Saturday, March 31, 2018

The Monthly Foresight: The Future of Abundance Mar. 2018

10:45 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

Digital is the age of abundance. There is an abundance of data, an abundance of information, and even abundance of knowledge.

The effects of an increasingly digitalized world are now reaching into every corner of businesses and every aspect of organizations. Digital is the age of creativity and innovation, creativity is the most wanted trait for digital leaders and professionals today, and innovation is the light every organization is pursuing. Which themes shall you set to advocate digital transformation? What are your practices for building a hyperconnected and ever-evolving digital business ecosystem?

The Future of Abundance

A High-Potential Mind: The Abundance of Human Potential: The brainstorming of human potential can be understood as a process of continuous discovery. Just like we have not yet explored enough to understand the cosmos, so the discovery of what it means to be alive and to be human is an ongoing process. How to unleash the abundance of human potential is perhaps one of the best rewarding arenas for humanity.

The Future of Abundance ? Abundance is directly related to who we ARE: Behind the eyes, the smile, and the body. The "abundance" is about awareness, within you, is who you ARE. It cannot be rocked, directed, or manipulated by anything. Once recognized, there are no limits, and, this is abundance.

Top Business Traits of Digital Maturity ? High mature digital organizations are being called “Digirati.”, as they have the high-level digital capability not only to build digital innovations but also to drive enterprise-wide transformation. And they benefit from their actions as Digirati have significantly higher financial performance than their less digitally mature competitors. Generally speaking, they have following digital traits:

Unleash Business Potential and Accelerate Digital Maturity ? Re-imaging the future of business is exciting, reinventing the business to get digital ready takes both bold leadership and strategic planning, navigating the different path for unleashing business potential needs to take a systematic approach and develop it into a more solid form, in order to evolve change and accelerate digital maturity.

The Abundance of Wisdom: Do we Have it yet Digital is the age of abundance. There is an abundance of data, an abundance of information, and even abundance of knowledge. But, wisdom is at the top of knowledge life cycle: the abundance of data, information and knowledge are not automatically equal to the abundance of wisdom. Many times, wisdom is still in scarcity, for human as species to survive and thrive, wisdom is the most important thing to push the world forward. Is there any essential value, or virtue, or principle that people need to follow in life that can gain more wisdom? And do you think wisdom is the very core to make human progress?

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2 million page views with about #4500th 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.

The New Book “Digital Maturity” Introduction Chapter IV: The Next Practices to Orchestrate Digital Paradigm Shift Seamlessly

10:37 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

A high-mature organization always looks for opportunities across the business to increase the usage of emerging digital technologies accordingly and charter the digital paradigm shift seamlessly.

We are experiencing the majority shift from the industrial machine age to the post-industrial information/knowledge/insight era. A digital paradigm is an emerging digital ecosystem of principles, policies, and practices that set limits or boundaries, also offer the guidance for problem-solving or creating something new under the digital rules, keep information flow and achieve a state of dynamic balance. It’s important to develop the best and next practices to expand systematically and charter the digital paradigm shift seamlessly.

Deburearcratization: The larger the organizations and inputs are, the larger the amount of “rules” necessary for its function are 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. 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. Most organizations today still practice the classic management discipline based on reductionistic or linear logic, assume that the business as a whole is equal to the sum of pieces. But in reality, today’s digital businesses are nonlinear, volatile, interdependent, and uncertainty, they also face fierce competitions and ambiguous digital environment. Bureaucracy causes stagnation. Organizations, like individuals, need to be in flow to operate smoothly. There is no “one size fits all” de-burearcratization formula, The business has to keep optimizing its structure and management pyramid to achieve the state of digital equilibrium. The whole business ecosystem needs to communicate, negotiate, and cooperate with each other to reinvent for harnessing innovation and catalyzing changes.

Improving digital responsiveness: The digital dynamic is where the digital disruption threatens to tear down legacy systems and practices just as it generates new opportunities. It’s natural to fear the unknown, question the unproven, and be skeptical of the latest technology trends or the next digital practice. In today’s volatile economy, nothing impedes progress more than protective silos which are simply a form of bureaucratic management style designed to preserve the status quo. Thus, breaking down silo thinking and digitizing the management disciplines and practices are the first stop for running a high-responsive digital organization. How successful organization can handle digital disruption depends on how fast and capable they can adapt to the ever-changing environment. The digital organizations are more dynamic, if you look at the business as a collection of subsystems, the degree of business responsiveness depends on how those subsystems interact with each other, and those interactions can be structural, technical, informational, or human. Organizations today must take holistic digital management practices to improve digital responsiveness relentlessly.

Fostering digital collaboration: Business involvement is essential as markets are continuously developing. If a business does not adapt and evolve, it will be disappearing soon. Organizations and their people learn through their interactions with the environment. They act, observe the consequences of their action, make inferences about those consequences, and draw implications for future action. It would be intelligent to make sure that everyone involved clearly understands the current and future mission and situation, as well as the delivery plan/strategy and the added value/benefits (why) of the change as it’s a lot easier to do things if you know what to do, when, how, and why. The purpose is the salt you put on groups for making them become teams. Fostering collaboration is the key to creating a seamless organization when in pursuit of a strategy. The most effective digital workplace is where collaboration and sharing are the norms. The least effective culture at fostering a digital workplace is traditional command and control environment.

The beauty of the digital landscape is the fresh insight of business. A high-mature organization always looks for opportunities across the business to increase the usage of emerging digital technologies accordingly and charter the digital paradigm shift seamlessly.

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The New Book Introduction: "Digital Maturity: Take a Journey of a Thousand Miles from Functioning to Delight"?

The New Book “Digital Maturity” Introduction Chapter 1 The Characteristics of Digital Organizations

The New Book Introduction Chapter 2 The Interdisciplinary Aspects of Orchestrating a Digital Business Ecosystem

The New Book "Digital Maturity" Introduction Chapter 3 Fine-Tune Organization Structures to Get Digital Ready

The New Book “Digital Maturity” Introduction Chapter 4: The Next Practices to Orchestrate Digital Paradigm Shift Seamlessly

The New Book “Digital Maturity” Chapter 5 Introduction: IT Maturity is Proportional to the Overall Business Maturity

The “Digital Maturity” BookIntroduction Chapter 6: Take a Holistic Approach to Measure Digital Transformation

The New Book “Digital Maturity” Introduction Chapter 7 The Pitfalls in Digital Managment

The New Book “Digital Maturity” Introduction Chapter 8 From “Doing Digital” to “Being Digital”

The New Book “Digital Maturity” Book Conclusion: Develop the strong Pillars to Build High-Mature Digital Organization

The Tide, Wave, and Ripple Effect of an evolving digital organization

10:29 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

The digital ecosystem provides unprecedented opportunities to strike a dynamic balance between the inner and outer elements, and leapfrog the business world up to the next level of advancement.

Change is the new normal. The speed of change is increasing, to put simply, change itself changes. Change Management also turns out to be more complex. Digitalization is all about the exponential growth of information, rapid speed of changes, hyperconnectivity and interdependence. The emergence of potential opportunities for exploiting digitization is likely to follow a nonlinear pattern as the pervasiveness of an organization's digitization journey increases. The digital ecosystem has also become more complex and dynamic. Therefore, today’s digital leaders need to understand the tide, wave, and the ripple effect of an evolving digital organization in order to manage changes seamlessly.

The ripple effect of changes: Ripples are small water movements produced by winds which transfer energy to the water as they blow over. Ripples expand across the water when an object is dropped into it. Ripple effect is often used colloquially to mean a multiplier. Organizations, like individuals, need to be in flow to operate smoothly. Change is fragile and often temporary - it usually occurs at the behavior level. To continuously change and innovate within organizations, individuals and groups need to connect and communicate more openly, easily and effectively. It’s important to understand the psychology behind changes and make a shift at the mindset level in order to have a ripple effect for changes. It’s important to make the cross-pollination of ideas and a close connection to the market for all parts of the organization. You can’t just command changes from the top, you have to build change platforms for supporting all valuable change initiatives and efforts, working with the people at all levels of the organization and having them motivated and inspired for changes.

The next wave of changes: These ripples can subsequently grow in size, length, and speed to form what we know as waves. Waves are usually influenced by a range of factors such as wind speed, duration, and distance. They are also influenced by the width of the surrounding areas and the depth of the water body itself. Same as the change management in today’s digital business for adapting to the digital dynamic. Organizations today need to constantly improve the business and seeing change as an opportunity while keeping a holistic overview of the business are the core messages. Organizations arise when the scale of the interrelations, interactions, or inter-relational interactions surpasses the individual’s capacity to be able to do whatever it does with smaller scales. Riding change waves takes both courage and strategy, skills and practices. Change is a volatile subject, just like change itself. It takes a lot of effort and resources to make change happen. Change leaders need to understand the relation and dynamics between consciousness (thinking), energy (emotions), and information deeply in order to ride the upcoming change waves effortlessly.

The tide of digitalization: The rise and fall of water, or rather the difference between the crests and troughs are defined as tides. Tides occur in deep oceanic regions and they are often characterized by movements of water over extended periods of time. Tides are formed as a result of nature force and the gravitational attraction between the Earth, Moon, and Sun. It’s the “product” of the natural ecosystem. Digitalization is like the ocean tide, it evolves the entire business ecosystem. Digital Transformation is the change, but on a grand level, at the level of the system, differentiate in terms of the end result on a systemic level. However, the biggest challenge with any large-scale transformation program is – do the senior leaders truly understand the time and impact on the organization and do they have the intestinal fortitude to hold up to corrections? For many, the ecosystems have evolved without much attention or planning. To effectively respond to these new dynamics, companies must begin thinking about ways to broaden their ecosystems and revenue streams while becoming more responsive and innovative. Align the different parts of the ecosystem to adopt more points of integration and incorporate the use of "stacks." Dynamic resources, long-term perspective, scalable performance and harmonized relationship are all critical to ride the tide of digitalization.

Just like the natural ecosystem has created so many impressive phenomena such as ocean waves and tides, as well as provided the impetus to her evolutionary agenda. The digital ecosystem also provides unprecedented opportunities to strike a dynamic balance between the inner and outer elements, and leapfrog the business world up to the next level of advancement and maturity.

The Monthly CIO Debates Collection: Is IT a Building Block or a Roadblock to Digital Transformation Mar. 2018

11:17 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

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 to brainstorm better ways to do things and improve management capabilities. Here are the monthly CIO debates collections.

Is IT an Enabler or an Obstacle to Get Things Done in Organizations ” In many organizations, IT has been perceived as a controller, a cost center, or even an obstacle to getting things done in the business. What’s the reality of your IT organization? How do you get the non-IT stakeholders to recognize and support the notion that IT and Business are not separate or independent departments? How do you get all stakeholders (IT and non-IT) to encourage the notion that IT and business need to work together to be successful? How do you get non-IT stakeholders to focus on collaboration, transparency, respect, and providing clear leadership?

Business vs. IT the battle rages on --Where do you stand ? There’re quite a few classic business vs. IT debates last decade-long: Does IT still Matter? What will happen to CIO role? 'Business vs IT': where do you stand for? Is the IT/business silo-ing a chronic problem in many organizations? Or have enterprises moved in the right direction, with a few hangers-backs? Yes, the battle rages on, also because 'we' continue to perpetuate the discussion. The positive side is: such debates may help business & IT do more reflection via pondering deeper?

Is Business the IT Sponsor or the Champion? Although IT becomes more crucial and touches almost every key process and core capability of business today, in many organizations with the lower level of business maturity, business and IT work as the silo, fighting for the limited resources or competing for the never-enough budget. What should you do if the business (non-IT functions) is not actively engaged or providing the appropriate role as the project sponsor or champion? What are the best ways to get your business (non-IT) partners to listen to your ideas and support them?

What are Tactics and Methodologies in Developing IT and Business Relationship? statistically, only less than 5% of IT can communicate with business partners seamlessly and build IT reputation as a game changer; while more than half of IT organizations still get stuck on the bottom level of maturity, functioning as an isolated support center or service provider due to ineffective communication. Both senior leadership team and CIOs are clear in what needs to achieve in terms of top line, bottom line and working in tandem with other departments to achieve the IT goal. So what are the tactics and methodologies in developing IT and business partner relationship via effective communication

Is IT a Building Block or a Roadblock to Digital Transformation ? Nowadays technologies make impacts on every vertical industry sector and information permeates into every corner of the organization. IT is becoming more critical strategically, and the building blocks of the business competency. But still, there are discrepancies between how IT evaluates its own influence & performance and how IT is perceived by business partners and customers. Sometimes, business partners think IT is lagging behind the change curve, and they see IT as a drag on innovation. Even IT should be the irreplaceable building block of differentiated organizational capabilities, businesses perceive IT as the roadblock. So, how can IT turn around these negative perceptions and build a strong reputation as a change agent, innovation engine and driving force of digital transformation?

he “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2.5 million page views with 4600+ 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.

Clarify the Myth and Misconceptions for Accelerating Digitalization

11:08 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

Digital transformation is worth its weight because of its high impact on optimizing business performance and driving the business’s long-term prosperity.

Embracing digital is inevitable as that is now part of reality. However, taking a journey of digitalization is a bumpy journey with many ups and downs. It could be misled because of the wrong focus, the wrong assumptions, the wrong ends, and the wrong means. It is important to clarify the myth and misconception in order to lead change and drive digitalization seamlessly.

Digitalization is not equal to digital technology: Digitalization is not just about one-dimensional technology adoption. It has to stretch out in every business dimension with people at the center of its focus and make organizations integrated, energetic, nimble, reliable, flexible, and fast. It requires both digital leaders and professionals to rethink how things are done in the business, and how to improve business performance and speed. The shift to digital cuts across sectors, geographies and leadership roles. It is now spreading rapidly to enable organizations of all shapes and sizes to reinvent themselves via harnessing cross-functional collaboration and fostering innovation. In order to survive and thrive amid rapid changes, companies must reclaim the right balance of standardization and innovation, process and flexibility, stability and change, competition and collaboration, etc. Digitalization represents the next stage of business maturity, which is not only about technical excellence or process efficiency. It’s also about being able to get all the way around the task and rethink the alternative ways to solve today’s complex problems. It is important to harmonize a hyperconnected and interactive digital ecosystem in which the business can grow organically and people can unleash their potential.

Digitalization is not a one-time change initiative: Doing digital is perhaps about playing some digital gadgets or taking a few actions, but being digital is the fundamental shift from the mindsets to behaviors. It is the long-term business transformation and it takes commitment and discipline to stay focused on the real priorities of the business instead of being distracted by what seems to be more urgent on any given day. Digitalization has to expand into every dimension of the organization with a structural approach. Thus, performing an organizational change impact assessment is very important to understand the 'current state' factors in digital transformation. Then, determine what the impact, risks, and challenges of any proposed changes are. The organizational journey is where the juice is in the organization, not just the destination. Those who lack vision are either incentivized incorrectly to focus only on short-term stability or quick win. Leaders must not only have the roadmap but track the journey along the way. Dealing with the challenge of digital transformation requires accelerated digital mindsets, leveraging multidisciplinary knowledge, taking end-to-end responses, and making changes as an ongoing business continuum.

Digitalization is not just about applying some best practices: Principles, processes, practices, performance, potential, etc, are all important perspectives of running a digital business. It is important to leverage a digital framework which provides guidelines, checklist, standards, processes, practices, as well as tools and building blocks to define and develop business competencies in order to manage a holistic digital transformation. Digital exploration is all about planning, designing, developing, operating, consolidating, integrating, securing, modernizing, optimizing, collaborating, innovating, balancing, investing and orchestrating. Before developing digital practices, it’s important to set updated digital rules which are not some out-of-date cliche or rigid processes to stifle innovation. Instead, they are based on the set of digital principles behind the methodologies, and they help to shape the mindsets behind behaviors and actions. By following the digital principles and rules, the business lifecycle could be viewed as resulting in emergent means of reorganizing, refocusing, rebalancing resources, and redirecting people to understand the whole, its components, the specific interaction among them, its interactions with external systems, etc, to ultimately achieve the seamless digital flow and high-level digital maturity.

Digital transformation is worth its weight because of its high impact on optimizing business performance and driving the business’s long-term prosperity. Digital businesses become more dynamic and hyperconnected, clarifying myth and misconceptions for riding those learning and change curves is particularly important for improving business responsiveness, increasing speed and accelerating business maturity.

The Weekly Insight of the “Future of CIO” 3/29/2018

10:21 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

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

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2 million page views with 4500+ 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.

Digital Innovation Bottlenecks Digital innovation has the broader spectrum and more enriched context. Innovation is not serendipity, but a management process. Innovation has three phases: discovery of a problem or new ideas; designing a prototype solution and the ultimate delivery of a commercially astute outcome. Therefore, the best point of view is to see innovation as a system, capable of delivering organizational-wide capability. However, innovation management has an overall very low success rate in the majority of organizations. From the management perspective, what are innovation bottlenecks and how to break them through in order to build innovation as the business competency?

The New Book “Digital Maturity” Introduction Chapter 1 The Characteristics of Digital Organizations The digital world is dynamic, interconnected, and interdependent, with the exponential growth of information and fierce competition. Organizations large or small are on the journey of digitalization, adapting to changes in faster speed and expand digital in every dimension of the business. Organizations today need to constantly improve the business and see change as an opportunity while keeping a holistic overview of the business is the core message. Otherwise, companies will begin a decline from its previous good performance. But more specifically, what are the characteristics of digital organizations and can you make an objective self-assessment whether your organization is a digital master?

How can BoDs Overcome Barriers to Get out of the “Comfort Zone With the increasing speed of changes and frequent digital disruptions across vertical sectors, the role of the corporate board also becomes more dynamic and strategic. No longer are boards sitting in a room and just voting on various policies for business compliance. They need to focus on their own performance as well as the performance of the management team. Dynamism means free and progress. It is the power of BoDs as dynamic leaders to drive changes. But what are some root causes of the board ineffectiveness, and how can they get out of the comfort zone and ride the change wave for steering the board in the right direction?

The Digital CIO as the Gap Minding Role "Nowadays, information is permeating into every corner of the business and technology is often the disruptive force of digitalization. The CIO is not a static management role, but a dynamic leadership role due to the changing nature of technology and overwhelming growth of information. Especially now more and more enterprises are leveraging IT for revenue-generating initiatives. The IT leader of the future and the exemplars of today must move away from pure IT manager, and become a trustful business partner and an insightful strategist to bridge the gap between IT and business, and between the industrial age and the digital era, The important component of IT leadership success has to do with the definition or scope of the role that the CIO is playing and the profundity of IT leadership influence.

Information Management vs. Innovation Management? The abundance of information brings both unprecedented opportunities and risks to businesses today. Information is the lifeblood of the enterprise, but if not properly managed, it becomes at worst case a liability and at best case an underutilized asset. Information Management is all about having the right people to have the right information to make right decisions at the right time. Information is one of the most critical pieces in innovation puzzle. Given this assertion, there is no limit to the value of information in running a high mature digital organization. CIOs as “Chief Innovation Officer”: How can you connect the dots between information management and innovation management

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.

The New Book "Digital Maturity" Introduction Chapter 3 Fine-Tune Organization Structures to Get Digital Ready

10:15 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

Tuning the organizational design and structure to achieve the high level of autonomy is the symbol of the digital maturity.

Due to the “VUCA” nature of digitalization, organizations that are skilled at managing complexity can gain advantages by pushing the boundaries of more complicated business mix that provides opportunities to create inter-business value. From an organizational change management perspective, how to fine tune the digital dimensions of your organizational structure development to get digital ready?

Tuning the organizational structure to improve digital ready-ness: Change can flow on the surface whereas digital transformation needs to permeate into business vision, strategy, culture, communication, and process, etc. At the organizational level, self-adaptation is faster if made with the full involvement of people in organizational changes, starting from relations between people. At the individual level, the “incremental consciousness” about our own potentials is changing the way we see ourselves, and our roles to a community - a team or a company. Understand people and the organization through a common lens, and then, make it possible to turn organizational theories into tangible management processes that use “relations between people” as the loom on which to create management structures and processes that support self-adaptive problem-solving and build “recombinant” business capability. Limited hierarchy works best in a creative environment where the free flow of ideas and their prompt implementation is a key element of success. Digital means the increasing speed of changes, it means that the management needs to challenge convention and break down people’s natural resistance to change or to new ideas; and helps to deliver incremental improvements over time.

Tuning the organizational structure for breakthrough innovation: There are many factors to decide innovation success. From an organizational structural perspective, the right structure allows the right mentality and culture to bloom. The structure carries inherent capabilities as to what can be achieved within its frame. A misaligned structure can reinforce a non-innovation friendly climate Within a well-aligned structure, dedication and effort will be spent on innovation efforts rather than overcoming organizational hurdles and pushing against structural boundaries. A lightweight process allows innovation to turn into value. Innovation challenges the status quo and that is important for a healthy innovative organization. An organization that has a lightweight process which allows creativity and innovation to flow, get protected, channeled, and nurtured will succeed more often than an organization that does not have such a process. A framework is needed for innovation to be successful.

Digital organizations have to adapt to the continuous changes via self-adaptability, self-renewal, and maintain the digital balance: Organizational structure and its impact on efficiency could play either positive or negative impact. The bottom line is how well the organizational structure is being influenced by factors such as communication effectiveness, information fluidity, and customer centricity, etc, to ensure that the business as a whole is superior tot he sum of pieces. The self-adaptive system is a system able to reconfigure its own structure and change its own behavior during the execution of its adaptation to environmental changes. It’s possible to see what enables a self-adaptive organism is an information-driven process and the fine-tuned capability to sustain it. The challenge for any business is to find a successful structure that helps to empower people, enforce iterative communication, and harness cross-functional collaboration to deliver better business results and unleash the full digital potential of the organization.

Digital means change, choice, innovation, speed, and people-centricity. Tuning the organizational design and structure to achieve the high level of autonomy is the symbol of the digital maturity. The future of the digital organization is complex enough to act intelligently and nimble enough to adapt to changes promptly. Running a high-mature digital organization is to improve business efficiency, effectiveness, agility, and ultimately become a digital-ready high-performance business powerhouse.

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The New Book Introduction Chapter 2 The Interdisciplinary Aspects of Orchestrating a Digital Business Ecosystem

11:32 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

Digital maturity requires a well-defined digital framework enabling to develop cross-functional and interrelational management processes and practices.

The digital ecosystem is dynamic, nonlinear, and complex, hence, digital management also needs to be nonlinear and transdisciplinary to deal with “‘VUCA” new normal. Digital leaders today have to frame bigger thinking boxes, and approach problems via the multifaceted lens, technically, scientifically, and culturally. An organization achieves the state of equilibrium through its leadership effectiveness and management capacity.

Don’t rest until you’ve done everything you can do to make your organization as resilient, inventive, inspiring, and accountable as it can be: The emergence of potential opportunities for exploiting digitalization is likely to follow a nonlinear pattern as the pervasiveness of an organization’s digitalization journey increases. The business across the industrial sectors are blessed with intuition and risk-taking attitude. They can practice out-of-the-box thinking, introduce new business concepts, and develop cross-functional platforms, systems, and procedures for efficient use of natural and human resources. They are experimenting, exploring, learning the lessons, and developing the best and next practices for reaching the next level of digital adaptability.

Digitalization 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: The autocratic or pyramidal enterprises are often limited by their DNA to take benefits of such ecosystems because the digital ecosystems are most likely to have a lattice-based architecture rather than a hierarchy. To improve the structural flexibility and strategic responsiveness of the business, the democratic processes will overtake hierarchical control, and hence, the new organic and self-organizing digital system approach to organizational structure could become a reality. And that will be a true evolution of the digital transformation. In fact, tuning the organizational design and structure to achieving the high level of autonomy is the symbol of the digital maturity.

The organizational digitalization journey has to permeate into business vision, strategy, culture, communication, and process: The digitalization is now spreading rapidly to enable organizations of all shapes and sizes to reinvent themselves. But dealing with the significant challenge of digitalization requires accelerated digital mindsets, leveraging multidisciplinary knowledge and insight, taking an end-to-end response and a structural approach. The solutions to today's complex business problems will most probably cover standard aspects such as culture/behavior change, support resources for design/build/implementation of changes, planning and controlling, but also very specific/technical/ functional/system aspects. To engage and function in such dynamic environments, it requires fundamentally different mindsets and paradigms such as accepting that influence is attainable, but control is not. It is important to understand the philosophy, psychology, and technology behind the digital transformation. The challenge is to move from the individual level to the system level.

Digital maturity matters because the digital transformation is not just a one-time business initiative; it requires a well-defined digital framework enabling developing cross-functional and interrelational management processes and practices to help reduce business tensions, frictions, and conflicts that arise; prioritize important things on the “TO-DO” list, set reasonable timelines, and achieve well-defined goals via stepwise approaches.

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How to Leverage the (PRY) Feedback mechanism for Improving Business Effectiveness and Efficiency

11:27 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

Feedback is the bridge to effectively connect our lesson-learned from the past to the future performance and potential.

Running businesses today is complex as there are so many variables that determine the success of the organization. Businesses have to keep tuning those important business factors, make continuous improvement. Therefore, feedback and feedforward are important to run a successful business for the long term, because feedback is aimed to move forward, they are important to avoid repeating mistakes of the past. Rather, either individually or collectively, we should learn from the past, and develop towards a better future. But more specifically, how to leverage the PRY feedback mechanism for improving business effectiveness and efficiency.

Feedback on performance//outcomes: Feedback on performance and outcomes help the business management make the timely adjustment for making continuous improvement. Feedback is always about how to improve performance so it is always about the future to keep it relevant. Feedback is information that enables you to improve. It is essential that you get this information. Feedback does not focus on the past - it tells you what is happening so that you can adapt. The idea that feedback is about the past is where the logical error creeps in. KPI dashboards such as the balanced scorecard were developed to try to encourage businesses to review a set of measures that could predict business performance. Feedback is also contextual, if we consider mistakes in the past as being in a different time or context, then we are not certain to obtain the same outcomes even though it seems that we are repeating the same mistakes. Real-time feedback performance systems are functioning well when in control of the person does the job well to manage feedback continuously.

Feedback on Action/Realization/implementation: Feedback needs to be continuous, as close to real-time as possible. The real-time feedback on action/realization/implementation can provide insights that can genuinely help operations teams to drive service over time. Real-time feedback also has the advantage that you can set up satisfaction alerts. Peers, subordinates, co-workers, clients, and vendors all have their various observations. Thus, they can provide great feedback, their respective viewpoints can indicate useful areas for further exploration and confirmation. But they do not always understand the constraints or circumstances under which the subject must operate. Customers’ feedback is invaluable as well, gaining feedback from customers at the point of experience when customers or guests are most engaged with the business and are most inclined to give useful and accurate feedback.

Feedback on Potential: Feedback is not limited and static as opposed to expansive and dynamic. Good feedbacks help to unleash business potential. By leverage feedback mechanism, leadership as a system is wrapped in a culture of openness and emergence, so that 'learning' and the application of new learning bring 'newness' which creates a healthy cycle of continuous feedback, exploration, experience and a more natural process of improvement. If you want to create a great culture to unlock business potential, you need to be responsive to feedback either individually or collectively. The crucial issue is that the content of the feedbacks is oriented towards behavior, and if we agree that behavior is an extension of the individual's mindset and personality, therefore, the topic becomes really touchy to cope with the root cause of issues. From the management perspective, feedback becomes so critical to not only improving business performance but also enable either people or the organization as a whole to maximize their potential.

We are learning from the past, and developing towards a new future. Feedback is the bridge to effectively connect our lesson-learned from the past to the future performance and potential. In a way, we are destined to look forward, and in doing so, seeing both the past and the future in front of us.

How can BoDs Overcome Barriers to Get out of the “Comfort Zone”

11:23 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

Performance Evaluation and strategic or long-term planning should top the list in the digital board’s agenda.

With the increasing speed of changes and frequent digital disruptions across vertical sectors, the role of the corporate board also becomes more dynamic and strategic. No longer are boards sitting in a room and just voting on various policies for business compliance. They need to focus on their own performance as well as the performance of the management team. Dynamism means free and progress. It is the power of BoDs as dynamic leaders to drive changes. But what are some root causes of the board ineffectiveness, and how can they get out of the comfort zone and ride the change wave for steering the board in the right direction?

Lack of communication around assumptions, expectations, knowledge, and speculation: Corporate boards oversee strategies. When trying to determine the macro environment and how the factors there influence business strategy/plan one way or another, it is difficult to move away entirely from assumptions. If the assumptions are WRONG, the CONCLUSIONS also go wrong. The homogenetic boardroom setting with groupthink often create more blind spots and make wrong assumptions when change becomes nonlinear, and uncertainty & ambiguity become the new normal. Everything has more than one side and you have to master them all, including assumptions. This is particularly critical at the board level as they oversee business strategies, advise top executive teams, and make business policies. Every situation has choices, every situation has known unknown and unknown unknowns, the only way we get to understand these is by leveraging multidimensional thinking to handle issues mindfully, understand the systemic wholeness with contextual intelligence, and communicate around those assumptions, knowledge, speculation, and expectations thoroughly. “Seeing” the context you are part of, allows you to understand the problem with context, identify the leverage points and then choose the decisive factors, in an attempt to scrutinize the strategy objectively and make sound judgments to steer the organization in the right direction.

Fail to understand the gap between knowledge and insight: Many Boards and independent Non-Executive Directors (NEDs) are unfortunately focused on the data and information fed to them, and not on how and where they get the information, as well as how to capture insight. Understanding the gap between knowledge and insight helps digital leaders such as board directors to be not overwhelmed by the exponential growth of information and abundant knowledge. Discover how & where to find valuable information, not just the information itself. Also, try to capture insight that enables identifying the root cause of a problem or the core issues of a situation which leads to understanding and resolution. You need to build your own trustful and diverse resources for absorbing knowledge, learning to activate and use your own mental band-stop filters, but always be objective, to avoid unconscious bias or silo thinking. There are clear sources of appropriate material that will help you find "the right answer." At the board level, the collective insight is superior. If a team clicks it may reach shared insight on the situation and improve governance effectiveness.

Some directors get too "comfortable" in their role on a board, but complacency stifles change and innovation: Contributing to the business strategy and business change agenda are the two places where most value can be added by BoDs. With rising digital tide and cascade change waves, the business ship must get to the New World to grow. You don't have any choices but to change your sails to move forward. The only way to get there is to be a proponent of change. The energy for changes needs to flow down from the top (boardroom). When the board gets stuck in the comfort zone for too long, they will slow down the pace of changes, and decrease the directorship effectiveness. If you want the business ship goes in the right direction, you must adjust your sails with the direction of the wind for getting you to the defined vision. Digital is the age of innovation, it is one of the requirements of the Board members to participate, or even lead, in constantly suggesting areas of innovation. A highly diverse BoD almost always accelerates innovation dramatically as well as spurs creativity proactively.

Performance Evaluation and strategic or long-term planning should top the list in the digital board’s agenda. From the leadership perspective, besides years of experience and vertical expertise, BoDs also need to have the digital acumen for setting key tones of the digital paradigm shift and getting out of the comfort zone in driving changes and catalyzing innovation.

The New Book “Digital Maturity” Introduction Chapter 1 The Characteristics of Digital Organizations

10:47 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

Going digital is the gigantic puzzle with many misplaced pieces; you have to put them all in the right places to discover the true meaning and unleash its full potential.

The digital world is dynamic, interconnected, and interdependent, with the exponential growth of information and fierce competition. Organizations large or small are on the journey of digitalization, adapting to changes in faster speed and expand digital in every dimension of the business. Organizations today need to constantly improve the business and see change as an opportunity while keeping a holistic overview of the business is the core message. Otherwise, companies will begin a decline from its previous good performance. But more specifically, what are the characteristics of digital organizations and can you make an objective self-assessment whether your organization is a digital master?

Holism: Going digital is the gigantic puzzle with many misplaced pieces; you have to put them all in the right places to discover the true meaning and unleash its full potential. Digitalization is the state of dynamism, continuum, and interaction. To effectively respond to new digital dynamics, companies must begin thinking about ways to broaden their ecosystems and revenue streams while becoming more responsive and innovative. Digitalization is to optimize the whole, not the separate silos. At the age of digitalization, with the accelerating speed of changes, the holistic mind is needed to make a continuous improvement. The digital convergence of devices and services are creating new business models and revenue source as most companies across industries are being forced to become the information management business. It’s about building a people-centric business with a holistic strategy. The holistic management focuses on the long-term and transformative business practices, in pursuit of possibilities rather than impossibilities, to drive change and accelerating digital transformation.

Hyperconnectivity: The digital organization is a living thing, it cannot be taken apart. As you cannot understand a cell or a living thing if you isolate it from its context. You need to understand a cohesive whole. Therefore, it’s important for digital leaders and managers to learn how to leverage Systems Thinking to understand the systemic wholeness, to see the interconnectedness of the parts and the whole. Digital blurs the geographical, functional, organizational and industrial borders, traditional hierarchical lines will phase out and a collective of business partners will emerge working collaboratively to set digital strategy and achieve organizational goals collaboratively. When you respect the connecting nature of the digital business, leverage Systems Thinking, fine-tune organizational structures, connect wider dots, you are on the right way to run a high-performance digital organization.

Adaptability: In the ever-changing digital dynamic, either individually or collectively, adaptability is to be understood as the ability of systems or people adapts themselves smoothly and fast to changed circumstances. In the digital age, the knowledge cycle is significantly shortened, digital workforce today needs to have abilities to absorb new knowledge, gain true understanding and capture insight, as well as participate in co-creating new knowledge. Self-adaptation is a phenomenon strictly linked to see learning and knowledge increasing if shared and consumed. Consider the digital organization as the self-organized but interlaced and hyper-connected ecosystem, and humans are vehicles of natural and cultural solutions. Self-adaptation is faster if made with the full involvement of people in organizational flow with the consciousness to change. The living digital organizations can self-discover, self-adapt, self-organize and self-renew, to adapt to changes promptly and make the digital leap smoothly.

Digital makes a profound impact from the specific function to the business as a whole and the entire digital ecosystem. The new paradigm that is emerging is a digital organization that is more responsive, holistic, driven, intelligent, vibrant, innovative, ambidextrous, and above all thrive in the sea of changes. Going digital is more like a journey than a destination. Predicting and preparing the next level of digitalization is an iterative learning and doing continuum.

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Three Aspects of Being an Innovative CIO

10:39 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

IT can become the bridge between the art and science of innovation.

Change is the new normal with a faster pace and high level of intensity. Ideologically, the highly effective and highly dynamic digital organizations, no matter large or small, have a multitude of digital characteristics such as information fluidity, interdependence, and hyper-connectivity. Information & Technology is the linchpin to run a dynamic digital business. IT leaders need to ask themselves tough questions such as: Is IT system just a commodity with a standardized usage of technologies or is IT a game changer? Chief Innovation Officer is one of the most appropriate titles for modern CIOs, to reinvent IT, it’s not about control, but how to take more resource to do innovation and build unique business competency.

Startup Mentality: Traditional IT organizations often operate with the “controller”’s mentality, to keep the lights on. But now with continuous digital disruptions, IT organizations are in face of fierce competitions and unprecedented pressures to deliver the top-line business growth in order to keep it relevant. This requires a mind shift to allow for changes and allow for the element of ultimate control to be released in order for the change to take effect. Digital CIOs today should have the startup mentality, the refusal to be bound by constraints and limitations and make the pursuit of possibilities. They are good at envisioning technological trends, perceiving business opportunities, discovering alternative business solutions. They can step out of the conventional thinking box or linea patterns, advocate innovativeness as a state of mind, and nurture the culture of learning and innovation. Running IT as the business startup requires visionary leadership and holistic digital practices to apply creativity in areas not being explored yet. IT should work both in the business and on the business, or put another way, they do not work within the box, but across the boxes, broaden the perspectives, and connect wider dots for contributing to the top-line business growth.

Creative Problem-solver: Digital CIOs today need to become both business strategists and creative problem solvers. Creative leadership is essentially anchored on the leader's overall multifaceted resourcefulness. They also show versatility, adaptability, and flexibility in response to unpredictable or unanticipated business circumstance. It doesn’t necessarily mean that CIOs will solve every problem on their own, but they have the ability to think synthetically, build high-performing IT teams, avoid unnecessary process and bureaucracy, and leverage multidimensional competencies to formulate unconventional alternatives or solutions to resolve problems. The CIO needs to be able to listen to a wide range of opinions and approaches and understand how that might benefit the business. With unprecedented velocity, uncertainty, nonlinearity, and complexity, digital dynamic forces IT leaders getting really creative on how they adapt to changes and be experimental to try new things, and ensuring that IT is strategically positioned to be ahead of where the business is moving next, and drive changes proactively.

Innovation practitioner: Innovation is not serendipity, but a process which can be managed. Innovation leaders such as digital CIOs face a complex reality. Every industry is different, the enterprise culture is unique, even you have ample ideas, it doesn’t guarantee innovation success due to the possible execution gap. Environment plays an important role, innovation leaders should be able to grasp the environmental opportunities, develop the right knowledge and skill set, leverage the available information, apply the right methods, to give the best results. CIOs as innovation practitioners play a critical role in bridging innovation execution gaps which requires clear stages, information thresholds, decision-making parameters combined with iterative processes that support wide-ranging exploration at each stage. An organization that has a lightweight process which allows creativity and innovation to flow, get protected, channeled and nurtured will succeed more often than an organization that does not have such a process. Running an innovative IT also means that CIOs need to be able to recognize the struggles of the company by understanding the business beyond IT. IT has a great opportunity here to catalyze innovation and lead the digital transformation of the business. Innovative IT leaders should foster a creative working environment, and make innovation become your business routine and corporate culture, to renew creativity energy, allow people to push boundaries and seek out new frontiers.

IT organization can become an innovation hub to bridge the art and science of innovation and get digital ready. The art of innovation is that it involves new ways of bringing together ideas and resources to create something novel. The science of innovation is to take a structural approach to innovation management. IT can become the bridge between the art and science of innovation. The ultimate criterion of "creative leadership," is to envision the future trends in business, technology, and society, explore business opportunities, build the capacity to unleash human potential, and spread leadership influence.

The Monthly Insight of “Digital Balance”: The Digital Hybridity Mar. 2018

11:01 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

Digital doesn’t mean just tear down all the old things in the previous era, in reality, digital means to strike the right balance between the new way and the “old way.”

We are experiencing the dynamics of the most significant business transformation since the industrial revolution. The majority of us will work in an organization that is somewhere between old and new; at both industrial speed and digital speed; It is more critical than ever to maintain the right level of digital balance. In fact, striking the right digital balance is a never-ending business life cycle.

The Digital Hybridity

A Hybrid Organization With the fast pace of change and emerging digital technologies such as social, mobile and cloud, companies large or small are brainstorming the next generation of organizational design, how to take advantage of the new digital tools, how to improve productivity and enforce creativity & collaboration cross-enterprise ecosystem?

A Hybrid IT IT plays a significant role in modern businesses today, touches almost every key business processes, especially with the trend of SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics, and Cloud), IT consumerization and internet of things. The effectiveness of IT can be derived best when overall IT Organization reflects on how the business is structured for responsibilities and accountabilities of key decision makers. In other ways, IT can not architect itself in isolation. So to effectively deliver IT capabilities, centralized, decentralized, or hybrid IT, which is the right way?

Hybrid Innovation : Innovation is a management discipline, just like many key elements in businesses today, such as leadership, culture, process, or technology, etc, HYBRID is the digital fit style for managing innovation. From portfolio management point of view, companies need both incremental product/service innovations to thrive but also desire large, disruptive innovations for a quantum leap. Managing innovation requires leaders, either formal or informal, to shepherd an idea through several phases of development, knowing when to move forward and when to return to an earlier phase. But more specifically, what is hybrid innovation and how to manage it effectively?

Three Hybrid Elements in Running a Digital IT and Organization With emergent digital technologies, organizations large or small reinvent themselves to become more agile, flexible and innovative. Digital doesn’t mean just tear down all the old things in the previous era, in reality, digital means to strike the right balance between the new way and the “old way,” the physical building and the virtual platform, the face-to-face communication and the always-on online presence. Here are three HYBRID elements in running a digital IT and organization.

The Hybrid Decision-Making Style ? The digital leaders and professionals spend the significant amount of time in making decisions. However, ineffective decision-making becomes one of the biggest root causes to fail businesses due to "VUCA" characteristics of the digital normality. The poor decision-making can cause the business dysfunction, employee disengagement, or customer dissatisfaction; the short time loss or the long-term pain in the organization. The point is that there is no one size fits all formula for all decision making, there are all sorts of decision-making styles depend on the decision maker's cognitive ability, knowledge, insight, or personality. With the increasing pace of change and overwhelming information, can the hybrid style help to improve decision-making maturity?

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2.5 million page views with about #4500+ 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.