The Monthly “Digitizing Boardroom” Book Tuning: The "Critical Thinking" Corporate Board Mar. 2020

The Corporate Board plays a critical role in business strategy oversight, monitoring execution, advising digital transformation, and setting tones for talent management. 

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.

The "Critical Thinking" Corporate Board

“Critical Thinker" Board Director The Corporate Board's role, in large part, is to make good decisions that enhance the value creation for the organization. Boards need to work closely with the management for mastering strategy oversight and risk intelligence, identify both business opportunities and risks, keep focusing on doing fundamental things right.

Three Thinking Pillars in Building Digital Boardroom The digital boards with all the important thinking pillars can advise wisely and get all business fundamentals right consistently. The board of directors is the top leadership role for overseeing strategies and steering their organization in the right direction. Leadership is the adventure to explore unknown, have confidence and insight for steering the right path for their organizations to reach the destination.

A “Skeptical Board” to Advocate Innovation The Corporate Board plays a critical role in business strategy oversight, monitoring execution, advising digital transformation, and setting tones for talent management. The boards are also transforming from compliance-driven to performance-oriented to get digital ready. In practice, the board's role is to pull management out of the trees to see the forest; to understand the business landscape and how it will address it; to continue questioning on important issues where the management's answers do not make sense, and to show the constructive skepticism for brainstorming changes and advocating innovation.

Constructive Criticism in the Boardroom The corporate board plays a crucial role in overseeing business strategy and driving business transformation. Criticism shows the portrayal of ideas, concerns, directions, and attitudes. Asking good questions to management or the board members themselves is not the “wasting time” activity, it can help to clarify the vision and bring new insight about how to steer the company in the right direction.

The Digital Traits of Board Directors At today’s digital dynamic, as businesses change shape, size, expansion, and transformations, they need conditioning, improvement, and navigation. Board directors are the directorship and leadership role, to help the organization steer in the right direction, to explore unknown, and have confidence and insight to take the right path for reaching the destination. Digital boards as the strategic advising role are also the “mastermind” behind digital transformation to oversee strategies, set policies, catalyze changes, and monitor performance. The real BoD’s dilemma is that driving the business forward is extremely difficult, it means looking into an unknown future and attempting to define the landscape with its risks and opportunities.

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