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

Thursday, June 25, 2020

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.