Welcome to our blog, the digital brainyard to fine tune "Digital Master," innovate leadership, and reimagine the future of IT.

The magic “I” of CIO sparks many imaginations: Chief information officer, chief infrastructure officer , Chief Integration Officer, chief International officer, Chief Inspiration Officer, Chief Innovation Officer, Chief Influence Office etc. The future of CIO is entrepreneur driven, situation oriented, value-added,she or he will take many paradoxical roles: both as business strategist and technology visionary,talent master and effective communicator,savvy business enabler and relentless cost cutter, and transform the business into "Digital Master"!

The future of CIO is digital strategist, global thought leader, and talent master: leading IT to enlighten the customers; enable business success via influence.

Saturday, August 31, 2019

The Monthly “100 IT CHARMS” Book Tuning: The Characteristics of IT Maturity Aug. 2019

IT is no longer just an enabler of the business strategy, but becomes an integral part of the strategy. 

The purpose of the book “100 IT Charms: Running Versatile IT to get Digital Ready“ is to articulate different flavors of digital IT organizations and brainstorm the best and next practices for running highly innovative and high-performance IT. Digital charm is not based on the style presented on the surface but on a set of unique competencies to make IT shine through as a business differentiator.

      

 The Characteristics of IT Maturity


Five Characteristics of IT Maturity With rapid changes, exponential growth of information and often technology led disruptions, the role of IT in the current business environment should enable business outcomes, catalyze enterprise growth, and build organizational competency. Many companies are reaching the inflection point of digital transformation. IT plays a critical role in the digital paradigm shift. Here are five characteristics of IT maturity.

Setting High Standard to Run High Mature Digital IT Organization Organizations across the industrial sectors are relying more on information technology, IT organization has more to overcome. It’s simply not sufficient to run IT as a support function only. IT can provide the business ability to explore new business models by knitting all important components seamlessly or delight customers by providing them digital options. IT organizations can bring up business benefit by mixing diverse business elements to create great products, services, or processes which generate differentiated value for the long-term growth of the business. It’s time to set a high standard to run high mature digital IT organization.

Five “Missing-Links” to Stop IT from Reaching Next Level of Maturity Nowadays, information and technology become the creative disrupter to business growth and industry evolution. IT is no longer just an enabler of the business strategy, but becomes an integral part of the strategy. However, in many companies across industrial sectors, IT is still perceived as an isolated support function and reactive service provider. How to identify and strengthen those missing links in order to run a high mature digital IT organization?

Running High Mature Digital IT with Three Mind Shift IT is in the middle of a sea change as businesses move into the digital future, information is permeating everywhere and technology is the fastest growing arena. It’s the undoubtedly dynamic time, with “always-on” businesses and high expectation of customers due to IT consumerization trends and continuous digital disruptions. CIOs must make three mind shift in order to run a high mature digital IT organization.

The Board as IT Maturity Evaluator Information is the lifeblood of the business and technology is the disruptive force behind the digital transformation. Nowadays, information technology can either lift or fail business even overnight. Therefore, an IT savvy board should change the perspective to understand the power of information technology and make an objective assessment of IT maturity of their organization so that companies can leverage IT to improve the top line business growth and build a long-term business advantage.

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 minds across the globe. The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with about #6000 blog posting. Among 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating 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.

What’s Inside the BoD’s Tool Box

The board directors who are equipped with a set of powerful tools have the advantage of communicating effectively and deciding wisely.

Due to the “VUCA” characteristics -complexity, uncertainty, ambiguity and velocity of the digital era, the directorship in any organization becomes more critical and challenging. The purpose of the governing body, or board of directors, is to direct the organization in the right direction, practice governance discipline, and monitor its performance. Corporate governance is to make sure that management is doing its job properly. The corporate board needs to shift from reactive to active and proactive mode for adapting to the dynamic business environment with continuous disruptions. To improve the directorship effectiveness, what’re supposed to be inside the board of directors’ toolbox to enforce its governance discipline?

SWOT Analysis:
We live in an era full of uncertainty, velocity, rapid changes and exponential growth of information, the result is a higher risk of conflict and inertia, etc. Decision makers including corporate board directors need effective tools to help them navigate between the rocks of analysis-paralysis, foresight-hindsight, and blind guesswork. the business strengths and weaknesses need an evaluation in order to have a decision-making ground. SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, Threat) Analysis is a good tool which provides a starting point to scrutinize strategy and helps to take a wide look around at what's going on outside the organization and how it might affect the organization (an environmental scan), and identify opportunities and threats. It also helps to take a hard look at what's going on inside the organization, including its strengths and weaknesses. By adding the Trends, you're asking the organization to look at what's happening now and what's coming down the pike so that they can be proactive in preparing for it. How effective the tool is depends on the SWOT users, do they ask the right questions, and answer them via multidimensional lenses, and understand them in context by zooming into the future more clearly.

Business Architecture: Business Architecture is more than a "hint of the business process," but an effective communication tool at the higher level. The business architecture could become a great executive communication tool, particularly when the architecture discussion is kept at a higher level and keep all executives at the same page by walking through the discussion about strategy planning, governance, transformation, etc. The board of directors with an architect’s mindset can translate the abstract concept back into the real world example. Thus, it also has the ‘visual’ ability to “see” an idea and express it in visual terms via interactive way. The real value of business architecture is how to keep the priorities in balance and make the sound judgment without losing the big picture. The board of directors who can speak architectural dialect is able to facilitate the digital dialogues between organizational decision makers and thereby assist the organization in continuously designing and redesigning itself in pursuit of new and more viable strategies, enhancing cross-functional business coordination, developing knowledge and expertise, and enforcing business responsibility.

Balanced scorecard: The well designed balanced scorecard with well-selected metrics can harness information-based communication at the board level. A balanced scorecard is very useful to provide a “balanced” view of tradeoff variables for facilitating discussions and ensure decision makers understanding the various trade-offs and making the strategic balance, business dependencies, and constraints between components, individuals, and overall risk exposure. A balanced scorecard helps the board capture the holistic picture, make sure that the strategy execution is on track. It enables feedback & learning, as well as adjusting the strategy accordingly. They can become more confident and accurately judge the coming curves and obstacles on the path, and get into actions in a creative, positive and proactive way, to lead the digital transformation journey smoothly.

At today's business dynamic with digitalization and globalization trend, the top leadership team such as board directors who are equipped with a set of powerful tools have the advantage of communicating effectively, deciding wisely, and pulling enough resources and pushing the business to reach the next level of digital maturity.

People-centric Innovation

In the rapidly evolving business and economic systems, innovation management is very complex but critical for the firm’s survival and thriving.

Nowadays the business ecosystem is so hyper-connected and interdependent, people all over the world can share information, co-develop new knowledge and co-create fresh ideas. Innovation management today is interdisciplinary, people-centric, and involves applied science (engineering), art (design), cognition (psychology), social norms (culture) and group behavior (sociology), etc. Being people-centric is a transcendent digital trait and the core of innovation.


Take multi-industrial collaboration to spark breakthrough innovation: Digital blurs the functional border, organizational border, industry vertical border and knowledge domain border. The digital boundaries are not sharp lines, they are fluid to streamline information flow and adapt to changes. Many companies have never been better positioned to break out of static industry box and engage in mass collaborations to spark creativity and enforce innovation, Instead of being rigidly grouped around a specific business, digital ecosystem is dynamic, expansive, interdependent, and hyperconnected. The enterprise collaboration platforms and emerging digital technologies enable companies leveraging various environments or ecosystems to take multi-industrial collaboration and spark breakthrough innovation. The ecosystems draw together mutually supportive companies from multiple industries that collectively seek to create differentiated value that could not create alone, especially breakthrough innovation. When continuing innovation take place for the community to thrive, the ecosystem is dynamic and healthy, keep a balanced cycle and reach the renewal stage.

Information systems play a fundamental role in deploying and operating open ecosystems to enable mass innovation: Due to the exponential growth of information and complexity of digital organization, digital innovation is intensive with lots of confusions and many missing pieces. An open information system enables companies to integrate the critical components of a smart platform, which is “open” to allow information exchange and participant involvement. In fact, information is the most time-intensive piece of innovation puzzles. Information System ensures that information is being refined into business foresight and customer insight, and available to allow the right people making the right decisions at the right time. It also ensures that interdependencies and loyalties between partners are taken into account and build up a strong innovation engine. By leveraging digital platforms and technologies, businesses can become highly effective in executing innovative ideas, relying less on silo functions, and more on cross-boundary communication and mass collaboration.

People-centric innovation: The digital era upon us is about people. Fundamentally, creativity is about generating novel ideas to solve human-related problems. Focusing on people's needs should be the right path to grow innovation fruits. Therefore, it’s important to bring up outside-in view for gaining an in-depth understanding of people. Organizations need to get deeply immersed in designing, developing, and delivering innovative products, services or solutions to make their customers happier and people smarter. At the heart of innovation is a life cycle of idea generation, interaction, learning and selection, The point of mass innovation is to bring in new ideas from outside, the lead users or from the wider user community to drive innovation development. The goal isn’t just to be democratized or be cost-efficient, but to ensure people must be the center of innovation.

Innovation is what leads to differentiation. There are many ways to differentiate and, therefore, there are many ways to pursue innovation. In the rapidly evolving business and economic systems, innovation management is very complex but critical for the firm’s survival and thriving. Keep in mind, innovation often happens at the intersection of people and business. Whenever people feel respected and needed in an organization, they are highly engaged in their work, encouraged to participate in creative activities, motivated to innovate, contribute to solve problems in a better way, and catalyze people-centric innovation.

Friday, August 30, 2019

The Monthly Organizational Structure Tuning: Tuning Organizational Structure for Change Aug. 2019

Forward-looking organizations leverage the latest technologies to fine tune the organizational structure and improve the business changeability. 

Digital makes a significant impact on every aspect of the business from people, process to technology, both horizontally and vertically. Digital becomes the very fabric of high performing business, being outside-in and customer-centric is the new mantra for forward-looking and high mature digital organizations today. From an organizational structure perspective, how can you fine-tune the digital dimensions of your organizational development to harness change and innovation?



Tuning Organizational Structure for Change 


Digital Organizational Design vs. Business Changeability The very characteristics of digital are the increasing speed of change and hyper-connectivity. Digital makes a significant impact on every aspect of the business both horizontally and vertically. Forward-looking organizations leverage the latest technologies to fine tune the organizational structure and improve the business changeability. Organization design is the vehicle through which the business strategy is executed and defines the business environment in which the digital organization can reduce the organizational culture friction, improve the business changeability, maturity, and unleash its full potential.

Tuning Organizational Structure to Improve Digital Ready-ness Organizations across the vertical sectors and geographical boundaries are on the journey of digital transformation. New generations of digital technologies such as digital collaboration platforms and tools are enabling not only the structured processes of the past but also the unstructured processes of the digital enterprise. The future of digital organizations would be complex enough to act intelligently and nimble enough to adapt to the change promptly.

Design for Adaptability Digital means fast-paced changes, continuous disruptions, overwhelming growth of information, and shortened business life cycle. Companies need to have an in-depth understanding of organizational design and development to improve business maturity. Compared to the traditional organizations with an overly rigid hierarchy or strictly pyramidal structure, digital organizations today are flatter, hybrid and more responsive to changes. Organizational adaptation is the ability to be highly responsive to the fast-changing business environment. High mature companies are designed for change and designed for innovating.

Tuning Organizational Structure from Hierarchy to Circular for Achieving Fluidity, Flexibility, and Fit With the increasing pace of changes, hyper-connectivity, and interdependence, organizations across vertical sectors are at the turning point, take the multidimensional approach to make the digital paradigm shift. From the organizational structure perspective, the overly rigid pyramidical organizational structure forms communication gaps, encourages silo mentality, creates the performance bottleneck, also decelerate business speed. Therefore, fine-tuning underlying business structure and processes is a critical step for improving digital business fluidity, flexibility, and overall digital fit.

Fine-Tune Organization Structure to Get Digital Ready Due to the “VUCA” nature of digitalization, the business complexity is unavoidable. Organizations that are skilled at managing complexity can gain advantages by pushing the boundaries of a more complicated business mix that provides opportunities to create inter-business value. From an organizational structure perspective, how to fine tune the digital dimensions of your organizational structure development to get digital ready?

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with about #5900+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. blog posting. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom, to inspire critical thinking and spur healthy debates. 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.

The Best “Creative leadership” Quotes of “Digital Master” Aug. 2019

Creative Leadership is great when you think, act and enable others with a creative spirit that drives positive changes.

"Digital Master” is a series of guidebooks (28 + 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, provides advice 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 “Creative leadership” quotes in Digital Master.


1 Creative leadership can be described as "Adaptability meets Agility" and "Innovation meets Principles."

2 Creative leadership is the ability to inspire, to create, and to maintain the social and psychological conditions and the environment in which people are able to reach their highest potential.

3 Creative leadership is being flexible enough to adapt to the situation and the players involved. It means doing unexpected, unconventional things to lead effectively.

4 Creative Leadership is great when you think, act and enable others with a creative spirit that drives positive changes.

5 What we deem as “creativity” in leadership, is at times down to cultural difference in traditions, practices, and perceptions of organizational productivity and community norms.

6 Creative Leadership show the following 'dispositions such as: visionary, faces reality, adaptable, persevering, competent, ethical, courageous, curious.

7 A creative leader is open minded, collects thoughts and ideas, seeks new experiences, plays, challenges, surrounds interesting people, things, environment, and enjoys solitude.

8 Creative leadership combines restless dissatisfaction with the current state coupled with the excitement of leading individuals or groups to find solutions that will produce results no one thought possible.

9 Creative leadership is essentially anchored on the leader's overall multifaceted resourcefulness, to formulate creative (unconventional) alternatives or solutions to resolve problems, to show versatility and flexibility in response to unpredictable or unanticipated circumstances.

Five Facets of Strategic CIOs

Being strategic means CIOs should always stay focused on the big picture of the business, value creation and strategic impact.

With the increasing pace of changes and fast-growing information, clearly, the role of IT is at the inflection point to go through significant changes. IT shouldn’t be just satisfied with the surviving mode, it has to be thriving. How well an IT organization can adapt to the dynamic environment directly affects the future of the business significantly. The CIO is not just a tactical manager, but a strategic business leader with multidimensional thinking competencies and multifaceted perspectives.


Digital Modernist: To run a high-mature digital organization, CIOs need to have better senses to capture technology trends, articulate a clear vision of what’s possible, gain insight to understand things holistically, and explore the premium path of digital transformation. Information Technology is permeating into every corner of the business nowadays. As the modern CIO, you have the most influential position in the business. Don’t waste the opportunity, seize it. The digital modernist CIOs should focus on information management, and ensure that information can be refined into valuable business insight and be actively used to shape a high-intelligent business. At the higher level of organizational maturity, IT is an innovation hub and change agent. The digital modernist CIOs can step out of conventional IT box and disrupt linear management disciplines, discover the creative side of IT, leverage the latest digital technologies and exponential growth of information to fuel innovation, and reinvent IT as the growth engine of the business.

Business Model architect: It’s not sufficient to run IT as a support function only. IT can become known as a revenue rainmaker by associating its efforts directly with sources of income. IT should invest in and leverage appropriate technologies and solutions to generate valuable insights and help the business open up new channels of revenue and monetization within the enterprise and their ecosystem. In fact, in today’s digital economy, Information Technology becomes an important element in developing the new business model or renovating existing business model. The strategic CIOs like the business model architect, run IT as the linchpin to connect all important building blocks of a strong business model such as revenue streams, resources, key activities, partnerships, cost structures, marketing channels or customer relationship management, etc. IT applications blended with emerging digital technologies can make continuously creative disruptions, rejuvenate business models, and deliver significant business benefits.

Savvy venture capitalist: IT is one of the most critical business assets besides people. IT investment is often costly. In fact, IT investment in the business can often become the decisive factor to run a high-performance organization with a long-term perspective. Many organizations across vertical sectors make huge investment in sophisticated IT, but unfortunately, IT portfolio management has considerably lower level of success rate compared to many other types of business investment. Because often, IT investment and management is not just the work of IT, but the responsibility of the entire company. CIOs should think and act like venture capitalist, make wise decisions and manage a successful IT investment portfolio to improve the overall strategic management effectiveness and business competency.

Skillful business solutionist: With rapid changes, the disruptions come almost overnight. Technology is a significant component in almost all critical business processes and capabilities. Information is often one of the most time-intensive pieces of complex problem-solving. Thus, modern CIOs need to be skillful business solutionists, assign their talent, resource and time carefully to solve problems really matter. They should leverage the enterprise's strategy and business objectives to set the right priority and decide which problems to solve and strike the right balance of IT transaction and transformation. IT needs to be influential enough to offer customers premium solutions in the right manner at the right cost. They won’t just wait for the customers’ requests to solve their issues; but work closely and proactively with the business to identify and frame the real problems, as well as leverage information and technology to solve them effectively.

Innovative culture influencer: A healthy corporate culture is very important as a determinant of business performance for the long term. IT plays a threshold competency role in building a culture of innovation. CIOs as “innovative culture influencer” should encourage out of the box thinking, have the vision and leadership competency to stimulate creative energy and maximize innovation at all levels in the organization. Change the culture is the mindset, it’s important to empower innovators, hire, retain, and recognize innovators who can help the organization shape the culture of creativity and develop an open and optimal environment for innovation. The art of innovation is that it involves new ways of bringing together ideas and resources to create something novel. It takes systematic effort within a company to embrace fresh thinking, leverage powerful digital information technologies, cultivate an innovative culture, and manage innovation in a structural way.

Being strategic means CIOs should always stay focused on the big picture of the business, value creation and strategic impact, to ensure doing right things before doing things right, leverage and prioritize, build long-term sustainable competitive advantage and take the organization to the next level of digital maturity.

Thursday, August 29, 2019

The Weekly Insight of the “Future of CIO” 8/30/2019

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

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with 5900+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The “Digital Master” book series includes 28 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.


It Takes Innovation to Measure Innovation Performance Innovation is about making differentiation. Forward-looking companies will spend more resources on innovation investment and take a scientific approach to decode innovation serendipity. Innovation as a management process needs to be measured for making continuous improvement in order to reap the fruit for gaining long term advantage. Innovation measurement is challenging, it takes innovation to measure innovation performance.

The Corporate Board Change Fit Change is the only constant, and the speed of change is increasing rapidly. The corporate board directors should become interactive change agents that represent the organization, stockholders, and senior management, make significant influences on setting digital tones and shaping the digital mindset of the organization, both walk the talk and talk the walk and set the digital tone for others to follow.

Setting High Standard to Run High Mature Digital IT Organization Organizations across the industrial sectors are relying more on information technology, IT organization has more to overcome. It’s simply not sufficient to run IT as a support function only. IT can provide the business ability to explore new business models by knitting all important components seamlessly or delight customers by providing them with digital options. IT organizations can bring up business benefit by mixing diverse business elements to create great products, services, or processes which generate differentiated value for the long-term growth of the business. It’s time to set a high standard to run high mature digital IT organization.

The Monthly “Principles & Practices" Summary: Setting Principles to Drive Digital Transformation Aug. 2019 A well-defined set of digital rules are not for limiting innovation, but for setting the frame of relevance and guide through changes and digital transformation. The purpose of “100 Digital Rules: Setting Guidelines to Explore Digital New Normal “ is to establish digital principles and update business policies that can be applied holistically and guide the digital transformation systematically. Here is a set of digital principles to drive digital transformation.

Five Pillars of Organizational Maturity Today’s business world is dynamic, volatile, uncertain, and hyper-competitive. Every business is different, they are at varying stages of its business life cycle and different level of organizational maturity. Many companies may be in business for many years but has not matured its management disciplines. But surviving and thriving in today’s business dynamic requires structural flexibility, cross-functional collaboration, inter-relational process to reduce business fricitions and deal with conflicts or disruptions that arise, to shape a people-centric organization from functioning to delight. Here are five pillars of organizational maturity.

Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking about 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.

The Best “Intellectual Curiosity” Quotes of “Digital Master” Aug. 2019

 The clear manifestation of intellectual curiosity is to ask good questions, the open questions, the profound questions and the thought provoking questions.

"Digital Master” is a series of guidebooks (28 + 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, provides advice 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 “Intellectual Curiosity” quotes in “Digital Master."


1 Discovery starts with an open mind full of intellectual curiosity and fresh eyes having a broader vision.

2 The clear manifestation of intellectual curiosity is to ask good questions, the open questions, the profound questions and the thought provoking questions

3 Children are a good example of having open-mindedness, curiosity, and joy for exploring because the world is so new for them.

4 Without humility, curiosity is feeble and without curiosity, creativity is ineffectual

5 People with intellectual curiosity are more like to ask those open questions such as “What if,” “Why not.” etc.

6 Truly curious people are more interested in what they don't know rather than just providing answers to show what they do know. Intellectual curiosity is one of the key ingredients to spark innovation and catalyze the culture of creativity.

7 Every discovery must be supported by intellectual curiosity with sound rational and logical certainty that can be accepted without any doubt whatsoever.

8 A friendly digital working environment like the melting pot to inspire creativity, encourage free thinking & experimenting, stimulate intellectual curiosity and appreciative inquiries.

9 Life's a journey, we might lose a lot of things on the way, but do not lose the character because it is our personal identity and brand; do not lose intellectual curiosity because it keeps life interesting and meaningful.

Brightening Up the Path of Going Digital by Uncovering Three “Hidden Spots”

The digital transformation is now spreading rapidly to enable organizations of all shapes and sizes to reinvent themselves. 

The characteristics of digital business are dynamic, hyper-connected, and interdependent, different companies are at a different stage of its business life cycle. Re-imagining the future of digital business is exciting, but investigating the different path of business growth and digital transformation is a tough journey. How to recharge the business and unlock its performance by identifying the following “hidden spots,” deal with problems systematically and unleash business potential into a more solid form of business advantage?

Blind spot: To survive in today’s “VUCA” digital new normal, organizations must adapt to rapid changes by making effective decisions in a consistent way. Often, there isn’t always a right or wrong choice in any situation, there are a lot of gray areas and varying blind spots in decision making. Blind spots are usually caused by silo thinking and homogeneous team-setting. They will cloud your vision, trigger poor judgment and lead ineffective decision-making. Therefore, it’s important to challenge, debate, and initiate dynamic and respectful dialogue to broaden perspectives and close blindspots.

In reality, many companies still have rigid organizational hierarchy and bureaucratic culture, their business is still the sum of pieces rather than a holistic whole. Many teams operate with an incomplete and relative small view of the business and take linear management discipline. It’s no surprise that such silo mentalities will create numerous blind spots in talent, resource, process, capacity, and capability management, and further cause failures in strategy execution. Thus, it’s important to develop high-performance leadership team with cognitive difference, complementary skills and distinctive capabilities to identify and fill blind spots and improve their leadership effectiveness.

Dark spot: Individually, negative emotions create dark spots - your fear drains energy and thwarts creativity; your ego is a mask or a costume that you wear in the great play of career or life to hide your authenticity; your envy degrades your integrity or professionalism, etc. Collectively, in the business environment, silo or bureaucratic thinking creates dark spots and generates negative energy. It’s about fear of failure; fear to get out of old habits, fear to lose the status quo. It makes people feel threatened, that’s why learning is stressful. Negative emotions create dark energy, drive misjudgment, and cause inertia to adopt the right course of action. To brighten the dark spot, learn to abide by nature and let the positive dominate the negative through continuous learning, adapting and maturing. As the society, the negative behaviors caused by negative emotions should be discouraged, organizations and society should adore and appreciate those individuals who are directed towards using their superior skills or unique abilities for driving progressive changes and making a better world.

Sweet spot: Compared to change, business transformation is definitely the more ambitious sounding term and a large scale of changes. It is like a treasure hunting journey to uncover the sweet spots and discover hidden gems for business growth. Business managers should take the intrapreneur spirit, turn the status quo upside down for dealing with”VUCA” normality via interdisciplinarity of art and science. They should practice strategic thinking by envisioning the future and clarifying the reality, keep asking themselves and others: What’s our strategic sweet spot? What’s our competitive advantage? What’s the future of business? What's our unique competency? Etc. Organizations that are skillful at exploring the sweet spots of growth can gain long term business advantages by pushing the boundaries of a more complicated business mix that provides opportunities to create inter-business value and build differentiated business advantages. To explore these sweet spots for growth, people are encouraged to take initiatives of stepping outside of the box, seek additional knowledge and experience, and focus on the learning opportunities provided by assignment, rather than on the status quo. Digital is the age of customers. focusing on customer needs should be an easier path to identify sweet spots and grow the innovation fruits continually.


The digital transformation is now spreading rapidly to enable organizations of all shapes and sizes to reinvent themselves. It’s critical to gain a contextual business understanding, look for those critical “hidden spots,” which is not always obvious, see around the corner, read between the lines, to overcome barriers and identify growth opportunities for making a leap to reach the next level of organizational maturity.

Wednesday, August 28, 2019

The Monthly “Dot Connections”: Strategic vs. Operational Management Dot Connection Aug. 2019

Strategic Managers see 'blue ocean' currents; Operational Managers only see 'red ocean' currents.

The effects of an increasingly digitized world are now reaching into every corner of businesses and every aspect of organizations. 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 strategic imperatives of the digital era. The work is not the place you go, but a live organization and an experiment lab you can connect the dots to explore the art of possibility.



 

     Strategic vs. Operational Management Dot Connection


Digital Playbook vs. Cookbook: What’s your Hand Book to Make a Leap of Digital Transformation The purpose of going digital is to make a significant difference in achieving high performance and unlocking the full potential of the business. It is a long journey full of uncertainty, velocity, complexity, and ambiguity. Generally speaking, transformation leaders have two jobs - to play their functional management role well and to be accountable for leading the cross-functional initiatives that drive business transformation. Digital playbook vs. cookbook: what’s your hand book to make a seamless digital transformation?

Strategic Management vs. Operational Management Strategic management as long-term planning requires a vision. In other words, a company needs to define where it wants to be in a decade or two (what's the vision) and how they want to get there (Strategy) and then Operational Management will translate the long-term plans into smaller scale plans to operationalize the move toward the vision.

Strategic KPIs vs. Operational KPIs? KPIs are indicators to identify if the adopted strategy, operation, and process, etc are working toward the objective. As such, you don't "adopt" a KPI to "achieve an outcome," you adopt a strategy or operational workflow to achieve the outcome, and you define KPIs to monitor the progress and performance. That’s the name KPI –Key Performance Indicators stand for. The provocative question is: is it possible to link operational KPI's to strategic ones to reflect and track the overall progress in achieving the strategic goals?

Transaction vs. Transformation A well-run business has a healthy business portfolio of “running, growth, and transformation,” focus on both short-term gain and a long-term win, to manage a seamless business transaction and transformation continuum. Here are three perspectives to connect the dots between transaction vs. transformation.

Scoreboard vs. Dash board The balanced scorecard (BSC) is a strategy performance management tool - a semi-standard structured report, supported by design methods and automation tools, that can be used by managers to keep track of the execution of activities by the staff within their control and to monitor the consequences arising from these actions. In management information systems, a dashboard is "an easy to read, often single page, real-time user interface, showing a graphical presentation of the current status (snapshot) and historical trends of an organization’s key performance indicators to enable instantaneous and informed decisions to be made at a glance. (Wikipedia)

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with about #5900th blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The Digital Master” book series includes 28 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 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.

The Best “Stereotype” Quotes of “Digital Master” Aug. 2019

Apply wisdom to break down any superficial, stereotypical and other negative mindsets, and equip yourself with a learning, growth, adaptive, and high-mature digital mind.

"Digital Master” is a series of guidebooks (28 + 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, provides advice 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 “stereotype” quotes in “Digital Master."


1 Stereotyping is when you judge a group of people who are different from you based on your own opinions or encounters.

2 Stereotype as a word has a negative connotation. Many times, the mind can and will play tricks on you, based on past experiences or outdated perceptions only. Even you are sometimes not aware of the stereotypes/prejudices/false assumptions you maintain.

3 Holding on to stereotypes which are false assumptions, is like holding on to a negative habit that is detrimental to one’s health, both physically and spiritually.

4 A good question would be you delineate truth from fiction about others, you must become a true culture of inclusion which will only happen through education both formal and informal.

5 Stereotyping one another is a human issue-one that you need to keep weeding out of the culture.

6 Stereotyping is a type of superficial thinking lack of in-depth understanding. To truly break down stereotypes, knowing that you are conditioned to stereotype others is a good start

7 To truly break down stereotypes, you have to make a concerted effort to know and understand each other and to give each other the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise.

8 Challenge your beliefs/stereotypes by continuously asking different people: Is it true? Questioning/challenging long-held beliefs is hard work and is often met with resistance, but, isn't that how CHANGE comes about.

9 Apply wisdom to break down any superficial, stereotypical and other negative mindsets, and  equip yourself with a learning, growth, adaptive, and high-mature digital mind.

Five Characteristics of IT Maturity

IT touches both hard business processes and soft human behavior. IT maturity directly impacts the overall business competency and maturity.

With rapid changes, exponential growth of information and often technology led disruptions, the role of IT in the current business environment should  enable business outcomes, catalyze enterprise growth, and build organizational competency. Many companies are reaching the inflection point of digital transformation. IT plays a critical role in the digital paradigm shift. Here are five characteristics of IT maturity.


Adaptability: Digital organizations are highly adaptive living systems. Adaptability is to be understood as the ability of systems or people adapt themselves to changed circumstances fast and smoothly. IT adaptability directly impacts the business competency for either responding to rapid changes or expanding market share timely. IT needs to provide guidance, direction, support, and assistance in the adoption and application of information technology solutions in support of strategic business goals and objectives with speed. More and more businesses expect the consumerization style responsiveness from IT, foresightful IT leaders understand what emergent digital technology trends can add business value and transfer that to the business advantage. Adaptation is faster if made with full involvement of people in organizational flow to harness change and innovation. IT needs to ensure its strategy allowing for digital speed and it’s fast enough to discover the root cause of problems, also quickly find solutions in case of emerging circumstances.

Multidimensional value proposition: IT value is multifaceted (economical value, quality value, utility value, social value). The value of IT is in the eye of the beholders - customers. IT value can be categorized in a number of ways such as revenue improvement (enable the top line business growth), agility (speed to market, ability to change), productivity increases, and the rate of customer satisfaction gains, etc. In fact, there are both tangible (cost saving, revenue gains, productivity increase) and intangible value (brand equity, sales enablement) components of IT value proposition. IT plays a critical role in driving changes and leading digital transformation. IT value-based management needs to be driven by concepts like collaborative value or collective advantage and multi-layer ROIs. It’s important to triangulate IT value from different angles in order to become a strategic business partner and change agent of the company,

Elasticity: Organizations are taking advantage of emerging digital technologies and abundant information for shaping highly adaptable and scalable digital organization. They build elasticity (scale up/down more seamlessly) by developing Lego-like module design architectures and capabilities with internal processes being broken into modular service components that have a standard open interface. Loose coupling makes it possible to change the components without affecting the system, as long as the interface is kept stable. The challenge for business management is to understand where and how you can improve to scale up for getting the biggest effect and improving business competency. Technically, scaling and performing the appropriate transformation could be vendor specific as you have to take into account the technology provided. It’s also important to develop a series of best/next practices to scale up and amplify its effects with the goal to improve IT elasticity and organizational competency.

Flexibility: Flexibility is about taking an alternative way to solve problems or making multi-dimensional choices to delight customers, etc. With unprecedented digital convenience brought by technologies, the “reach and range” flexibility that now exists removes barriers that have existed in the past. The pervasive digitization requires both business and technology professionals to rethink how things are done in organizations. With rapid changes and continuous disruptions, IT organization demonstrates flexibility by taking a different approach for solving emerging problems and meeting the business’s expectations. They also take initiatives to break down silos and overly rigid processes, encourage cross-functional collaboration, and enforce business changes. Great IT leaders advocate the culture of flexibility; they are comfortable with ambiguity and respectful of processes, without being slaves to them, have risk tolerance for encouraging different ways of getting work done and inspire creativity.

Resilience: The fast growth of information and disruptive nature of technology bring both abundant opportunities and unprecedented risks to businesses today. Resilience is the ability to respond to changes proactively, act courageously when facing challenges, bounce back or fail forward. We live in an era of information abundance and continuous disruptions. Strategic risks are about uncertainties, inherent variability and the unknown interdependencies among sources of risks that could have an effect on the delivery of strategic objectives. The business managers should weigh risk and reward, take prudent risks and find ways to mitigate risk rather than eliminate it. Digital resilience depends on how to manage the gray effectively at today’s VUCA –Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous business environment. The risk management mechanism needs to be well embedded into both soft business factors such as corporate culture or communication and hard organizational elements such as processes or functions so that high mature business can elevate the management discipline from risk mitigation to risk intelligence.


IT touches both hard business processes and soft human behavior. IT maturity directly impacts the overall business competency and maturity. Business savvy CIOs can take an outside-in lens, articulate the business benefit realized through IT investment, truly build a high mature IT organizations with all these important characteristics and run IT as a strategic business partner, to help their organizations"playing to win" not just trying not to lose, and gain long term business advantages.

Tuesday, August 27, 2019

The Monthly Keyword Summary: Prioritization Aug. 2019

 There're always some constraints for businesses to explore new opportunities or deploy new ideas, therefore, evaluation and prioritization are taken place to leverage resource and improve effectiveness.

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


     Prioritization


How to Embed Prioritization Mechanism into The Multitude of Digital Management Disciplines Modern businesses often get trapped into “busyness,” overwhelmed with too many business initiatives, and overloaded with short-term business concerns and continuous digital disruptions. The reality is that there are a lot of things that can go wrong and it is not always easy to identify what is important. To enhance its business effectiveness and maturity, how can organizations embed prioritization mechanism into the multitude of management disciplines to improve organizational responsiveness and overall business maturity?

Does Prioritization Stifle Creativity? A company has finite resources to apply to get the best yield possible to meet stakeholder expectations. So there're always some constraints for businesses to explore new opportunities or deploy new ideas, therefore, evaluation and prioritization are taken place to leverage resources in project or innovation management. Does it mean such prioritization process will stifle the creativity?

What is the Highest Strategic Priority? Contemporary businesses today have quite many strategic goals, from Human Capital to Customer/Client Relationships, from Innovation to Corporate Brand Reputation, from Operational Excellence to Corporate Governance, If only pick one, what is the highest strategic priority though?

What are the CIO’s Top Priorities for Improving Business Maturity Nowadays, information is the lifeblood of business, and technology is the big brain of the organization, there are so many things on the CIO’s agenda, IT is always in overload mode, and CIOs seem to be always at the hot seat. Therefore, in order to run IT more effectively and efficiently, how shall CIOs prioritize the projects, and what shall be put on the top of the CIO’s agenda?

The Best “Inclusiveness” Quotes of “Digital Master” May 2019 "Digital Master is the series of guidebooks (28+ 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, gives pieces of advice 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 “Prioritization” 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 minds across the globe. The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with about #5900 blog posting. Among 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating 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.

The Corporate Board Change Fit

Leadership or directorship is about setting directions and inspiring changes.

Change is the only constant, and the speed of change is increasing rapidly. The corporate board directors should become interactive change agents that represent the organization, stockholders, and senior management, make significant influences on setting digital tones and shaping the digital mindset of the organization, both walk the talk and talk the walk and set the digital tone for others to follow.


Change is the “DNA” of modern leadership: Change starts at the board level. We live in a world where change is the norm and if we don't embrace it, accept it, roll with it or make it happen, we're not going to be successful. While there are many components of leadership, one of the most important ones is the ability to adapt, model and influence change. It is a basic human ability to inspire self and others to look beyond limitations and make continuous improvement. This is particularly important at the board level because board directors help to oversee the business agenda for change and digital transformation, they also must help to push this agenda, pull all important business resources to achieve it. The contemporary corporate board can inspire, innovate, improve, interact, interpret, influence, exemplify, encourage and orchestrate change, as change is often uncomfortable, but a necessary part of reaching the future and sustain the success. 

Change capability is a strategic skill on leadership qualities: While there are many components of leadership, one of the most important ones is the ability to adapt, model and influence change. The leadership team such as corporate board must push the change agenda, and pull the resources to achieve it. We live in a world where change is the norm and if we don't embrace it, accept it, roll with it or make it happen, we're not going to be successful. It also makes it possible for everyone to be on the same page speaking the same language and fosters an atmosphere of accountability. Change leadership concerns the driving forces, visions, and processes that fuel large-scale transformation. Leadership is all about change management and also the ability to take initiative (change leadership). So accepting and embracing change has put leaders more at ease because of its consistency. It's also given digital leaders such as BoDs confidence because you know you are able to positively adapt to any given situation.


The boards of Directors sets policies and principles for changes and digital transformation: Change is the new normal, and the speed of change is increasing, Without well-preparation, major changes in an organization’s ecosystem could have unforeseen consequences that negatively impact the company’s productivity and performance. More than 70% of Change Management effort fails to achieve the expected result. Thus, it is important to bring the CHANGE wave to the boardroom as well. Digital leaders including board directors should contemplate the big "WHY" and know the dynamic of change and adapt to the ever-evolving business circumstances. Change leadership at the board level is important because change management is an interdependent ecosystem that includes many business factors such as the company goals, policies, internal control requirements, customer experience improvements/customer satisfaction, etc, which should be synchronized without compromising the need for any item.

Leadership or directorship is about setting directions and inspiring changes. Change Management has a very wide scope and is a relatively new area of expertise, it needs to focus on coordination and facilitation, follow the right set of principles and take the best or next digital practices.

How to Deal with Business Dynamic with “Unpredictability, Uncertainty, and Unrepeatability”

It is no surprise that there is a tension between “old and new,” from the business model, mindset, process or practice perspectives.

The tides of change and waves of disruptions indicate that business leaders couldn’t predict the future with a certain degree of accuracy. To tackle great challenges with grand consequences over long time spans, they need to become highly visible, proactive, and innovative for dealing with an unprecedented level of uncertainty, unrepeatability, and unpredictability effectively.





Unpredictability: Modern organizations are complex systems that tend to be non-linear and thus, hard to predict the upcoming changes on the way. Often, a part of the nonlinear business system emits more energy and that’s going beyond the linear response of that part. It means small changes in the initial conditions could have much larger and unpredictable consequences in the outcomes of the business system. From the business management perspective, even though you couldn’t predict anything beforehand, you can always imagine different scenarios based on “lessons learned” with many experiences involved in current or in the past. Although not everything is predictable, information is still one of the most important assets of the company. It is a complex domain and information becomes meaningful when being sort through and processed to make sure its coherence. When information is refined into the business foresight and customer insight, it becomes the “light tower” to navigate the business in the right direction. It requires to take leaps of setting some of the right things in motion, and delicately balancing and re-balancing the results toward urgent, but hard to predict outcomes.

Uncertainty: The pace of change is accelerated both in businesses and society, either as an individual or an organization. Uncertainty (of outcomes or occurrences) is inherent in almost every business endeavor, More specifically, uncertainty is a state of having limited knowledge where it is impossible to exactly describe the existing circumstance. From a strategic management perspective, although it is not so much you could do about the uncontrollable situation. Still, a good plan can identify external business factors and a structural process can enable an organization to walk around the externals. From a leadership perspective, great leaders supply the framing context in understanding uncertainty and encourage optimism, help to mitigate the impact of uncertainty or risks by enabling a team to encounter uncertainty and deal with it strategically and systematically. They need to visualize and identify uncertainty, convert uncertainty to risk through the application of quantification methods in order to be able to manage uncertainty as risk, and move up management maturity from risk mitigation to risk intelligence.


Unrepeatability: Due to the “VUCA” digital new normal, change is unavoidable and digital disruption is inevitable. Businesses become complex if things do interact, particularly in the case of "nonlinear" interaction with un-repetitive activities and behavior. Nonlinearity, hyper diversity, fewer rules, and regulations, information exponentiality, unpredictability, etc, are all causes of unrepeatability. Therefore, today’s business leaders and professionals need to be open-minded, resourceful and learning agile, be able to effectively handle issues that they had never met before and overcome some unrepeatable challenges smoothly. To improve collective and collaborative problem-solving competency, business leaders should take a holistic look at the variety of business relationships and interconnectivity, enforce cross-functional communication and collaboration, apply interdisciplinary management approach to frame bigger thinking boxes and deal with many complex and unrepeatable business issues technically, scientifically, and culturally.

It is no surprise that there is a tension between “old and new,” from the business model, mindset, process or practice perspectives. To survive the “VUCA” digital new normal and thrive with the long-term business advantage involve more planning, adjustment, and speed. In today's interdependent global economy with high level of unpredictability, uncertainty, and unrepeatability, that will need a new model of leadership in which openness, vision, innovation, multidimensional intelligence, learning plasticity, flexibility, transparency, become necessary features. Lead by influence, not brute forces. The most critical and yet overlooked foundation of being a real leader is in choosing a destination that creates a better world!

Monday, August 26, 2019

The Monthly “Performance Master’ Book Tuning:The Performance Management Dashboard Aug. 2019

A well-designed dashboard is an effective management tool for enabling business leaders to make better decisions and lead change in the right direction.

Corporate Performance Management is a management control from strategy to the shop floor. "If you can't measure, you can't manage," legendary management guru Peter Drucker once asserted. Managing performance means understanding results, setting metrics, fixing plans, and making decisions to ensure it happens. It takes multifaceted approaches from multidimensional perspectives to unlock digital performance and catalyze change.

  
                      

The Performance Management Dashboard 


The Performance Dashboard of Digital Transformation Forward-looking organizations are on the journey of digital transformation. You can’t manage it if you can’t measure it. A well-designed dashboard is an effective management tool for enabling business leaders to make better decisions and lead change in the right direction. A well-designed digital management dashboard is an easy to read, often single page, real-time user interface, showing a graphical presentation of the current status (snapshot) and historical trends of an organization’s key performance indicators to enable instantaneous and informed decisions to be made at a glance. A digital performance dashboard helps capture the progress being made or the important issues need to be taken care of, with the goal to improve management effectiveness.

An Effective Executive Dashboard Just like the control board in our cars, business dashboard is "an easy to read, often single page, real-time user interface, showing a graphical presentation of the current status (snapshot) and historical trends of an organization’s KPIs - Key Performance Indicators to enable instantaneous and informed decisions to be made at a glance. What are the essential information in a management dashboard at the executive level?

The Multifaceted Aspects of IT Management Dashboard
A Dashboard is a support decision instrument, gives instantaneous information about the organization's main drivers. In other words, it is a tool which is a part of a management system. The feature of the dashboard is to display information that can be customized and categorized to meet a user’s specific needs.

The CIO's Dashboard A well-designed dashboard is an effective management tool to enable business leaders to make a better decision, from an IT management perspective; a dashboard should present the topics that you manage. CIOs shall ask themselves what are IT business objectives towards your organizational strategy. Then, translate it to smart KPIs. Smart is in a sense of how to cover all important business objectives, but not too many KPIs, to measure the progress, and not only the final result, to show the status at a glance without the need to drill down too much and so on. Typically, CIOs would need to remain on top of various parameters such as costs, production Issues (especially business-critical applications), risks, technology, customer, long-term business transformation, etc.

The New Book “Performance Master” Chapter IV Introduction: Digital Performance Scoreboard and Dashboard The balanced scorecard model offers a visual way for a corporation to gain a wider perspective on its strategic decisions by considering the impact on finances, customers, internal processes and employee satisfaction. A management dashboard is an easy to read, often single page, real-time user interface, showing a graphical presentation of the current status (snapshot) and historical trends of an organization’s key performance indicators to enable instantaneous and informed decisions to be made at a glance. To put simply, the scoreboard is strategy focused, and the dashboard is operation oriented.

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 minds across the globe. The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with about #5900 blog posting. Among 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating 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.