Tuesday, June 30, 2020

The Monthly “Performance Master” Summary: The Goals and Definition of KPIs June 2020

10:47 PM Pearl Zhu 2 comments

The well-defined measures and KPIs are important factors to map strategy & execution and manage performance effectively.

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 Goals and Definition of KPIs

The Goals for Defining and Assessing KPIs Digital businesses are dynamic, connected, interdependent, and hyper-competitive. Performance Management is no longer a siloed practice but a multidimensional management discipline by connecting all-important dots with multifaceted perspectives to close performance gaps, make continuous improvement, and improve organizational maturity.

What are the Goals to Choose the Right KPIs Choosing the right KPIs is crucial. The challenge is that people have their own take on KPIs. KPIs must be aligned with the corporate goals and objectives - but should also be directly relevant to the activities that businesses are attempting to manage (process execution). If you only select KPIs based on outcomes without managing the processes that contribute to 'good and bad performance', you will continue to be out of control. However, it is equally dangerous when you focus on 'process execution' without understanding if the process is delivering the desired 'outcomes'. Perhaps the greatest challenges are not about 'data management' - but 'relationship management' within the organizations.

What’s the Real Purpose of Performance Indicators The goal of Performance Indicators is to identify if the adopted strategy, operation, and process, etc are working toward the objective. KPIs should be periodically reviewed and revised depending on what the firm's strategy is and what they are targeting. Are they entering a new market? Is their goal to achieve 25% higher profits than the last 6 months? Have they recently re-engineered their organizational structure? All such questions need to be kept in mind when deciding and revising the KPIs. And you define KPIs to monitor progress and performance. KPIs should be under constant review to determine if they actually provide the necessary insight into what is happening in order to make informed decisions. If the KPI is not providing the necessary insight, it needs to be refined. KPIs should change when business needs and environment changes.

Three Challenging Aspects of Performance Indicators You can only manage what you measure, Performance measures and management is not a simple task though, approximately there’re more than ten thousand KPIs around today, a bit overwhelming, let's not forget that there is a "K" in KPI for a reason: Why do you select the certain set of performance measures? What’re the most challenging aspects of working with KPIs? How to leverage the right set of performance indicators in measuring whether the organization is functioning well or dysfunctional? Which management metrics shall you apply to measure organizational overall health and maturity? Who and what tools are being applied to measure if an organization is healthy or sick? Proactive or reactive? Intelligent or dumb? Customer-centric or operational driven? And what are those challenging aspects of performance measurement?

The Principles to Define KPIs The well-defined measures and KPIs are important factors to map strategy & execution and manage performance effectively. However, selecting KPIs is the main challenge in establishing a performance management framework, what are the main principles to define KPIs?

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 #6900 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 "Performance Master" Book Amazon Order Link

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The "Performance Master" Book Introduction Slideshare

The "Performance Master" Book Preview

The "Performance Master" Book Introduction

The "Performance Master" Book Chapter 1 Introduction

The "Performance Master" Book Chapter 2 Introduction

The "Performance Master" Book Chapter 3 Introduction

The "Performance Master" Book Chapter 4 Introduction

The "Performance Master" Book Chapter 5 Introduction

The "Performance Master" Book Conclusion

The "Performance Master" Quote Collection I

The "Performance Master" Quote Collection II

The "Performance Master" Quote Collection III

The “Manifest” Quotes of “Digital Master” June 2020

10:41 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

How creativity as an innate process to generate ideas and manifest itself in each of us is unique, and then such interlinks often fuel new thoughts, perspectives, creativity, and imagination to spark the abundance of creativity.

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 ”manifest” quotes in “Digital Master.”

1 Creativity is an innate ability to generate novel ideas. It is important to create conditions so that the creative potential can manifest.

2 Cause-Effect analysis anticipates purpose but not until the system is actualized, can you really observe manifest purpose.

3 How creativity as an innate process to generate ideas and manifest itself in each of us is unique, and then such interlinks often fuel new thoughts, perspectives, creativity, and imagination to spark the abundance of creativity.

4 The goal to take the “digital first” approach is to create conditions so that the creative potential can manifest, and stay focused so that the business can unlock its performance and maximize its potential.

5 Visionary leaders anticipate change and are proactive, rather than reactive to events. As they manifest their visions base their leadership on an inspirational, positive picture of the future, as well as a clear sense of direction as to how to get there.

6 A learning strategy is the organization's competitive learning "logic" manifested through organizational cultures and actions.

7 We have purposes that arise from our interactions with others. They too are influenced by unconscious emotions that manifest as social, political, technical values, etc.

8 To catalyze leadership innovation and improve leadership maturity, it is necessary to identify the unofficial structures and take them along on the journey of innovation and change, and manifest connection, caring, trust-building and influence to accomplish strategic business goals.

9 Systems thinking and systematic structure provide the shell within which individuals can collaborate to manifest design and create transparency to problems.

Learning Intelligence

10:38 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

The shift from the reactive learning mentality to a proactive learning attitude enables individuals and organizations to look forward and enhance their learning intelligence.

Learning intelligence refers to a person’s ability to learn with meta-cognition (learning how to learn). We live in the digital era of rapid and relentless change, today’s workforce is knowledge workers, intelligent workers, and hard workers.

Even though each one of us has some “raw” talent, it takes an immense amount of time on learning and hard work that most "naturally talented" people have committed to developing their innate talents into value-added skills and professional competency.

Collaboratively, shaping a digital organization with learning intelligence is about cultivating a culture of learning, creating, and developing talent as a strategic choice to get digital ready.

Meta-cognition: Meta-cognition, or learning how to learn, is a vital element of independent learning in an era of information exponentiality, as well as rapid and relentless change. Technically, meta-cognition is a process that enables understanding, analysis, and control of one’s cognitive processes. A crucial part of metacognition and more importantly, why metacognition is important, is to give the learner an opportunity to be aware of and understand their own strengths and weaknesses so that they can take a scientific approach to learn or adapt their skills and strategies.

Meta-cognition is the process of being open to wonder, gaining conscious awareness, setting time aside to allow an idea, or a problem to incubate. It is in combination with immediate learning to give way to advancing insight. Generally speaking, understanding how we think is the first stage of understanding our cognitive style - how we approach and solve problems and embrace opportunities. Metacognition would be where the individual is aware of reaching the point of "not knowing," and then, developing strategies and methodologies to resolve it to become "knowing," like how to induce, deduce hypotheses, reflect on them, and question them.

“Self-directing” learning: Today, there are continuous technology-led disruptions and overloaded information, and commodity knowledge only a click away, a digital organization is a dynamic, self-regulating and self-adaptive system which is able to reconfigure its own structure and change its own behavior based on rich information and collective learning experience for responding to dynamic environment proactively. “Self-directing” learning is the ability for high professionals to keep building new and nonlinear skills and shaping multi-layer, recombinant capabilities for problem-solving and innovation.

Historically, many learners, in all disciplinary domains, built a kind of “dependency” on their teachers/trainers and developed a form of “learned helplessness.” Knowledge is dynamic and multidimensional nowadays, it’s not just spoken or transferred in hard-copy, it’s also transferred visually or virtually and through emotions or feelings. Thus, digital workforce needs to become self-driven, must have the attitude to keep learning, as well as have learning aptitude and intelligence to learn fast and smart, learning knowledge is even not enough, capturing insight is the MUST.

Master the full learning cycle: Today’s digital leaders and professionals with learning intelligence can critically examine their thinking and reflect thoroughly on what attitude or behaviors help them learn, and master the full cycle of “Learning, Delearning, Relearning” effortlessly. With ever-evolving digital new normal, top seasoned leaders and digital professionals become aware when some of the long-acquired knowledge is no longer applicable in certain situations. They have to relearn the updated knowledge for gaining insight into the changing circumstance, become continuous lifelong learners, and adapt more readily to whatever changes life/work throws at them.

Organizations with learning intelligence can create the right environment to grow a natural affinity into a "talent, “ believing in "building talent" discipline in which it would otherwise be underutilized or dormant. In fact, to become learning intelligent, the digital workforce today has to learn and relearn all the time and then apply those lessons to succeed in new situations, become better problem solvers, foster innovation, and drive digital transformation.

Digital learning is multidimensional, dynamic, interactive, informal, and integrated. Driving digital paradigm shift is not a passive activity, but a proactive pursuit. The shift from the reactive learning mentality to a proactive learning attitude enables individuals and organizations to look forward, enhance their learning intelligence, actively position their businesses in the right place to take full advantage of opportunities, and raise the organizational learning intelligence and maturity.

The Monthly “Change Agent CIO” Book Tuning: Business Driven IT Transformation June 2020

11:09 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

A digital CIO has to have great leadership traits, understand the business context, oversee processes, envision the latest technology trends, and motivate the IT team to do more with innovation.

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 life-cycle management, though it is not all linear steps, but an iterative, ongoing, and up-going 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?

Business Driven IT Transformation

Running a Business-Driven Digital IT Organization At today’s information-driven business dynamic, IT continues to grow in importance to organizations, both operationally and as a competitive advantage. To reinvent IT for getting digital ready, the IT organization has to move from a reactive order taker and a back-office support function to a strategic business partner and digital catalyst. It is important to run a business-driven digital IT organization with interdisciplinary management practices for moving the company to a dynamic, iterative, integral, and interactive digital flow and business continuum.

The Goal-Driven IT Transformation The digital world is so technology-driven and information-intensive, organizations rely more and more on information & technology nowadays, IT needs will only expand. Hence, IT must be a business partner within the organization to deliver business-driven results. A digital CIO has to have great leadership traits, understand the business context, oversee business processes, envision the latest technology trends, and motivate the IT team to do more with innovation. And most importantly, take a systematic approach to manage the goal-driven IT transformation seamlessly.

Running a Future-Driven IT Organization to Catalyze Growth Organizations large or small are on the digital journey, corporate IT needs to shift from a back-office support center to a future-driven growth engine. Because more often information is the lifeblood and technology is the disruptive force of digital transformation.

Modern IT organizations with Three Digital Competency IT plays a significant role in the digital paradigm shift. The unprecedented opportunities brought by digital technologies and increasing speed of change can lift up a fast-growing business promptly. It can also reinvent a well-established organization to reach the next level of the business growth cycle. The CIO must run a modern IT organization with core competency. A core competency is a harmonization of multiple organizational capabilities underpinned by business processes, such that it permeates the entire organization with a focus, and in alignment with the resource-based view. Here are modern IT organizations' three digital competencies.

Transforming IT from Monolithic Hardware Oriented to Mosaic Software Driven With overwhelming growth of information and rapid changes, the role of IT in the current business environment should become strategic, enable business outcomes, build organizational competency, and catalyze business growth. IT leaders need to make an objective assessment: What’s the focal point of IT- monolithic hardware-oriented, or the bits & bytes information-driven? Inside-out operation-driven or outside-in customer-centric? Transaction or transformation focus?

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 #6900 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 “Confluence” Quotes of “Digital Master” June 2020

11:04 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

Running a digital organization is to connect the old and new, mix the solid and fluid to enforce digital confluence, foster innovation, and achieve people-centricity.

"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.”

1 Running a digital organization is to connect the old and new, mix the solid and fluid to enforce digital confluence.

2 Information confluence means breaking down functional silos or geographical borders to streamline information flow, to make sure information integrity and consistency.

3 Digital is the age of innovation. Digital innovation has all sorts of flavors and a broader spectrum. Effective innovation management requires a suitable process as part of the holistic 'system,' to ensure innovation confluence and management cohesiveness.

4 It is important to understand digital organizations as socio-technical systems, people readily perceive organizations and projects requiring the confluence of multiple perspectives (people, process, and technology) to make great decisions.

5 It is a strategic imperative to broaden IT outlook, embrace IT consumerization and emerging trends, envision the bigger picture, emphasize contextualization, explore the art of possibility, and ensure digital confluence.

6 Running a digital organization is to connect the old and new, mix the solid and fluid to enforce digital confluence, foster innovation, and achieve people-centricity.

7 Today’s business leaders are capitalizing and operating on digital ecosystems that are expanding due to the confluence of digital technologies, broader scopes of communication and collaboration, and multifaceted resource alignment.

8 People readily perceive organizations and projects requiring the confluence of multiple perspectives ("Business, People, Process, Technology") to make great decisions.

9 Today’s business leaders are capitalizing and operating on digital ecosystems that are expanding due to the confluence of social networks, mobile computing, analytics, and cloud computing (SMAC). SMAC also provides unprecedented opportunities for enterprises to take advantage of digital disruptions.

Unpuzzling IT Complexity

11:01 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

Companies that are skilled at managing IT complexity can gain advantages by pushing the boundaries of a more sophisticated business mix that provides opportunities to create inter-business value.

Information is growing exponentially and the nature of technology is complex, there is a multitude of complexities in the organizational scope. The emergent digital complexity includes hyper-connectivity, hyper-diversity, and hyper-dynamism.

The goal of an IT organization is not to make things more complex. The fact is that IT has to become the business optimizer for managing complexity and unlock organizational performance. Unpuzzling IT complexity means to improve IT organizational maturity from functioning (have redundancy) to firm (work solidly), to delight (“just right” simplicity).

Operational complexity (look at the IT organization itself): IT has to look at itself first. Technically, the complexity of aggregate layers of every internal IT system is a burden that often causes conflicts. When an organization becomes overly complex and people get frustrated and annoyed by not being able to accomplish things easily, this drives the search for simpler concepts, methods, and processes to improve its own efficiency, robustness, effectiveness, and simplifying the way it does things. So IT leaders need to manage that complexity regardless of who builds it and they should take a structural approach to consolidate, modernize, integrate, automate, and optimize for improving IT performance.

Strategically, look at complexity from a business impact perspective as well as from a solution perspective. A healthy IT management cycle is to simplify unnecessary complexity, look for what is common for maximum reuse, manage the full application life-cycle, retire legacy systems; reassess any systems that suck too much resource, budget, energy or require too much IT effort. Keeping things simple and optimizing businesses, is all about leveraging technologies to lower costs, improve operation, and increase revenue.

Nonlinear complexity (hyperconnectivity, interdependency, emergence, etc.): Digital is complex, it becomes complex if things do interact, particularly in the case of "nonlinear" interactions, with interdependent relationships. You can't separate things properly or you cannot predict the actual effect of interactions straightforwardly. Organizations today are nonlinear systems that keep evolving. One characteristic of nonlinear systems is that small changes can have large impacts. A small error, inconsistency, or change in a system specification can totally ruin its performance.

Emergence is a characteristic of all complex systems which are not always predictable. The better you understand the interrelationships and interactions of the different parts of the whole the better you can unpuzzle IT complexity. There are at least two ways to look at nonlinear IT complexity. The first is to try to analyze what the impact of complexity is on a system (such as processes, customers, businesses); the second is to look for the impact of removing some of the complications or unnecessary complexities by simplification or optimization.

Design complexity such as highly-productive complexity, value/cost/risk ratio complexity: There are two sides of IT, behind every intuitive user interface, there is complexity in it. The forward-thinking organizations understand how things such as design help IT organizations become customer-centric by making things likable rather than just making them functioning.

There is an emergence-vs-design-paradox thereon across the business complexities around the multi-faceted business world. It’s important to apply design thinking to decode complexity and make things simple but purposeful. Trans or interdisciplinary science can be applied to IT complexity management by integrating multidisciplinary methodologies, enables leaders to leverage design thinking, and manage the digital business by taking the multi-faceted approach, technically, scientifically, and culturally.

Simplicity and complexity are dual forces of running high performance IT organizations. Every company is unique as a "system." You have to listen to the system data from the outside in and top-down - this helps identify root causes to negative complexity (entropy) with the objective of driving simplicity, so corporations become agiler to achieve the goals. Companies that are skilled at managing IT complexity can gain advantages by pushing the boundaries of a more sophisticated business mix that provides opportunities to create inter-business value, differentiated IT-enabled business capabilities, and a unique set of organizational competency.

The Monthly Summary: Knowledge/Information Architecture & Structure June 2020

11:15 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

Information is one of the most invaluable business assets which can create or multiply the business value and maximize its return on investment.

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.

Knowledge/Information Architecture & Structure

The Objectives of Informational Architecture Information architecture is a structural information design technique of the various shared environments, more at the user face level, for how the information could be organized to make it searchable and usable by users, and how these data interrelationships make sense to users and ensure the value of information is identified and exploited to the maximum extent possible.

Knowledge Architecture and Design Maturity We live in the digital era with knowledge abundance. Knowledge fuels imagination. Knowledge architecture is a useful tool to develop the design competency of the business. The forward-thinking leaders understand how things like design thinking can fundamentally change organizations, build a strong brand, and whether and how they can build knowledge architecture as a practical tool to improve design thinking and maturity.

The Focus Areas of Information Architecture (IA)? Information is one of the most invaluable business assets which can create or multiply the business value and maximize its return on investment. Information Architecture describes through a set of requirements, principles, and models, the current state, future state, and guidance necessary to flexibly share and exchange information assets to achieve effective enterprise change.

Knowledge Management Structure and Value Knowledge is information that has the potential to generate value. Knowledge is power. Compared to the physical asset, knowledge is more intangible, complex, and dynamic. Some companies have managed it, but very few companies are doing what they should do to design a knowledge structure and take a holistic approach to preserve and manage knowledge from the long-term strategic perspective and build a knowledge savvy organization.

Information System vs. Digital Ecosystem Information is permeating into every corner of the business and becomes the lifeblood of the digital organization. Digital technology is lightweight but more powerful. The Information Technology System is the "nerve system "of the digital business which is like the switch connected to the dynamic ecosystem continually evolving and expanding in the modern world.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with about #6900th 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.

The “Alternative” Quotes of “Digital Master” June 2020

11:12 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

Thinking creatively about a problem requires being close to the problem, having context for understanding the problem from different angles, and figuring out the alternative ways to shape better solutions.

"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 ”Alternative” quotes in “Digital Master.”

1 The more complex the situation is, the more different approaches and role gaming is needed to reach for understanding and inject novelty, study the choices, and select the best possible implementable alternative.

2 With the breakdown of physical barriers and blurred digital territories, digital professionals should become more open to diverse viewpoints, connect the dots in the interdisciplinary domains, look for alternative ways to do things, and take the unique path to digitize and innovate.

3 Evaluating which alternatives might work better than others - that is the realm of logical analysis within systems understanding.

4 A"decision" has lots of connotations of finality. One alternative perhaps has a lot more strengths than another, but all those strengths together may not be nearly as important as the one or two strengths that another alternative has.

5 An effective decision can be defined as an action you take that is logically consistent with the alternative you perceive. Therefore, it’s important to dispassionately examine alternatives via fact-finding, analysis, structured planning, objective evaluations, and scientific comparison.

6 It takes courage to get out of the conventional thinking box, practice creative thinking to come out with novel ideas, broaden thoughts, and connect wider dots for coming up with alternative solutions to tough problems.

7 Thinking creatively about a problem requires being close to the problem, having context for understanding the problem from different angles, and figuring out the alternative ways to shape better solutions.

8 From the problem-solving perspective, it's about deepening the understanding of the issues, accumulating interdisciplinary knowledge or unique insight, developing a framework to apply creativity for problem-solving in an intelligent manner, studying the choices, and selecting the best possible implementable alternatives.

A Happy Organization with a “State of Pleasant”

11:09 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

It takes both bold leadership and strategic planning, time, and effort to develop "their people" for investing in not only the employee's future but also the company's future.

The digital era upon us is about people. One of the very goals for running a digital organization is to engage employees and delight customers. People define the “state of pleasant” - happiness at work as being derived from an engaged, active interest in the work, “deriving” meaning from the work being performed, and performing the work in a pleasant or harmonious environment.

A happy organization has a positive and pleasant working environment with high-level employee engagement, generating positive energy, and building a vibrant working environment via joint efforts and co-responsibilities of management and employees.

Digital fluency: The organization with digital fluency means that the business can speak the digital language fluently, have the ability to effectively and critically navigate, evaluate, and create information using a range of digital technologies, and manage information lifecycle skillfully. On the navigation dimension, digital leaders and professionals are not only skillful in one domain but through different angles. Organizations with digital fluency have more antennae focused on the trends and what’s going on in the world, or what'll impact the next generation, what are the top priority for businesses to drive successful changes, and achieve the “state of pleasant.”

Process transparency: Businesses are always on and hyper-connected nowadays, there is no shortcut for building a trustful workplace, transparency is a must. The goal of transparency is to transform the organization into the system approach to accelerate the journey from current state to future state, of enablement, of improvements, of accomplishments, of the implementation of digital business strategies, and build a happy organization. Trust can only be built in an organizational environment conducive to ideal-seeking attitude and behavior. A company can have all the recognition, celebrations and such it wants, but unless the relationship is a trustworthy one, these activities will have limited value in increasing engagement and employee performance, and ultimately reach the “state of pleasant.”

Culture of inclusiveness: Organizations need to build an innovative and inclusive culture because people can learn a lot from different mindsets, cultures, and positions, so organizations as a whole can be competitive enough to keep surging further. This only happens when the ‘inclusiveness mindset’ is available with top management. The real inclusiveness needs to focus on cognitive differences, skills, abilities, and the wealth of ideas since the value lies in the contributions of the individual to the organization for co-solving business problems effectively. The managers can generate scenarios in which there is no one solution to one problem, but rather, to construct an event in which the individual inputs must compound and build upon each other. The focal point of digital management is to make the careful planning of activities to foster creativity, build the interdisciplinary nature of the team, encourage idea sharing and think differently, and amplify collective creativity effect to reach the “state of pleasant.”

Deliberate leadership development: Leadership has a direct influence on organizational culture and performance. Fear-based leadership styles actually hurt the advancement of others. One of the most important attributes of leadership is "showing by example," and “making influence.” Not to forget the continuous improvement because leadership is a talent. A leadership development program implies 'doing things differently' as well as “doing different things,” at all leadership levels and not just for those going through a formal leadership development program. In fact, leadership development has to be integrated with all other policies and procedures, clarify leadership substances, skills, and styles. The key to organizational success is to integrate the next generation of leaders, tap into their way of looking at the world, respond and adapt to quickly changing contexts, and solve problems really mattering in a very collaborative working style.

Potential maximization: “With a tree, all the growth takes place at the growing tips.” Humanity is exactly the same. The goal of workforce engagement is to improve productivity, encourage independent thinking, inspire creativity, and unlock collective human potential, etc. In a “happy organization,” if a top-notch employee wants to continue growing elsewhere, better the company support and encourage that. Organizations should feel “shameful” for not being able to keep each and every one of the best and brightest high potential employees. The potential is an investment. Employees want to feel valued and giving new opportunities, and when done right, it will make people want to stay and to sum it up with one sentence: "People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care." In fact, the collective human potential transcending into the business potentiality is the greatest thing the organization should ever invest in for reaching the “state of pleasant” and riding the next growth cycle.

The digital workplace is fluid, alive, creative, vibrant, and productive. An organization's philosophies, core values, and organizational objectives drive learning and development. Re-imagining a happy organization with a “state of pleasant” is exciting, but it takes both bold leadership and strategic planning, time, and effort to develop "their people" for investing in not only the employee's future but also the company's future.

The Monthly “Digital Hybridity” Book Tuning: The Balance Practices and Logic to Go Digital June 2020

11:19 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

Organizations of the future are increasingly exhibiting digital characteristics in various shades, extensiveness, and intensity.

The purpose 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 Balance Practices and Logic to Go Digital

Three Digital Balance Practices for Leading to the Future The digital era upon us means fast-paced changes, continuous disruptions, overwhelming information, and a shortened knowledge life cycle. Organizations of the future are increasingly exhibiting digital characteristics in various shades, extensiveness, and intensity. Leading evolutionary changes and driving business growth is the never-ended journey that takes planning, methodologies, and practices. It’s important to understand that digital management is multifaceted and holistic. Balance, growth, and harmony are not fixed, they are flowing. Here are three digital balance practices for leading to the future.

The Corporate Board’s “Balance” Practices The role of corporate board members should always focus on the strategic initiatives of the organization amidst the mounting pressure of governance, regulatory compliance and risk management responsibilities, enable and direct the management towards good outcomes, develop the best and next boardroom practices, and ensure the business is on the right track to reach well-defined business goals. Here is a set of “balance practices” to improve the corporate board maturity.

Digital Balance: How to Strike it Just Right We are experiencing the dynamics of the most significant business transformation since the industrial revolution. The majority of us will work in an organization that is somewhere between old and new; at both industrial speed and digital speed; in the physical building and remote environment; or will remain to be a mixture of old and new. It is the biggest management challenge to be a change agent, where we respond to the current state of the organization and we try to take it from there to the next level. Just like running up to the string, the point is how to strike the right digital balance?

Three “Balance” Practices to Run Digital IT With the increasing speed of changes and continuous disruptions often led by technologies, the digital era upon us is full of uncertainty, velocity, complexity, and ambiguity. It blurs the geographical, functional, organizational, and even industrial borders nowadays. The hyper-connectivity and IT consumerization bring both challenges and opportunities for IT to ride the exponential growth curves, unleash its full potential, and improve organizational maturity. Here are three “balance” practices to run high performance digital IT.

Leverage Paraconsistent Logic to Steer Digital Transformation Digital transformation is more like a journey than a destination, it is no surprise that there are many confusions and frustrations on the way. There must be well-thought-out planning and well-defined digital principles to deal with unprecedented uncertainty and increasing the pace of changes. In practice, digital leaders sometimes have to play oddball games and leverage paraconsistent logic to deal with contradictions and navigate through digital transformation. "The driving thought of paraconsistency is that there are situations in which information, scientific, or philosophical principles (and so on) are inconsistent, but in which people want to draw conclusions in a sensible fashion." (Encyclopedia).

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with about #6900+ 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.

The “Innate” Quotes of “Digital Master” June 2020

11:12 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

Creativity is both innate and a skill. Developing creativity requires both internal motivation and self-awareness.

"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 ”Innate” quotes in “Digital Master.”

1 Creativity is a person’s innate ability to create novel ideas. Creativity is as much defined by the problem as by the capacity of the individual to connect things to resolve that problem in new and sometimes unexpected ways.

2 Talent is innate, a “raw” ability. It's a natural affinity for something. It can't be completely trained. So it has to be identified as distinct from a skill, which is acquired by learning and practice

3 Motivation is often innate, not necessarily learned, whether motivating oneself or others.

4 A child is born with the innate capabilities for language. These innate capabilities emerged through the evolutionary process.

5 Creativity is both innate and a skill. Developing creativity requires both internal motivation and self-awareness.

6 How creativity as an innate process to generate ideas and manifest itself in each of us is unique, and then such interlinks often fuel new thoughts, perspectives, creativity, and imagination to spark the abundance of creativity.

7 Creativity is an innate thought process to create novel ideas. Creativity converges with the concept of innovation that is the management discipline to transform innate ideas and achieve its business value.

8 Organizations need to discover their “innate strength,” make an objective assessment of their business capability maturity, also hone them into unique business strength via a good alignment of reliable information, rigorous processes, flexible structures, efficient technologies, and talented people, etc.

Critical Thinking & Innovation Management

11:09 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

Shaping a truly innovative company is challenging because of the sophisticated management skills needed and the potential risks involved.

Innovation is a process to transform fresh ideas for achieving its business value. Every innovation pursuit has risks in it, and every risk has opportunities in it. Often, innovation initiatives that ultimately break new ground frequently are fraught with uncertainty on many dimensions such as technical, market, resource, and ecosystem uncertainties abound.

Thus, critical thinking is important to analyze and synthesize, estimate innovation risks, look beyond the surface, ask insightful questions, and make logical reasoning.

Leverage critical thinking to validate new ideas: Innovation is a management process that deals with any sort of idea necessary to solve a problem that definitely requires a critical analysis skill. The essence of critical thinking is careful deliberation, examination, and testing of assumptions, and consideration of opposing views to improve decision effectiveness. Organizations have limited resources and time, therefore, critical thinking is crucial to make a scientific assessment of idea validation and innovation process optimization, help to drive improvement, select new ideas or build solutions, and make them stick successfully.

Innovation management is an idea generation, validation, and implementation process. Before the ideation, companies need to spark creativity, brainstorm and discover insights, and after ideation, it’s important to leverage critical thinking to filter, prototype, and validate those ideas. The performance of idea management depends on the ability of the company to set the right priority, select the best ideas to implement based on both the strategic business goals and capacities, develop and implement them, to maximize the business value.

Develop an open environment to inspire creativity and encourage critical thinking: In traditional companies with rigid hierarchy and silo settings, people often have to follow overly restricted rules or algorithms in the workplace. The danger is that it reduces the scope for a critical approach and creativity. In fact, the entire system is in danger of itself becoming rigid, unresponsive to changing circumstances and obsolete, in the long run. Therefore, it makes people very uncomfortable to think independently, unable or unwilling to think out of the box, and freeze when they have to face a challenge that is out of the norm, and therefore, prefer not to think critically.

High mature organizations have an open environment to encourage both critical thinking and creative thinking. Both are essential in today's workforce seeing as to how the current economy demands new innovative ways to look at things. Critical thinking evolves deep thinking processes usually with creative thinking embedded. Both critical thinking and creative thinking share a kind of symbiotic relationship. To practice critical thinking, it is important to broaden the lens and increase perspective, absorb fresh knowledge, and perceive the value of inclusiveness.

Practicing critical thinking to identify innovation risks: Innovation Management overall has a very high failure rate. Innovation risk would broadly need to consider both endogenous and exogenous drivers. Innovation success depends on many factors such as talent, process, resource, etc. The risk is part of innovation, but you can leverage critical thinking and other mind-tuning or process optimization tools to manage parts of these risks. The good innovation leaders have the right dose of risk appetite, critical thinking skills, rational risk management skills, and the high level of risk intelligence in order to take an interdisciplinary approach to manage innovation effectively and build an innovative powerhouse ultimately.

Some risks can be quantifiable; some can only be approximated. Failure should not be an offense and actually if there are not a few failures, and then you are not trying hard enough. Innovation management takes a balancing act to have enough failure and an environment that encourages critical thinking, learning from failures quickly and cheaply, without having failures that are too frequent or too expensive. The positive attitude for inspiring innovation is to be cautiously optimistic, practice critical thinking, take calculated risks, and be alert about obstacles or pitfalls.

Shaping a truly innovative company is challenging because of the sophisticated management skills needed and the potential risks involved. Whether it is a debate, argument, interview, investigation, or chess game, usually critical thinking, and creative thinking will apply. Innovation needs to be the collective habit of the business, you have to live it and breathe it every day, otherwise, you don’t feel accomplished. A systematic innovation management process helps businesses recognize challenges, understand boundaries, deal with constraints, and manage resources, to improve the overall innovation management success.

The Monthly “Digital Maturity” Book Tuning: The Corporate Ecosystem Planning & Expansion June 2020

11:31 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

The digital ecosystem is dynamic, hyper-connected, expansive, and interdependent. It provides unprecedented opportunities to strike a dynamic balance between the inner and outer business elements.

Digital makes a significant impact on every aspect of the business from people, process to technology, both horizontally and vertically. The digitalization flattens the organizational hierarchy and blurs the functional, organizational and geographical borders in the business ecosystem.

It is like a gigantic puzzle with many misplaced pieces, you have to put them all in the right places to discover the real meaning and unleash its full potential. You cannot make a true digital paradigm shift without an in-depth understanding of the digital interconnectivity and embracing the multitude of digital maturity.

The Corporate Ecosystem Planning & Expansion

Ecosystem Planning and Expansion With the exponential growth of information and emerging digital enterprise platforms and collaboration tools, everything is interconnected and the business ecosystem becomes more interdependent and dynamic than ever. The digital ecosystem expands when the business territories blur and the organizational communities broaden their scope and consume all sorts of resources.

Running a “Boundaryless” Digital Organization Today’s digital businesses are nonlinear, volatile, interdependent, and uncertain. Digital blurs the geographical, functional, organizational, and even industrial borders nowadays. It means that organizations today need to be fast and flexible, have fewer boundaries but better abilities for dots connections Tso that the business can adapt to changes effectively and innovate continually. Here are three aspects of running a “boundaryless” digital organization.

Five Stages of Digital evolutionary ecosystem Digital is the new paradigm shift to deeply connect the business with the natural ecosystem. The digital business ecosystem is dynamic, nonlinear, expansive, and complex. Digital makes the business flatter and the world smaller because of its very characteristics of hyper-connectivity and interdependence. Digital management also needs to shift from linear and reductionistic to nonlinear and interdisciplinary for dealing with the new “VUCA” digital reality. Therefore, digital leaders today must frame the bigger thinking boxes and approach problems via multidimensional lens, technically, scientifically, holistically, and culturally. They need to understand the five stages of the digital evolutional ecosystem in order to lead innovatively and progressively.

Three System Pillars in Building an Intersecting and Interacting Digital Organization Digital is the new paradigm shift to deeply connect the business with the natural ecosystem, which is a community of living organisms in conjunction with the nonliving components of their environment. Digitalization makes the business flatter and the world smaller because of its very characteristics of hyper-connectivity and interdependence. The effects of an increasingly digitized world are now reaching into every corner of businesses and every aspect of the organization which consists of the follow three types of intersecting and interacting systems:

Debunk the Myth of the Digital Business Ecosystem The digital transformation is now spreading rapidly to enable organizations of all shapes and sizes to reinvent themselves. A high mature digital organization can bring greater awareness of the intricacies and the systemic value of organizational systems, business competency, people dynamics, resource alignment, information permeation, and technological touches with an ecosystem perspective. The digital ecosystem is dynamic, hyper-connected, expansive, and interdependent. It provides unprecedented opportunities to strike a dynamic balance between the inner and outer business elements; it expands when the components of the business system consume all sorts of resources and broaden their scope of influence. There are known known, known unknown, and unknown unknown. How to debunk the myth of the digital business ecosystem and leapfrog the business to the next level of organizational growth and maturity?

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with about #6900th 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 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 take 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 “Transition” Quotes of “Digital Master” to Celebrate 6900 Blog Posting June 2020

11:24 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

Transition States can be realized without waste or false starts by characterizing the rate of change or "volatility" of various components.

"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 ”Transition” quotes in “Digital Master.”

1 The ultimate goal of Business Architecture is to architect business in the transition to the strategic state defined in the enterprise Strategic Plan.

2 Change is external; the transition is internal. When companies learn how to tap into and pay attention to employees' transition process, they'll have a richer perspective of where they are along the successful change management curve.

3 Transition States can be realized without waste or false starts by characterizing the rate of change or "volatility" of various components.

4 The transition from a maintenance mindset to a value creation mindset will further drive IT as a proactive strategic partner and the business innovation engine.

5 The transition is challenging and it's one of the largest reasons that "Agile" projects fail.

6 Make sure the voices of diverse workgroups are heard and that these individuals have an active role in completing the culture transition. Understand how workgroups may react to change and develop some strategies for helping those who are fearful and uncertain make the transition.

7 Leaders and their teams are responsible for inclusion. They monitor participation via interactions with the teams and designated transition "ambassadors."

8 To transform smoothly from an overly-rigid process-driven model to an agile people-centric model, organizations engage teams early in the process via robust communications, training, and core process workshops to identify issues, concerns, and strategies for making a smooth transition.

9 IT is impacting every business unit and is becoming the driver of business change and digital transformation. There are many transitions on the way, it has to keep the digital flow from top-down to bottom-up; from branding on the surface to tuning the processes underneath; from gut feeling to data-driven decision style, from operation driven to customer-centric mentality.

The “Highs & Lows” of IT Digital Transformation

11:15 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

IT management has to work both in IT and on IT, understand the “highs and lows” factors, deliver the best solution to the business problems which meet the business’s requirement.

With robust digital technology and pervasive information influence, business initiatives and digital transformation, today nearly always involve some form of technology implementation and information facilitation in order to solve problems efficiently and improve the overall business responsiveness and manageability.

However, IT management is challenging, there are learning curves and skill gaps, and there are “highs and lows,” and “ups & downs” on the journey of IT digital transformation.

High Performance, Low Cost: Many traditional IT organizations have the history of being a very expensive cost center, often with the little demonstrable value that typically misses its commitments. To keep IT relevant, IT performance effectiveness is about how to qualify the business result brought by IT-enabled business initiatives, taking continuous improvement practices to guide the team in understanding the purpose of performance and measurement management. Ideally, every new technology adopted must facilitate business but also bring down the incremental cost of growth and the time to market.

To improve business performance and keep digital fit, IT management needs to be in the continuous tuning mode through consolidation, modernization, integration, and optimization. IT needs to continually build business capacity and optimize cost (reducing the cost of “keeping the lights on,” improving margins, or freeing up capital for new ventures, etc.) Successful capacity planning and resource management are critical to ensuring that resources are available before they are needed to drive business performance cost-effectively. IT metrics have to evolve from being a cost center to becoming a revenue generator. The only way to do this is to show a clear link to top executives between IT performance and productivity/ top-line revenues.

High Quality, Low risk: Modern IT organizations are a complex business system, IT quality management ensures that IT products or services are consistent to meet customers’ satisfaction. Quality is defined by a number of factors, and to effectively lead an organization into good practices to focus on quality attributes takes work and a level of credibility within the organization. Where there are ineffectiveness and inefficiency in business management, there are quality gaps existing. The quality check of IT management is to ensure IT is the enabler and even a game-changer of the digital transformation.

Keep in mind though, the long-term IT product success will require maintainability, reusability, scalability, etc, lowing IT overhead and technical risk. IT leaders need to have “T-shaped” talent, otherwise, they may not be effective to lead technology-savvy IT staff if they have little understanding of the technology they are responsible for. They need to have the technical depth and business acumen to effectively manage IT staff and supplier challenges, provide on-the-spot rough estimates to the C-team, sniff out looming technical risk/crises, and improve IT organizational transparency and maturity.

High Manageability, Low Bureaucracy: IT continues to grow in importance to organizations, both operationally and as a competitive advantage. IT cannot architecture itself in isolation because IT management is the business of the entire company. IT has to set priority right, keep improving IT manageability and speed. In high-performance organizations, the selection of roles is done automatically and naturally, focusing on creating the right atmosphere in which people can take ownership of their processes and participate in various activities to boost performance and drive progressive changes.

The biggest challenge for CIOs is keeping up and stepping up, breaking down silos, and lowering bureaucracy. Generally speaking, bureaucracy is correlated with a mechanistic view of the organization system based on a hierarchy of authority and division of workforce functioning in a routine manner. The digital IT organizations should be a complex, but flexible system starting to appreciate business attributes such as readiness, ownership, integration, open communication, customized structuring, and multifaceted partnerships, to streamline idea flow and increase revenue stream.

Many IT organizations are at the crossroad - to drive change or become irrelevant. The idea that the IT organization is overlooked as a digital driver comes at an odd time when you consider the robust new technology prospects. IT management has to work both in IT and on IT, understand the “highs and lows” factors, deliver the best solution to the business problems which meet the business’s requirement or tailor the customer’s needs and manage a seamless digital paradigm shift.

The Insight of the Week 6/19-6/26 “Future of CIO” June 2020

11:22 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

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

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with 6800+ 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 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.

Critical Thinking and Multidisciplinary Management The business dynamic today is full of uncertainty, velocity, complexity, ambiguity, fierce competition, and continuous disruptions. The digital paradigm has many dimensions. It is like solving a jigsaw puzzle with thousands of pieces, easy to get lost. Thus, digital leaders and professionals need to develop critical thinking skills for making logical reasoning and practicing multidisciplinary management scenarios skillfully.

The Monthly Digital Framework Summary: GRC Framework and Components June 2020 The digital frameworks add value as they are implementations of the patterns to avoid having to reinvent the wheel, it helps the organization embed a digital culture into the very fabric of the business, explore digital in a structural way and laser focus on the most important things to get business digital ready.

Ecosystem Planning and Expansion With the exponential growth of information and emerging digital enterprise platforms and collaboration tools, everything is interconnected and the business ecosystem becomes more interdependent and dynamic than ever. The digital ecosystem expands when the business territories blur and the organizational communities broaden their scope and consume all sorts of resources.

Information-Intensive Innovation Many organizations feel overwhelmed by the exponential growth of data and continuous disruptions often led by emergent digital technology. Information is the most invaluable commodity individuals and organizations produce in the digital environment in which they currently function. And in fact, it’s one of the most intensive pieces of innovation that need to be managed successfully!

The Monthly CIO Debates Collection & “Digital IT” Book Tuning: Are You an Atypical CIO or a Stereotypical CIO June 2020 Due to the changing nature of technology, IT leadership roles also continue to involve & shift the focus, to move up the maturity level. More and more CIOs are requested to take more responsibility and many CIOs present the breadth of leadership competency. The proactive IT debates help IT leaders to brainstorm better ways to do things and improve management capabilities. Here are the monthly CIO debates collections about envisioning digital IT leadership and running high-performance digital IT organizations.

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 Monthly “Digital Boardroom” Book Tuning: The Strategic Oversight of Corporate board June 2020

11:16 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

The corporate board’s strategic oversight is crucial to identify and strengthen the weakest link in strategy 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 multiple perspectives on shaping strategic boardroom with digital acumen.

The Strategic Oversight of Corporate board

The Corporate BoD's Strategic Oversight The modern digital board has many responsibilities and also gets a lot of distractions. The corporate board’s strategic oversight is crucial to identify and strengthen the weakest link in strategy management, laser focus on the most critical perspectives to steer the business in the right direction, and ensure business success in the long run.

The BOD's Three Oversights of Digital Transformation The beauty of the digital landscape is a fresh insight into the business. The digital paradigm is an emerging ecosystem of principles, policies, and practices that set limits or boundaries, also offer guidance for problem-solving or creating something new under the digital rules, keep information flow, and achieve a state of dynamic balance. An effective board enables and directs management towards good outcomes, and ensures the business is on the right track to reach well-defined business goals. What are important oversights the board can offer about digital transformation, and what are the possible governance methods, techniques, structures, etc, that help to improve the boardroom effectiveness?

Three Digital Barriers Limit the Board’s Strategic Oversight Effectiveness Organizations across the sectors are steadily moving into the digital era with characteristics of hyperconnectivity and fierce competition. There’s knowing unknown, there’s unknowing unknown. The corporate board as a senior leadership team has to overcome many obstacles and numerous pitfalls in order to lead effectively. Here are three digital barriers that might limit the board’s strategic oversight effectiveness.

The Corporate Board’s Three Strategic Focal Points 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.

The BoD’s Strategic Oversight of Three Important "Soft" Corporate Capitals The board of directors as the de facto guardian of modern organizations plays an important role in steering the organization towards the better future, helping business management identify and close blind spots in decision-making, pinpoint the root cause of critical business issues, set good policies to drive progressive changes, and monitor business performance closely. The corporate board is also responsible and accountable for protecting the shareholders’ investment and improving the business value proposition. Besides physical capitals, here are three critical "soft" corporate capitals that the board of directors needs to oversee in order to improve business governance effectiveness and lead the company forward successfully.