Three Ingredients in Creativity

Developing creativity requires both self-awareness and self- motivation. 

Creativity is the flow. It’s about breaking down the convention thinking box, connecting wider dots, embrace broader viewpoints, and come out novel ideas. Creativity has many “ingredients,” and creativity is the high-level intelligence.

Intuition: Intuition is often called “gut feeling,” sometimes, not just the emotional side of the mind, it’s an inner calling. An intuitive mind has the inner strength and the willpower to follow the courageous heart, and thus, having the better chance to be creative. Intuition needs some kind of catalyst, sometimes that can be as easy as asking a right-brain-oriented question. We need to be provoked to make our intuition work. it's about proactively opening ourselves, leverage intuition to take “fast thinking” scenario and switch on creativity button purposefully. Intuition should be taken as a new insight, a new idea, a new angle, but must be backed with sound reasoning in the end before putting it into action. Creativity is nurtured in solitude and triggered by intuition, it requires to step away from the normal noises, listen to your heart, follow your guts, be curious enough to understand the surroundings and let creative thoughts flow.

Insight: Creativity often means you need to apply the previous knowledge to the different context, thus, insight is the right ingredient for developing creativity. Creativity is about connecting dots, which are usually seemly unrelated because they are scattered in transdisciplinary, but interconnected domains. Too often people may take the easy path, think and work at a superficial level rather than spend the time on understanding what is going on underneath. Being insightful means that you have to digest knowledge, and not just understand it on the superficial level, but to “see” things or make connections others cannot, to stimulate creativity. Insight is captured from information, and the information is based on data. An essential aspect of creativity, both at the individual or group level, is the ability to challenge assumptions, conclusions, and beliefs. Insight is an understanding of cause and effect based on the identification of relationships and behaviors within a model, context, or scenario. With unique insight, there’re more possibilities you can discover the new path, experiment the better way, and spark creativity.

Imagination: Creativity is an actual idea carried out in a tangible way that offers or shows something new or imagined. Imagination is the fuel for the “Creativity Engine.” Thinking things differently and making imagination roll into reality is creativity. To nurture creativity, it is important to get out of the "fear" that blocks our own genius, learn how to liberate the imagination and come up with bold ideas. No imagination, the creativity engine simply will not run. The imagination can entertain the seemingly impossible, given the right resources of knowledge, experience, and talent; a bridge may be created between the current 'impossible' to a whole new 'possible.' Imagination is the ability to expand the boundaries of knowledge to connect unusual dots for sparking innovation. As Albert Einstein said, “imagination is more important than knowledge.” An open mind leads to imagination, imagination leads to discovery, discovery leads to creativity.  So, you should learn how to liberate the imagination and come up with a new approach to solve problems, that is creativity.

Creativity has many faces and manifestations. And by manifesting creativity from an individual endeavor to a team activity and a collective effort, the horizon of creativity is expanded and the collective creative potential can be unleashed.

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Winning Digital Dynamic in a Structural Way

Running a dynamic business needs to practice dynamic planning, develop dynamic teams, and build dynamic business capabilities. 

Digital is about fast-paced change, the exponential growth of information, high business intensity, and velocity. Closer to reality is that 'change' is continuously happening in such a dynamic environment of a company. The leading businesses across the vertical sectors are the ones that can manage change fluently, and adapt to digital new normal for creating a winning digital dynamic in a structural way.

The dynamic business planning: A business plan outlines the preferred course of action, provide direction. But with today’s business velocity and frequent digital disruptions, if planned in detail as far ahead as the end state, much planning time and effort will be wasted. As the saying goes,” plan is nothing, and planning is everything.” This is particularly true in the digital era with change as the new normal. The dynamic planning process is the continual attention to current changes in the organization and its external environment, and how this affects the future of the organization. The planning process is never "done" -- the planning process is a continuous cycle; that's part of the management process itself. And then, the responsibility of the management is to make a seamless alignment of planning and implementation. The key is to engage the whole organization in knowing and understanding the direction and planning of the business and build the momentum and increase the tempo of operations. In practice, planning and execution are not linear steps, but an iterative continuum. Plan a little and try implementing to see immediate results to verify the expectations. But always keep the big picture, do dynamic planning, make a necessary delegation, implement plan collaboratively and seamlessly.

The dynamic team building: Building a dynamic digital workforce is to provide a creative working environment with the necessary resource to improve productivity, creativity, and employee engagement. A high-performance team is a cohesive group of people with complementary skills, saddled with the responsibility to achieve higher than expected results. High performing teams succeed because they are corporate in nature, get the bigger picture to clear on what, who, when and how to achieve business goals based on the dollar value and available resources. There are fewer obstacles and pitfalls to navigate and overcome when team members trust one another, have supplementary skills, and take complementary actions which provide the basis for the trust. When teams are cultured to focus on the shared goals of the organization, they compete professionally and complement (when needed) towards the attainment of the shared goals and that creates a conducive environment for mutual trust to flourish.

The dynamic business capability building and capacity planning: A business capability is the abilities needed by an organization in order to deliver value. A business capability defines "What" a business does or can do by encapsulating all organization resources (tangible, intangible or human resources). It’s the ability of an organization to do things effectively to achieve desired outcomes and measurable benefits and fulfill business demand. Due to the increasing pace of changes and continuous digital disruptions, businesses today should be able to speed up, build dynamic business capability or recombine existing capabilities into the new business competency for adapting to the new market dynamic. Usually, Enterprise Capacity Management refers to a process used to manage Information Technology. Its primary goal is to ensure that IT capacity meets current and future business requirements in a cost-effective manner. Capacity planning needs to be part of the corporate initiatives around continuous improvement. IT capacity planning allows for a transparent view from across the organization that should improve business performance. If all the departments in a company practice capacity planning, you will move closer to organizational harmony and efficacy, and it is important to measure the ROI on such activities in order to improve the business manageability.

Running a dynamic business needs to practice dynamic planning, develop dynamic teams, and build dynamic business capabilities. It is worth the effort to break down silos and prepare the future proactively, in order to win the digital dynamic in a holistic way.

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The Monthly Book Tuning “100 Digital Rules”: Enforcing Digital Principles to Accelerate Changes Jan, 2018

The inevitable range, breadth, and pace of uncontrollable factors acting on any organizations mean constant fine-tuning is essential.


Change is inevitable, organizational change has become a common practice within an organization, but too often changes are made as a reaction to outer impulses, crisis, and demands. This is the bureaucracy’s way of meeting the challenges. A digital transformation is achieved via dynamic Strategy-Execution-Change lifecycle management, though it is not all linear steps, but an iterative, ongoing and upgoing change continuum. How to set principles and develop next practices to lead change and digital transformation effortlessly?

Enforcing Digital Principles to Accelerate Changes

The New Book “100 Digital Rules - Setting Guidelines to Explore the Digital New Normal” Chapter 2 Digital Change Rules? Close to reality is that “change” is continuously happening in the environment of a company. Change Management, in fact, is a complex management discipline due to “VUCA” digital new normal. It is critical to capture the right timing for changes, make people at the center of change, and take the logical scenario to make change more nature, and less painful. Thus, it is critical to set digital rules to improve Change Management effectiveness.


Five Principles to Manage Change? Change is inevitable, organizational change has become a common practice within an organization, but too often changes are made as a reaction to outer impulses, crisis, and demands. Change Management is a complex management discipline due to the "VUCA" nature of digital organizations. How to set digital principles to improve Change Management effectiveness?


Setting Digital Rules to Guide Digital Transformation? Digital transformation is rarely a straight line. It is all about interaction, incrementalism, and innovation. The journey is far more important than the destination. Digital organizations have to adapt to the continuous changes and are able to follow digital principles, revise business rules, reconfigure organizational structures and change their own behaviors for its adaptation to environmental changes and business dynamic, to get digital ready.

Three Principles in Managing Change Continuum? Change is a volatile subject, just like change itself. Everything changes continuously by following the laws of evolution, and the rate of change is accelerated. Organizations, like individuals, need to be in flow to operate smoothly. An organization achieves this state of equilibrium through its management practices. The strong support for continuous improvement is an essential strategy. The old stimuli of needing to change because of IT, major competitors or new market entrants are no longer the only catalysts for change. And today it is so much more about sensing emerging customers’ needs and creating new markets. The inevitable range, breadth, and pace of uncontrollable factors acting on any organizations mean constant fine-tuning is essential. Change is not for its own sake, it is an ongoing business capability to execute the strategy and compete for the future. Here are three aspects of managing today’s change continuum.

TThree Change Principles? Statistically, more than two-thirds of change effort fail to achieve the expected result. All efforts at having other humans act as you would like to depend, in large part, on circumstances, the number of actions/tactical moves, action sequence, and "action coordination" vary. Therefore, change is situational, these differences have to do with who the people are, what they plan, what and HOW they execute. Although there is no “one size fits all” formula for changes, you can set principles to make Change Management more effective and cohesive.

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 the 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.

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The Reflection, Reinterpretation, and Reinforcement for Reinvent IT to Get Digital Ready

To improve IT maturity, IT needs to develop their own set of best or next practices, change the emphasis to an “outside-in” approach. 

The purpose of digitalization is to make a significant difference in the overall levels of organizational maturity. The IT organization needs to be reinvented to achieve its own potential and help the business maximize its overall performance as well. Besides the disruptive digital technology trends and overwhelming information growth, IT effects in radical digital tuning are to be an integrator in knitting all important business factors, to improve business responsibility, flexibility, innovativeness, speed, customer-centricity, and performance. Here are three practices to reinvent IT for getting digital ready.

Reflection: Due to the disruptive nature of technology, IT simply cannot stand still. It shouldn’t just react to changes as well, digital IT organizations need to become the change agent of the business. Thus, it’s important for CIOs to spend time on doing IT evaluation and reflection, stepping out of the routine transactional activities for a while, and reimagine the new possibility to run an innovative digital IT organization. In practice, IT leaders have been tech nerds for too long, not taking interest in innovation, not taking enough initiatives to drive business changes. Therefore, IT reflection needs to focus on strengthening its strength and improving its weakness. CIOs should make an objective assessment of their leadership impact and IT maturity- Are you there to just keep the lights on, or is IT expected to actively take part in strategic decisions or innovative initiatives? Do you want to lead change efforts at your company? Does IT stretch, challenge, or interrupt the status quo? Does IT expand the zone of possible change and innovation? How will IT have to change to meet the shifting needs of the company? Is IT in a high-involvement process to make the digital paradigm shift? Does IT drive team building and organizational learning? What is the business perception of IT organization? Do IT leaders have a seat for making contributions to strategy development? Can IT delight both internal and end customers well? Can IT strike the right balance between driving innovation and setting standard; catching opportunities and preventing risks? CIOs need to evaluate the overall IT manageability, innovation capability, skill gaps and ensure IT is on the right track for progression and moving up to the high level of organizational maturity.

Reinterpret business-IT conversation from inside out to outside in lens: The gap between IT and business is often one of the biggest barriers to run a highly responsive and high-performance digital organization. The seamless connectivity between IT and business lies in using the common business language to help businesses cross that bridge to IT. Sometimes, IT misinterprets the business requirement with the result of wrong delivery and poor customer satisfaction; or at the other times, the business lacks an in-depth understanding of the IT complexity. More specifically, the “Lost in translation” syndrome is caused by mistakes that most organizations make in business communication that fails to translate the high-level language of strategy into the professional language of the various staff specialty for execution. if these symptoms exist, it's important to reinterpret business-IT conversation from the outside-in business lens. A good “interpreter” can leverage contextual intelligence and multidisciplinary business perspectives with respect to make a positive influence on pulling progressive communication ahead, focus on commercial business outcomes, not just technical throughput. It’s also about how to leverage open, creative, and interactive communication styles to bridge the gaps and connect the minds and hearts, to enforce IT-business mutual understanding, and ensure that IT staff understanding the commercial end point of their work and being able to think IT from the outside-in business lens.

Reinforce IT value proposition as the strategic business partner: IT and business should build the reciprocal relationship to ensure they work collaboratively to run an integrated digital organization. It is simply not enough to run IT as a support function or help desk only. IT needs to be embedded into the business for driving changes and catalyzing innovation and act as a strategic business partner for guiding digitalization and making the enterprise more competitive and successful. It is all about enforcing communication, enhancing collaboration, improving transparency, and building trust. High-performing digital IT organizations have to reinforce a set of clearly defined digital principles, take process improvement and business optimization as a journey, scale up and amplify digital effects. it's important to foster IT-enabled business models and business capabilities through a combination of existing and emerging technologies or information-based insight. Deliver the innovative capabilities to capture first-mover advantages. When businesses get hit by challenges or problems, especially at the strategic level, they come to IT for getting further ideas, they start seeing IT as an integral part of the business and not just a business enabler.

Organizations shouldn’t just response to exponential changes and continuous digital disruption in a reactive way. To improve IT maturity, IT needs to develop their own set of best or next practices, change the emphasis to an “outside-in” approach, run IT in a digital mode to enable ongoing business strategy execution, optimize business processes, drive information-based organizational culture, and catalyze business growth and innovation.

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The Monthly Digital CIO Spotlight: CIOs as Chief Insight Officer Jan., 2018

Modern CIOs have many personas and face great challenges.

Modern CIOs have many personas and face great challenges. It is not sufficient to only keep the light on. Regardless of which industry or the nature of organization you are in, being a digital leader will need to master the art of creating unique, differentiating value from piles of commoditized technologies. Information is the lifeblood and knowledge is the power of modern businesses. All leading businesses across the vertical sectors claim they are in the information management businesses Here is the monthly spotlight of the CIO as “Chief Improvement Officer.”

                   

       CIOs as Chief Insight Officer

The New Book “12 CIO Personas” Chapter 3 Introduction: The CIO as “Chief Insight Officer” Organizations across the industry sectors are stepping into the deep “VUCA” new normal with the exponential growth of information and continuous technological disruptions. The pace of changes and complex nature of technologies force more CIOs to shift to the insightful digital leadership role to understand of the organizational interdependence and bridge IT-business gaps seamlessly.

The Five Stages of Information-Knowledge Management? Information is the lifeblood and knowledge is the power of modern businesses. All leading businesses across the vertical sectors claim they are in the information management businesses. Information does not live alone but permeates to everywhere in the businesses, information potential directly impacts the business's potential of the organization. Managing information-knowledge lifecycle effectively becomes a strategic business capability. And there are different levels of information/knowledge system models to meet the business requirement at the different stage.

Brainstorm to stimulate Digital Mining? Many say digital opens the new chapter of innovation because digital technologies and social platforms provide unprecedented opportunities and convenience for people to brainstorm and collaborate. Brainstorming is a creativity technique by which a group of people can come up with multiple solutions to solve the problem creatively. Brainstorming can be made much more powerful with knowledge. There are "Stimulus Mining" areas that can help to fill the minds with information and then- individuals can start to explore from a much stronger point of view and create fresh ideas. Here are three “Stimulus Mining Areas” in brainstorm worth to dig through.

The gaps between knowledge and insight: Insight is perception through multidimensional cognizance. If knowledge is manpower, wisdom is nature power, then insight is perhaps the bridge between manpower and nature power. There are multilayer meanings upon insight. The gaps between knowledge and insight are existing, and how to dive into the depth of knowledge sea and climb the insight-wisdom pyramid?

The Insight upon INSIGHT? If knowledge is manpower, wisdom is nature power, then insight is perhaps the bridge between manpower and nature power. There are multi-layer meanings upon insight.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2.2 million page views with about #4300th 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 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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Running a High-Performance Digital Organization with Digital Rhythm

Every digital organization perhaps has a different rhythm (rock, pop, or jazz, etc), and needs to monitor its own digital pulse periodically.

In music, rhythm is the movement with the harmonized or patterned recurrence of a beat. It is the combination of melody and rhythm makes the music theme recognizable. In business, digital organizations today must adapt to changes and stay focus; the digital rhythm is the business’s progressive movement with the harmonized workforce, synchronized activities, and patterned digital system woven by information & technology, to run a high-performance digital powerhouse with the abundance of energy, well-balanced business elements, and steadfast pace, to gain the sustainable advantage.




Synchronization: In the digital era with “VUCA” characteristics, timing is everything. Digital business is the living thing. In nature, when one startling changes, information moves across the flock very quickly and with nearly no degradation. In essence, that's the beauty of synchronization and the part of the digital rhythm that enables the organization keeping the pace with increasing speed of change, continuous technological disruption, and exponential growth of information. The business management should aware that change keeps evolving, disruptive events occur anytime, and sometimes there will be several short-term changes in direction that could slow the long-term direction. In those circumstances, you don’t and can’t afford to defer decision-making. The decision is necessary as a result of limited resources in time, knowledge, capital, and people. Therefore, the real-time information is important for responding to changes. Information synchronization is the process of establishing consistency among data from a source to the target storage and vice versa, as well as make continuous harmonization and refinement of the information to capture invaluable business insight. The insight-driven digitalization can create the business synchronization of all functions running seamlessly. Digital synchronization occurs on multiple levels of the organization as well, it presupposes the ability of each 'link' to articulate their 'strategic intent,’ and present the recognizable digital rhythm to keep the business not only spinning around but also moving forward with the right pace.

Harmony: A business organization can only achieve high performance via harmonized collaboration and seamless execution. Collaboration through powerful social platforms and technologies is breaking down silos, driving and accelerating changes in enterprise systems and its eco-environment. Collaboration is good, but it’s not an end in itself. Creating a context where people can collaborate where they are empowered and respected and make collective decisions is the essence of the business harmonization. The most effective digital workplace is the one where collaboration and sharing are the norms. From the organizational structure perspective, the design of a digital organization will have a significant impact on how performing and considerate the organization is. Is the business structure interrelational - Are management processes developed to reduce tensions, frictions, and conflicts that arise? Are the practices of business management interactional? Are management processes developed to help communicate objects and concepts smoothly without “lost in translation.”The alignment process becomes the business 'harmony' process where the actual configuration of the organization's strategy management is a consequence of design and implementation strategies.

Pattern: Digital organization is the system. System = Pattern. Systems don’t exist independently and that there are interactions between systems such as system overlaps and real in-and output dependencies. Therefore, listening to the digital rhythm is also about how to recognize patterns for either solving business problems or stimulating creativity. To be creative, you need to continue discovering new patterns. It requires you to keep your eyes open and keep your mind off the box in order to break down the conventional box and actively seek out new ideas wherever you can discover them. A pattern language can generate different solutions to complex business problems. A pattern language is "about" the relationships between patterns and learns how to navigate from pattern to pattern for learning about a problem space and to apply different solutions in combination. Digital boundary has the zigzag pattern on it, recognize the digital rhythm, learn the pattern language to gain an in-depth understanding of the digital organization in order to manage a successful digital business effortlessly.

Every digital organization perhaps has a different rhythm (rock, pop, or jazz, etc), and needs to monitor its own digital pulse periodically. Overall speaking, digital management is responsible for designing, enabling, and enforcing a collaborative, innovative, intelligent, inspiring and inclusive working environment based on cross-siloed or cross-divisional collaboration, and orchestrating all important business elements to build a high-mature digital organization.

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The Monthly “Digital Fit” Book Tuning: The Digital Organizational Traits Jan., 2018

With “VUCA” digital new normal, to survive the fierce competition and thrive with the long-term business advantage involve more planning, adjustment, and speed.

Digital makes a significant impact on every aspect of the business from people, process to technology, both horizontally and vertically. Digital becomes the very fabric of high performing business, being outside-in and customer-centric is the new mantra for forward-looking and high mature digital organizations today. But what are digital organizational traits, how to define digital fit and take a structural approach for digitalization?

 The Digital Organizational Traits

Three Actions to Improve Digital Responsiveness of the Business? Digital means the increasing speed of change and continuous disruptions. With “VUCA” digital new normal, to survive the fierce competition and thrive with the long-term business advantage involve more planning, adjustment, and speed, and run a high-responsive, high-mature, and real-time digital organization. Here are three imperative actions organizations at the strategic level need to take for improving the digital responsiveness for running the digital powerhouse.

“Simplexity” as the Characteristic of Digital Maturity Modern businesses become over-complex every day, they also become part of the dynamic and complex digital ecosystem. If we accept the business and the world are complex, somewhat unpredictable or not completely predictable, we have to accept uncertainty. Because uncertainty comes with complexity. Simplicity vs. complexity is not only an age-old dilemma but also the opposite ends of the same spectrum. Complexity can either stimulate or stifle innovation. In fact, “Simplexity” is a portmanteau word to reflect the digital reality and how to strike the right balance to achieve the next level of digital maturity.

“Corpetition” as the digital Characteristic Competition is part of the natural dynamics of life. In nature, competition is for evolution; in business, competition is for surviving and thriving. In the silo industrial age, the competition is about commanding and controlling to keep the status quo; and now we are stepping into a deeper and also far more advanced digital era steadily, the goal of healthy competition in the human society is to encourage innovation and accelerate the speed of progression

Three Perspectives of Debureaucratization The root of the word "bureaucracy" is: bureau(fr) = desk and kratos(gr) = rules/ power. 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. However, too many rules will stifle innovation, outdated rules will stop the business from moving forward with accelerated speed. And the overly restricted hierarchy will cause silo, discourage cross-functional communication and collaboration. Hence, dismantling bureaucratization is inevitable because of the ever-increasing speed of changes and expanding interdependence. Here are three perspectives of de-bureaucratization.

The Organization’s Digital Fit  The multidimensional digital transformation provides impressive advantages in terms of the speed of delivering business solutions and ability to adapt to changes. Either be a disrupter or being disrupted, digital makes significant impacts on every aspect of the business from people, processes, to technology and capability both horizontally and vertically. The effects of an increasingly digitalized world are now reaching into every corner of businesses and every aspect of organizations. So, how can organizations keep digital fit and highly-responsive because nowadays digital businesses need to be fast, always “on,” highly connected, interdependent, and ultra-competitive?

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2+million page views with about #4300+ 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 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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Three Linchpins for Connecting to the Digital New Normal

Digital organizations need to keep tuning structures and processes, become more adaptable and innovative.

Running a digital business represents the next stage of business maturity which will improve how the enterprise works and interacts with its ecosystem, with people at the center of its focus. To break down silos and overly rigid hierarchy, businesses need to emphasize communication, participation, relationships, and realize that they will need to renew themselves periodically to cope effectively with change and have a fluid structure that responds effectively to the business dynamic. The digital world is so information-savvy, change-intensive, and innovation-driven, here are three linchpins to connect the digital new normal and improve business responsiveness, performance, and speed.

Information Management as the linchpin of running a real-time digital business: Though digitalization is not just about adopting some fancy new technologies. Information Technology plays a crucial role in leading the digital paradigm shift. Information is the lifeblood of the digital organization, and information management is the linchpin of running a real-time digital business. Information does not live alone but permeates to everywhere in the businesses. Thus, the value of information is not isolated. Information can either enforce cognitive understanding or sometimes misleading or cause distraction due to incomplete information or false knowledge. The goal of Information Management is to make the full data-performance life cycle: Data- information-analysis -insight- decisions-performance effectively. Poor information management implies not understanding what raw material they have to play with and lack of business insight to grasp emerging opportunities, predict risks and respond to changes in fast-enough speed. An information-savvy organization can store, retrieve, process. and refine information efficiently, to ensure the right people getting the right information to make right decisions timely. Information Management as the linchpin is to connect silos, keep information flow, idea flow, and thus, business flow.

Change as the linchpin of strategy and implementation: Digital organizations are dynamic with fast-growing information and continuous disruptions. Change Management needs to go hand-in-hand with strategy management. Change is no longer just an isolated business initiative, it needs to be built as an ongoing core business capability and a mechanism embedded into underlying business processes or functions. Change cannot be just another thing that needs to be accomplished. It has to be woven into communication, process, and action of the organization. Change, in many business circumstances, has to go deeper, fine-tune the underlying functions or manage intangible business elements, and become the linchpin between strategy and implementation. Change inertia is one of the fatal issues to cause the business mighty fail. Sometimes people are not part of change because they feel like they don’t need any change, and even the ones who recognize the importance or urgency of change, do not understand their own role, impact and most importantly, emotions involved in a change process. In today's over-complex work environment, change is happening at a more rapid pace. If you make change part of your operation routine and your DNA - and then change becomes easier to deal with, the business can move forward effortlessly.

Inclusiveness as the linchpin of digital innovation: Being innovative is the state of mind. In the business setting, there is no innovation without inclusiveness. The most innovative working environment and the most advanced societies are diverse mixtures of peoples that can spark creativity and amplify innovation effect. Inclusiveness is the linchpin of digital innovation. Competitive advantage can be created by bringing together diverse groups of people whose mindsets, experiences, preferences, skills, and capabilities are complementary to one another. Diversity makes the organizations stronger. From innovation perspective, diversity should refer to the cognitive difference. We are idea-rich and vision clear through inclusiveness. Because people can learn a lot from different mindsets, cultures, and positions, so organizations as a whole can be competitive enough to keep surging further. It is important to build an open environment where individuals or groups need to generate creative results regularly and frequently, diversity becomes the engine for creativity, and inclusiveness becomes the linchpin for connecting important building blocks of constructing new digital competency.

Digital organizations need to keep tuning structures and processes, become more adaptable and innovative, take advantage of the latest digital technology platforms and tools, integrate and knit all important business element into business competencies, for connecting to the digital new normal.

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The Monthly "Digital IT" Book Tuning: How to Sow IT Innovation Seeds via Asking Open-Ended Questions

Debating is not for stimulating conflicts, but for brainstorming better ways to do things.

Due to the changing nature of technology, IT leadership role also continues to involve & shift the focus, to move up the maturity level. More and more CIOs are requested to take more responsibility and many CIOs present the breadth of leadership competency. The proactive IT debates help IT leaders brainstorm better ways to do things, and improve management capabilities. Here are the monthly CIO debates collections.

CIOs as “Chief Intrapreneur Officer”: How to Sow IT Innovation Seeds via asking Open-Ended Questions Entrepreneurship is about creating new venture from within an established company to look for changes and explore new opportunities. Many IT organizations become the change department of their company and they have to become the innovation engine of the business as well. Intrapreneur CIOs need to be dynamic people with vision, openness, inquisitiveness, growth and complexity mindset. Intrapreneur leaders practice entrepreneurship in the large enterprise to rejuvenate culture, advocate digitalization, inspire innovation and accelerate the speed of changes. They master at asking open-ended questions to sow innovation seeds and reimagine IT to reach the next level of organizational maturity.

CIOs as “Chief Initiative Officer”: How to Take Initiatives on Change, Innovation, and Digital Transformation? In practice, the CIO role should transform from a reactive IT manager to a proactive digital leader; from a controller to a change agent Thus, the CIO as “Chief Initiative Officer” has become necessary or even imperative to manage strategic digital alignment and orchestration from concept to post-implementation of all initiatives from the C-level to the front lines, focus on changes and innovation. CIOs are also quite eager and enthusiastic to drive challenging transformation initiatives, to reinvent IT as the information hub and the business growth engine.

Is R&D Spending Proportional with Innovation Success Rate? Many organizations invest significantly in their R&D department and expect R&D becomes their innovation engine, however, many innovation studies show that the best innovators are not the one that invests the most in their R&D. So what’s the role of R&D in innovation, and is R&D spending proportional to innovation success rate?

CIOs as Chief Innovation Officer: Can you Clarify the Business’s Expectation from IT via Innovation Lens? As businesses embark on the “Digital Era” of computing and managing, with the changing nature of information & technology, IT is always in the changing environment creating unexpected situations and requiring quick and appropriate responses based on the conditions. IT has to change with the faster speed and also drive the business transformation proactively. The nature of the digital IT leadership needs to focus on information and innovation, and the primary role of the CIO needs to become the "Chief Innovation Officer," to not just running IT as a support center, but as the innovation engine to catalyze business growth and build the organization’s differentiated competency and long-term winning advantage.

Good Innovation, Bad Innovation: How to Discern It? Innovation is the light every business is pursuing, and there is no surprise that the average success rate of Innovation Management is very low. The good innovation can leap the business to the next level of prosperity, and the bad innovation can fail the business in a fatal way. So how to set the criteria, make a clear discernment, and manage innovation more effectively?

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2.2 million page views with 4300+ 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 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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How to Improve IT visibility as the Strategic Business Partner

 The highly visible IT can elevate its maturity from “controlling to change to innovate,” from "surviving to striving to thriving,"

Even though IT permeates to almost every corner of the business, many traditional IT organizations are still perceived as an invisible back office maintenance function. Thus, to improve IT visibility as the strategic partner, CIOs should have both business leadership skill and technical knowledge to understand the business and run IT as an integral part of the business. They should raise the IT bar on a continual basis to ensure that the stakeholders get a real picture of how well IT efforts are bearing desired results and keep IT and the business on the same page.

Profit growth: IT can keep business areas up to date with the opportunities emerging technology provides. CIOs need to make an objective evaluation of how IT can directly contribute to the organization' top line growth. To improve visibility, IT needs to be considered a line of business, and not some back office or geek function. CIOs must lead IT in reaching high-level performance by taking multifaceted approaches. The first face should see the future of business and speak in the business language and at the same time, the second face must evaluate technical risks and cost of solution for your company. The ultimate success of IT should be evaluated on how IT is able to deliver innovative products/services or supply a differentiated solution that contributes to both top line business growth and the bottom line success of the organization. Making the IT department a profit center is one of the biggest challenges in most IT organizations. IT leadership needs to shift their management orientation and begin thinking like entrepreneurs. CIOs must lead IT in reaching high-level performance. It is important to foster a culture of innovation, create innovative IT-enabled business models and business capabilities through a combination of existing and emerging technologies. IT professionals need to be creative enough, investigate new technologies and software, be curious about how they can blend and integrate different technologies and solutions, not as technical challenges, but for achieving business value.

Cost optimization: IT is in a unique position to oversee business processes which underpin organizational capabilities. To improve IT visibility and organizational maturity, it’s important to leverage the latest technologies or tools to continue trimming cost or retooling business processes. Keeping the fundamental right is always important. Business functional leaders need IT to ensure the availability and reliability of their business process automation tools/technology so their staff can function as efficiently as promised. IT needs to have a long-term perspective of cost optimization via consolidation, modernization, and integration. Increase visibility and transparency of the legacy environment through eliminating something which is not used and saving effort on maintaining it. There is never "enough" to optimizing operations and fine-tuning differentiated business capabilities. To reinvent IT as the value creator and improve its visibility, it is important to leverage knowledge to uncover hidden value, not only within IT but benefit the entire organization.

Productivity improvement: Business needs IT to deliver services/solutions that drive business productivity and effectiveness. This includes all aspects of the company, such as information management, logistics, application throughput, employee engagement etc. From an information management perspective, IT should provide the firm with a platform to sustain and manage the business effectively with accurate and appropriate information whenever required, and also equip the business to explore/venture into new areas that'll provide value to the business. IT can empower users with the powerful technologies to improve their productivity and creativity, help employees at all levels within an organization (from leaders to front-line) understand and develop their creative capacity to solve problems and exploit opportunities in new and innovative ways. It is important to foster a culture of innovation, create innovative IT-enabled business models and business capabilities through a combination of existing and emerging technologies. A highly visible IT can deliver innovative business capabilities to capture first-mover advantages.

IT is not just technical, but rather business-driven, the highly visible IT can elevate its maturity from “controlling to change to innovate,” from "surviving to striving to thriving," IT visibility depends on how clearly IT leaders can convey the message about the value IT brought to the business; how responsive IT can adapt to the exponentially increasing speed of changes; how well it can delight customers and how its employees feel engaged, and how capable it can drive the business's digital transformation in a seamless way.

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The Monthly “Digital Gaps” Book Tuning: How to Bridge Digital Leadership Gaps Jan., 2018

“Digital Gaps -Bridging Multiple Gaps to Run Cohesive Business” is a guidebook to help digital leaders and professionals today identify, analyze, and mind multiple gaps via multidisciplinary insight and holistic understanding. Today’s digital organization simply just can’t stand still., bridging the 'gap of opportunity' between where you are and want to become is a welcomed challenge, it is important to bridge communication, knowledge and insight gaps and take a stepwise approach to make a leap of digital transformation.

Three Styles of Innovation Leaders? The leadership in any organization must have the ability to guide, inspire, innovate, and motivate a group of people toward accomplishing shared visions and goals. Innovative leadership is essentially anchored on the leader's overall multifaceted resourcefulness and multidimensional competencies to formulate creative alternatives or unconventional solutions to resolve problems, to show versatility and flexibility in response to unpredictable or unanticipated business circumstances. Here are three styles of innovation leaders.

Gap Minding Leadership Practices in Digital Boardroom? Digitalization makes the business flatter and the world smaller because of its nature of hyper-connectivity and interdependence. Competition at the leading edge of business is also becoming fiercer at the age of digitalization and globalization. Thus, successful companies need to grow and innovation is no longer "nice to have," but must have business competency. The corporate board plays a critical role in setting policies for innovation and exemplifying leadership influence. Thus, foresightful BoDs should always look for the complementary mindsets, diverse experiences, and differentiated skillsets so that collectively, they can avoid groupthink, make sound judgments, provide innovative advice and mind leadership gaps to ensure the boardroom digital ready.

Three Perspectives of Intrapreneur Leadership? Corporate Entrepreneurship or intrapreneurship has been recognized as a potentially viable, it means for promoting and sustaining organizational performance, renewal and enforce competitiveness. Being entrepreneurial is first the mindset, then an attitude and skills are the easier part to be developed.

Three Traits of Senior Leadership? Leadership is about the future and change. More specifically, 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. People lead in the different levels. The senior leadership of the organization or the society are like the steering wheel to ensure their ships are moving in the right direction towards the uncharted water. Senior leadership is neither equal to seniority nor the big title, it implies the high level of intellectual and emotional maturity, strategic foresight, profound insight, decision wisdom, and high-level leadership influence.

Three Perspectives on Visionary Leadership Leadership is about setting directions, making positive influences and inspire innovation. At its core, leadership is the journey for problem-solving. Visionary leaders are always the rare breed and in strong demand. Because leadership vision is like the light tower to guide the organization to the uncharted water and blurred digital territories. In fact, vision is one of the most critical digital leadership traits to lead today's business with "VUCA" characteristics. There are a lot of misunderstanding about vision and being a visionary.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2 million page views with about #4300th 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 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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"Digital Gaps" Introduction, Slideshare

"Digital Gaps" Chapter 1 Cognitive Gaps

"Digital Gaps" Chapter 2  Leadership Gaps

"Digital Gaps" Chapter 3 Management Gaps

"Digital Gaps" Chapter 4 Capability Gaps

"Digital Gaps" Chapter 5 Professional Gaps

Conclusion: Bridging Gaps to Catalyze Digital Maturity

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Digital Reinforcement Management Practices

Organizations are moving from doing digital via experimenting some digital technologies to going digital via expanding to all dimensions for a holistic digital transformation. 

Many organizations are on the journey of digital transformation which represents the next stage of business maturity and will improve how the enterprise works and interacts with its digital ecosystem, with people at the center of its focus. However, every business evolves digital with varying speed. There are stresses in business leadership because organizations must respond to continuous digital disruptions and the increasing pace of changes proactively. Businesses need to become more adaptive, innovative and resilient. Here are three digital reinforcement management practices they should take in order to get digital ready psychologically, technologically, sociologically.

Reinforcing digital mindsets: The unprecedented digital convenience brought by digital technologies changes the way we live, we work, and even how we think. Nowadays, physical boundaries such as oceans, mountains, or deserts can no longer limit us from either gaining new knowledge or communicating with people across the globe. It is time to reinforce digital thinking via breaking down silo mentality, pre-conceptual bias or bureaucracy. Digital fitness comes via cognitive fitness either at the individual or the organizational level. The digital fit mindset is about how to think forward, strategically, creatively, positively, and systematically. In addition to the set point changing, digital paradigm shift requires first shifting mindsets and then building new skills, capabilities, and reinforcing digital thinking processes such as creativity, critical thinking, pattern thinking, and other cognitive skills for either making effective decisions or solving complex problems. It is also important to leverage collective mindsets to brainstorm new ideas or co-develop knowledge. In the organizational scope, it’s about building a culture (the collective mindset) of creativity, goes a step further and involves internalization of the outside the box thinking and digital conceptual model. And digital leadership can connect the minds and transmit energy to the variety of people, giving them a sense of confidence in achieving a well-framed digital vision with the long-term business perspective.

Reinforce digital principles, processes, and practices: Digital does flatten the organizational hierarchy and blur the functional, organizational, and geographical borders in the business ecosystem. You cannot make a true digital paradigm shift without breaking some old rules, optimizing certain business processes, or updating outdated best practices. Digital encourages autonomy and innovation. That means less restrictive rules or bureaucracy, but it also means the guiding principles become more crucial to be defined as core decision values and behavior guidelines to practice multifaceted management discipline. To stay competitive, companies must go beyond experimenting with digital and commit to transforming themselves into a highly innovative digital powerhouse. Most of the organizations commit theoretically to process optimization, but they haven’t achieved the full potential by exploring it more strategically and systematically. High-performing digital organizations have to reinforce a set of clearly defined digital principles, always take process improvement and business optimization as a journey, develop their own set of tailored best and next practices to keep the business in the innovative mode for managing change, scaling up and amplifying digital effects.

Reinforce accountability: Lack of accountability is often one of the biggest obstacles in the organization (especially in large and well-established businesses) to get things done, stifle changes and decelerate digitalization. Digital organizations are flatter, with an “every individual as a stakeholder” culture, to close the accountability gap through improving cross-functional collaboration, open door listening, transparency, and empathy. Poor leadership or management is the root cause to lack of accountability because people don’t feel “safe,” or run away from accountability because they had a personal experience or they have observed others being treated poorly or unfairly when being held accountable for results. Therefore, it is important to build a culture of accountability at the organizational level. Stressing out employees is not helpful to the company or its stakeholders in the long-run. Accountability goes hand in hand with the delegation of authority or power, to advocate the digital style of autonomy and self-management. If you ensure the individuals have the autonomy within their tasks, you will be able to address performance on an equal partnership base. The right formula to reinforce accountability also depends on the organization and what they are trying to accomplish. Shared accountability or collective accountability involves shared ownership, empathetic communication, the true measure of accountability is about resilience and ensure the workforce is professionally healthy and the workplace is positive, productive, and innovative.

Organizations are moving from doing digital via experimenting some digital technologies to going digital via expanding to all dimensions for a holistic digital transformation. The digital journey is neither a flat road nor a straight line. There are quite many bumps or curves along the way. It is important to make the necessary adjustment and management reinforcement for steering the business in the right direction and stepping into the deep digital new normal steadfastly.

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The Weekly Insight of the “Future of CIO” 1/25/2018

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

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2 million page views with 4300+ 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. Here is the weekly insight about digital leadership, IT Management, and Talent Management.

Three Barriers To Innovation and Digital Maturity Digital paradigm means holism, hyper-connectivity, integration, interdependence, and innovation. Digital transformation is the journey for solving problems caused by "Conflict," "Out of Balance," “Lack of Logic,” or “Too much complexity.” Therefore, it is critical to break through the industrial constraints and limitations, overcome roadblocks to change and digitalization, and improve the overall business responsiveness and maturity. Here are three barriers businesses must overcome in order to accelerate the digital paradigm shift.

The Monthly “Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As” Book Tuning: The Digital Board’s Inquisitiveness Jan. 2018 Modern corporate boards play significant roles in guiding businesses toward the right direction and achieve expected business results. Due to the “VUCA” characteristics -Complexity, Uncertainty, Ambiguity, and Velocity of the Digital Era, the directorship in any organization must have the agility to adapt to changes and build abilities to advise, inspire and motivate a group of people toward accomplishing shared visions and goals. Here is the monthly “Digital Boardroom” summary about the digital board’s inquisitiveness.

The New Book “12 CIO Personas” Quote Collection V The book “12 CIO Personas: The Digital CIO’s Situational Leadership Practices” is the extensive brainstorming and logical content expansion of my book “CIO Master: Unleash the Digital Potential of IT,” to reimagine and reinvent CIO leadership via practicing multitudes of digital influence.

Five Elements (AISDE) in Digital Problem-Solving Framework Running a business is fundamentally an iterative problem-solving continuum. Due to fast-paced change, the exponential growth of information and continuous digital disruptions, the problems facing business also turn to be over-complex and difficult to solve. You need to have deep insight, take a holistic approach to complex problem-solving and build a comprehensive framework for both defining the right problems and solving them effectively. Otherwise, the temporary fix will cause you to reconsider the problem statement soon after. Here, we introduce a comprehensive digital problem-solving framework with "AISDE" components.

How to Embed Prioritization Mechanism into The Multitude of Digital Management Disciplines Modern businesses often get trapped into “busyness,” overwhelmed with too many business initiatives, and overloaded with short-term business concerns and continuous digital disruptions. The reality is that there are a lot of things that can go wrong and it is not always easy to identify what is important. To enhance its business effectiveness and maturity, how can organizations embed prioritization mechanism into the multitude of management disciplines to improve organizational responsiveness and overall business maturity?

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

Three Digital Competencies Differentiate IT Leaders from Laggard

Running a nimble and innovative IT as a great business problems-solver enables the business building differentiated competency and accelerating change and digitalization.

Organizations rely more and more on information and technology. It is simply not sufficient to run IT as a commodity service provider. IT organizations have more and more to offer, but also have more obstacles to overcome. A clear understanding of what services or solutions are supporting business advantage is a strategic imperative. However, many IT organizations suffer from overloaded tasks for “keeping the lights on” only and get stuck at the lower level of maturity. Here are three digital competencies differentiate IT leaders from laggards.

Nimbleness: Traditional IT organizations are perceived as the controller, slow to change based on the fact that most IT organizations still run in a reactive and order-taking mode. The digital dynamic is where digital disruption threatens to tear down legacy systems. More and more businesses expect the consumerization style responsiveness from IT, digital IT needs to become the change organization of the company. To adapt to the increasing speed of changes, organizations have to be more nimble about updating technology and managing information effectively. All forward-thinking organizations across the industries claim they are in the information management business. In the digital era with “VUCA” characteristics, timing is everything. Because digital provides abundant opportunities for business growth, also brings unprecedented risks to fail the business even overnight. IT has to not only improve its own speed and responsiveness but also overall organizational responsiveness and adaptability. Running a high-responsive IT organization needs to be nimble for change, have the adaptability to meet the business’s expectation, and possess the flexibility to take different approaches, with the goal to create business synergy and achieve digital synchronization of the entire organization.

Innovation: Innovations often happen at the intersection of people and technology. A leading digital IT should spend more resources on crafting unique business capabilities and capturing business growth opportunities. IT is often the driving force for both incremental innovation and radical innovation, also the linchpin to connect an effective 'innovation ecosystem' that is capable of supporting both widespread incremental innovation in products/services and ways of working as well as the rarer breakthrough' innovation in products/services, methodology, business model, and market positioning. The digital mantra is to run IT as a software startup - IT entrepreneurialism becomes a new fixture for management in their efforts to create a new revenue stream, explore emergent business opportunities, substantiate their competitive position, affect the market landscape, and drive business growth. When IT executives move beyond commodity management and dedicate more resources to innovation and building business competency systematically, it is on the right track to build digital competency and maximize business potential.

Problem-Solving: Information grows rapidly and digital technologies are lightweight, powerful, intuitive, and fast. Information Management is not just about information or process, but a scientific management discipline for problem-solving. Organizations today have to aggressively leverage digital technologies, platforms, and tools as the enabler of communication, collaboration, social interaction, and brainstorming, for proactively engaging in problem-solving. In practice, the comprehensive solution to a business problem requires both cross-domain knowledge and breakdown of the silo mentality. IT also plays a crucial role in managing information to refine business insight for either solving problems or capturing growth opportunities. Insight is about seeing things via different angles, around the corner and beyond the obvious, to solve complex problems. IT has potential to become creative business problem solver because it is in the unique position to connect cross-functional dots and optimize the underlying processes to switch on the creative mode of the business through the interaction of ideas from different domains of thoughts and experiences, as well as divergent thought processes, so it can wander and be influenced by disparate associations brought up during exploring different problem-solving scenarios.

IT is the custodian of information solutions and data assets that can be applied in new and different ways to generate massive business value that far exceeds what other functions can incrementally bring to the table. Running a nimble and innovative IT as a great business problems-solver enables the business building differentiated competency and accelerating change and digitalization.

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