The Monthly “12 CIO Personas” Book Turning: CIOs as “Chief Intrapreneur Officer” May 2019

The digital CIOs have to wear different colors of hats and master multiple leadership personas and management roles effortlessly.

This 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. The important thing is that CIOs as the top leadership role must have a strong mindset, a unique personality, and a clear idea of what needs to be done, yet creative enough to not hold the company back from growth. Regardless of which personality they have, digital CIOs need to be both transformational and situational, innovative and tactical, business savvy and technology insightful, communication-effective and operation-efficient. Here is a set of blogs to brainstorm CIO as “Chief Intrapreneur Officer.”

CIOs as “Chief Intrapreneur Officer”

CIOs as Chief Intrapreneur Officer: How to Encourage Creativity and Manage Innovation It's common that many IT companies tend to focus more on their core competencies with age and often forget about the value of innovation. Without encouraging creativity, organizations would be upstaged by the ones that are creative because disruptive innovation will happen no matter how well you prepare. Digital IT needs to be run as a business, and digital CIOs should be the “Chief Intrapreneur Officer,” with “whole brain” thinking: Being logic in your mind based on your years of engineering training and experiences and be creative in your heart, dream big and think big. Because the CIO’s vision will directly impact their organization’s strategic perspective for the long term. So, how to encourage creativity and manage innovation effectively?

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. Here are three aspects of intrapreneur leadership.

CIOs as “Chief Intrapreneur Officer”: Practicing Entrepreneurship in IT Contemporary CIOs have multiple personas, "Chief Innovation Officer," and “Chief Intrapreneur Officers,” are the most pertinent titles for CIOs to fit the digital leadership role in running IT as a business. Companies are recognizing that IT is roughly coupled to the business strategy as an innovation engine. With the increasing pace of changes, CIOs generally have greater opportunities to stand out and practice digital leadership in driving innovation across their companies. Being entrepreneurial is first the mindset, then an attitude and skills are the easier part to be developed. More and more forward-looking IT organizations are practicing entrepreneurship and running IT as a software startup to play the niche and make continuous deliveries.

CIOs as “Chief Intrapreneur Officer”: How to Sow IT Innovation Seeds via asking Open-Ended Questions Intrapreneurship is about creating a 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.

Running IT as the “Center of Possibility” IT continues to grow in importance to organizations, both operationally and as a competitive advantage. To keep IT relevant, IT management shouldn't just practice some transactional activities or act as a controller only. It has to explore both the art and the science of digital management discipline, run IT organization as the “center of possibility,” to accelerate its performance and unlock business potential.

Modern organizations have their own sophistication with silo functions, the sea of information, and the pool of talents. The CIO is an inherently cross-functional role, to bridge the business and IT; the data and insight, the business’s today and tomorrow. The digital CIOs have to wear different personas and master multiple leadership and management roles effortlessly. They need to lead at the strategic level for conducting a complex digital orchestra; they should be handy managers to plumbing information and keep it flow smoothly; they also have to be like the diligent gardeners, to build a unique IT landscape via tuning technology, removing waste, nurturing culture, and empowering people.

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The Best “Advancement” Quotes of “Digital Master” May 2019

The most ADVANCING thing in the world is an advanced mindset.

"Digital Master” is the series of guidebooks (27+ books) to perceive the multi-faceted impact digital is making to the businesses and society, help forward-thinking organizations navigate through the journey in a systematic way, and avoid “rogue digital.” It perceives the emergent trends of digital leadership, advises on how to run a digital organization to unleash its full potential and improve agility, maturity, and provide insight about Change Management. It also instructs the digital workforce on how to shape a game-changing digital mindset and build the right set of digital capabilities to compete for the future. Here is a set of “Advancement” quotes in “Digital Master."

1 The most advanced things in the world are not hard things, neither supercomputers nor fancy gadgets, but the soft stuff - the mindset that can think forward, positively and creatively.

2 Real societal advancement is made through the work of the visionary mindset, update knowledge, and progressive activities.

3 ADVANCEMENT can be accelerated when we follow the most advanced mindsets in the world and evolve into advanced activities and movement in a consistent way.

4 When things or people are mature, they are not aged, they are in the advanced stage - ripened and delightful.

5 We are on the advancing journey when we move from information scarcity to knowledge economy to creativity economy

6 The advanced learning journey gets to the inflection point when you do not just absorb knowledge, but criticize old knowledge, co-create new knowledge, and share a fresh perspective. The advanced journey reaches the turning point when you are in the right spot to see the two sides of the coin, and capture multidimensional views via the right angle to spur creativity.

7 Advancement is about forward-thinking, progress, improvement, fresh knowledge, modernization while the opposite of advancement is primitivity, outdated concept/tradition, static mindset, negative behavior, etc.

8 The advancement can become more reachable when we appreciate each other’s strength, complement each other’s capability; understand each other via empathetic mind connection and heart touches.

9 Only through continuous improvement, human advancement can be sustained and the world can move forward with accelerated speed.

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Three Causes of Business Vulnerability

We live in an era, full of uncertainty, velocity, complexity, and ambiguity, the result is the higher risk of priority conflict, change inertia, resource limitation or business vulnerability. 

Digital organizations are organic, complex, informative and hyperconnected. Closer to reality is that change is continuously happening in such a dynamic environment of a company. The inevitable range, breadth, depth, and pace of uncontrollable factors acting on any organizations mean identifying business vulnerability and constant fine-tuning is essential to improve business adaptability, performance, and maturity.




Homogeneity: With “VUCA” digital normality, business leaders today need to keep navigating unknown and build up the team which includes the complementary mindset, diversified background, and skills in order to spark innovation, co-solve over-complex problems, and deal with unprecedented changes and high business velocity. From a decision management perspective, it is a strategic imperative to close cognitive gaps caused by “group thinking” with the thought pattern which is following the crowd but lack of insight to understand things from multiple perspectives. Because often the homogeneous team setting will make team numbers more vulnerable to peer pressure and make biased decisions. Then, ineffective decision-making, especially at the strategic level will make their business vulnerable to emerging events, the ever-expanded business eco-system or even mislead their business in the wrong direction. It is important to be objective and gain a different view in order to develop and have a better understanding of certain topics or problems that may occur and prepare for the different scenario to deal with them smoothly. From an innovation management perspective, homogeneous thinking limits the organization's imagination and creativity. Forward-thinking digital businesses today should look for and promote cognitive diversity, mental agility and encourage thinking differently in order to connect wider dots for spurring creativity. They should develop a highly innovative team including different types of innovators (such as idea generators, innovation navigators, innovation implementor, etc.) A simple way initially to improve innovation in almost any organization is to simply broaden the audience, or expand the collective insight to overcome challenges and connecting unusual dots to catalyze creativity.

Inflexibility: When organizations grow, they often add more rule, processes, people, or technology; all those elements are not isolated, but interdependent. The larger the organization and inputs are, the larger the amount of 'rules' are necessary for its functions, to keep dependent variables and outputs delivery stable. If not handled well, organizations are overly rigid, inflexible and become so vulnerable to the dynamic business environment. Inflexibility is caused by bureaucratic management practices, complicated processes or procedures, legacy IT systems, outdated rules or practice, etc. To improve business flexibility, flatten the overly rigid hierarchy and battle bureaucracy which often stifles changes and creates bottlenecks for cross-functional communication and collaboration. Ideally, digital organizations should be a complex but flexible ecological system starting to appreciate business attributes such as readiness, ownership, integration, open communication, customized structuring, and multifaceted partnerships. To improve organizational adaptability and innovativeness, digital management today requires a different kind of control. For example, the control on desired outcomes, keep the end in mind, not overly control the process of “HOW.” They do not focus on hierarchy but on ideas-generation, information flow, flexibility, and openness.

Complacency: The world is constantly changing, and digital is all about flow. But complacency is at the heart of resistance to change and causes business vulnerability in the face of fierce competitions and frequent disruptions. More often, a complacency mindset lives long after the success that created has disappeared. A complacency mind gets used to reacting, not being proactive. It is the unknown and being afraid of new things and it will be the same for the word "complacency." When business leaders or managers are comfortable with the status quo, they often miss the big picture and become complacent. Collectively, complacency damages the culture and makes the business stagnate. Numerous changes or business transformations run, complete, and then slowly crumble away as people slowly revert to old ways of doing things and get stuck with complacency. To avoid being disrupted, business leaders should be cautiously optimistic, have the right dose of risk appetite to explore the various environment and ecosystems to chase growth opportunities and unlock their performance, set up a prioritization process to remove inefficiency, change things which really matter for the long-term prosperity of the business.

We live in an era, full of uncertainty, velocity, complexity, and ambiguity, the result is the higher risk of priority conflict, change inertia, resource limitation or business vulnerability. Thus, organizations must have solid digital management to keep tuning business success factors for building differentiated business competency; people focus on learning opportunities offered by assignments and developing their professional competency. So, the company can strengthen the weakest link, handle business vulnerability and deal with either internal or external risk effectively in order to achieve the long term business advantage.

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The Weekly Insight of the “Future of CIO” 5/30/2019

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

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2.8 million page views with 5700+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The “Digital Master” book series includes 27 books to share insight from the multidimensional digital lens and perceive the multi-faceted impact the digital era upon us is making to the businesses and society. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Here is the weekly insight of digital leadership, IT Management, and Talent Management.

Three Tough Questions Digital Leaders need to Ponder for Driving a Smooth Digital transformation The pervasive digital technology and exponential growth of information bring unprecedented opportunities and risks, many organizations are like to explore digital by following nonlinear patterns with accelerated speed. They have to strike the right balance between chaos and order, innovation and process, change and stability, etc. Business leaders need to ask tough questions, clarify the goals, and identify pitfalls on the way. At the high level of maturity, organizations have to stretch out in every business dimension for driving the full-fledged digital transformation.

The Corporate Board’s Outside-in Views? A digital paradigm is an emerging business ecosystem of principles, policies, and practices that set boundaries to frame the smooth business transformation with the focus. The board provides an “outside-in” view to the business management by overseeing the strategy and monitoring performance management. It should also offer guidance for creative problem-solving and steering the business in the right direction by practicing digital philosophy and principles.

Three Digital Continuums to Run a High Mature Digital Business In the digital era with rapid changes and continuous disruptions, any business can be at risk for survival at any minute due to continuous disruptions and “VUCA” digital new normal. “VUCA” is an acronym used to describe or reflect on volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity of general conditions and situation of the business. Going digital takes multifaceted management disciplines and structural approach to drilling down the critical business success factors that underpin every dimension of the business performance. Here are three digital continuums to run a high mature digital business.

Running IT as Digital Force Multiplier In the world where change is significantly speeding up, that business leaders couldn’t predict the future with a certain degree of accuracy. The pace of change has been felt the most in areas of Information Technology, marketing, and business operations. The expectation from business consumers outstrips the digital readiness of most companies. The business strategy can no longer stay static and strategy implementation is not a linear scenario, but an iterative continuum. IT organizations can no longer hide in the corner as a support center, The role of the CIO is to proactively drive the corporate strategy by running IT as a digital force multiplier and improve the organization maturity from functioning to delight.

The Monthly “100 Creativity Ingredients” Book Tuning: Creative Personas May 2019 All humans are born with raw creativity ability. Creativity has many dimensions, with multi-faceted truth and myth, manifold knowledge and multidimensional insight. Creativity is the wings of our mind and the tempo of our heartbeat. Creativity is a constructive disruption, not so bad addiction, and a sensational phenomenon. The purpose of “100 Creativity Ingredients - Everyone’s Playbook to Unlock Creativity “ is to classify, scrutinize, articulate, and share insight about one hundred special creativity ingredients, to paint the picture with them, to add colors on them, to embed the music into them, and to make the story via them, in order to unleash our collective creativity potential.

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.

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Three Perspectives on Being an Innovative Leader

Innovation leaders are versatile with open-mindedness and learning agility.

By etymology, "innovare" signifies "to germinate seeds," knowing that, go ahead and innovate by inventing your future, and the one of your company’s. Business success today depends on innovation. Business innovation depends on innovation leadership. Highly innovative leaders need to have a clear vision, effective communication and make a commitment to roll the imagination into reality. The success of innovation depends on visionary leadership, systematic management, as well as a creative culture having a strong connection with business objectives, skills, and knowledge. Everything begins with leadership. Here are three perspectives on being an innovative leader.

An innovation leader is not only a dreamer and a strategist but also a practitioner to develop and renew creative energy in the business environment: Forward-looking organizations understand the strategic imperative for business reinvention and renewal. The board and the top management team are looking for shareholders’ value, which requires developing innovative products or services that have unique selling points to expand the market growth. Thus, innovative leaders are in strong demand to establish an innovation framework and environment for nurturing creative ideas and transforming them into the commercial value of the business. On one side, it’s critical to shaping an organization towards innovative working climate by encouraging fresh thinking and unleashing creative energy; on the other hand, the best innovative leaders are also well-disciplined, they should focus on the strategic business goals skillfully and navigate innovation management in the right decision. Innovation fails usually because that innovation invariably has not had top executives’ guidance and sponsorship; communication across business functions has been weak and there are very little empowerment and too limited delegation. The trick is to release the innovation potential of the business by addressing all those issues insightfully and dealing with them effectively. Walking that tight rope makes the innovation leader and managing innovation is both science and art.

An innovative leader today is a problem-solver, who has to create, manage, and explore innovation networks and business eco-system: Innovation is a process that is cross-functional and non-industry specific. It is, at its heart, a problem-solving process- a simple process of deduction to derive a solution drawing from knowledge, experience, and out-of-the-box creativity. Innovative leaders require the strength to review a recommendation to a problem or decisions. They see the old problems from every direction and find different solutions. The traditional type of business management usually cannot look outside the box, but innovation management needs to shape a bigger box to think, recognize innovative ideas, fight for resources and political cover, connect ideas and teams together to deliver highly innovative solutions and achieve innovation excellence. Logically, it's important to break down silos and being intentional about developing business processes that encourage cross-functional communication and collaboration and enforcing business adaptability and innovation. Change, creativity, and problem-solving are all important perspectives on driving the business forward. It combines restless dissatisfaction with the current state coupled with the excitement of leading individuals or teams to find innovative solutions that will produce great results. Otherwise, you’ll have very little change to run a high-performance digital business successfully.

The other great sign of a good innovation leader is that he/she will recognize his/her limitations and build a team with complementary mindsets and skills: Innovative leaders are like a conductor leading the orchestra with a not yet completely written digital innovation symphony. Innovation leadership is anchored on the leader’s multifaceted resourcefulness and differentiated competency. True innovative leaders inspire creativity and encourage employees to do new things and show the right dose of risk appetite. So even innovation effort fails, they learn from it and grow to make better products or services in the future. Innovation thrives when talented people are put in the right position to stimulate excellent ideas or implement them relentlessly. Aptitude and skills will vary from front-end to back-end. Thus, it is critical to building a highly innovative team with all sorts of talent and skills, from sowing the seed of creativity, growing the innovation fruits, to reaping innovation benefits. It’s also crucial to develop a strong capacity for integration and digestion of information from various sources because nowadays information is usually one of the most time-intensive pieces of innovation puzzle. The emerging business collaboration tools and platforms are not only enforcing the structured business processes of the past but also enabling the unstructured processes of the digital enterprise to break down silos to enforce collaboration and amplify collective creativity.

Innovation leaders are versatile with open-mindedness and learning agility. The speed of change is expedited, so does the speed of innovation. Innovative leaders are also strategic leaders who can take the calculated risks to find new opportunities that would lead the right path to innovation. They have flexibility and adaptability to practice the wide range of leadership skills available to them and show self-awareness to know when and how to use and develop the professional skills of those that they lead. More often, they are the innovator themselves, walk the talk, to build a digital organization for achieving innovation excellence.

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The Monthly Keyword Summary: Holism May 2019

“Holistic thinking" refers to a big picture mentality, and understand that the whole is often greater than the sum of the parts.

From one generation to the next, the substance of leadership does not change, it’s about future, change, and influence. However, digital leadership trends will continue to emerge. Here is a set of featured blogs to dig into "Holism" as the keyword of the 21st century to brainstorming the future of digital leadership and business transformation.

  

  Holism

Digital Holism Digital disruptions are inevitable, and digital transformation is unstoppable. Organizations shouldn’t just respond to them in a reactive way. To stay competitive, companies must go beyond experimenting with digital, take a holistic approach, commit to transforming themselves into a fully digital business powerhouse.

Shaping a Holistic View -Seeing both Forest and Trees Holistic thinking involves understanding a system by sensing its large-scale patterns and addressing the big picture. In terms of a holistic' viewpoint,' one does often need to integrate different stereotyped or mechanistic viewpoints; it is the integration and searches for new viewpoints that are holistic. At times, when you only want to see things from your own point of view, see what you want to see, or, hear what you want to hear, often you miss the point to understand the real problem holistically as well as how to solve it creatively or systematically. Here are three aspects of shaping a holistic view of digital transformation.

How to Learn Systems Thinking in Understanding the Holism Ordinarily people do not inquire into the matters, they are too much a slave to the conventional way of thinking or follow the mainstream thinking, they just accept what is instilled into their minds, mainly even through the indirect experiences, one side of story or unverified information; for to accept is more convenient and practical, and life is to a certain extent, though not in reality, made thereby easier. Most of the people are in nature conservatives, not because they are lazy, but because they are educated to be compliant with conventional wisdom or group thinking, even superficially. But the time comes when traditional logic does no longer hold true, for you begin to feel contradictions and splits and consequently spiritual anguish, especially at today's hyper-connected digital world, the disruptions come almost overnight, and the knowledge life cycle is significantly shortened. You lose trustful repose which you experienced when you blindly follow the traditional ways of thinking. So what are the Systems Principles you can follow to practice independent thinking, critical thinking or agile critical thinking which has creativity deeply embedded in it?

Holistic Problem-Solving? “Holistic thinking" refers to a big picture mentality, and understand that the whole is often greater than the sum of the parts. Holistic thinking is the type of thinking practice that appreciates how underlying complexity generates the features and phenomena of interest to practitioners so that they can work with them accordingly. From the problem-solving perspective, what are the characteristics of situations or problems in which we should adopt holistic thinking? When is the trade-off more beneficial in adopting holistic thinking versus mechanistic thinking or linear logical thinking for improving problem-solving effectiveness?

The Best “Holistic Thinking” Quotes of “Digital Master” Mar. 2019 “Digital Master” is the series of guidebooks (27+ books) to perceive the multi-faceted impact digital is making to the businesses and society, help forward-thinking organizations navigate through the journey in a systematic way, and avoid “rogue digital.” It perceives the emergent trends of digital leadership, advises on how to run a digital organization to unleash its full potential and improve agility, maturity, and provide insight about Change Management. It also instructs the digital workforce on how to shape a game-changing digital mindset and build the right set of digital capabilities to compete for the future. Here is a set of “Holistic Thinking” quotes in “Digital Master.’

The blog is a dynamic book flowing with your thought; growing through your dedication; sharing your knowledge; conveying your wisdom, and making influence through touching the hearts and connecting the minds across the globe. The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with about #5700 blog posting. Among 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. 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.

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The Corporate Board Director Digital Profile VII

Great boards consist of outstanding directors who are able to “rowing together in the boat,” toward the destination via a clear vision and strong governance practices. 

The purpose of the governing body, or board of directors, is to direct and control the organization to accomplish its judiciary duty -corporate governance and steer the business in the right direction. Due to the “VUCA” characteristics -complexity, uncertainty, ambiguity and velocity of the digital era, the directorship in any organization becomes more critical and challenging. Here is a set of corporate board director’s digital profiles.

Strategic communicator: Communication is the leadership style to amplify your positive influence. It is increasingly important for business leaders such as board directors to clearly communicate their values and purpose through strategic communication. Strategic communication includes the conversations about strategies with the goal-driven conversations - laser focusing on problem-solving and keeping the end in mind. It also refers to understand modern communication styles and the skills to craft messaging for a varying global audience. If communication has to develop fully, it is essential that the person communicating should be equally aware of what he/she wants to communicate, how he/she communicates and above all ensure that he/she has communicated correctly. BoDs need to educate themselves by hearing different views about the organization, its environment, and strategic alternatives, collecting reliable information to help the management set broad strategic goals. The strategic conversations must be followed (with some flexibility) at every board session to ensure that management follows and does not "forget" the strategy. The BoDs need to practice multidimensional thinking and gain a deeper understanding of the enterprise in order to be a credible actor in the strategic dialogue. The bellwether BoDs can master strategic communication and provide excellent feedback which gives the top management accurate information to improve; great questions to self-aware; and keen insight to help the organization innovate, grow and mature.

Digital accelerator: Organizations large or small are on the journey of digital transformation, speed matters because the digital era upon us means the increasing pace of changes and exponential growth of information. Speed matters because it directly impacts the responsiveness of the business and the effectiveness of business strategy management. The business speed can only be accelerated with a clear vision, strong leadership, laser focus, and distinctive capabilities. The digital savvy board directors understand what's required and how as a high-level basis of going digital mean to the business. To accelerate changes, digital leaders should both understand the psychology behind the change and the art and science of change management. They have the advantage of pulling enough resources and pushing the business model of information technology and enforcing leadership trustworthiness to accelerate performance, make a significant impact on accelerating digital transformation with premium speed. Furthermore, the corporate board leaders must have an in-depth understanding of the digital dynamic and practice open leadership to drive the business forward confidently. Just like a steering wheel that can’t accelerate the speed of the vehicle directly, but by navigating the better pathway, it may shorten the distance or save the energy, to reach the destination promptly.

Governance champion: The purpose of the governing body, or board of directors, is generally known as “corporate governance.” There are four key dimensions of corporate governance which are accountability, strategy, policy, and monitoring. Governance is a sophisticated process which facilitates the successful functioning of an organization while ensuring there are adequate controls in place to operate responsibly in accordance with its values but not to the extent of restricting the aspiration to achieve its vision through an ambitious mission and actions. While “corporate governance” can be modeled in general terms, and while certain aspects of corporate governance are heavily regulated in some jurisdictions. Good governance must ensure organizations running in the right direction and create an excellent performance at the right speed, especially for long-term business growth, to ensure the best fit between short-term profitability and long-term sustainability. It is important to emphasize that governance is fundamentally about having a systematic approach to set strategies, objectives, and policies of the organization, either directly or through some levels of delegation to management, for mastering digital fluency and making a leap of digital transformation.

Organizations need to hunt for qualified and independent Board members who are aware of their responsibilities and duty to the shareholders and have a good understanding of the organization's strategic direction and its business alternatives. Great boards consist of outstanding directors who not just provide a critique of the ideas they are presented with, but they are able to “rowing together in the boat,” toward the destination via a clear vision and strong governance practices. The challenge also includes converting vision to clear marketing and executable management processes and lead a smooth digital transformation effortlessly.

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

The Corporate Board Director’s Digital Profile VI

The Corporate Board Director Digital Profile VII
The Corporate Board Director’s Digital Profile VIII

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"Continual improvement" as the Mantra to Run Digital IT

Effective IT leaders are excellent at articulating the benefits of making business improvement and how IT can make these changes happen. 

Digital transformation is an arduous journey with the long jump and it takes time and commitment to reach a higher level of digital maturity. IT plays a crucial role in the digital paradigm shift because IT can drive and orchestrate transformative changes by integrating to and knowledgeable of the business as well as weaving all important business factors into differentiated organizational competency. Making continuous improvement is the way how IT should improve itself, the business, the interrelation between IT and business, in order to get digital ready.

Highly effective IT has never just been “keeping the lights on,” it’s about ensuring IT as a platform to enable business growth: The CIO is required to think about business first, technology second. Technology is one of the powerful tools to help move the business in the direction of meeting its strategic objectives. With technological advances happen at a rapid pace, IT in the high mature organizations progressively see themselves as an integral enabler of business advances and even a game changer, translate the promise of technology to a strategic and competitive advantage for the company's long term prosperity. Therefore, business foresight and careful thought are required to truly understand the implications of emerging technology trends and identify the opportunities for defining a successful business rationale in order to make wise IT investment toward getting a higher ROI. In these high mature digital organizations, there are no walls between IT and business, they are tightly integrated. Running IT as the business in the business. IT application development shouldn’t be strictly a service that follows the order only; IT must partner with the business to listen to their feedback, understand their true need, and deliver the best solution to truly solve their issues. That is the progressive move from being a reactive order taker to a proactive solution provider.

There is never "enough" to optimize business operations, increase revenue, make profits and improve customer satisfaction: Every organization needs to drive continual improvement in order to meet their objectives and stay competitive. The breadth and depth of IT management improvement include technology update, process optimization, and competency development. Leverage holistic thinking to make sure that the business as a whole is superior to the sum of pieces. The optimization of technology shouldn’t be the be-all and end-all at the expense of the health of the overall organization. There is a never-ending IT management improvement cycle of advancing systems, streamlining processes, expanding IT products or services, and making continuous deliveries. IT needs to strike the right balance of improving operational excellence by reducing the waste, trimming the cost and trying to stay current with ever-changing technologies. Last but not least, continuous improvement goes hand-in-hand with one of the digital principles: "To learn constantly so we continually improve." Develop a culture of continuous improvement, encourage IT staff to get out of the comfort zone, figure out alternative ways to do things, enforce communication and foster innovation.

IT measurement system and incentive should help to assess the tangible result of continuous improvement and serve the ultimate business goals: It includes a broad range of monitoring, performance measurement, performance reporting, or functional failover schemes, etc. Dysfunction and inefficiencies do not develop overnight, they creep in slowly. They are easier to uncover if there is a good measurement system is in place to improve the system. IT leaders must keep in mind which KPIs best measure IT ability to deliver business value. It’s dangerous to impose metrics just because the focus on what’s measurable is manageable. IT metrics have to evolve from being a cost center to becoming a revenue generator by showing a clear link to top executives between IT efficiency and productivity/top-line revenues. Performance Indicators for IT need to be defined in keeping the view of the corporate objectives and put into a mix of other performance measures. Select the right set of indicators of Improvement, Innovation, and Investment, and measure them effectively. Make sure IT and business are always on the same page by providing a broad range of monitoring, performance measurement and reporting in order to make continuous improvement.

IT is in the middle of a sea change, "Continual improvement" is the IT mantra in the digital era. Effective IT leaders are excellent at articulating the benefits of making business improvement and how IT can make these changes happen. IT continues to reach a higher level of maturity by continuous optimizing “people and process” and keep consolidating, integrating, engaging, and innovating.

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The Monthly Foresight: Reimagine and Reinvent the Future of Digital Organization May. 2019

Reimaging the future of business is exciting, but investigating the different path for unlocking business performance takes strategy, methodology, and practice.

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? How to lead to the digital future effortlessly?

Reimagine and Reinvent the Future of Digital Organization

Reinvent Digital Organization and Step into the Future by Building Three Bridges: The emerging digital technologies make a profound impact on businesses across industrial sectors, from specific functions to the business as a whole. Reimaging the future of business is exciting, there is more than one road to lead the digital way, and there are many opportunities the organization can explore and a lot of barriers it has to overcome. Running a future-driven organization starts with the growth mindset, prepares people for the digital new normal, follows by a series of progressive activities to shape organizational competency and build the substantial bridges between the imaginable state of the organization and the business realities of today in order to move toward the future confidently and effortlessly.

Revitalize Digital Workforce to be Future-Ready With the faster pace of changes and continuous disruptions, companies across vertical sectors have huge pressures to survive and thrive in today’s hypercompetitive economic dynamic. They are at the transition stage from operating a mechanical organization to running a dynamic digital living business. Digital organizations are the mixed bag of something old and new; physical building and virtual platform, with a diverse workforce working in different functions running varying speed. A digital workplace encompasses so much that it's hard to isolate it from other dimensions of the enterprise. What is the logical scenario to overcome challenges and revitalize digital workforce to be future-ready?

Running a “Programmable” Future of Digital Organization? Reimaging the future of business is exciting, but investigating the different path for unlocking business performance takes strategy, methodology, and practice. The multidimensional digital effects provide impressive advantages in term of the business speed, the abundance of information, and the quality of the digital workforce. The future of digital organization needs to be non-stop, instant-on, adaptable to change, open to new knowledge, informative and innovative. The future of the digital organization presents the programmable capability which enforces adaptability, exhibits the willingness and ability to learn and then applies those lessons to succeed in new situations and makes a leap of digital transformation.

Reimagine the Future of the business for Exploring the Digital Minefield Innovatively The very characteristics of the emerging digital era are velocity, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, with the faster pace of changes and exponential growth of information. The digital companies are hyperconnected and interdependent. They have amazing digital traits such as adaptability, differentiated competency, innovation, customer-centricity, empathy, and participation. The organization of the future is designed openly for anyone with ideas on how human organizations ought to be contrived in face of “VUCA” digital new normal and explore the digital minefield innovatively..

Three Aspects in Building a Digital Workplace Digital workplaces are about building an environment with the abundance of information and the culture of innovation, to put people at the center of business, and to both engage employees and delight customers. After clarifying the Big Why, there are still many questions haunting around about the Knowing -HOW, though: Is it possible to have an effective digital workplace where the culture is more command and control, where the chosen solutions simply mirror or reinforce the way of working within that hierarchy, but do so very well? Or is it a prerequisite of an effective Digital Workforce to have that more open culture and "traditional" organizations are facing a culture change task alongside the development of a more effective Digital Workforce? Could you be imposing the current values of collaboration and openness on an effective Digital Workforce, and discounting organizations who aren't making progress in developing their own Digital Workforce? When setting the workplace policy to enforce digital management, are you thinking of guidelines for people? Do you have a basic business conduct policy that people sign when they join?

Running a Future-Driven Digital Organization Digital organizations are the living systems which keep growing and maturing. Organization of the Future is an organization designed openly for anyone with ideas on how human organizations ought to be contrived in the face of the “VUCA” digital new normal, hyperconnectivity and fierce competition. Reimaging the future of business is exciting, but investigating the different path for unlocking business performance and potential needs to take a systematic approach and develop it into a more solid form. Digital leaders must realize that you cannot wait until there is an immediate pressing task, continuous adaptability is necessary in an ever-changing world, in order to run a future-driven digital organization.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with about #5700th blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The “Digital Master” book series includes 27 books to share insight from the multidimensional digital lens and perceive the multi-faceted impact the digital era upon us is making to the businesses and society. 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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The Best “Improvement” Quotes of “Digital Master” May 2019

Continuous improvement goes hand-in-hand with one of the digital principles, "to learn constantly so we continually improve."

"Digital Master” is the series of guidebooks (27+ books) to perceive the multi-faceted impact digital is making to the businesses and society, help forward-thinking organizations navigate through the journey in a systematic way, and avoid “rogue digital.” It perceives the emergent trends of digital leadership, advises on how to run a digital organization to unleash its full potential and improve agility, maturity, and provide insight about Change Management. It also instructs the digital workforce on how to shape a game-changing digital mindset and build the right set of digital capabilities to compete for the future. Here is a set of “Improvement” quotes of “Digital Master."

1 Though change is not always an improvement, improvement is change.

2 Continuous improvement goes hand-in-hand with one of the digital principles, "to learn constantly so we continually improve."

3 The culture of continuous improvement means to continue to discover that "there is always a better way."

4 Improvement cannot happen without change, and change should not happen without improvement.

5 Adapting learning and continuous improvement culture involve gathering data, analysis, defining areas to be improved and a measurement scale for the culture improvement

6 Change is never for its own sake, it's about making the improvement, create synergy in the multitude of its impact across the organization.

7 The magnitude of improvement and the impact it has on the organization, short term, long term, effectiveness, and profitability all depend on the vision and the competence of management leadership.

8 Continuous improvement is performed in collateral activities, meaning that people can step out of their daily job to perform specific improvement activities, and improvement is the reward for being willing to change.

9 Change with improvement in mind is a proactive approach that allows for planning and support considerations to be made and, therefore, is much more likely to turn into a smooth and successful collaborative business transformation.

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Design a Digital Organization from Multiple System Perspectives

The high mature digital organizations are highly conscious about what’s happening in their environment, with the ability to adapt to change timely and unlock their performance continually.

Running a digital organization is to connect the old and new, mix the solid and fluid to enforce digital confluence, foster innovation, and achieve people-centricity. Organizations generally consist of varying intersecting and interacting systems. But the strictly mechanic business architecture framework perhaps do not know how to address the business and people system dynamic. How to leverage flexibility as a guiding principle to design a highly responsive, self-adaptive and high-performance digital organization from multiple systems perspectives?

Sociological design perspective: Sociology is the study of human interaction, usually within the context of organized groups, business communities, or human societies. The digital paradigm that is emerging is the sociological organization which is the “living thing.” The organization has its purpose and the people working there maintain purposes of their own. A high mature digital organization starts with a transcendent purpose that leads to design-led strategic business initiatives most fit to achieve the strategic goals of businesses. Thus, an enterprise is never going to be architected and designed like the mechanic system. People-centricity is a transcendent digital trait and the core of corporate strategy in today’s digital organizations. You have to look at the problem domain holistically and apply the “simplicity and flexibility” principles to architect and design a sociological organization and proactively plan the total enterprise ecosystem to either make a profit for shareholders or generate prosperity of constituencies. Designing a “digital fit” company as a sociological system enables the organization to morph as living conditions and capacity change, allow a better fit for the business purpose; enable employees doing their work more productively and improve customer experiences seamlessly, with the goal to reap the business benefit for the long term.

Techno-system design perspective: Information Technology is the backbone of modern business nowadays. Thus, the techno-system perspective is a critical lens to architect and design a digital organization that is a socio-technical system with people at the center and IT as the linchpin. In fact, designing a multidimensional socio-technical business system is more difficult than designing a single-dimensional "data-driven mechanistic system"; or a "data-driven mechanistic system." Applying digital technologies and embracing digital conversion is inevitable as that is now part of the deal. There are very progressive organizations in which Information Technology sparks organizational creativity, and flexibility is an essential characteristic of the business systems. Modern digital technologies bring unprecedented convenience for people to learn and work, improve their productivity, learning agility, and innovativeness. The techno-system organizational design helps to identify and blend the ways that information and technology can assist and shape the business by linking all digital aspects together to enforce the business value creation, and appreciate many excellent business attributes such as digital readiness, ownership, information fluidity, customized structure, IT-business integration, open communication, etc, to improve organizational maturity.

Cultural design perspective: In the digital era with rapid change, innovation, and people-centricity, businesses today need nothing less than a paradigm shift in their thinking about the fundamentals of how organizations work to build a digital fitting culture and an engaging workforce. If you are truly interested in culture change then you need to understand how cultures evolve to dramatically accelerate the digital transformation and to increase the likelihood of sustainable change. Thus, highly proactive and social-techno-cultural business systems need to be architected and designed. It’s challenging because the radical culture and social structure changes are required to fit the business circumstances. Culture is a collective mindset, attitude, and behavior. Culture or subculture can be designed and shaped. Cultural design starts with objective observation and assessment: Do you have an “authentic” organization that encourages its people to express, grow, and become “who they are,” or do you have a “silo” organization which has many gaps and frictions and people get stuck with “we always do things like that” mentality. Then, design and shape a flexible or an innovative culture by making an alignment of both visible business factors such as people process, structure, technology and invisible success factors such as leadership, communication, etc. A company's culture, which is heavily ingrained, implicit and not directly perceptible, is also very hard to change and changes slowly if at all. Great leaders with cultural design lens ought to be concerned not only with the here and now but prayerfully with their legacy to future generations -- a better future and brighter workforce.

As our digitized world becomes hyper-connected, over-complex and interdependent, digital leaders should develop a design framework with multiple system perspectives, leverage flexibility as design principles to clearly define the future of digital business, fine-tune the varying business factors to make a seamless digital paradigm shift. The high mature digital organizations are highly conscious about what’s happening in their environment, with the ability to adapt to change timely and unlock their performance and potential continually.

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The Monthly “Digital Boardroom” Book Tuning: The Board’s Best and Next Practices May 2019

 Boards need to develop their own set of digital best and next practice to improve both the organizational performance and their own performance.

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 is a set of the best and next practices for shaping a strategic boardroom.

              The Board’s Best and Next Practices

Five Boardroom Digital Practices The corporate board directors are the top leadership role, leadership is the adventure to explore unknown, have confidence and insight to steer the organization in the right direction and take the best path for reaching the destination. It’s important to develop the best and next boardroom digital practices, encourage the board directors making their influence over volatility, managing uncertainty, simplifying complexity, and master the art and science of the board leadership.

The Boardroom's Feedback Feedforward Practices Digital has the “VUCA” characteristics - velocity, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. It implies both business opportunities and risks on the way and change is a new normal. Corporate Board as a high-level governance body plays a crucial role in business advising and monitoring, as well as setting key tones in leadership exemplification and talent development. To overcome the challenges, boards need to develop their own set of digital best and next practice to improve both the organizational performance and their own performance.

The Policies, Performances, and Pitfalls in Digital Boardroom The corporate board as the advising role is responsible to steer the organization in the right direction and provide an “outside-in” view of the business via multidimensional lenses. 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,” and strike the delicate balance. Digital organizations are complex systems that are dynamic, self-evolving, self-adaptable, and self-perpetuating. Thus, the directorship in any organization must be able to adapt to changes and build abilities to advise, inspire and motivate. The Board of Directors is the top leadership team that can make a great influence on shaping digital mindsets, setting right policies, advocating changes, and steering the business to digital new normal.

How to Bridge Insight Gaps in the Boardroom Leadership is about envisioning and leading the business towards its future. Top leadership roles such as board directors are supposed to be the guiding force in the enterprise. In practice, the digital era is volatile, complex, uncertain and ambiguous. Many say that the multitude of gaps (thinking, knowledge, innovation, strategy execution, etc.) are enlarged because different industries, organizations, functions, and individuals evolve with varying speed. To lift up the board leadership maturity, minding the insight gap is challenging, but a critical step for improving leadership effectiveness. Leadership is an influence, influence comes from progressive mindsets, profound insight, and step-wise actions. Insight is an understanding of cause and effect based on the identification of relationships and behaviors within a model, context, or scenario.

Reinforce Digital Competency in the Boardroom The new paradigm arises out of new knowledge, the emergent trends can shape the behavior of future enterprises and some have been happening already. BoDs as top leadership roles need to envision, proactively influence changes, reinforce digitalization and lead the organization towards its future confidently.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with 5700+ 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; 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 your voice, deepen your digital footprints, and match your way for human progression.

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Reinvent Digital Organization and Step into the Future by Building Three Bridges

The organization of the future will be organically and adaptively developed, highly adaptive, flexible, fast and innovative.

The emerging digital technologies make a profound impact on businesses across industrial sectors, from specific functions to the business as a whole. Reimaging the future of business is exciting, there is more than one road to lead the digital way, and there are many opportunities the organization can explore and a lot of barriers it has to overcome. 

Running a future-driven organization starts with the growth mindset, prepares people for the digital new normal, follows by a series of progressive activities to shape organizational competency and build the substantial bridges between the imaginable state of the organization and the business realities of today in order to move toward the future confidently and effortlessly.

The bridge from data to insight: The digital era means the exponential growth of data. Data is raw content, 'a collection of zeroes and ones,' without context. Data starts to become information when people add some business context. Information becomes meaningful when businesses sort through, process, refine information into the knowledge which can be used by digital leaders and professionals to capture the business insight and gain an in-depth understanding of operations, customers or emerging business trends or risks. To build the bridge from data to insight, perhaps you should first work to identify the pattern - show information is associated with the valued tangibles of your business, your products or services, resources, customers or marketing, then it’s easier to figure out the true value of information, readily apparent and quantifiable by association. In fact, Information Management is a critical bridge and a threshold competency to enforce the strategic focus of the business, diagnose the root causes of a problem or the core issues of a circumstance to truly understand the resolution and operate a smart digital business.

The bridge from industrial productivity to digital delight: With change nature of the business, the emerging digital technologies and more intense customer demanding, companies today have to keep consolidating, rationalizing, modernizing, integrating, and optimizing for building a strong organizational maturity bridge from functioning to firm to delight. A digital organization can bring greater awareness of interconnectivity, intricacies and the systemic value of organizational systems, business process, people dynamics, resource alignment, or technological touches. It evolves multidimensional management disciplines to achieve digital delight. From the products/service delivery perspective, product development is a full cycle of research, define, design prototype, iterate, and test, for delivering high-quality and intuitive products or services to delight customers. From the process management perspective, the organizational design issue is about how to build the best mixture of organizational elements that harness adaptability through less hierarchy, frictionless processes, and flexible structures. From a talent management perspective, creating positive change and building a delightful working environment is a joint effort and co-responsibility of management and employees. It requires not just things work but be delightful and innovative to improve their productivity and engagement.

The bridge from learning to creating and innovating: In digital organizations with abundant information and knowledge, learning and doing are not linear steps but an iterative continuum. In doing so, you can create a shared business context for learning, working, re-learning, co-creating, and cross-pollinating for generating new ideas or alternative business solutions. That means absorbing knowledge is only the first step. The rising digital technologies such as social platform provide a flexible way to learn, share and collaborate, the digital tools and apps make learning informal, but more cost-effective and interactive. Collectively, high organizational learning relates to high response in recognizing and addressing system constraints, unleashing business potential, improving organizational changeability and innovation capacity. In the organization with a culture of learning, people focus on the learning opportunities offered by assignment rather than on the status quo that goes with them. They learn, share, and co-create. Digital learning is dynamic, interactive, informal, and should be integrated into the innovation cycle. The culture of collective learning becomes a critical bridge to foster knowledge or technology transfer innovation.

As an often forgotten fact is that organizations consist of three types of intersecting and interacting systems: Social, Technical, and Cultural. Perhaps businesses today need to build more than three bridges to move into the future smoothly. The organization of the future is designed openly for anyone with ideas on how human organizations ought to be contrived in the face of “VUCA” digital new normal and explore the “art of possibilities” to grow and innovate. The organization of the future will be organically and adaptively developed, put values and people before rules and roles so that the new breed of digital organizations is adaptive, flexible, fast and innovative.

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