Unleash Business Potential and Accelerate Digital Maturity

How to unleash the abundance of human potential is perhaps one of the best rewarding arenas for pursuing digitalization.

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.

Business potential includes the ability to perform in the future and that’s what really matters: Potential is about the future performance. Thanks for the digital convenience brought by lightweight and powerful digital collaboration platforms and tools, organizations are shifting from the classic management style with the reductionistic mechanism that resulted in silo and bureaucracies, to the digital paradigm that encourages creativity, foster collaboration, and enforce employee engagement. In order to unleash collective potential, the business needs to discover its strength and build a unique set of business competency based on the differentiated digital capabilities. Many traditional organizations still only focus on the performance today - to keep the light on. But forward-looking and modern digital organizations explore the new possibility and build the capabilities to perform in the future so that the organization does not only 'earn enough from today,' but 'thrive in the future,' because that’s what really matters from the longer term perspective. Those organizations build the culture of learning, empower employees to constantly learn, and lead a healthy learning and doing continuum. Perhaps most importantly, in these working environment, knowledge is shared instead of hoarded, thus, expanding power instead of confining it. Unleashing potential is a strategic effort either at the individual or the business level. Sometimes, you even need to leverage all tradeoffs, retreat today’s performance a step back in order to accelerate the future performance three steps ahead. If you don't take the time and make the effort to get the strategy right, you could end up "doing the wrong things right." That means you would only keep spinning the wheel without going anywhere.

The potential makes the business grow and mature: Performance enables business survival, but potential makes the business thriving; leap the individual or the organization to the next level of the growth cycle. Therefore, to unleash the full potential of the business, leadership needs to be future-oriented and further-looking, with a clear business vision and collective and broad range of business perspectives. So,  they can embrace fresh ideas or spot on high potential talent to explore their digital vision in a spirit of open-mindedness, discovery, and experimenting. All ambitious businesses strive to unlock their business creativity and unleash their full digital potential because digital brings unprecedented opportunities for business growth. A high-potential business is a changeable organization because improvement cannot happen without change, and change should not happen without improvement. Unleashing potential is truly about sharpening the ability to change for better. Those businesses enforce communication, foster relationship-building, emphasize participation, and realize that they have to renew themselves periodically to cope effectively with change and have a fluid structure that responds effectively to their function at the moment.

The potential relates to the innate and developed capability: Unleashing potential either for individuals or businesses is about how to discover your innate ability, and strengthen your strength to develop the unique set of capabilities. It's important to identify potential and create an authentic organizational culture to encourage employees’ growth, inspire discovery, autonomy, and mastery. Business leaders and talent managers need to pay more attention to those high potentials with shining spots: Who can bring unique POVs, who can discover the better way to solve problems? Who are those change agents or innovation champions? Who can make the influence on building the positive and creative culture? Consider the digital organization as the self-organized but interlaced and hyper-connected ecosystem, and humans are vehicles of natural and cultural solutions. Digital is the age of information overloading and knowledge abundance. People and organizations could now learn faster in a time when leading strategists were arguing that the only sustainable advantage was to learn faster than your competition and unleash your full digital potential. Do not just keep the eyes on your competitors only because each person or business has their own unique strength, should spend sufficient time on developing their own competency. Changing, adapting or mitigation is a "practical" way of implementing the existing change plan, and unlocking potentials to accomplish the goals of tomorrow.

Organizations of the future are increasingly exhibiting digital characteristics in various shades, extensiveness, and intensity. The ultimate goal of the business either today or future is to achieve the high-performance result and accelerate the high-level business maturity. As a society, we need to inspire authenticity, creativity, respect and encourage change, difference, and uniqueness. It is only then we will see 'human potential' really show itself, via the progressive lens, with the power to make the impossible possible.

Posted in: Digital Master,Digitalization,Enterprise Capability