Digital organizations are like complex systems that are dynamic, self-evolving, self-adaptable, and self-perpetuating. The contemporary corporate board as a top leadership team plays a significant role in overseeing business strategy management and exemplifying leadership effectiveness. Due to the complexity, uncertainty, ambiguity, and volatility of the digital era, the directorship in any organization should get out of the mental boxes shaped in the considerably static or linear industrial age; break down outdated conventional thinking, absorb current information or knowledge, fill out blind spots by embracing fresh insight, become more flexible and proactive to drive change and digital transformation. Here is a set of the corporate board director's digital profile II.A foresightful digital trendsetter: The board director is the top leadership role; leadership is all about direction and change. The fact is that change is happening at a much faster pace than ever before, requiring much more rapid response in order to survive and thrive. Digital leadership is the adventure to explore unknown, have confidence and insight to navigate the business on the right path. At the board level, vision helps to predict the macro trends, assist in "seeing" and bringing clarity to the future within the business ecosystem and beyond. A clear vision is a good combination of perception, prediction, and precision. The vision thing matters in the boardroom because it helps to advocate forward-thinking, to predict, prepare and overcome the challenges and uncertainty on the way to the future. By focusing forward, businesses are able to more accurately judge the coming learning curves and obstacles to changes in their path. Visionary board leaders have a clear choice among future scenarios that advocates future trends, set digital principles and trends, shape advanced mindsets, and promote certain behaviors. It is through identifying the “destination,” BoDs can steer the organization into the uncharted water and blurred territories, focus on what the organization needs to look like, alongside the impetus and sense of urgency, toward the destination steadfastly.
An insightful problem-definer: Corporate boards oversee business strategy and fundamentally, strategy development is a scenario of diagnosing business problems, making choices, and taking actions to achieve well-defined goals. Corporate boards need to become the co-problem-definer for framing some most important issues at the strategic level because often they can delegate the responsibility of problem-solving to the management. The point is, framing the right problem is equally or even more important than solving it. To be a good problem-definer, BoDs need to gain deep insight into how things work just by analyzing the aggregates, not necessary to dive into the details. Tactically, framing the right question more often needs to step back or get out of the box, in order to look at the problem from a different angle or understand the issues holistically. Often, the corporate board directors can bring the outlier’s view and many of them have an interdisciplinary understanding of crucial business problems, frame bigger thinking boxes, and approach problems technically, scientifically and culturally, mainly at the strategic level. Because problem-solving is about seeing a problem and actually finding a solution to that problem without causing too many side effects, or just taking the band-aid approach to fixing the symptom. The BoDs as “Problem-Definer” should understand what is exactly wrong, the exact description of the problem, and how to frame the right problems for solving. Thus, the board directors need to have sharp eyes to identify problems and unique insight to identify the problem and pinpoint the root causes. Otherwise, fixing the wrong cause of a problem will create more gaps and lead to even more serious problems later on.
Digital transformation is a radical change. We are on the advancing journey of moving from an industrial economy to a knowledge economy to a creative digital economy. Great boards are heterogeneous, inquisitive, intelligent, effective, innovative and influential. There is no static standard or cookie-cutting approach to select the great board leaders. Forward-looking boards continue to add the new blood for enforcing digital acumen, bring fresh eyes to see things differently, inspire diversity of thoughts to capture global insight, with the goal to shape a strategic board to improve top leadership maturity.
The Corporate Board Director's Digital Profile Blog Series
The Corporate Board Director’s Digital Profiles
The Corporate Board Director’s Digital Profile II
The Corporate Board Director’s Digital profile III
The Corporate Board Director’s Digital Profile IV
The Corporate Board Director’s Digital Profile V
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