Book “100 IT Charms: Running Versatile IT to get Digital Ready“ Insight: Initiative

 CIO as “Chief Initiative Officer” has become necessary or even imperative to manage strategic digital alignment and orchestration from concept to post-implementation of all initiatives

The purpose of the book “100 IT Charms: Running Versatile IT to get Digital Ready“ is to articulate different flavors of digital IT organizations and brainstorm the best and next practices for running highly innovative and high-performance IT. 

Digital charm is not based on the style presented on the surface but on a set of unique competencies to make IT shine through as a business differentiator.

      

Initiative

Initiative & Involvement Change is inevitable. Running a business today is an iterative planning-action continuum. High performance organizations take business initiatives proactively and drive continuous progress steadfastly. Change is never for its own sake, any business initiative, especially change, should be viewed as an "opportunity" for solving business problems, improving employee productivity, delighting customers, optimizing costs or improving business products/services/processes.

IT-Initiative CIOs can convey the vision at the front, but lead the change from behind. Either fast-growing businesses or well-established organizations have to continuously adapt to the numerous changes and well chart the path to significant business transformations such as digitalization or globalization, should CIOs take the initiative to promote such strategic business initiatives, if so, shall they promote at the front or lead from behind?

Innovation Initiatives CIO as “Chief Initiative Officer” has become necessary or even imperative to manage strategic digital alignment and orchestration from concept to post-implementation of all initiatives from the C-level to the front lines, focusing on changes and innovation. CIOs are also quite eager and enthusiastic to drive challenging transformation initiatives, to reinvent IT as the information hub and the business growth engine.

Initiative & Improvement Contemporary businesses are overwhelmingly inundated by exponential growth of information and too many different types of business change management initiatives. Generally speaking, change is usually required when an organization is expanding its business, its mission, instilling a fresh culture, or installing/implementing some new technology. so there is no one size fits all approach to successfully managing change.

How to Manage Business Requirements for IT Initiatives IT is business, every IT initiative needs to have a well-defined business requirement and well-supported business sponsors. What are the most effective vehicles for understanding business requirements? What are effective ways to ensure that non-IT stakeholders are engaged and performing their appropriate roles? Talking to business partners is clearly essential, but are informal discussions sufficient? How does IT get the right executive sponsorship and commitment, who should they be, and perhaps more important, what are the roles that they must play?

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 5 million page views with about #7500 blog postings. 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.

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Innovative “Informationer”

The qualitative digital leaders today must be very open to information, desire for insight, and hunt for wisdom.

Information does not live alone but permeates to everywhere in the businesses nowadays. The power of information is to provide real-time insight across the organization in ways never possible before, for making timely decisions, responding to changes accordingly and catalyzing innovation relentlessly. 

The younger generation today are exposed to much more information and can easily acquire knowledge in most areas they want to engage in. Hence, a leader is expected to be more informative, intelligent and wiser to be able to make effective decisions and lead by influence, not by brute force.

The ability to think strategically involves information analysis and interpretation, which only a few people have: Information is the lifeblood of business, the value of information is not isolated, the words like "information" and "data" have a variety of meanings: Colloquial, professional and technical, etc. It is open to interpretation in accordance with the level of knowledge one has. “Information" as input to the decision-making does not absolutely determine the decision but allows the decision-makers to exercise their judgment. Leaders as decision makers are the information agents who can master information to capture not only just knowledge but business insight, well mixed with the right amount of guts, in order to make effective decisions timely.

Leadership qualities or detailed responsibilities for dealing with information may depend on the specific role. For decision-making to be effective, the business leaders as the decision-maker must have relevant information and enough knowledge to make their decisions rich in information and significantly different from the available data. When information has been used to make an informed management decision to develop the right product, enter a new market, exploit a new channel or have the information to be able to conduct day to day operations (which have an output value) etc, information becomes the true lifeblood of the business.

Leaders as “informationer” can connect people with the right information to either generate new ideas or drive changes: The pervasive digital transformation means “reduced time to information and knowledge.” The art and science of information management are to optimize its usage, to ensure that accurate information is accessible and shared within relevant business units, achieve its value and full potential. In practice, put the right person that knows how to lead (evangelize) the effort and bring the users to the information that will allow them to create the knowledge to change the way business is run.

In the human context, information drives awareness, it can also trigger a sense of confidence, confirmation, validation, verification. Both Information and Knowledge are not equal to insight, but they are the foundation to capture insight. Companies generally should have a set of well-defined GRC rules on information management to make sure that people are able to find, reuse, publish, refactor and refine information to capture business insight or co-develop new knowledge. The ultimate goal of holistic information management is to guide the company forward by capturing business insight, identify and assess risks and adjust the business speed for accelerating business responsiveness and performance.

Top executive team needs information-based analytics to gain business insight and improve organizational maturity: The more the team members share the knowledge, the better the results. An intelligent organization always looks for opportunities across the business to increase the usage of predictive analytics, social analytics, and collaborative decision making accordingly. Information-based analytics doesn’t just serve up pretty charts and graphs, but helps businesses focus on crucial problems, look for insights, leverage imagination, set priority, make validation and predictability, bring transparency and create internal competition among new ideas, grasp opportunities to innovate products and services offerings, and generate new business models continually. Information-based analytics in real-time coupled with a powerful rules engine poses a challenge to the market with the prize being people centric and information savvy.

From an innovation management perspective, information is a crucial ingredient of innovation, the abundant information can be refined into business foresight and customer insight that provide the very clue to connect wider dots to stimulate great ideas, and build the business competency model. Technically, leaders as “informationer” identify how information is associated with the valued tangibles of businesses; products, services, and resources; how it triggers novel ideas, looking deeply into the future based on predictive analytics can have a profound effect on where you go, and how you get there to build business innovation competency.

Leadership is about setting directions, making positive influences and inspiring progression. It’s a psychological phenomenon. The qualitative digital leaders today must be very open to information, desire for insight, and hunt for wisdom. Great leaders have their version of the playbook and their handy toolbox to process information, capture business insight and improve leadership effectiveness and maturity.

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Info-Interlink

It is critical to identify the weakest links and determine how each part of the organization, including all of the key functions must "put it all together" to be successful in implementing strategy and bring tangible business results.

"Digital Gaps -Bridging Multiple Gaps to Run Cohesive Business” is a guidebook to help digital leaders and professionals today identify, analyze, and mind multiple gaps with multidisciplinary insight and holistic understanding. 

Today’s digital organization simply just can’t stand still., bridging the gap of opportunity between where you are and want to become is a welcomed challenge, it is important to identify and strengthen the weakest link and take a stepwise approach to make a leap of digital transformation.

           Info-Inter-link

Inf--interlinks It is important to reconnect the missing links, strengthen the weak links in the organization to run a hyperconnected and interdependent organization. Digital Paradigm means holism, hyper-connectivity, interdependence, and integration. Digital transformation is not just a one-dimensional stretch, but a multi-dimensional expansion.

UncertaintyThe emerging digital era has many dimensions and demonstrates very characteristics such as options, sharing, empathy, and personalization. To deal with the new normal, knowledge is no doubt important but more than that is complete awareness of what is happening in the business context. Once you do that, you use your ability to classify the elements and know their linkage. Either individually or at the organizational level, it’s important to manage uncertainty and fill opportunities gaps, accelerate business growth and reach the next level of maturity.

Investment People are the most invaluable business asset, but often the weakest link between strategy and execution. Knowledge workforce changes each day, they grow, learn, develop, and mature. They are not human cost or resource only but human capital which needs to be invested in continuously. Theoretically, human capital is the "big umbrella" concept that could include people, processes, systems related to employees.

IT-links ? IT continues to grow in importance to organizations, both operationally and as a competitive advantage. Digitalization is driving unpredictability, demanding a more rapid deployment that can quickly adapt to the changes and adjust to the dynamic business conditions. It requires IT to run as a business, becomes the business's revenue growth maker and the game changer for the digital transformation.

Linkages It is critical to identify the weakest links and determine how each part of the organization, including all of the key functions must "put it all together" to be successful in implementing strategy and bring tangible business results. The strategy is not just one of the things a leader does, it is the most important thing to reach the business vision and it's about creating tomorrow's organization out of today.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with about #7500th 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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"Digital Gaps" Introduction, Slideshare

"Digital Gaps" Chapter 1 Cognitive Gaps

"Digital Gaps" Chapter 2 Leadership Gaps

"Digital Gaps" Chapter 3 Management Gaps

"Digital Gaps" Chapter 4 Capability Gaps

"Digital Gaps" Chapter 5 Professional Gaps

Conclusion: Bridging Gaps to Catalyze Digital Maturity

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How to Win Primary Objective of Strategy for Competitive Advantage

Everything is interlinked nowadays and business leaders cross-functionally should stay on the same page when sharpening business strategy and sharing information.

Today we are inextricably linked in real time and in ways far more imminent than most realize. Running a modern business is not just about crunching numbers, but also needs to connect the dots and paint colors. 

Organizations today need nothing less than a paradigm shift in their thinking about the fundamentals of how organizations work, as well as how to leverage information, evolve rapid changes and catalyze innovation.

How to win the primary objective of strategy for competitive advantage: Every business is different, they are at a different stage of its organizational maturity cycle, they have their own unique strengths to delight customers and gain the market shares. Organizations need to discover and develop their “innate strength,” keep it relevant and timely, and achieve competitive advantage by creating unique value which is difficult to imitate. It’s important to make a seamless alignment of reliable information, rigorous processes, flexible structures, efficient technologies, and talented people, etc to build differentiated business capabilities. So the organizational management can keep one eye on today’s performance and the other eye on the future performance of the business.

In reality, organizations today face unprecedented uncertainty, they have limited resources, needs to laser focus on what is good for the business, and what defines success. Opportunities and threats cannot exist without a context of interactions, which constitutes an implicit system. It is essential for developing a company strategy that encourages realistic innovations which will prove successful in the market. Business management needs to do the periodic state check and analyze the current state of the business by asking: What is the current state? What are the concerns with the current state (costs, efficiencies, top-line impacts, etc)? What are current policies/procedures/practices, values, and resources associated with the current reality. It’s also important to imagine: What is the proposed state? What is the cost, time; other resources needed to get to the proposed state? What is the financial impact of the proposed state in terms of ROI? How to seek new ways to maximize business potential?

Define the business value proposition and build a strong value chain: The purpose of business is to create customers. Value propositions should be customer focused, and define the ideal business model, distribution, products & services, and business brand. The management needs to clarify: Can our management approach drive the enterprise and business strategy? Do we have common values and a dynamic enterprise business model that takes into account initial customer investments, life cycle of customers, products, services, economical cycles, market shifts to ensure flexibility and positive results throughout? How balanced and effective is our value chain? What value does the investment provide the business," and how to improve ROI? Etc.

The goal of business model development is to create value. Businesses value is multi-faceted and it’s interesting to see how business value is in the eye of the beholder. Not all business value is directly related to ROI. To perceive the value of the business model and make an objective assessment of an investment, you need to have a very clear idea of the new product/service - its life cycle, the overall "value proposition," where it fits into the overall "product/service portfolio" of the company. The whole value chain needs to be aligned, engaged, contributing by sharing the value so customers and stakeholders - from suppliers, to factories, employees, shareholders, get their fair share.

Leverage invaluable assets to build business advantage: In the business world, most relationships are nonlinear, change is continuously happening and spiraling up in such a dynamic environment. To lubricate strategy management, people are the most invaluable human capital to invest in and soft skills such as motivation, creativity, intentions, trust, relationships, informal dialogues, engagement are the most invaluable assets of the company to build solid sustainable value propositions. Organizations are social realities that emerge from the communication patterns of people. Communication is the coordination mechanism that makes a group of people as a cohesive team to achieve more, keeps the digital business flow and brings harmony, enabling clear linking of strategy from the boardroom to the shop floor. Strategic problem-solving is everyone's responsibility and therefore a clear communication to all levels of an organization is indeed a tool that may guarantee successful execution and achieve desired results.

Today’s business leaders and professionals need to be open-minded, resourceful, and learning-agile, harness communication, and build trustful relationships to overcome common challenges. They need to be discerning, but not overly judgmental in managing relationships; be flexible, but not too rigid in the outlook or too static to sense changes; be truly curious about cognitive difference or culture diversity, not getting stuck with conversational wisdom. When strategic complexity can be “visualized” in a better way, individual contributors can for the first time see where they fit in the universe of work and it can bring a great sense of purpose to their work as well as their role in the strategy management. The key is engaging at the right level and about the right things with clarity of the strategic goals, and leaders' commitment must be clearly and completely communicated for engagement of all stakeholders.

Everything is interlinked nowadays and business leaders cross-functionally should stay on the same page when sharpening business strategy and sharing information, Business teams innovate, create, research and resolve problems indefatigably. Anything that a leader does that does not advance the strategy is the wrong thing to do, and he or she needs to set the right priority, leverage the most invaluable business assets, do the right things before doing things right and get things done more effectively.

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“100 Creativity Ingredients - Everyone’s Playbook to Unlock Creativity" Brief: Innovatively Involving

As the digital world becomes hyperconnected, interdependent, and dynamic, the industrial silo and old boundary has been broken down, the digital business ecosystem is ever-evolving and interdependent.

All humans are born with raw creativity ability. Creativity has many dimensions, with multi-faceted truth and myth, manifold knowledge and multidimensional insight. Creativity is the wings of our mind and the tempo of our heartbeat.

 Creativity is a constructive disruption, not so bad addiction, and a sensational phenomenon. The purpose of “100 Creativity Ingredients - Everyone’s Playbook to Unlock Creativity “is to classify, scrutinize, articulate, and share insight about one hundred special creativity ingredients, to paint the picture with them, to add colors on them, to embed the music into them, and to make the story via them, in order to unleash our collective creativity potential.

 

    

Innovatively Involving

Involving As the digital world becomes hyperconnected, interdependent, and dynamic, the industrial silo and old boundary has been broken down, the digital business ecosystem is ever-evolving and interdependent. Highly innovative organizations naturally have closer connections between functions and all functions and hierarchical layers are more intimately involved with the market and each other on a regular basis.

Innovation-Anticipation Digital is the age of people and innovation. An essential aspect of creativity, both at the individual or group level, is the ability to challenge assumptions, conclusions, and beliefs, to discover the new path, and experiment the better way to do things. Innovation is change, the human element of change entails a people-centric approach to management style. Thus, empowering the workforce to embrace and anticipate change is a most effective, efficient and result-oriented management in organizations.

Innovating & Engaging Every organization declares people are the most invaluable asset. However, statistically, about 70% of employees are not engaged in their work, It becomes the very challenge for talent managers to overcome, and to dig to the BIG WHY, what are the principles and practices to manage today's multi-generational, multicultural and multi-devicing digital workforce, and is employee engagement only about productivity?

Ideal-workplace Compared to traditional industrial organizations running as a mechanical system, digital organizations are more like the living things which need to grow more organically and become more fluid to adapt to changes with self-renewal capabilities. In an ideal digital workplace, the organizational structure is solid enough to keep people or things in order; but fluid enough to keep information and idea flow. What are further perspectives to decipher the ideal digital workplace and nurture the creative and productive digital workforce?

Inclusiveness Contemporary organizations are diversified with a multigenerational, multicultural workforce using multidevice to do multitasking. Competitive advantage can be created by bringing together diverse groups of people whose mindsets, experiences, preferences, skills, and capabilities are additive to one another. We are stronger through diversity, it allows us to explore options that one individual or a homogeneous group might not have uncovered; we are idea-rich and vision clear through inclusiveness. Diversity is the engine for creativity and a facilitator for merging building blocks of new ideas, fresh insights, and ultimate wisdom. But how to embrace the diversity of thoughts and achieve such competitive advantages of inclusiveness?

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with about #7500th 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 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.

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Learning Logic

Either individually or collectively, applying learning logic to gain fresh knowledge and capture business insight differentiates high potential from mediocre.

We live in the information and knowledge economy, today’s digital professionals are hard workers, knowledge workers, and creative workers, continuous learning is not only a job requirement but also a great habit to keep our mind fresh and develop professional competencies. 

 From the corporate management perspective, a learning strategy is the organization's competitive learning "logic" manifested through organizational cultures and actions. It’s critical to build a culture to encourage learning, creativity, and align the employees' professional goals with the strategic business goals of the organization.

Make logical choices to select and gain knowledge: With fast pace of changes and frequent disruptions, digital leaders and professionals need to continue learning, as knowledge is power, the knowledge you logically select becomes "part" of you. The logic behind learning is to gather the details around the subject under scrutiny and then and only then, can you be selective. Keep in mind, knowledge is not equal to insight. Critical thinking and independent thinking are always important to gain insight from static knowledge. Each person has a different level of knowledge, with their own consciousness about a problem, uncovers the hidden logic, and reacts to environmental changes with behaviors that are logically linked to the information they have, knowledge they are equipped with, but most importantly, the insight they capture.

Knowledge is power; digital professionals with a growth mindset learn from different channels, and transcend information to their own knowledge logically and enforce their learning cycle via learning-thinking-asking-understanding- sharing-collaborating-creating new knowledge. By accumulating useful knowledge, people gain the “incremental consciousness” about their own potential, as well as how to develop their core competencies. They continuously seek new challenges, solicit direct feedback, self-motivated and get work done resourcefully.

Digital learning logic is nonlinear, and there's a complementary relationship between employee learning and organizational learning: Digital learning is multidimensional, dynamic, flexible, interactive, informal and integrated. Developing people capability and systems capability raise different "learning" issues. There is a distinction between employee learning and organizational learning. Employee learning does not translate automatically into organizational systems learning. But one employee who learns can indeed influence the organization if the processes and structures are established for that learning to be assimilated into the organization. And collectively, building a culture of learning will significantly improve the organizational competency and maturity.

The division between 'working' and 'learning' is replaced by combining and integrating 'working, thinking and learning.” There are different styles of digital learning, “adaptive learning” must be joined by “generative learning,” to enhance “our capacity to create.” The digital tools and apps make learning informal, but more cost-effective and interactive. High organizational learning relates to high response in recognizing and addressing system constraints. In doing so, it may evolve and that evolution may apparently be termed as learning. Collective learning agility improves the productivity, innovation, effectiveness, and many other attributes of the business.

Ask logical questions and gain “lessons learned” from failures: with risk and uncertainty comes a statistical probability of failure, eventually you will have a failure if you are in the business. You can only learn and fail better only if you learn from the failures. And then failing is something that prompts you to move ahead. There are always logical questions to ask, among others when a failure is detected, such as: Can you turn this into a success, and could you have detected the problem sooner? Re-introduce the past in a logical way and build the bridge to effectively connect lesson-learned from the past to the future performance and potential.

We should be learning all the time as we go, on successes just as much as on failures. The amount we learn is probably closely related to the amount of risk we take, failure or otherwise. We might go through a whole series of failures until we find one success. It involves logical reasoning and takes a balancing act to have enough failure and an environment that encourages learning from failure quickly and cheaply, without having failures that are too frequent or too expensive. Errors or failures can then be seen as opportunities and drivers for learning and improvement - and not reasons to blame and punish.

Humans as a species have already developed so much that mere survival is the shadow perception of the world. Knowledge is more intangible, complex and dynamic compared to the physical asset. Either individually or collectively, applying learning logic to gain fresh knowledge and capture business insight differentiates high potential from mediocre; at the organizational level, learning agility directly impacts on the top line organizational growth and the strategic competency of the business.

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Inspirational Insight 1/29

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

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with 7500+ blog postings 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.

Inspiring Intrapreneurship Intrapreneurship is about creating a new venture within established organizations to leverage the startup culture for catalyzing innovation. The great intrapreneur leaders can envision how abundant information and emerging technology trends impact on the business direction and how the exponential growth of information becomes the time-intensive piece of digital innovation. Intrapreneur-leaders deploy new ideas, new processes, and new adventures to adapt to change, take generative, iterative, integrative, and holistic approaches, and balance innovation with other organizational priorities.

Intelligent-Intentional-talk The great communicators are the high-quality leaders or professionals who can communicate objectively with strong logic, clarity, and understanding; the great communicators are the great artists who are fluent in creative expression or metaphorical description. Communication is both art and science. How to set principles and develop practices to improve communication effectiveness and build communication competency?

Interlogic With unprecedented uncertainty and high velocity, business problems become over complex and interdependent. The most obvious symptom of business distress is the widespread problem of incoherence. In practice, there is always a temptation to use simple linear logic to understand highly complex or nonlinear business problem-solving scenarios. People have to make a huge effort to get beyond rational linear thinking, apply interconnected logic to uncover hidden clues and systematically define and estimate, thus plan any problem, project, and phenomenon, regardless of its size to improve problem solving effectiveness. There are different kinds of pontificators about logical reasoning:

Informants The World now becomes more advanced, complex, hyperconnected, and interdependent, with exponential growth of information. In fact, information is one of the most invaluable assets and the time intensive piece of innovation in contemporary organizations. The challenge for digital leaders and professionals is whether they can provide quality information, how to discern information they trust from information overflow, discover how and where to find valuable information, not just the information being fed. So they can become the true information master-“informant” or “informationer” to provide and use information skillfully.

Ingredient Culture is a collective mindset, attitude, and habits that could be considered part of the people skills/competencies component to model a business capability. Strategically, your culture guides and informs “how you do what you do and should point you to why you do it.” A high performance culture enables an average strategy, but a negative culture perhaps sinks a good strategy. Culture is soft but there are multiple hard ingredients in it. It’s a tough element to lift your organization up to the next level of digital maturity. Technically, corporate culture is created out of the systems, processes, human capital, organizational hierarchy, business development, and strategy design of the organization.

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.

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Implicit-BoDs

An implicit corporate board is forethoughtful, knowledgeable, innovative, situational, and committed in order to contribute to strategy oversight when required and effectively at all times.

Due to “VUCA” digital new normal, the real BoD’s dilemma is that driving the business forward is extremely difficult. It means looking into an unknown future, gaining implicit knowledge, discovering hidden clues, and attempting to define the landscape with its risks and opportunities. 

Digital boards are diverse, innovative, and implicit, so they can set the right culture tone. Because at every level of organizations today, we need different perspectives, the multitude of insights, both explicit and implicit knowledge, and alternative ways to solve emergent and old challenging problems effectively.

Leverage implicit cognitive abilities: Implicit cognition is automatic, unconscious or intuitive (gut feeling) cognition: Making decisions at the strategic level is one of the most critical responsibilities of the corporate board. Both conscious reasoning and implicit cognition are important in decision-making. Gut feeling and other implicit cognition are very good at prediction as long as the environment is highly predictable and stable. An example of where either explicit or implicit cognitive abilities seem to outperform any data-driven methods is the vision. In fact, many moral judgments, and indeed the moral judgments of institutions, are made without full conscious awareness. In practice, 'gut feeling,' is the key to really solving problems in some cases, such as human factors which can think outside the box.

Information and gut feeling are both important for making many critical decisions. Gut feeling isn't a random loose arrow. It's an internalized knowledge that has developed through theoretical knowledge, unconscious learning, and practical experience that guides the gut feeling so that people can make the right decisions intuitively. The sentiment of trusting your intuition is spot on, but attempting to break it down into conscious, and unconscious, etc, and consistently leading to a perspectival minefield. It is not so good to go with intuition when there is an excuse not to put in the effort to think critically. Besides leveraging quality information, the right dose of the “gut feeling'' of BoDs allows the decision-maker to exercise their judgment and helps them find "the right answer" intuitively.

Catch “implicit” elements: In reality, the business system is complex and the organization is contextual today, opportunities and threats cannot exist without a context of interactions, which constitutes an implicit system. So many business "managers" focus on the tangibles, but lack an in-depth understanding of invisible or intangible things; just getting them to consider the list of intangibles would be a breakthrough. BoDs need to provide the strategic oversight of the business and frame the right problems for the management to solve. They are true critical thinkers who are able to see things underneath and around the corner, perceive the invisible behind the visible, catch “implicit” elements, recognize connections and interdependencies, and have an in-depth understanding of cause and effect in order to solve complex problems in a structural way.

At the board level, to break through thinking ceilings, you need to think profoundly by leveraging critical thinking, have sufficient knowledge and unique insight to observe deeper, capture explicit elements and see things underneath. Decisions that affect the lives of people, and the vitality of an organization, should be executed on the heels of history and information. Thus, to drive transformative change, the most effective way in confirming senior leaders’ (such as BoDs) buy-in is to show how the data, directly and indirectly, affects performance and profitability.

Influence implicit culture: Not only is the culture of the board/executive important, it is a determinant of the culture developed within the whole organization. Thus, the development of organizational culture starts with the board and executive. Culture is not a mythical "thing" that comes automatically. It will change how the process works and how collaboration works and most importantly "How to identify Innovation" and deliver it for the success of all- employees, customers and shareholders. Great leaders with a cultural design lens ought to be concerned not only with the here and today but prayerfully with their legacy to future generations, a better future and brighter workforce.

In reality, the company's culture, which is heavily ingrained, implicit and not directly perceptible, is very hard to change and changes slowly if at all. If Boards and Management do a good job of defining Mission, Objectives and Strategies, exemplify and oversee the culture, and successfully align resources toward achieving them, business culture will take care of itself. To achieve great results, the boards have to figure out what the culture is, decide what it should be, to make the implicit culture more tangible, and move everyone toward the desired culture, but it is through clear business vision. Companies with an adaptive culture which is aligned to their business goals routinely outperform their competitors.

With overwhelming growth of information and continuous business disruptions, today’s digital organization simply just can’t stand still. An implicit corporate board is foresightful, knowledgeable, innovative; and committed in order to contribute to strategy oversight when required and effectively at all times. It has “sense and sensitivity” to know the business, know the corporate direction and can even influence that direction and make significant impact

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Intrinsic Logic behind Complex Problems

Innovative problem-solvers enjoy understanding a variety of complexity, appreciate the interaction and interrelationship dynamic, guide people through it; find common ground and initiate dialogues, apply multifaceted logic to solve problems creatively.

Business is complex with many moving parts, to deal with today’s multi-logical situation in digital dynamic requires multiple valid viewpoints, multidisciplinary approach, and multi-choice solutions. Digital leaders or professionals should understand the intrinsic logic - how likely the situation is likely to change or better information will become known. 

Critical Thinking is an effective tool to analyze and synthesize, creative thinking helps to figure out better solutions.

Diverse viewpoint: Large, complex problems are complex and multifaceted, it’s best to bring a group of people together with cognitive differences, different backgrounds, capabilities, or strengths etc, they do not have the same view of the small part of the world that the team is dealing with so that they can complement each other’s viewpoint to analyze the problem, go more convergent to really hone in on the "why." Once you figure out what the true problems are and are ready to ideate, that needs to leverage divergent thinking to explore the space (alternative, diverse ideas via open-ended and contextual inquiries.)

The more complex the situation is, the more different approaches are needed to reach for understanding. Cognitively, human thought is characterized by expansion in multiple directions, rather than in one direction, and based on the concept that there are multiple starting points from which one can apply logic to problem-solving. The whole effort of leveraging diverse viewpoints to connect dots for expanding thoughts cross-disciplinarily can make progress toward a deeper understanding, enforcing divergent thinking and convergent thinking and unpuzzling intrinsic-logic behind problems in order to come up with better problem-solving scenarios.

Interdisciplinarity: In the past, the share and spread of knowledge and skills could survive in isolation. However, in the hyperconnected and interdependent digital era, the faster the dissemination, the better the response. People bring different perspectives and the boundaries might have changed based on the open conversations and taking the time to thoughtfully think about the specific issue and common challenges from different angles. To break down silos and handle complex problems thoughtfully, digital leaders and professionals today need to be in a continuous learning mode with multidimensional thought processes, interdisciplinary knowledge, strategic reasoning skills, challenging existing thoughts, knowledge, or standards, seeking additional knowledge and experience, and apply interdisciplinary logic to overcome challenges.

Behind every problem is a relationship dynamic out of alignment, logic enables us to uncover patterns, understand the interconnectivity underneath the surface, and unpuzzle the myth behind intelligence. Interdisciplinary knowledge should lead us not only to understand, but also to predict; dig into the root cause, not just point out symptoms, in order to solve problems systematically. Today's digital leaders or professionals must have a humble attitude to keep learning, sharing, and coaching, and seek multidisciplinary knowledge. They are skeptical about conventional wisdom, so they examine everything before accepting it for the real truth,

Multithread-actions: Running business is a problem-solving continuum. Business leaders should have a solid grasp on what has been tried before and analyze why those initiatives didn’t succeed, what consequences can be created through actions, etc. Forward-thinking organizations cannot think in terms of single-thread serial actions alone nor can they give undue priority to areas that are covered by the tactical implementation of the strategy only. The multi-thread management involves aligning initiatives, talent, resources, and performance with the goals and objectives of seamless strategy management.

Sometimes things go smoothly, other times not so much. Without the inner balance of energies, one cannot achieve a perfect balance of emotions and logic in smooth problem solving. Organizations need to have objectivity; as you cannot assign work to people based on individual bias and prejudices, therefore, applying data-driven judgment skills, incorporates the multi-faceted aspects of the knowledge system, innovation, and intuitive behavior. Organizations and their people learn through their interactions with the environment. They plan, act, observe the consequences of their action, make inferences about those consequences, and draw implications for future action.

There is logic in all meaningful things, including complex problems. Innovative problem-solvers enjoy understanding a variety of complexity, appreciate the interaction and interrelationship dynamic, guide people through it; find common ground and initiate dialogues, apply multifaceted logic to solve problems creatively.

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"Information-Savvy" Boardroom Brief

Contemporary corporate boards today are IT savvy and digital ready for moving their organizations to the next level of business agility and maturity.

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.

Information-Savvy Boardroom

Information-savvy Information is the lifeblood and one of the most invaluable assets in digital businesses today, technology is often the disruptive force behind digital transformation. Therefore, the corporate board as one of the top leadership pillars need to become information savvy and decision smart.

Informative The foremost thing is to realize that IT is strategic at the board level. Information is the lifeblood and one of the most invaluable assets in digital business today, the corporate board as a top governance body plays a significant role in overseeing business strategy and monitoring business performance. To connect the dots, can today’s digital board become more information-driven, and IT savvy? But how?

Info- Savvy Businesses of all sizes shall re-frame the big data conversation with stakeholders in the boardroom. The Big Data concept is still at the emerging stage, the members of the board are just now getting their feet wet, sweating out the risks of getting hacked. Big data conversation is a little ways off for members of the board, but it will eventually get noticed. Board members are not so getting used to thinking outside the box.

InfoTech-savvy IT savvy board expands its leadership horizon for gaining a better understanding of their business’s performance and potential and advancing their “directorship” for getting digital ready. The corporate board is moving up their directorship maturity from a compliance focus to performance-driven, from “keeping things in order,” to “advocating change and innovation. “

Info-fluency Contemporary corporate boards today are IT savvy and digital ready for moving their organizations to the next level of business agility and maturity. The corporate board in a high-level leadership position plays a crucial role in strategy oversight, business advising, and monitoring, as well as setting key digital tones in organizational culture styles, talent management trend, and leadership quintessential.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with 7500+ 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.

The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As" Slideshare Presentation

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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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Upside

Business managers should take the intrapreneur spirit, turn the status quo upside down for dealing with”VUCA” normality via interdisciplinarity of art and science.

"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 "Upside” quotes in “Digital Master.”


Uncertainties are a common occurrence in any walk of our progress, be it social, professional or personal life. Take the “entrepreneurs’ spirit to turn the status quo upside down for dealing with uncertainty and practice intrapreneurship.

If companies don't make room in the prioritization process for projects that have significant risks but also potentially significant upside results, it can, in fact, drive creative thinkers out of an organization.

Take Entrepreneurs’ spirit to turn the status quo upside down. Some leaders use a counter argument in open discussions just to ensure multiple points of view are explored, bringing together management teams in a common and committed effort, and moving people in the right direction despite many obstacles on the way.

Understanding the dynamics, working to influence the dynamics and shaping a good digital strategy takes attention and energy, turning the status quo upside down for dealing with uncertainty via interdisciplinarity of art and science.

Leaders may be inflexible about the goal but they are extremely flexible with the options for attaining that goal. They continue to ask thought-provoking questions such as: What’re the alternatives to do things; what’re the upside risks and what’re the downside risks? They are always looking for options and the only way to discover options is to ask.

From a risk management perspective, continue to question: what’re your downside risks and what’re your upside risks? Risk assessment is important and something a board, through its appropriate committee, should be aware of and work with management to plug holes and mitigate risk.

Business managers should take the intrapreneur spirit, turn the status quo upside down for dealing with”VUCA” normality via interdisciplinarity of art and science.

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Explore Concept of Business Model by Inquiries

Design and validate your business model via inquiries and take a systematic approach to develop it into a more solid form.

A business model is "why this business works" and how a business operates. It defines customers, needs, and solutions as well as a competitive advantage. It includes the components and functions of the business which generate revenues and expenses of the business. Business leaders explore the concept of a business model by addressing several core questions that the majority of business model researchers deal with their models:

Who is the target customer? The purpose of business is to create customers. A holistic approach to design a business model would be to look at the purpose of the business, who is the customer, what they want, what’s the value to them and how they want it delivered, then look at the function-products and markets, processes required and the structure, resources, or authority of the system. It is important to build a new model around 'sustainable customer value' that aligns customer expectations with customer experience, staff expectations, corporate vision and values, as well as business capabilities.

We live in the era with people centricity, choices, and fierce competition, the end customers who shop the business’s products or service and continue to compare their customer experience with competitors. Winning new customers or new markets is the journey. A valid strategic objective mapping allows you to first understand your customers or prospective customers and what they value, and then identify how to best characterize that value through effective management. Often, customers understand their pain point, but do not know what they want. Shaping "customer desire" is a different task from shaping or understanding "need"; and making consumers believe their "want" is a "need" is a recipe for success.

What need is met for the customer? Look at the business model as the "WHAT" the business is about or what it will do for customers. What offer will you provide to address that need? How does the customer gain access to that offering? What role will your business play in providing the offering? What customers generally want is a fit-for-purpose, and hassle-free solution to their needs, combined with as little interaction with the seller as possible. “Fit-for-purpose" is equally true for human relationships as for solutions to other needs. If you promise your customers that you will be responsive, then the culture in the company needs to reflect that as well. Forward looking companies can capture customer insight, examine the entire customer lifecycle from acquisition through disposal, and isolate where in the experience they choose to invest, where they choose to compete and where they choose to innovate. The strategic and operational priorities are key factors in customer experience management.

Digital is the age of customers. Customer Experience is vital for business growth, development and to make sure you stay in business in the long run. So engage customers in business conversations, point out that customer inquiries are not just support related, but can foster new and better ways the products/services/application can perform and optimize every touch point of customer experience. If you promise customers, you will be easy to do business with, and then internally you must become that to each other - easy to work with and work for and spend a lot of time on future products/customers. Customer Experience Management is key to every business. It is not just important, it is vital for growth, development and to make sure you stay in business.

How will your business earn a profit? The digital evolution means that channels to customers. Without customers, an organization cannot survive, and without creating value and profitability, an organization cannot grow and thrive. Design the new business model and align the business activities that have a three-way impact - Revenue, Cost and Investments at the same time by choosing an environment to compete. Customer-facing applications/solutions are critical as at the end of the day, they generate revenue for the business. Keep in mind though, there are frequently “fundamental differences” between the organization's view of value and that of customers. You might produce the most-sophisticated-in-the-market product, but no one needs and buys it. That will waste the talent and resources of the business, without making profit for the company.

In consumer companies, if there is an outage, it normally has a direct impact on revenue and consequently attention of the top management. Explore new business models and make profit by asking: What new opportunities could you capture that you can’t address with your current business model? Can you sense and create new markets before competition thus make it much more sustainable than the competition? Building customer-centricity consistently in a way that delivers the right experiences to the right customers at the right times is, in most companies, enormously complicated, but worth the effort, for long term profitability.

Design and validate your business model via inquiries and take a systematic approach to develop it into a more solid form. There is such a massive leap from validated framework to the detail which is required for a working business. The ultimate goal of shaping a customer-centric organization is to architect an organization to bring value to customers in ways that are beneficial for them while also creating added value for the company itself.

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"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Insight: Innovation, Inference, Interdisciplinarity

Innovation is not serendipitous, there is a logic behind any innovation effort. Digital innovation management is a system that can be fine-tuned in a structured way to improve its success rate.

A digital workplace is all about people-centricity, empathy, innovation, agility and high-level business maturity. Digital organizations are always on, inter-dependent and hyper connected, people are always the most important asset in any organization before, today, and future.

In an ideal digital workplace, the organizational structure is solid enough to keep people or things in order; but fluid enough to keep information and ideas flow.

                Innovation, Inference, Interdisciplinarity

 

Illustration, Inference, Interdisciplinarity We live in the world with a mixed bag of physical and virtual, new and old, truth and false, opportunities and risks, etc. Either running a business or taking a life journey is fundamentally an iterative problem-solving continuum. Problem-solving is about seeing a problem and actually finding a solution, not just the band-aid approach to fixing the symptom.

Interdisciplinary Inference Due to the occurrence of increased economic integration, information permeation, technology underpinnings, the black and white boundaries continue to diminish in the 21st century. It’s important to deal with the nonlinear, multi-logical situation in today's digital dynamic, and understand the logic behind business scenes. Business logic today is often nonlinear or even paradoxical characterized by the movement of information, people, and businesses with the mixed structures, hyper diversity, volatility, unpredictability, and increased flux. Business management today needs to be interdisciplinary, informative, and innovative.

Inference & Innovation Due to the fact that innovating in today’s digital world has become increasingly complex in nature. Often, organizations can no longer rely on a single individual or team to drive innovation. Innovation is not serendipitous, there is a logic behind any innovation effort. Digital innovation management is a system that can be fine-tuned in a structured way to improve its success rate

Idealism & Inference The fact is that change is happening at a much faster pace than ever before, requiring much more rapid response in order to survive and thrive. Organizations across vertical sectors are on the journey of digital transformation. Change, creativity, and problem-solving are all important perspectives on driving the business forward. Competitive leaders need to have strong logic, enthusiasm, and quality information to explore uncovered territories, pursue growth opportunities. It combines restless dissatisfaction with the current state coupled with the excitement of leading individuals or teams to find innovative solutions that will produce great results. So they can build differentiated business competencies effortlessly.

Insightful Inference Data analytics is statistics at speed. “Statistics is the study of the collection, analysis, interpretation, presentation, and organization of data. In applying statistics to a scientific, industrial, or societal problem, it is necessary to begin with a population or process to be studied. Populations can be diverse topics such as "all persons living in a country" or "every atom composing a crystal".

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with about #7500th 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 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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Unnoticed

Often small innovations around keep on happening and go unnoticed because those are taken for granted; because none is able to connect those with the larger picture. 

"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 Unnoticed” quotes in “Digital Master.”

It would be good to think critically more often than we do concern our actions. If we don't, half of our life routine part becomes "unexamined" and unnoticed by us.

Often small innovations around keep on happening and go unnoticed because those are taken for granted; because none is able to connect those with the larger picture. Leaders who are open, collaborative, and willing to listen to employees are more likely to be successful innovators.

Management needs to continue to check: what about the supervision of the staff engaged in processes critical to the strategic risks being audited? Is this adequate or are there issues going unnoticed or glossed-over due to workplace politics, cronyism, or other forms of staff disengagement from what should be hyper-awareness of risk and its impact and consequences on the company they work for?

The hairball is an example of “creeping normalcy”, which refers to the way a major change can be accepted if it happens slowly in unnoticed increments.

The organizational process is slowly undergoing changes with the elapsing times. The reporting patterns, the communication channel, the scalar chains have already registered unnoticed changes with the creeping in of team-oriented working culture.

Benchmarks can be great but can be really misleading too. If an activity is required and important, benchmarks can assist in ensuring that the company maintains competitiveness / relevance. But it might be better to reduce the activities and streamline operations by thinking outside the proverbial box - something that would go unnoticed if the company is focused on benchmarks.

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Inferential-connectivity

Today's digital leaders or professionals must have a humble attitude to admit known unknown and unknown unknown, develop critical thinking skills, use common sense, and train rational thinking skills, to make logical reasoning skillfully.

Logic is the hidden clue of meaningful things or the multithreaded cause effect relationships of complex situations. Logic is often nonlinear and multidimensional in today’s digital dynamic, if you want to discover the essential meaning of a term, you must be prepared to go beyond thinking that confines itself to linear relationship. Here is the interlinked relationship of logic, critical thinking, or common sense.

Logic & Critical Thinking: Critical Thinking is an important tool for understanding the interwoven logic of complex problems. It is the skill for analyzing, synthesizing, evaluating, and producing coherent argumentation by examining inference. It involves the multitude of thought processes and logical reasoning via connection, discernment, penetration, and perception. Both analysis and synthesis are crucial processes of critical thinking. Analysis enables you to break down an intellectual or substantial whole into parts or components; synthesis helps to combine separate elements or components in order to form a coherent whole.

With an unprecedented level of uncertainty and complexity, digital leaders and professionals need to develop critical thinking skills for making logical reasoning and practicing multidisciplinary approaches to solve complex problems. The core skills of critical thinking include analysis of argumentation, critical thinkers can dig into the root causes of problems, and understand the problem from different perspectives by asking: What is the problem? Why? Is it the symptoms or the real issues. What seems to be the constraints? Which factors or aspects of the problem seem most critical? Where is the weakest link or the strongest constraint? Etc. Critical thinkers can leverage explicit and implicit reasoning, have the ability to frame the right problems and solve them logically.

Logic & Common Sense: Common sense implies that the very group of people has shared common beliefs that serve to understand and interpret the natural and social phenomenon. In reality, people may have abundant experiences, but they do not know how to apply logic to frame the right questions or how their experiences relate to useful outcomes. Then, they may still lack common sense. The mind with common sense is restructured, critical and predictive, not for keeping the status quo, but to make things simple, not simpler. Learning common sense requires restructuring brain tissues to first think logically, take a structured approach to solve problems and make accurate prediction of consequences. People continue to weigh evidence, analyze and take measurements to answer.

The greater the knowledge of the systems in which one lives, a correct inference to be made from the use of common sense. On one hand, use common sense to make better and faster decisions; on the other hand, have the courage to challenge it if it turns out to be just out of date conventional wisdom. The effectiveness of common sense, and thus the ability to use such knowledge in a functional way, is directly proportional to the degree of familiarity with the environment in which it operates. Using common sense effectively speeds up decision-making but using common sense inappropriately, for example, taking local common sense to solving global issues perhaps causes confusion and conflicts.

Logic & rationality: People can be rational. They know how to design with observability and controllability in mind. They know how to make rational decisions. They know how to build systems rationally. They can restructure systems rationally. There is physical or technical rationality. Being rational doesn’t mean taking linear logic only or ignoring intuition. There is emotional or psychological rationality, and there is mental or spiritual rationality. Management of any type is a complex interaction of many cognitive systems, to avoid being illogical or irrelevant, the nature of how the "implementation of the idea has to follow a logical path for the solution" may include devices such as pattern recognition. We have a predisposition to seeking patterns, or potentially in the pursuit of logic.

Even though we live in a knowledge society, we assume that we follow rational decision-making, but, in fact, our experience tells us that we observe highly technical and rational people acting on impulses/gut feelings or so-called “irrational decision-making” in the spur of moments. It is difficult to encounter a 'real world' (physical/commercial) problem whose solution does not follow any logic at all. Often, the apparent 'illogical' nature of our original perception of the problem may be masking a rationale that we just cannot comprehend. Thus, enforcing logical thinking and reasoning skills helps uncover the hidden clue and make people become professionally rational.

Today's digital leaders or professionals must have a humble attitude to admit known unknown and unknown unknown, develop critical thinking skills, use common sense, and train rational thinking skills, to make logical reasoning skillfully. keep learning to seek multidisciplinary knowledge, and have courage to challenge conventional wisdom effortlessly.

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Book “100 Digital Rules: Setting Guidelines to Explore Digital New Normal “ Insight: Inclusion

A well-defined set of digital rules are not for limiting innovation, but for setting the frame of relevance and guide through changes and digital transformation.

The purpose of “100 Digital Rules: Setting Guidelines to Explore Digital New Normal “ is to establish digital principles and update business policies that can be applied holistically and guide the digital transformation systematically. 

Digital rules are based on a set of fundamental beliefs behind the methodologies and they help to shape mindsets behind behaviors. Digital rules encourage mindfulness, authenticity, creativity, inclusiveness, and discourage static thinking, silo, and bureaucracy, and help to accelerate collective human progress.

                Inclusion

Innovation vs. Inclusiveness Creativity is innate with many special ingredients; creativity can be developed if the conditions are right and there is inspiration, inclusiveness, encouragement, and abundance of knowledge. Innovation is then the management discipline to transform those novel ideas and achieve their business value. Many think there is no innovation without inclusiveness. The most advanced societies are diverse mixtures of peoples that can spark creativity and amplify innovation effects. So, how to involve people with different talents in creative thinking and actions? And how can you help to improve the harvest of the creative seed and accelerate the advancement of the society?

Inclusion-as-a-Strategy Inclusion starts with a thought process, a mind, besides the conventional understanding of diversity -gender, race, age, etc., inclusiveness nowadays is more about how to embrace the cognitive difference, the color of character, or diversity of viewpoints. It needs to become the key ingredient of corporate culture; Further, it should be viewed as a company-wide strategy. But how to implement it?

Inclusiversity More and more forward-thinking global organizations have established a "diversity and inclusion" initiative. However, inclusiveness is a mindset and a habit, it can not be shaped by the overnight, either as a one-time project or a "check-in-box" compliance tool. More objectively, would you label such diversity initiatives a "delight" or just a “makeup”? And how to build a truly delightful digital workforce?

Inclusion In many traditional multinational organizations, there is often a diversity agenda with good intention to make equal opportunities. However, sometimes it leads to further divides. The prefix ‘div’ seems to have a negative connotation associated with the words such as division, divide, divergent. By focusing only on what makes people different or even using a certain set of “diversity” vocabulary, you actually gear their mind to think about differences first, and even build the walls in people’s minds to deepen the gaps. Inclusiveness is the "digital fit" mentality: the prefix ‘in’ has the positive connotation associated with the words such as information, intention, or intelligence. To lead more effectively, empathetically, and wisely, can you be an inclusive leader without talking about diversity? And then what should you talk about to build an inclusive culture and reach the next level of organizational maturity?

Inclusiveness? Contemporary organizations are diversified with a multigenerational, multicultural workforce using multidevice to do multitasking. Competitive advantage can be created by bringing together diverse groups of people whose mindsets, experiences, preferences, skills, and capabilities are additive to one another. We are stronger through diversity, it allows us to explore options that one individual or a homogeneous group might not have uncovered; we are idea-rich and vision clear through inclusiveness. Diversity is the engine for creativity and a facilitator for merging building blocks of new ideas, fresh insights, and ultimate wisdom. But how to embrace the diversity of thoughts and achieve such competitive advantages of inclusiveness?


The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with about #7500th 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 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.

Read More