The Monthly “Digital Fit” Book Tuning: Performance Fit Jan. 2020

The point is that how you know for sure that people being called “talent,” are really fit, how do you know you are putting the right people in the right position to solve the right problems.


The purpose of “Digital Fit: Manifest Future of Business with Multidimensional Fit“ is to share insight about multidimensional enterprise fit from digital characteristics, organizational structure, change, knowledge, and talent perspectives; evoke critical and paradoxical thinking about digital “fit vs. misfit,” spark healthy debates on how to define and develop true digital fit, and build a fitting working environment to inspire creativity and accelerate digital transformation.

                

  

Performance Fit

How Would you Calculate the Organization’s Performance Score of Digital Transformation The digital transformation represents the next stage of business maturity. It has to permeate into business vision, strategy, culture, communication, and processes. etc. Thus, performance management should take a multidimensional approach, to connect all important dots, with multifaceted perspectives. In practice, the more meaningful the thing you want to assess, the harder you can measure it objectively. More specifically, what are important factors could be used to measure digital transformation score and how to lead transformative changes successfully?

The Corporate Board "Performance Fit" Performances are not just numbers with metrics, they are numbers in context, results related to business goals. Business performance can be affected by numerous factors of which governance is one of them. The corporate board as one of the most crucial governance bodies in the modern enterprise plays an important role in setting digital principles for improving performance management effectiveness and monitoring business performance smoothly.

Three “P” Factors for Assessing Digital Fitness Digital fit starts with people fit. People are always the weakest link in organizations. So, part of the digital transformation journey is to prepare people for the new paradigm shift and to recognize this is a crucial step. The point is that how you know for sure that people being called “talent,” are really fit, how do you know you are putting the right people in the right position to solve the right problems? Here are three “P” factors for evaluating digital fitness.

Three Growth Forces to Accelerate Digital Business Performance The digital organization is the dynamic business ecosystem with the two most basic systemic structures which are the balancing cycle and the growth cycle, and their emergent characteristics just happen to be balance and growth. Change is the new normal, and change can be an opportunity, but at the end of the day, it needs to be all about moving the business numbers upwards. Although we have to change with the "tide," companies that lead in digital transformation, are much more likely to have a top executive team who understands digital opportunities and threats and who can enforce the business growth forces for the strategy execution and accelerate digital business performance.

Running Fit, Healthy, and High-Performance Digital IT organization Digital means the increasing speed of changes, fierce competition, hyperconnectivity, interdependence, and always-on business dynamic. IT is no longer just a reactive support function or a cost center, but a change organization that keeps information flowing and enables business growth and drive digital paradigm shift. CIOs need to have strong digital awareness, understand how they relate to other functional leaders, business partners as well as the varying shareholders. They should also make an objective assessment: Which speed can they swim in the uncharted water; what competencies do they need for the business’s surviving and thriving? Or to put simply, how to run a digital fit, healthy, and high performance IT organization?

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with about #6300+ 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 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 “Modernization” Quotes of “Digital Master”Jan, 2020

Even "application modernization" seems to remain an elusive, fuzzy concept that can mean a host of things. Therefore, the way to do it is through some careful, painstaking business analysis.

"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 “Modernization” quotes in “Digital Master.”

1 Organizations across the industrial sectors declare they are in the information management business and take the converging journey of digitalization, modernization, and innovation.

2 It takes a lot of patience, sense of humor and deep pockets. To move forward with portfolio rationalization and modernization,

3 It's natural to fear the unknown, question the unproven, be skeptical of the latest technology trends. IT modernization is an important stepstone for reaching the goal of going digital. The strategic corporate benefits of application modernization are effectiveness, efficiency, differentiation, and maturity.

4 Organizations have a "set it and forget it" mentality. One of the challenges of application modernization is the (perceived) embarrassment factor; for some legacy (applications reach their life cycle), it could be too costly to modernize, especially for some struggling organizations and industries.

5 It is challenging to take the converging journey of digitalization, modernization, and innovation. But this is also a golden opportunity for digital leaders to lead the way by enabling, governing and optimizing the consumer-driven technology and information management.

6 Cloudification is a journey to reinvent IT via modernization, classification, integration, and optimization.

7 Even "application modernization" seems to remain an elusive, fuzzy concept that can mean a host of things. Therefore, the way to do it is through some careful, painstaking business analysis.

8 From Application consolidation, rationalization/ modernization, integration, optimization to now, cloudification, application lifecycle management is a critical part of IT strategy, which is an integral part of business strategy, and linked directly to business goals.

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The Characteristics of Future Organization

Digital leaders should predict emerging trends, proactively influence changes and gain long-term business advantages via the lenses of technology, sociology, psychology, the economics of education, the anthropology of cultures, economics, etc.

With rapid changes and exponential growth of information, the forward-looking view of the organization is to determine what the future needs to look like and how business leaders can navigate digital new normal smoothly.

Organizations of the future are increasingly exhibiting digital characteristics in various shades and intensity, also possess certain characteristics and capabilities to survive. They are flexible and tolerant of ambiguity, develop and deliver products and services to meet customers’ expectations, unlock business performance and improve organizational maturity. Here are the very characteristics of future organizations.

Work without boundaries: Organizations and their people learn through their interactions with the environment. The emerging digital platforms and technologies break down functional, organizational, industrial, and geographic silos, and the most effective digital workplace is one in which cross-boundary communication, collaboration, and sharing are the new norms. Self-organization as a digital management style allows business leaders to adapt to current context and circumstance, and emerge the next most useful evolutionary change to get where you think you need to go next.

Running a business is an iterative problem-solving continuum. Thus, the management should gain a contextual understanding of where all the digital boundaries are, the scope and context of the problem, see a larger system with interactive pieces and “conflict” goals, and create the relevant context to make an optimized solution. Otherwise, you perhaps only fix the symptoms or cause more side effects later on.

Multi-generational workforce: Digital organizations are hyper-connected and intergenerational, the biggest challenge is to understand what's important to each of those generations and try to incorporate strategies that will keep each generation engaged, build the heterogeneous teams with a mixed bag of cognitive differences, experiences and personalities, and encouraging intergenerational collaboration. The biggest challenge for digital leaders or managers is to understand each individual and recognize them for who they are, what they could offer, and what they can bring to the table.

Today’s organizations are complex and human behaviors are so varied; collaboration and higher performance are usually difficult and challenging. The workforce in each generation needs to understand the company's vision, mission, value and buy into them in order to create the business synergy. There are opportunities for the involvement of all generations in shaping corporate brand and customer propositions in order to reach a much wider audience. Thus, harnessing the different experiences, perspectives and ideas of people from across multiple generations has enormous potential.

IT consumerization: As now users have the opportunity to be more selective in terms of how they want to consume their Information Technology. Productivity and innovation are the noble business goals behind the consumerization of IT and this is a snowballing trend that will be adopted by many different kinds of industries. The emerging technologies with the optimal combination of cost, convenience and learning curve are catching on extremely fast.

In practice, there are a lot of risks and planning required for embracing the "consumerization of IT” trend. There will be security and questions as to which corporate app is best or most useful to accelerate business performance. The transition will not be easy for employees or their IT managers, but with the right strategy in place, it will ultimately benefit organizations and improve ROI.

Continuous products/services deliveries in a flexible manner: The digital era upon us is about continuous performance and deliveries with shortened products/services development cycle. The lightweight digital technologies, real-time information and flexible on-demand service delivery model bring unprecedented convenience and significant improvement of productivity and business efficiency.

With “VUCA” digital reality, business management has to enforce flexibility and automation to deal with rapid changes. Developing and delivering tools down to departments and users help the digital workforce better do their job, the job of more streamlined and profitable operations to achieve high-performance business results.

Accelerated the shift to the multipolar world: The emerging digital world upon us is about hyperconnectivity and interdependence. When organizations start maturing, a key transformation must take place, often called the ‘Entrepreneurial to Purposeful’ transformation. Such a large scale of changes involve people, process, and technology, and enable the ecosystem orchestration with the multipolar and interdependent digital world.

To adapt to the dynamic business environment, you have to envision for gaining a long-term perspective and apply multidimensional intelligence for gaining clear discernment and apply wisdom to the knowledge you are exposed to. It is crucial to see the context, perceive invisible, identify the leverage point of the ever-evolving digital ecosystem. the ecosystem perspective as the digital shaper allows the organization to explore digital in all directions and scale up innovation systematically.

Digital leaders should predict emerging trends, proactively influence changes, and gain long-term business advantages via the lenses of technology, sociology, psychology, the economics of education, the anthropology of cultures, economics, etc. The emergent trends can shape the behavior of future enterprises with different characteristics such as mixed structures, diversity, volatility, ambiguity, unpredictability, and increased flux and improve organizational maturity from functioning to delight.

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The Monthly “Digital Hybridity” Book Tuning: The Organizational Design and Balance Jan, 2020

The purposes of the book “Digital Hybridity: How to Strike the Right Balance for Digital Paradigm Shift” is to shed some light on how to strike the right balance of stability and changes; being transactional to keep spinning and being transformational to leap forward for making a seamless digital paradigm shift. Digital organizations should apply the hybrid management approach, focus on building a diverse, networked, and extended modern working environment in which the powerful digital platforms and computing technologies enable seamless conversations, delayer overly rigid organizational hierarchy, inspire idea-sharing and brainstorming, and engage employees and partners to achieve the high-performance result.

The Organizational Design and Balance 

The Digital Organizational Design vs. Balance The purpose of organizational design is to improve the business maturity from functioning to firm to delight, and ultimately achieve the high-performance business result. High mature digital organizations integrate organizational design (OD) into the process design and organizational re-engineering for enabling employees doing their work productively and shape an interactive, dynamic, balanced and multidimensional ecosystem.

Running a Digital Organization with Impartial, Independent Hybrids With rapid change and exponential growth of information, businesses today need nothing less than a paradigm shift in their thinking about the fundamentals of how organizations work. There are so many seemingly paradoxical, but indeed coherent elements in running a digital organization today. Forward-thinking organizations need to discover their own strength, find a niche, and build a set of core and recombinant capabilities in order to become highly competitive and digital savvy.

Digital Cohelience (Coherence + Resilience) Traditional organizations usually apply a reductionistic management principle to run the business as the sum of pieces. It used to be that we were seeing silos as making the boundaries and territories of different lines of business within an organization. However, digital means hyperconnectivity and interdependence. The challenge for organizations is to manage its portfolio of relevant cross-border strategic synergies and organizational interdependence, fine-tune the structure and improve changeability to achieve coherence, manage risks to improve effectiveness. Or to put simply, we perhaps need to coin another hybrid word “Cohelience” (coherence + resilience) for articulating the very characteristic of digital maturity.

Achieve Digital Equilibrium via Delicate Balance Digitalization means hyper-connectivity, over-complexity, and interdependence; it blurs the geographical borders, functional borders, organizational borders, industry vertical borders and knowledge domain border. Many come to believe that boundaries are not tangible places of resistance but are only self-imposed limitations we place on ourselves to hide our own fear to move forward. The black and white boundaries continue to diminish in the 21st century due to the occurrence of increased economic integration, digital dynamic characterized by the movement of information, people, and businesses. Therefore, it is more critical than ever to maintain the right level of digital balance. In fact, striking the right digital balance is a never-ending business life cycle.

A Hybrid Organization With the fast pace of change and emerging digital technologies such as social, mobile and cloud, companies large or small are brainstorming the next generation of organizational design, how to take advantage of the new digital tools, how to improve productivity and enforce creativity & collaboration cross-enterprise ecosystem?

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with about #6300+ 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 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.

Read More

The Best “Justification” Quotes of “Digital Master”Jan, 2020

"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 “Justification” quotes in “Digital Master.”

1 Visualizing change inspires imagination and enforces communication. Achieving visibility of digital transformation provides a pathway into process optimization and business case justification.

2 Change needs to have reasons. Keep in mind, no one like change, or more precisely “being manually changed,” especially when one cannot identify the justification for the change.

3 IT investment is both risky and costly, it’s important to invest in IT as an “asset under construction,” make IT investment justification to ensure that IT spends the money in the right way and get the right business results.

4 You integrate when a justification can be made for doing so. By integrating, you are creating a case where you force an organizational alignment to the integration.

5 Many traditional organizations probably wouldn't know where to invest in new capabilities. even if the organization thought there was any value justification for making investment.

6 It is an opportunity to improve IT agility and increase IT maturity, make good preparation and clear business case justification, avoid potential pitfalls. Cloud is not only about the technology, more crucially about a digital management philosophy and methodology.

7 Start small, create a core team and in the process identify resources from other areas that can assist with the business initiative, define a clear objective, business justification, and make a full alignment with the overall company’s objectives.

8 Achieving visibility of digital transformation provides a pathway into process optimization and business case justification. It helps the leader become more future-oriented and discover the path to where you need to go and be persuasive to lead others toward to right direction and reach the destination confidently.

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Attitude, Aptitude, Altitude of Design

To build a design-driven digital organization, you need to understand the company’s long-term goals, business identity or brand, and the industry realities such as competition or marketing position, etc.

As our digitized world becomes hyper-connected, over-complex and interdependent, digital leaders should build a design framework with multiple system perspectives, and develop a set of practices to make design a strategic goal and show how your work contributes to defined business goals and KPIs.

Design is multidisciplinary in nature. It’s important to leverage flexibility as a design principle to clearly define the future of digital business, and articulate attitude, aptitude, and altitude of design.

Design attitude: Design thinking and socio-technical systems concept are important and should become the fundamental principles for businesses to understand the digital dynamics and improve organizational maturity. From decision attitude to design attitude, the effective decision-making is based on understanding relationships between activities inside as well as outside an organization, and make the design as a strategic goal. Developed methodology and practices that engage the right people early in any design activity in ways that capture innovative thinking, manage decisions and conflicts throughout the design cycle.

Design is both a mentality and attitude. Designers (either for products/services or business models, etc) may speak in different languages. For example, people from IT tend to want to create taxonomies all the time while people in business care more about the actual concepts and less about the words. It’s important to clarify design-related communications and goals, make sure they are clear and unambiguous with a clear sense of purpose and where they want to be within a given timeframe. Design the business model based on the technologic vision, design thinking and on the mega-trends.

Design aptitude: Business transformation needs to be carried out within the company's system, apply design principles accordingly and build design as a unique business competency. Genuine design leadership capability is essential and most of the design activities have benefited from the use of business architecture and high-calibrated design teams. While doing actual work using “Design Thinking,” you must end with solutions, but you do need to understand that those solutions may come through the back doors and side windows. Therefore, always be careful about examining the potential points of engagement, rather than jumping to the “fixing” mentality.

Organizational leaders need to identify design capability gaps and make an objective assessment of the business design capability, develop the target state design competency, and figure out what needs to be done to improve it. By assessing, the management readily considers multiple dimensions (service, process, information, assets, people, etc.) of the adequacy of the business capability to fulfill their business strategy. You have to know how the product architecture works to design a usable front end that will work the way you think it does within the system that already exists. The healthy design cycle is that you design the process, then model, execute, monitor, optimize then again back to design. It's a continuous improvement cycle.

Design altitude: The digital business today is not just working within the industry, but also permeating to the cross-ecosystem. it is absolutely necessary for leaders to incorporate design thinking as part of the organizational culture, the management has to understand the value of design and put a lot of effort into it. The designer’s job in the business is to listen intently, help the organization make the intuitive and the best possible solution. The forward-thinking leaders understand how things like design thinking can fundamentally change organizations and their societal impact by demonstrating delightful products and services, as well as promoting sustainability and social responsibility.

To build a design-driven digital organization, you need to understand the company’s long-term goals, business identity or brand, and the industry realities such as competition or marketing position, etc. Business leaders need to ensure organizations are on the right track of embracing design as a culture and build a strong brand. From the organizational design perspective, 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.

Understand the attitude, aptitude, and altitude of design in digital organizations in which people can learn and work, improve their productivity, creativity, and design competency so the company can climb the business maturity ladder from functioning to firm to delight.

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The Monthly “Change Agent CIO” Book Tuning: Modernist CIOs Jan. 2020

CIOs are digital modernists who lead through influence, not through brute forces.

Change is inevitable, organizational change has become a common practice within an organization, but too often changes are made as a reaction to outer impulses, crises, and demands. This is the bureaucracy’s way of meeting the challenges. A digital transformation is achieved via dynamic Strategy-Execution-Change lifecycle management, though it is not all linear steps, but an iterative, ongoing and upgoing change continuum. What are digital CIO’s profiles and how to reboot IT to get digital ready and cultivate the culture of learning and innovating?      

Modernist CIOs

Are You a Traditional CIO or a Modernist CIO Information Technology is now permeating into every corner of the business, it’s a crucial component to run a modern business. As businesses embark on the “Digital Era” of computing, the landscape for all executive roles constantly change, the CIO role also continues to be reimagined and reshaped. They should keep asking themselves: What is the future of IT? How to shape a digital IT organization? What is the nature of the digital IT leadership and what is the primary role of the CIO in harnessing IT leadership? Am I a traditional CIO or a modernist CIO?

Modern CIOs as Digital Adventurists Traditional IT organizations have been perceived as technical support centers and help desks, and traditional CIOs have been portrayed as technology geeks and controllers to keep the lights on. Digital transformation represents a break from the past, with a high level of impact and complexity. IT plays a different role in such a paradigm shift. Modern CIOs need to keep an eye on what happens today, also be focused on what is next. They are the digital adventurists to lead radical changes and innovation breakthroughs.

The CIO as Digital Modernist II The modern IT is not equal to IT modernization, it goes a step further, becomes the change agent of the company, doing more with innovation and solving problems creatively. The CIOs are digital modernists who lead through influence, not through brute forces; who not only enforce the engineering side of IT but also stimulate the creative side of IT for reaching “the art of the possible.” Here are three perspectives of CIOs as digital modernists.

The CIO as the Digital Modernist The modernist is a believer in or supporter of modernism, especially in the arts. Information & technology is both art and science. The digital modernist CIO is an advocate to catalyze change and lead digitalization. Many perceive engineering as an art because it involves creative thinking, personalized observation and judgment, design thinking, intuition, and innovation. To unleash the digital potential of the business, organizations need to understand that IT is not just technical or scientific, but also artistic and delightful.

The Digital Portrait of Modern CIOs In the world moves too fast, with the exponential growth of information, leadership, marketing, finance, technology, etc, are all intertwined. IT leadership is strategically important. What C-level executives really want is a partner that works both "on the business" and "in the business," not just "for the business"; someone who knows what they want before they know themselves; someone who can contribute to the top-line business growth and long-term business strategy. Thus, the digital portrait of modern CIO is different from the traditional CIOs who often think and act as the tactical IT manager. The important thing is that digital CIOs as the top leadership role, must have the strategic mindset, interdisciplinary knowledge, unique personality, and a clear idea of what needs to be done, yet creative enough to not hold the company back from growth.

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 #6300 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.

Read More

The Best “Navigation” Quotes of “Digital Master”Jan, 2020

On the navigation dimension, digital leaders have more antennae focused on the trends and what’s going on in the business and the world.

"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 “Navigation” quotes in “Digital Master.”

1 Without foresightful leaders with navigation capacities, businesses would find themselves setting radically different trajectories, they are facing daunting tasks of navigating the business context with largely uncharted territories.

2 Innovation navigators are a critical role to envision future trends and capture potential innovation opportunities.

3 Metaphorically, contextual navigation is just like to draw and paint a polygon, context is part of a polygon. Each vertex dynamically interacts with the other vertices. One vertex is cognitive perception. Another vertex is the expectation that there is more going on than just the image.

4 Fundamentally, leadership is about the future and direction - how to navigate their organization in the right direction. Navigation is actually the synthetic competency integrated by a couple of important professional capabilities such as metacognitive capability - thinking about thinking, strategic reasoning, and adaptability, etc.

5 Navigation competency requires the multidimensional understanding of both tangible and intangible business success factors, overcome silo or overly rigid polarity, strike the right balance to lead change steadfastly.

6 On the navigation dimension, digital leaders have more antennae focused on the trends and what’s going on in the business and the world.

7 The most powerful innovation navigation system involves tapping the organization's ecosystem for collective perspectives and knitting all critical business elements such as people, processes, and technology into transcendent innovation capacity.

8 Strategic plans need to get to the level of specifically achievable goals via “5W+1H” navigation, such as "Who is doing what, with whom, how are they doing it and when does it need to be started and finished by.

9 Highly innovative organizations have a powerful innovation navigation system to detect opportunities for innovating and a highly effective IT system to integrate important business elements into innovation competencies.

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The Crucial Components of Innovation Management

Different types of innovation should be managed via tailored management processes and scientific resource allocation. 

Information is growing exponentially and technologies are changing very rapidly, innovation is no longer nice to have, but “must-have” business competency to survive for the future. Everyone in the leadership team has a gift and digital organization is very complex. The exercise of deciding just what innovation is within each organization is one of the most critical activities of an innovation effort.

Working in an innovation garden not only takes passion but also needs to work hard, cultivate a culture of creativity, and develop a systematic innovation management discipline with crucial components and improve the overall innovation management success rate.

Prioritization: Organizations have limited resources, prioritization is about managing constraints. Innovation managers need to check periodically: You can't do everything; so which business initiative will you pursue? What are your practices for the best use of resources and how to manage innovation effectively? Forward-looking organizations build a system that can "smell" the right idea at the right time and place, make it tangible, and achieve their business values.

Prioritization brings transparency and creates internal competition among new ideas. It helps to focus on the strategy of the organization, which has huge benefits in terms of execution. In practice, there is no way to create a definitive prioritized list without more business context., it’s important to build business innovation strength and capabilities by prioritizing resources and managing risks. Building a balanced innovation portfolio is a practical approach for optimizing resources and improving risk intelligence.

Process: Innovation is not serendipity, it’s a management process and discipline. Make innovation processes as visible and company-wide as possible. Innovation is a high mature digital capability that needs to be built via scientific disciplines, structures, processes, and practices. The ability to innovate consistently and achieve sustainable innovation results continually does require some degree of a “hard-wired” innovation system with multidisciplinary knowledge such as economy, technology, psychology, sociology, and law, etc.

The main barriers to innovation are silos, rigidity, inflexibility, static process, or bureaucracy, etc. Innovation processes need to be flexible and dynamic, require much more effective collaboration to minimize cost and manage risks, so the right level of guidance is important, but the overly rigid processes, inflexible structure or too “pushy” goals stifle innovation. As processes yielding results, innovation and efficiency can complement and enhance each other. Organizations can reach a high level of business innovation maturity by relying less on silo functions, more on cross-functional collaboration and continuous deliveries of innovation benefits.

Resource: The essence of innovation is about how to manage people, assets, and resources to meet the business goals for innovation. Resource management becomes an important management discipline to improve innovation effectiveness and efficiency. The resource needs to be assigned scientifically, to make sure that your company has a steady flow of fresh ideas floating in your innovation pipeline, and you need a methodological platform that allows you to do that in an efficient way. 

How resource allocation is determined should be understood by all-important business parties, and innovation management needs to break down resource bottlenecks and manage a well-rounded innovation portfolio effectively and efficiently. An effective resource allocation scenario helps to take advantage of resources effectively, optimize cost, set priority, keep process transparent, and bridge talent gaps to improve innovation management maturity.

The greater the efficiency of an organization, the greater the need is for innovation. There are many ways to differentiate and, therefore, there are many ways to pursue innovation. Different types of innovation should be managed via tailored management processes and scientific resource allocation. You need to make sure the right people are put in the right position with the right talent to manage innovation, frame the systematic innovation management effort to stay focus, set priority right, optimize processes, and allocate resources scientifically in order to improve the success rate of innovation management.

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The Monthly Summary: The Contextual and Philosophical Understanding of Information Management Jan. 2020

 Managing information and the information position of an organization is what ought to be called Information Management. 

The aim of modern Information Management has often been described as getting the right information to the right person, in the right format and medium, at the right time, in order to make the right decisions. The value of information is qualitative, measurable, and defined uniquely by an organization.

The Philosophical Understanding of Information Management  

The Philosophical and Conceptual Understanding of Information vs. Knowledge The digital era upon us is about the exponential growth of information, abundant knowledge, and the rapid pace of changes. While information is an ingredient of knowledge; in order to interpret information, you need knowledge. Both information and knowledge are not equal to insight, but they are the foundation to capture insight and allow people to make the right decisions at the right time.

Three Perspectives of Information Management Information is growing exponentially, and become one of the most invaluable business assets of the business. However, in many companies, the organizational modern data environment is fraught with inconsistency, redundancy, and multiple data and knowledge platforms, it causes confusion and decelerates business speed. Digital IT organizations should take an integral and holistic approach to manage the information cycle, and ensure that reliable information has been provided to the right people for making the right decisions at the right time. Here are three perspectives of information management.

The Intrinsic, Extrinsic and Epistemic Aspects of Information and Knowledge Management Information nowadays is the invaluable resource and asset of organizations, and information assets need to be managed successfully. Back to fundamentals, CIOs are Chief Information Officers, and one of the most important responsibilities for IT is to ensure the right people getting the right information, extract sufficient knowledge and unique insight to help them make the right decision at the right time and location. But more specifically, what is Information Management theoretically, philosophically, strategically and tactically, and what are the intrinsic, extrinsic and epistemic aspects of information management?

Three Characteristics of Information Management System A system is a group of interacting, interrelated, or interdependent elements forming a complex whole. A system has a purpose to perform a set of functions to achieve well-defined goals. A system that is composed of interacting and interdependent pieces has a specific structure that is defined by its components and processes - the interrelationship between components. Managing information and the information position of an organization is what ought to be called Information Management. Information Management is a system with interdependent processes, technologies, and a set of interdisciplinary practices for moving the business to a dynamic, iterative, integral and interactive digital flow.

Take a Journey of a Thousand Steps for Information Management IT is only increasing in importance and relevance with each passing day. IT shifts from “T” technology-focused to “I” driven - information, intelligence, innovation, and improvement. Information Management is the overall process of aligning the use of information through the management, assurance, and exploitation, guide the business in the right direction and deliver services and solutions. It is a thorny journey with a thousand steps. IT leaders should set principles to ensure information is managed effectively and guide the business in the right direction and deliver value-added services/solutions effortlessly.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with about #6300th 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 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.

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The Best “Attention” Quotes of “Digital Master”Jan, 2020

Intuition matters, but pay more attention to the unconscious bias.

"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 “Attention” quotes in “Digital Master.”


1 Prioritization management is both art and science. The art is to know when to pay attention and when to ignore.

2 Intuition matters, but pay more attention to the unconscious bias.

3 Pay more attention to ineffective hands-on or micromanagement pitfalls: Pay more attention to “micromanagement” pitfalls.

4 The dangers are getting too involved in the technologies and losing sight of the real goals. But when necessary, they are able to dive into technical know-how, to enforce communication with the staff and putting attention to the important details.

5There is no magic communication formula but always pay more attention to content, context, and style for interpreting things with clarity, communicating shared goals clearly and making smooth business progress.

6 Many say boards do not pay enough attention to the culture within the company. since the culture can undermine strategy. The board has to pay more attention to the culture, which will "eat the strategy" otherwise.

7 The strategic communication needs to not only pay attention to what has been said but pay more attention to what’s not being said, to bridge the gap between strategy and execution, functional silos and holistic corporate view; reality and vision statement.

8 Business management needs to pay attention to creating shared and admirable goals, and then articulate them into workforce language, develop an inclusive and innovative team to compete and collaborate as they deem fit.

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IT Architecture & Creative Problem-Solving

 It is important to leverage the architectural perspective to experiment, explore, and encourage a new way to solve problems. understand the complexity and guide people through it.

In an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world, problems become over-complex and interdependent. Architecture could be a problem-solving framework that consists of multiple aspects, and the multiple aspects could be architected in their own right. Architecture is an ingredient of planning and designing for creative and systematic problem-solving.

Focus on preemptively building a solution in anticipation of the problem: Many of today’s business problems are complex, to understand the “scope” of the problem, it’s important to leveraging the architectural perspective to make sure that everything works as a "system," not just from a technical perspective, but from the perspective of the system's goals, as well as make sure all of the elements necessary for an outcome are present. It also means that you have to start small and think big, understand the context and intangible variables, and see things from different angles to gain different perspectives.

Architecture should be considered as such, meaning that you will need to set up the environment for implementing solutions such that it becomes hard to not do good design for creative problem-solving; it becomes hard to not develop generic code, to make it hard to not follow set processes. Often the failure of problem-solving is caused by “We always do things like that,” mentality, even circumstances are already changed a long time ago. When architecting a solution, requirements, qualities and cost factors should be prioritizing while comfort zone and market trends taking place. Always be careful about examining the potential points of engagement, rather than jumping to the “we'll fix this" mentality.

Solve not just technical issues, but human and social concerns: Architect is able to see beyond tactical solution, understand the need for root cause analysis for an issue with regards to existing system and is able to find a systemic solution to deal with human and social concerns, provide in "solutions" can be sustained not only in the "systems" but in the systems of people. Art, design, science, and humanity are interconnected. You have to look holistically at the problem domain in order to architect and design a tailored solution by deepening the understanding of issues, accumulating interdisciplinary knowledge, and providing unique insight.

There is understandably tension sometimes between the creative and the administrative, strategic and tactical, logical and intuitive, etc. Great problem-solvers demonstrate the courage to leave inside box thoughts and standards to seek additional resources, update knowledge, and embrace alternative solutions. By leveraging the architectural framework, you can look at the problem domain holistically and apply the “simplicity and flexibility” principles to architect, design, integrate and consolidate when defining requirements via experimentation and continuous discovery.

Prevent issues, not just fixing issues: Nonlinearity, interdependence, hyper diversity, rules, regulations, information exponentiality, unpredictability, etc, are digital new normal today. Many organizations seem lacking appreciation of cost savings in a problem that never happens due to the stiff organizational culture in conjunction with the lack of architectural perspectives. There are unknown interactions and very high inner dynamics in business complexity today. Preventing problems requires architectural perspective, information technologies, people, processes, and systems to analyze and predict the possibility of a problem. Simplifying complicated things is an optimal choice for preventing problems or errors.

Perhaps no individual architect is capable of defining all of the current needs, foreseeing all of the future events and recognizing all of the potential opportunities for business exploration. Some trends are more significant than others in their impact on business growth. Some corrections require drastic paradigm shifts with corresponding economic impacts or predictable political challenges. This alone will eliminate a vast majority of flaws in designing problems, and prevent some potential issues.

The pace of change is accelerated both in businesses and society, either as an individual or an organization. Turn around the tough situations, and enjoy the challenges about complex problem-solving. Architecture is an investment. It is important to leverage the architectural perspective to experiment, explore, and encourage a new way to solve problems. understand the complexity and guide people through it.

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The Monthly “Digital Boardroom” Book Tuning: Strategic Communications in the Boardroom Jan. 2020

 Communication, whether verbal, non-verbal or digital, is the coordination mechanism that makes business flow. lubricates changes and practices leadership influence. 

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 are the multiple perspectives of shaping a strategic boardroom with digital acumen.

  Strategic Communications in the Boardroom 

IT Coming Into the Board Conversation With the fast speed of changes and exponential growth of information today, corporate board directors need to be the digital gurus with the ability to lead, influence and innovate.

Strategic Communication in the Boardroom The corporate board is one of the most critical leadership pillars in contemporary organizations. At the board level, it is a matter of leadership guidance to make sound judgments and steer the organization in the right direction. Language influences perception. Communication, whether verbal, non-verbal or digital, is the coordination mechanism that makes business flow. lubricates changes and practices leadership influence. Here are three insights into the corporate board’s strategic communication.

Three “C” Practices in Digital Boardroom Digital transformation represents a break with the past, having a high level of impact and complexity. It takes visionary leadership to drive changes and steer the corporate ship navigating through uncharted water and blurred territories in the right direction. The importance of the corporate board’s responsibility for overseeing strategy, monitoring performance and setting business tone has become much clear in today’s business dynamic with velocity and uncertainty. The BoDs need to become the mastermind behind digital transformation and change agent to advocate digitalization. Here are three “C” practices in the digital boardroom.

Communication Competency of BoDs Communication is the key to improve leadership effectiveness and improve business fluidity. Either at the boardroom or the different layers of the business hierarchy, effective communication is like the thread to connect all-important business gems, for building a trustful relationship, enforcing collaboration, and improving digital readiness and manageability.

The “Deep Listening” Practices in the Boardroom Business evaluation, strategic oversight, and policy setting are always at the top list of the corporate board’s agenda. One of the biggest challenges in this complex, multi-polar world is the fact that we need different perspectives, a multitude of insights, dynamic knowledge, and alternative ways to solve emergent or old thorny problems. The digital-savvy board has to develop “deep listening” skills, gain digital awareness, shape multidimensional thinking, leverage five senses, and exercise the supervisory power effectively.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with 6300+ 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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The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As" Introduction


The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As" Chapter 1 Introduction: The Digital Board's Composition Inquiries

The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As" Chapter II Introduction: The Digital Board's Digital Inquiries

The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As": Chapter III Introduction: The Digital Board's Strategy Inquiries

The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As" Chapter IV Introduction: The Digital Board's IT Inquiries

The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As" Chapter V Introduction: The Digital Board's Leadership Inquiries

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The Best “Orchestration” Quotes of “Digital Master”Jan, 2020

 With effective leadership and masterful design and orchestration, digital organizations can be operated as high-performance and high mature business catalyzed by diversification, versatility, and intelligence.

"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 “Orchestration” quotes in “Digital Master.”

1 The journey of digital transformation is the full-scale changes in the way business is conducted so that it’s multi-dimensional planning and orchestration.

2 Meta is an abstraction, description or even orchestration. The "orchestration" is more relevant to the "system of processes" as business processes management has to be more dynamic and adaptive to the accelerated speed of changes.

3 Business Architecture is a great tool for business leaders to orchestrate organizational interrelationship by bridging gaps, enforcing communication, fostering collaboration, building trust, and ultimately leading to greater autonomy and "self-generated" engagement.

4 IT leaders are in a unique position to oversee business processes and key capabilities, they should play the role as “change agent,” to build a culture of innovation via orchestrating people, process, and technology seamlessly,

5 The role of IT today for many organizations is SOLUTIONARY for information management, operation automation, and digital orchestration.

6 Many IT organizations are also on the way to cloudification, you can reduce the legacy costs through automation and cloud-based orchestration.

7 With effective leadership and masterful design and orchestration, digital organizations can be operated as high-performance and high mature business catalyzed by diversification, versatility, and intelligence.

8 Digital ecosystem orchestration is accelerated to the hyper-connected digital world. 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.

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Three Perspectives of Critical Thinking

 There are very few real critical thinkers because it is a complex type of thinking with the multitude of thought processes. 

Critical thinking has been described as “reasonable reflective thinking focused on deciding what to believe or do for making reasoned judgments.” It’s the mental process of actively and skillfully processing, conceptualizing, analyzing, and synthesizing information to reach an answer or conclusion.

Critical thinking is to make objective reasoning in order to form a judgment: Critical Thinking is a multifaceted thought process to make logical reasoning via analysis and synthesis, induction, and deduction. People have cognitive differences, it is no surprise to create the thinking gaps by imperfect people using imperfect processes via the narrow lenses. Thus, they need to acknowledge their perception bias, expand their perspectives by understanding diverse viewpoints, dispassionately analyze information, and integrate knowledge into holistic understanding in order to form sound judgments.

To practice critical thinking, it is important to broaden the lens and increase perspective, absorb fresh knowledge, see the value of inclusiveness, dig into the root cause of the issues, and get into the heart of problems. Critical thinkers can take the reasoned consideration to evidence, context, conceptualizations, methods, and criteria for making an objective assessment and analysis.

In reality, too often assumptions and prejudices get in the way of true understanding, with overwhelming growth of information and shorten knowledge cycle, people get stuck in their own little thinking box and outdated perception even the circumstances change a long time ago. It is important to broaden the lens and increase perspective, look at another belief from a little less emotional perspective. Furthermore, if you uncritically accept the information being received or knowledge being taught, many of them are out of date, you are also not a great critical thinker who can see around the corner or underneath the superficial layer, apply multidimensional understanding to make effective decisions.

Critical thinking is an integrated thought process of Systems Thinking: Critical Thinking has been described as the process of purposeful, self-regulatory judgment via analysis, and synthesis. Systems Thinking is about understanding the interconnectivity of the parts and the whole, and evolving emerging properties in decision-making and problem-solving. Critical thinking needs to combine different thought processes to gather a mass of information, break it apart and reconstruct with a level of accuracy projecting futuristic events, numbers, etc.

Critical Thinking is an integrated thought process of Systems Thinking. Systems Thinkers solve each unforeseen problem as it arises. They can dig deeper to ask why those problems happen, why there are differences, and realign or reorient thought processes to dig into the root causes. They understand there are different opinions or they are making a mistake. Thus, it’s always important to bear the opposite, synthesize massive amounts of information, hold information flow without getting lost on tangents.

Critical Thinking is about making up your own mind: Critical thinking is an iterative thought process leading to a series of refinements based on learning and experience. Independent Thinking is one of the great traits of a critical thinker. An individual's ability to think critically comes down to each individual person's desire to think critically and explore life's possibilities. Forward-thinking digital businesses today should look for and advocate critical thinking and encourage independent thinking, appreciate thinkers of consequence, not thinkers of convenience.

Unfortunately, many organizations keep the status quo and reward mediocrity and compliance, it makes people very uncomfortable to think independently, and therefore, prefer not to think critically. To practice critical thinking, kindly asks questions to draw out other's assumptions. At a deeper level, critical thinking has creativity embedded in it. Constantly check assumptions, recognize and appreciate the real critical thinkers who can fill cognitive gaps and management blind spots effectively.

Critical thinking is one of the most important skills to learn for a career and life in order to make sound judgments. There are very few real critical thinkers because it is a complex type of thinking with the multitude of thought process. There is evidence that business professionals, managers/leaders who utilize critical thinking with an evidence-based approach to decision making do better than those that don't and can solve problems radically.

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The Monthly Principles Summary: Principles of Knowledge Economy Jan. 2020

 It is important to develop your own company tailored principles to inspire change mentality, motivate positive attitude and good behaviors, and to generate winning concepts for digital transformation on a consistent basis.

Digital principles define why one makes a decision one way or another. Principles are statements of values. Things that define why one makes a decision one way or another. These core decision values guide the behavior of individuals within an organization.

           

Principles of Accelerating Knowledge-Economy

Three Principles to Practice Expertise Power? Power has many different formats; some visible, some invisible; some are earned, some are given; some are delightful, some are intimidating. There are three powers either as visible or invisible hands in an organization: Structural power (the position with the organizational hierarchy), expert power (business and technical knowledge), and connection power. Due to the exponential growth of information and the shorten knowledge cycle, expert power is perhaps more powerful than other types of powers in the digital era because brainpower can stimulate all kinds of creativity; and the knowledge power is the key for any sort of human progress. Here are three digital principles to practice expert power effectively.

Following the "BASIC” Principles in Problem-Solving and Digital Transformation, The digital transformation is now spreading rapidly to enable organizations of all shapes and sizes to reinvent themselves. It is the transformation that is reshaping our thinking and recasting the way we view ourselves, the systems of which we are part of the environments in which we live, and the way we think and solve problems. To make a seamless digital transformation, it’s important to set guidelines and make updated rules for navigating through changes and steering the journey of digital transformation

Setting Digital Principles to Guide Through Digital Transformation Credo is a Latin word that means "a set of fundamental beliefs or a guiding principle." For a company, a credo is a set of well-defined principles based on its management philosophy. Principles are general rules and guidelines, intended to be enduring and seldom amended. Philosophy is the history of ideas and an ongoing inquiry into the nature of things based on abstract reasoning rather than empirical methods. Digital means flow; digital organizations have to adapt to the continuous changes and business dynamic to get digital ready. The challenge is to prioritize what you know about and keep an eye open for signs of things you don't know about. Therefore, it is important to develop your own company tailored credos to inspire change mentality, motivate positive attitude and good behaviors, and to generate winning concepts for digital transformation on a consistent basis.

Three Principles in Building a Creative Digital Workplace Digital is the age of people, and the digital work environment needs to embrace the abundance of information and the culture of innovation, put people at the center of business, and to both engage employees and delight customers. How can digital leaders set principles to encourage creativity, build creative digital workplaces and open a new chapter of digital innovations?

Following “ADVANCE” Principles to Build “Future-Proven” Digital Leadership The rule of thumb about leadership is for ADVANCEMENT. Advancement is about forward-thinking, progress, improvement, fresh insight, modernization, or innovation while the opposite of advancement is primitivity, outdated concept or knowledge, lagging, backward, etc. When following “ADVANCE” principles, leaders become more mature; people are becoming more progressive; the life or the business reaches up to the next level of maturity, and the society as a whole is advancing to the next stage of prosperity.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with about #6300th 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.

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The Best “Toughness” Quotes of “Digital Master”Jan, 2020

 It takes mental toughness to lead today’s complex business for managing orders from chaos, staying cool under the turmoil in the dynamic business ecosystem.

"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 “Toughness” quotes in “Digital Master.”

1 Being tough is neither about rude nor about arrogance, it is about grit and resilience.

2 It takes mental toughness to lead today’s complex business for managing orders from chaos, staying cool under the turmoil in the dynamic business ecosystem.

3 Digital leaders with mental toughness have a balanced viewpoint to make effective decisions, take calculated risks of pursuing innovation or focusing on achieving the mid or long-term strategic goals even facing the daily pressure to solving emerging requests from customers.

4 The mental toughness enables leaders to be kind with consistency, without losing the character or the very core of leadership - setting the right direction to make the progressive movement.

5 Besides the hardcore competency and mental toughness, business leaders need to have a sense of soft-touch for leading by influence, not by brute force.

6 The mental toughness coming with solid business knowledge and IT expertise will enable CIOs to make sound judgments for improving the IT investment success rate and taking the necessary risk for doing more with innovation.

7 Being tough is imperative if only you think it’s the right choice to sow more seeds of kindness in the long run. Being kind doesn’t mean you cannot be tough, and being nice doesn’t mean you should compromise all the time.

8 The person with mental toughness can undergo high-dynamic stress, makes the sound judgment via emotional excellence, and keep positive energy flow. Being kind also doesn't mean you should always take orders or making compromises, being sheepy or say yes all the time.

9 Be kind and be tough at the same time. Live a creative and productive life by strengthening mental toughness and practicing creativity continually.

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A Set of Questions for Shaping Strategic Decision Making

Collectively, it is critical to gain multiple perspectives, close blind spots, optimize processes and develop best practices to improve decision maturity.

Making the right decision is both art and science. The effectiveness of strategic decision making directly impacts the long term business competency. It has to weigh in multiple factors and needs to search for profound business insight.

The internal factors which may influence decision processes include such as decision-making goals, decision situation, decision context, relevant knowledge, as well as the organizational capabilities and resources. The external factors which influence strategic decision-making include technology factors, political and legal conditions, competitions and consumer demands. Here is a set of questions for shaping strategic decision-making.

Which perspective should I consider? Which system should I consider? Perspective is looking at either heads or tails. The secret of making effective decisions lies in "imagining" a perspective of the whole coin as you aspire towards truth. There are process perspective and creative perspective, the multidimensional perspectives often come from the mind with the high level of cognitive maturity.  The perspective of being better is just opinion until pre-defined measures of success are applied to the decision process.

With multiple perspectives, you can always gain insight and empathy to see things from the other angle and make better decisions. A decision is arguably a choice between two or more options. The greater majority of these options are circumstantially provided. From a system perspective, decision-makers should be acutely aware of any experience in the context of interconnectivity and inter-relationships rather than standing alone, have a process-oriented perspective, seize the opportunity to take a fresh look at the decision-making processes, fix decision support process, in order to not just making faster but also better decisions.

Did I overlook, how to fix decision-making blind spots? Effective decision making needs to well blend both information and intuition; methodology and practice. How deep your understanding is based on the mindset, logic, knowledge, lenses, and the methodology you leverage to interpret things. High mature decision-makers need to ask themselves: Did I overlook? What perspective am I taking that might blind me to other things I could have distinguished otherwise. Decision-makers who are not cognoscente of what they can or cannot do will often make poor decisions.

The point is not about arguing who can make a faster decision but to understand the reason for the perception. To close decision-making blind spots, teams, especially with the heterogeneous group setting, work because they bring different perspectives and knowledge to the table. They help to balance out the biases from which the poor decisions are made. Leverage thinking Fast and Slow accordingly in order to make effective decisions. A wise person makes a mistake, however, he/she won’t repeat the same mistakes, and learn from it quickly for improving decision competency.

“What happens if? “” How would that affect decision-making?” “Do we agree this is the reality? WHY?” With blurred geographical, functional, and industrial borders, hyperconnectivity and interdependence, being open is the choice for making good decisions by asking open-ended questions such as “what if…” Digital evolution only exists in the open-cultural environment.

The hyper-connected business ecosystem can create insight and take advantage of all resources in a more open way for accelerating changes via decision right in a consistent manner. Making decisions in a timely manner requires resource awareness. Effective resource allocation and utilization is an important factor for timely decision making.

The human brain can be a magnificent synthesizer of disparate pieces of nebulous information for making sound judgments. An effective decision can be defined as an action you take that is logically consistent with the alternative you perceive, the information you get, and the preference you have. An argument opens a new perspective; changing perspective will change your mind. Collectively, it is critical to gain multiple perspectives, close blind spots, optimize processes and develop best practices to improve decision maturity.

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