running a frictionless digital IT?
  • Three Practices in Achieving IT Management Excellence? With the fast pace of changes and overwhelming information nowadays, Information & Technology are permeating to every corner of the business, often IT can either make or break a company almost overnight. IT strategy is an integral component of the business strategy, as more often than not, technology is the driving force behind business innovations. The history reveals that IT needs to be understood and harnessed by all stakeholders, to fulfill its potential and strategic importance as a differentiator of companies. A seamless digital journey is made of many solid steps, how to develop a set of next practice for achieving IT management excellence and improving organizational agility?
  • Three Practices to Overcome Corporate Silo Mentality? We have transitioned from an industrial to knowledge, innovation, and hyperconnectivity economy - with this shift has come to a change in organizational forms away from the traditional rigid hierarchies managed through command and control to more fluid and responsive network forms. Yet many business managers still apply old silo management mindsets to new ways of organizing and this legacy of the old economy limits many 'networked' organizations. Are silos a mere product of organizational design? Or is their nature tied to a deeper level: the humankind's nature?


  • The Daily Grinding of IT? Today’s IT organization plays a significant role in the journey of digital transformation, IT needs to be strategic, innovative, forward-thinking, agile, flexible, speedy, and customer-centric. However, every journey starts with the first step, the long-term perspectives come with daily grinding. Think big, and start small. How can IT leaders manage IT with daily best practices, to not just fixing the symptoms, but building its capabilities and making a continuous delivery to achieving the strategic goals and fulfilling the business vision?
  • Three Practices to Scale Up Digital Transformation? Organizations large and small are on the journey of digital transformation. Besides building a set of principles to follow, it’s also important to develop a series of best/next practice to scale up and amplify digital effects. The business practice is always a combination of people and how they are used to doing things based on the set of principles and standards to adapt to changes in the business or technology shift.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.5 million page views with 3200+ 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. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating the new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes the time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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"Leadership Master" Book Tuning: Three Traits of Transformational Leader

10:20 PM  Pearl Zhu  No comments

Transformational leadership is moving you and others, from mindset to behavior, and evolving to what is needed next for radical changes.

Fundamentally, leadership is more about future but starts at today. Leadership is about creating a powerful future that is compelling in the present, utilizes the best talents, capabilities, and resources of their people and organization to drive changes and produce meaningful and valuable results. Change is a vital element for the contemporary organization to stay competitive, and transformation is a radical change. Transformation is the momentum from quantitative accumulation to the quantum leap. What are the unique traits of transformational leaders though?

Vision: A transformation is on the horizon, seek for change. Vision is a foresight with a proactive understanding of cause and effect, not reactive seeing. Vision differentiates transformational leaders from transactional managers. It is a clear choice among future scenarios that advocates future trends and promotes certain behavior. Leaders need to be constantly VISIBLE sharing VISION and enabling others to share it. The vision for long-term transformation is required for the change to be effective and lasting. Change the game is a mindset, transformational leaders can provide the direction as vision, mission, strategy, as well as leadership skills like decision-making, delegation, and monitoring. This role affects most through congruent behaviors, continuous endorsement of the change and regular communication to keep the momentum. Change leadership concerns the driving forces, visions, and processes that fuel large-scale transformation. The transformation is required to provide the vision and focus on what the organization needs to look like alongside the impetus and sense of urgency.

Creativity: A Transformation has long-range perspective, and focuses on goals of innovation. You can not make the omelet without breaking a few eggs. A transformation often needs to break down the outdated rules, that makes “creativity” a unique trait for transformational leadership. In addition to the set point changing, transformation requires first shifting mindsets, and then, building new nonlinear skills and integral capabilities, and reinforcing and embedding new practices/reflexes. From curious to creative to critical, the emphasis of transformational leadership should be put new ways to improve surrounding and the world. For what can be called "implement-table innovation." The term transformational change, when applied to an organization, carries with it a sense of "evolution" which means, a renewed understanding of the future of business; what’re the disruptive trends; how your organization catalyzes the positive and progressive changes and how much better one can do to leverage creativity and lead a seamless transformation.

Changeability: Leadership is about CHANGE. Change is the “DNA” of modern leadership. It is a basic human ability to inspire self and others to look beyond limitations and make continuous improvement. It is hard to believe the leader will be an effective transformational leader if he or she never made any transformational change in his/her own career or life. Keep in mind good leaders make tough decisions. If the end state is desirable, it is highly probable tough decisions will need to be made. People respond in different ways to different situations, and some people perceive less risk when compared with others. The fear of consequences; the perception / response to consequences vary from person to person, and that's what makes change interesting and challenging. Hence, change leaders/practitioners need to have good critical thinking skills, high level of adaptability, learning agility, communication and engagement skills. Change is a dance between the top management and the affected parts of the organization. Starting with a core belief that people can be trusted, they like to change, but dislike “being changed." We tend to need interpersonal transformation, then intra-personal transformation to achieve the organizational digital transformation.

Fundamentally leadership is about change and influencing people to change. The speed of change is accelerating, Transformational Leadership becomes a more critical capacity to influence others through inspiration, motivated by a passion, birthed by a conviction of a sense of purpose of why you were created. Transformational leadership is moving you and others, from mindset to behavior, and evolving to what is needed next for radical changes and societal advancements.

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The Noble Purposes of IT Performance Management

10:18 PM  Pearl Zhu  No comments

Running IT as a business, IT performance has to be clearly linked with business performance.

IT organizations are at the cross-road to either ride above the learning curve of the digital transformation or become irrelevant as a support function. IT metrics has to evolve from being a cost center to becoming a revenue generator. It’s dangerous to impose metrics just because the focus on what’s measurable is manageable. The only way to do this is to show a clear link to top executives between IT efficiency and productivity and top-line revenues. Continually accelerating changes in IT consumption and production require faster responses and better performance metrics. Start with the noble purposes of IT performance management and then select the right set of metrics for measuring the right things and measure them right. IT measures should cover all areas that contribute to value creation including service quality, employee engagement, customer satisfaction and financial outcomes itself.

Measuring IT performance to enable business growth and development: Contextually, the measurement method is to persuade management of the progress of strategy execution. IT value to the business can be categorized in a number of ways, IT is a key enabler to build almost all differentiated digital business capabilities nowadays. Assuming a healthy pipeline of work, trending to forecast on releasing new capabilities (the business getting what they paid for), KPI setting should focus on achieving the ultimate goals of business as a whole. It is one thing to have the IT resource aligned with the business strategies/ objectives (IT Effectiveness); it is also something to have the IT resources (people and operational IT processes) refined to the point that they are nimble, can adapt to changing business demands in a timely fashion, can be reapplied to altering business priorities and be effective with little down curve via IT efficiency. There are indeed qualitative objectives that the basis for rating performance is the set of criteria that address the question: “what does it mean to enable business growth and catalyze development?" And develop a set of measures to stimulate IT performance for achieving such a noble business purpose.

Measuring IT performance for improving revenue (enable the business to gain market share, enter new markets, etc): IT metrics has to evolve from being a cost center to becoming a revenue generator. The only way to do this is to show a clear link to top executives between IT efficiency and productivity/ top-line revenues. This is an important step to building IT reputation as a strategic business partner and growth engine. Improving revenue alone without improving net will become meaningless as stakeholders will be more interested to see how much net generated from the business rather than revenue. A CIO can help the business to improve net by spotting the growth opportunities, capturing customer insight, reducing cost of doing business or by various means such as right sourcing & sizing, keeping IT cost flat while at the same time maximizing its output so when the business revenue increase, IT cost remain the same which will improve net or that will improve the top line and at the same time decrease expenses to improve the bottom line.  

Measuring IT performance for improving speed/agility (Speed to Market, ability to change direction with the market, etc): It is one thing to have the IT resource aligned with the business strategies/ objectives (IT effectiveness), it is also something to have the IT resources (people and operational IT processes) refined to the point that they are nimble, can adapt to changing business demands in a timely fashion, can be reapplied to altering business priorities and be effective with little down curve via IT agility. When a CIO is able to position and maintain the IT organization to ensure it addresses both "IT effectiveness" and "IT efficiency," "IT agility" and "IT maturity," measure them in the right way and communicate the tangible IT value to business partners, they have earned their stripes.

Measuring IT performance for improving customer satisfaction (internal customers -employee productivity and engagement, end external customer experience optimization): One of the noble purposes for digital IT and the organization as a whole is to build up a customer-centric organization. On one side of the gap is how well you understand your customers, and on the other side is how well you deliver to your customers. The narrower the gap then the more Customer Centric (CC) you are. Once recognition of the gap exists then the journey starts towards CC starts. Measuring how well you are delivering to your customers is relatively easy but developing a true measure of how well one understands their customers is the hard part. The other key factor in affecting a customer's perception is that of relevance. First of all, you would look at how many of your KPIs measure the end result from a customer perspective of outcome driven rather than output driven. IT internal users and/or end customers whatever works for your business, consider using the Net Promoter Score (NPS) to measure customer and/or partner advocacy of your IT organization.

Measure IT performance for Risk Management (reduces business system downtime, create business continuity, etc): There are two aspects to managing risk, assessing it and then evaluating it against acceptable levels (risk appetite.) In this case, there are multiple players. The CIO will generally drive a periodic risk assessment, usually with the help and input of multiple areas. But it is up to the board or other governance bodies to determine if the risk level identified is acceptable. The CIO does not own the risk, but he/she can and should certainly be tasked with assessing, measuring, and monitoring the risk on an ongoing basis.

Measure IT performance for optimizing cost (reduces the cost of the current business process, improve margins, freeing up capital for new ventures, etc): Every new technology adopted must facilitate business but also bring down the incremental cost of growth and the time to market. That should be the true metric for the IT leaders: how have they been able to impact the top and bottom-line and facilitate growth and competitiveness. IT value is measured by the optimization and consumption of IT assets in support of business solutions. Some organizations apply the technique, either being called touchpoint analysis or another term for identifying and tracing through the manner by which an IT initiative impacts an organization’s bottom line and business efficiency.

Running IT as a business, IT performance has to be clearly linked with business performance. IT projects should be called a business project with a clear objective and full alignment with the overall company’s objectives, otherwise, they do not exist. Most commonly, the IT narratives within strategic business cases reflect multifaceted business value pathways: responding to mandates by external parties; upgrading existing technologies; making business process improvements; responding to a competitive necessity; gaining a competitive advantage, generating options for provisioning future business capabilities and fueling the digital transformation.

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Saturday, October 29, 2016

The Monthly Mind Tuning: Five Anti-Digital Mindsets Oct. 2016

11:35 PM  Pearl Zhu  No comments

Diagnose the problems and lead changes at the mindset level.

 The right mind is the foundation with which to build competitive capabilities and drive the right attitude. From talent management perspective, you need to evaluate how people think, why they think that way, and how they approach problems and solve them. So you can easily and consistently differentiate future high performers from those with a mediocre mindset in your organization.

     

Five Anti-Digital Mindsets Oct. 2016


A Bureaucratic Thinking? The word "bureaucracy" is often seen in pejorative circumstances. Though, its roots being: bureau(fr) = desk and kratos(gr) = rules/ power, it can embrace different meaning:  According to dictionary.com, bureaucratic is “a system of administration based upon organization into bureaus, division of labor, a hierarchy of authority, etc, designed to dispose of a large body of work in a routine manner." From this perspective, it seems the larger the organization and inputs, the larger the amount of 'rules' necessary for its function and to keep dependent variables and outputs delivery stable. At the industrial age, most of the organizations are running at silos, with the top down organizational structure, bureaucracy thinking is perhaps understandable, because “command and control” are part of business culture. However, in the digital environment in which organization’s function become more dynamic, the environment changes quicker than the 'speed' with which rules and processes can be changed, does bureaucratic thinking become the intolerable mindset to stop the change and mental barrier to stifle innovation? What makes the difference between bureaucracy and a 'healthy' organization?
Group Thinking and Abilene Paradox  Group thinking or peer pressure is a term first used in 1972 by social psychologist Irving Janis that refers to a psychological phenomenon in which people strive for consensus within a group. In many cases, people will set aside their own personal beliefs or adopt the opinion of the rest of the group. In an Abilene paradox, a group of people collectively decide on a course of action that is counter to the preferences of many or all of the individuals in the group. You can see it at work when nobody wants to admit that the project is doomed, so they keep working on it, even though each person on the team knows it is futile. Why is it human nature to go along with what we believe the rest of the group wants to do without taking the time to actually check out if we are all taking a trip to Abilene?
A Complacency Mind The world is constantly changing and digital is all about flow. But complacency is at the heart of resistance to change. Where does complacency come from, and how to fix such an anti-digital mindset?
A Binary Mind? The digital world is nonlinear and ambiguous, also multi-dimensional and colorful. However, many leaders and business professionals still keep the old silo thinking habits at the industrial age, for many of them, people are either good or bad, friend or enemy; things are either right or wrong; win or lose; the state is either blue or red, and the world is either black or white; there are no shades in between. Either you call it “extreme thinking,” “binary thinking,” or “bipolar thinking,” such mind is too rigid in the outlook; too judgmental in managing relationship; too static to sense the change; too silo to think the big picture, and too linear to fit in the non-linear digital world. More specifically, what’re the root causes of such mindset, is it changeable?
An Excessively “Angry” Mind: It’s normal as humans, we have all sorts of emotions, but how you react to them decides your EQ maturity level. From example, according to American Psychology Association, “Anger is an emotion characterized by antagonism toward someone or something you feel has deliberately done you wrong. Anger can be a good thing. It can give you a way to express negative feelings, or motivate you to find solutions to problems. But excessive anger can cause problems. Increased blood pressure and other physical changes associated with anger make it difficult to think straight and harm your physical and mental health.” The point is what antidote are you using to counteract your angry reaction and your habit to pull the trigger??
The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.5 million page views with about #2100th blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating the new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes the time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.


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Five Pillars in Building Decision-Making Capability

11:31 PM  Pearl Zhu  1 comment

Decision-making is a solid business capability to improve business responsiveness, agility, and competency.

 Digital business is becoming complex and uncertain, decision making is more often a complex scenario, especially for the large, strategic decision making. Therefore, it is crucial to take a systematic approach for improving decision effectiveness, leveraging both gut-feeling and analytics, logic and intuition, interdisciplinary knowledge and group contribution. Here are five pillars to build decision-making as a solid business capability to improve business responsiveness, agility, and competency.

Information: Information and decision-making are intimately connected and interdependent. Many information-savvy organizations have invested in tools and created analytic teams to make informed real-time decisions. The information allows you to build an actionable insight on making effective decisions as well as how to take actions to move from one level to the other. Information as input to the decision-making does not absolutely determine the decision but allows the decision-maker to exercise their judgment. It applies to the context and environment in which decisions are made. The full life cycle of corporate information management is to ensure that decisions have been made by the right people at the right time via the right processes to solve the right problems. In high-effective organizations, information is refined to knowledge, insight, and wisdom, enabling making the right decisions at the right time for solving the right problems.

Resource: Making the decision in a timely manner requires resource awareness. Effective resource allocation and utilization are important factors for timely decision making. The resources include the available information, effective decision-making framework or tools, the heterogeneous team setting with cognitive difference; the internal decision factors which may influence the decision process include, such as the goals of the decision maker, decision situation, decision context, relevant knowledge, as well as the organizational information/knowledge management capabilities, etc. Resource limitations are significant and decision makers who are not cognoscente of what they can or cannot do will always make a bad decision.

Process: With increasing complexity and overwhelming information overloading, many decisions are difficult and time-consuming, and decision making is more science than art. A sound process to frame decision is critical. You need a sound process to frame the decision, spec out your options, weigh them appropriately with the right people, and actually make a decision. In traditional organizational setting, decision making often lies in informal and closed group power centers within the organization. The lack of clarity usually surrounds the context of the decision to be taken. To fine tune decision-making processes, it is important to identify the bottleneck in decision-making scenario and choking point. If the decision-making scenario is well designed and executed, you have the highest probability of getting the best outcome in the state of knowledge accessible at the time of decision.

Tools: We live in the era of digital convenience. There are many great tools around for either collecting useful information or helping to make effective decisions. A collaborative tool is better for strategic decisions. Most strategic decisions involve many people with different objectives, an effective collaboration platform will enhance communication and improve group decision-making effectiveness. Analytics is the great tools for improving decision maturity as well. With an effective process and efficient tools, if you mine, cleanse and improve the data to produce information, then combine that information and visualize it in different ways, then you gain organizational knowledge and from that knowledge, you can make excellent decisions.

People: People are the ultimate decision makers, not tools or information. For decision-making to be effective, the decision-maker must have the right dose of "gut feeling," and enough knowledge to make their decisions rich in information and significantly different from the available data. It is important to understand the psychology of decision-maker. The psychology to make a decision is embedded with the "choice" process (which includes identification, contemplation, evaluation, and selection of a universe of alternatives) within the thoughts block. Often making decisions is all about making the right choice to fit different circumstances. That's why "the most relevant aspect" of thoughts is choices...because that's ultimately what drives actions. And how effective the decision is depends on how capable the decision maker can climb the knowledge pyramid from data to information to insight and wisdom.

One significant effect of digitization is increased velocity, complexity, unpredictability, and a need for a faster response to changes in businesses based on effective and efficient decision making. Decisions are necessary as a result of limited resources in time, knowledge, capital, and people. The distinction between the decision quality and the outcome is important. The big “HOW” of decision making becomes more transparent, logical and scientific, and it is based on the decision-making capability of the organization.

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CIOs as "Chief Improvement Officer": Three Practices in Achieving IT Management Excellence

11:28 PM  Pearl Zhu  No comments

IT management excellence is one of the most important pillars for running a high-performance digital IT organization.

 With the fast pace of changes and overwhelming information nowadays, Information & Technology are permeating to every corner of the business, often IT can either make or break a company almost overnight. IT strategy is an integral component of the business strategy, as more often than not, technology is the driving force behind business innovations. The history reveals that IT needs to be understood and harnessed by all stakeholders, to fulfill its potential and strategic importance as a differentiator of companies. A seamless digital journey is made of many solid steps, how to develop a set of next practice for achieving IT management excellence and improving organizational agility?

Prioritization Practices: Majority of IT organizations are often overloaded and understaffed, and get stuck at the lower or mid-level of maturity. They are always struggling with “doing more with less,” or “taking orders from customers without doubts.”  A company has finite resources to apply to get the best yield possible to meet stakeholders’ expectation. So there’re always some constraints for businesses to balance a healthy portfolio of “run, grow, and transform,” to explore the new opportunities or deploy the new ideas. Therefore, evaluation and prioritization are taken place to leverage resources in management. Prioritization is critical, as the alternative is a land grab for resources. Prioritization helps to focus the strategy of the organization, which has huge benefits in terms of execution. Since the projects have different investment considerations and business goals, for example, digitizing touch point of the customer experience is to delight customers and improve customer retention; designing new tools is to help improving employees’ productivity; risk reduction for maintenance work, ROI for tactical and some strategic work, and organization learning measures for true innovation work. So the business objective shouldn't be to work on only those projects for which you have staff, it should be to maximize what you can accomplish through creative leverage of your talent pool. In addition, prioritization brings transparency to the organization, creating internal competition among new ideas and projects. Prioritization forces people to be more creative, to come up with better ideas, and manage them in a structural way.
Cost Optimization Practices: Thoughtful cost cutting and investment with an eye towards the future is the continuous practice of a well-run company, this is particularly true for IT, because of frequent technology update and costly IT investment. All of IT spending must be looked at through an investment lens. Mistakes are made when the all-in value of a business line (including technology) is not taken into consideration when making budget decisions. IT management should check periodically via asking: What returns are you expecting? When do you expect them? What risk levels are you taking on? Scrutinize every expenditure and ask if it can be done more cost effectively. Renegotiate all maintenance contracts; using demand-side analysis with TCO shifts from technology budget to business budget discussions, to ensure that technology spending is in line with the business strategies and objectives. From staff management perspective, take advantage of re-aligning staffing by having a more flexible talent management. When a CIO is able to position and maintain the IT organization to ensure it addresses both "IT effectiveness" and "IT efficiency," they have earned their stripes.

Simplification Practices: By nature, technology is complex, every intelligence has complexity behind it. However, it doesn’t mean IT should make things more and more complicated. In fact, “Keep it Simple” should always be one of the guiding principles and management culture for running IT to achieve operational excellence. Logically, simplifying the complicated thing is an optimal and smart choice,
Simplicity brings speed, clarity, flexibility, and productivity. IT management is in the continuous tuning mode through consolidation, modernization, integration, and optimization, streamline IT processes and tighten coordination with vendors and partners. Re-plan any project or undertaking via Agile methodology so that there are deliverables that provide benefit to the business at the shorter delivery cycle. Run, grow and transformation, simplify unproductive complexity and streamline limited resources on higher prioritized projects to make competitive business advantage.

IT management excellence is one of the most important pillars for running a high-performance digital IT organization. IT leaders should remember that IT is about the Information, and focus on being a solution-driven organization, innovation engine, and run IT as a business, rigorously identify and pursue business value via setting the right priorities, keeping things simple, and making continuous optimization.

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Friday, October 28, 2016

The CIO’s Digital Agenda: Leverage Critical Thinking in Digital Transformation Oct. 2016

11:26 PM  Pearl Zhu  No comments

With the increasing speed of changes, many organizations are inundated with tactical tasks and daily operational duties, they don’t spend enough time on scrutinizing the long term strategy and identify disastrous blind spots in order to make a smooth business transformation. Indeed, there are both blind spots in strategy formulation and execution. So how to identify and close those blind spots in order to accelerate digital transformation.

     Leverage Critical Thinking in Digital Transformation

  • How to Leverage Critical Thinking for Transformative Actions? Either in our personal life or professional life, besides daily routines, there are crucial points for transformation, in which we need a mind shift for radical changes. What do you see as the spark within each of us that when ignited passion inspires us out of a routine? Is it the spark of adversity from the lower levels of Maslow's hierarchy or the spark of creativity from the top? Do you agree that the agile critical thinking has creativity well embedded? And how can you leverage critical thinking for the transformative actions?

  • Have You Focused on Fixing the Wrong Cause of a Problem?As human species, we are still facing many problems and challenges. Either for individuals, organizations, or society as a whole, the problem-solving capability is crucial to surviving and thriving. However, many decision-makers fail to fully grasp and accurately perceive what leads to problems and difficulties. Often, events and patterns are observed on the surface, and then the action is taken, but that is too early. After observing events and patterns, there are the underlying structures, the mechanisms, that cause the problem. And people lack critical thinking are usually never question because "it's the way things should be." Problem-solving in the majority of organizations today is woefully inadequate, so what happens when you focus on fixing the wrong cause of problems?
  • Do we Handle Problems at the Level of the Mindset, or Shall We? We live in the rapidly changing digital era full of paradox: on the one side, human world is running at internet speed, the physical distance is no longer the barrier to separate the world, the information is only a click away, the knowledge cycle is significantly shortened; on the other hand, people’s minds, mainly shaped in their early age, with change inertia, are far lagging behind the era we live in, they turn to be the true obstacle to distance the heart and stop human progress. And it is also the deep root cause of many business and societal problems. So would it be possible to handle the problems at the level of the mindset, but how?


  • How do you Change Mindsets? We live in the era, more often the "mainstream" mind is far lagging behind the internet speed. It must be acknowledged that changing mindset can be a very long process, it takes both vision and strategy. It occurs only through a dialogical process. It requires a devotion to fairness, correctness, truth, progress and solid respect for fundamental rights. Change happens when mindset turns into mind flow.
  • Critical Thinking as Corporate Management Practice The National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking defines critical thinking as the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action. From a management perspective, why isn't critical system thinking more prevalent in corporate management practices??

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.5+million page views with about #3200+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. blog posting. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom, to inspire critical thinking and spur healthy debates. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating the new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes the time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

Read More