Wednesday, June 5, 2019

The Corporate Board Director’s Digital Profile VIII

11:22 PM  Pearl Zhu  No comments

The board plays a significant role in making good policies and setting digital principles for nurturing a high performing and high-innovative culture to lead the successful digital transformation. 


Leadership is all about future, direction, and the ability to take initiative for changes. The level of the board accomplishment may vary but the essential competencies will remain the same, BoDs need to be strategic, insightful, influential, and highly effective. They can sense emergent trends and predict potential risks, retain the ability to capture immediate and future opportunities which will enhance its shareholders’ benefit and steer the business ship to the uncharted water or the blurred digital territories for reaching the ultimate destination. Here is a set of corporate board director digital profile VIII.

Digital architect: Compared to other junior level management position, the boards as a senior leadership role needs to spend significant time on focusing on the “big picture,” making both strategic decisions and sound judgments. An architect’s mindset has the ability to zoom in and out of the bigger picture. Thinking as the digital architect means the board directors can both grasp the big picture of the business and go deeper, pay more attention to the significant details. Senior leaders such as boards play a critical role in setting digital principle and policies, oversee strategies and monitor performance. The more complex the situation is, the more different approaches and role gaming is needed to reach for in-depth understanding. An architect’s mindset is coherent and persuasive, has the ability to read the "ripples on the surface of the water," practice abstract thinking, critical thinking and creative thinking all the time. The board directors with an architect’s mindset can leverage business architecture as a strategic communication tool in the boardroom, translate the abstract concept back into the real world example to clarify strategic conversations by “seeing” an idea and express it in visual terms via an interactive way. In addition, board directors need to have the ability to analyze problems and mentally iterate through possible solutions to find the best fit. The board oversees the business strategy and monitors organizational performance. The real value of business architecture is how to keep the priorities in balance and make the sound judgment without losing the big picture. It helps the board laser focus on the most important issues, facilitate conversations and make good decisions that enhance the value creation for the organization.

Continuous learner: Digital leaders are lifetime learner with a thirst for knowledge, insight, and wisdom. Board members should be joining the boards because they have strong intent and learning agility to share unique insight and contribute to the maximization of the company's full potential. It’s not the acquisition of knowledge that will make the leader, it is the desire to acquire and apply that knowledge, transform into the insight that will make the leader. Highly effective board directors make sound judgments based on proficient knowledge, in-depth understanding, and multidimensional intelligence. Leadership in itself is a constant learning process that requires the leader to apply the growth mindset, leverage the right tools, build experience and share insight, listen carefully, learn continually, expect to find some fresh viewpoint all the time in order to practice better governance, better oversight, better risk control with strong discipline and self-assessment. Digital leadership maturity is improved by continuously strengthening leadership strength and improving professional competency. What keeps leaders successful is their intellectual curiosity and ability to continuously be open to learning and applying these learning as they move forward, identify tradeoffs and negotiate them with all stakeholder to collaborate skillfully with empathy.
Culture influencer: Organizations rise and fall, not on the quantum of plans and resources, but on the capabilities to manage, lead, yet most importantly to execute. Culture is often the #1 root cause to fail strategy. Boards play a significant role in making good policies and setting digital principles for tuning a high performing culture and oversee strategy management. Culture should begin from the senior management and board level. And then, it will be followed by others from top-down. Culture as a collective mindset and the unique competency to decide the business’s long-term success. If boards and management do a good job of defining strategies, goals, and objectives, exemplify an open, inclusive, and innovative culture, oversee the cultural impact and successfully align resources toward achieving them, a healthy and productive culture will be built up. In all the conversations about culture, keep in mind that it is the policies, procedures, rewards, and retributions that drive behavior and it is the employee behavior that expresses “culture.” Organizations are transforming from industrial silos to hyperconnected holistic digital businesses, the board plays a significant role in making good policies and setting digital principles for nurturing a high performing and high-innovative culture to lead the successful digital transformation.

The directorship in any organization must be able to adapt to changes, build abilities to advise, inspire and motivate, leverage candor and diplomacy; opportunity and risk; logic and creativity; confidence and humility; play the multiple leadership roles fluently, enable and direct the management towards good outcomes, pull enough resources and push the business model of technology, trustworthiness, innovation and ensure the business is on the right track to reach well-defined business goals.





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