Monday, October 8, 2018

The Monthly “Digitizing Boardroom” Book Tuning: The Digital Personas of Board Directors Oct. 2018


Modern corporate boards play significant roles in guiding businesses in 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 are the multiple perspectives of digitizing boardroom.

                 The “Digital Personas” of Board Directors



The Corporate Board as “Digital Overseer” The board as senior leadership team needs to steer their organization toward the uncharted water or blurred territories with unprecedented uncertainty and complexity. To lead effectively, they have to look into an unknown future and attempt to define the landscape with its risks and opportunities and provide the guidance about what core to preserve and what future to stimulate the business progress toward. Here are three aspects of the corporate board as “digital Overseer.”

The Board Directors Think Like "Digital Architect" With the organization/industry/society moving forward and stepping into the "VUCA" digital new normal, the corporate boards as the top leadership pillar play a critical role in leading changes; they are like the steering wheel, to ensure their corporate ships are moving in the right direction towards the uncharted water. Compared to other junior level management position, the boards as senior leadership role needs to spend significant time on making both strategic decisions and sound judgments. They are like digital architects to envision the future of the organization and orchestrate the digital transformation smoothly.

The Corporate Board as Digital Shaper The business is complex, the world is complex, and leadership is complex. Leadership can be perceived with both broader scope of the open system and in-depth understanding of its interconnectivity and interdependence. The digital directors and executives today need to understand things and circumstance in a holistic way, deal with opposing views, cultures, constraints, and competitions, in order to steer the business in the right direction and navigate it through the uncharted water to lead digital transformation seamlessly.

The BoDs as the Digital Rule-Maker The purpose of the board of directors is to direct the organization in the right direction. The board directors as senior directorial roles have both privilege and responsibility to “talk the walk,” make the good policies or set digital principles to drive changes and lead digital paradigm shift. The board of directors is the digital rule-maker for getting the business management digital ready.

Board Directors as the Digital Provocateur Digital transformation represents a break from the past, with a high level of impact and complexity. In order to lead today’s hyper-connected digital organizations with the hyper-diverse workforce, board directors should become the digital provocateur to drive changes and set the leadership tone for digital transformation; and the board composition should be synchronized with the digital perspective of the business, to advance its leadership maturity.

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"Digitizing Boardroom" Book Introduction, Slideshare Presentation

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