The Corporate Board Director’s Digital Profile IV

 The board directors today need to be original, positive, progressive, inquisitive, courageous, conscious, and creative.

Digital boards are like the steering wheel of the organization, leading the business to step into the deep "VUCA" digital new normal with uncharted water and blurred territories, in order to reach the final destination. Board directors as the top business leadership and directorship role need to build the solid thinking blocks; have sufficient expertise and unique insight to understand the business and its ecosystem via the multidimensional lens, technically, scientifically, economically, holistically, and culturally. Their knowledge must be updated and their viewpoint should be objective, otherwise, the outdated perceptions could enlarge leadership gaps and stifle business progress. Building the best fit board depends on the board’s current makeup, culture and which "gap" needs to be filled. Here is a set of board director’s digital profiles.

Innovation overseer: Innovation is doing something better than it currently is. Innovation involves new ways of bringing together ideas and resources to create something novel and then, transform those novel ideas to achieve the business value. Innovation needs a level of guidance. Boards need to advocate, steer, and sustain innovation. Innovation has to deliver business objectives, but it needs the right kind of governance to thrive. In forward-looking organizations, innovation strategy becomes an integral part of business strategy which requires the board oversight. A good governance standard provides a common corporate "language" as well as work instructions to improve innovation effectiveness. Digital innovation has a broader spectrum and comes in many flavors, there are many opportunities in an enterprise to do so, such as breakthrough innovation, evolutionary innovation, incremental innovation. However, innovation overall has a very low success rate. Therefore, it's simply too important to delegate to the management without the board's oversight. It is important to set rules for safeguarding the status quo, but not stifling innovation. It’s also important to set good principles for shaping the heterogeneous team with neurodiversity, complementary skill sets and diverse experiences to play the innovation oddballs skillfully, boost idea creation and improve the innovation success rate. With explosive information, the shortened business life cycle, limited resources, and fierce competitions, innovation governance should include how to monitor the pulse of innovation including idea generation, prioritization and risk management. The board’s innovation governance also helps to establish the framework for innovation management, clarify innovation purpose, oversee innovation variety and velocity, steer and sustain innovation to manage risks and maximize its business values.

Performance monitor: A high-performance board makes the disproportional impact on running a high-performance business. Corporate Performance Management facilitates the flow of the right information to the right people at the right time, to coordinate and execute strategy, tactics, and risks. The BoDs play important roles in setting principles for improving performance management effectiveness and monitoring business performance smoothly. Performance management is not just about winning but in pursuit of excellence. Business performance is not limited to financial performance, but also includes the firm's performance in creating value for employees and customers, etc. The Board's role, in large part, is to make good decisions that enhance the value creation for the organization. The "performance" oriented board agenda should be focused on the maximization of business performance and potential, business capital allocation, and shareholders’ value. They need to focus on their own performance as well as the performance of the management team. At the board and executive level, performance management should get the leadership team to sit down and connect multidisciplinary management dots to tell the full story with the business context and ensure the business as a whole is superior to the sum of pieces. For the majority of the time, the board agenda should be focused on the performance progress toward the goals, targets, schedules., etc, of the value maximization planning.

Brand enhancer: The corporate board can contribute to the corporate brand enhancement as a coherent effort of overseeing the business vision and strategy. The corporate brand is the consistent image the organization present to its customers, employees, business partners or other stakeholders. The Board of Directors is an influential brand enhancer that represents the organization, stockholders, and senior management. Modern boards can set a clear choice among future scenarios that advocate advancement and promote the organizational brand and encourage positive attitudes and behaviors. Board directors need to be able to guide senior management team through effective questioning, coaching, advising, and assessment of the business strategy, vision statement, and brand message. The real challenge is to understand where and how you can and should improve to get the biggest effect and scale up across the digital ecosystem effortlessly. BoDs should continually evaluate the management team to determine if the right strategy and culture are thriving in the organization to proactively drive the future growth of the business and build a strong corporate brand. This includes addressing risks to reputation, and the need to make the process transparent. By envisioning and clarifying brand core, the board and business management can work together to communicate a clear message down to the different level of organization and ensure that the entire business working in the same direction to build a strong corporate brand and reputation.

Digital boards are diverse and innovative, because at every level of organizations today, we need a different perspective, the multitude of insights, dynamic knowledge, and alternative ways to solve emergent and existing tough problems. Therefore, the board directors today need to be original, positive, progressive, inquisitive, courageous, conscious, and creative. Leadership is an influence and a practice, there is no magic recipe otherwise. The digital leaders such as board directors should think that every minute of their time counts, to achieve leadership proficiency and 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

Posted in: Board Room,Leadership Master