Tuesday, October 1, 2019

The Corporate Board’s Three Strategic Focal Points

Digital boards are like the steering wheel of their company,  leading the business toward the uncharted water and blurred territories for reaching the ultimate digital destination.

Generally speaking, in the boardroom, the key dimensions of practicing corporate governance discipline are policy setting, strategy oversight, leadership empowerment, and performance monitoring. The Board of Directors as top leadership roles should have multi-intelligent wisdom, to envision and lead the organization towards its future confidently, make a better influence on guiding the organization toward the right direction and bring profound insight in transforming the business up to the next level of business maturity. To lead effectively in today’s digital dynamic, here are three strategic focal points of corporate boards.

An integral and increasingly important aspect of business strategy development and oversight: Strategy management is about creating tomorrow's organization out of today. examining meta-process to determine how each part of the organization, including all of the key functions putting all together to implementing the business strategy successfully. The fact is that change is happening at a much faster pace than ever with"emergent uncertainties,” The degree of Strategic Planning has a correlation with the degree of uncertainty and unpredictability. Strategic planning now is a different animal as digital strategy-execution is no longer linear steps but a dynamic and iterative business continuum.

Nowadays, the Board of Directors see the development of strategy as a collective effort between themselves and management, rather than a question of “us versus them.” They perhaps should spend more time on participating strategy development. More specifically, BoDs can contribute a unique viewpoint as the business outlier to examine strategy management meta-process because they don’t evolve in the everyday business. Management generates and shares ideas that stimulate debate among directors who are there to make positive, valuable contributions to strategy and monitor strategy implementation effectively.

An integral and increasingly important aspect of ongoing business viability: The digital transformation is now spreading rapidly to enable organizations of all shapes and sizes to reinvent themselves.Viability is one of the very characteristics of the digital organization. In the digital era with hyper-competition and continuous disruptions, top business leaders including board directors today must ensure that the organization is “playing to win,” not just trying not to lose. You aren't sacrificing the long-term viability of the business management portfolio for short-term rewards.

A viable digital organization takes continuous digital practices to improve manageability and develop business competencies to deliver impressive business outcomes. The emergence of potential opportunities and risks for exploring digital is likely to follow a nonlinear pattern with exponential speed. The corporate board’s strategic oversight and investment review help to fill the blind spots and bring a new perspective on improving business maturity, steer changes and ensure the business developing a creative workforce to maintain viability.

Business competency assessment and development: The characteristics of digital business are dynamic, volatile, uncertain, and hypercompetitive. Therefore, it is also critical to build dynamic business capabilities to adapt to changes. Digital transformation is the journey of continuous delivery and improvement, organizational management and corporate boards need to do the regular review to ensure that the business has and continues to build a set of cohesive digital capabilities with a right mix of competitive necessity and competitive uniqueness to improve strategy management effectiveness. 

 Many components of business capabilities are common and reusable across the enterprise. To shorten the time cycle and save the cost for building business capabilities. Building a Lego-like digital organization is all about mastering dynamic planning & competency building, reinventing business but not reinventing the wheel. The high mature digital businesses do great work to preserve core competency even as management expands and redefines the business. In order to know the organization better, the corporate board should make an objective assessment to ensure they not only have “me too” type competitive necessity but also keep developing unique business competency.

In a world of rapid changes, directors are required to exercise leadership influence and improve decision effectiveness over volatility, manage uncertainty, simplify complexity, and resolve ambiguity. Digital boards are like the steering wheel of their company, leading the business toward the uncharted water and blurred territories for reaching the ultimate digital destination.

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