"IT Innovation" Book Briefing: Innovation & Intrapreneurship

Intrapreneurship has been recognized as potentially viable, it means for promoting and sustaining organizational performance, renewal and enforce competitiveness.

Within abundant information and emergent digital technologies, IT is a key component of holistic business mindset to re-imagine “what is possible” - unleashing business potentials and improving business efficiency, effectiveness, agility, and maturity. 

The “art of possible” to reinvent IT in the digital age is to deliver the value of information in helping businesses grow, delight customers and do more with innovation.

 Innovation & Intrapreneurship 

Innovating & Intrapreneurship It’s about discovering the new path for business growth and balancing innovation with other organizational priorities. With frequent disruptions and high velocity, the world of business has never been more complex, as companies compete or collaborate as partners across ever-changing value chains to serve disparate and dynamic market segments. Across the industrial sectors, many legacy businesses come with a legacy mindset, the old way to do things,...

Inspiring Intrapreneurship Running an innovative business doesn’t mean everything goes rogue, practicing intrapreneurship in the large organization also doesn’t mean getting rid of all rules. It is about creating the future via learning, experimenting, and discovering. 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...

Innovating Business Models Upon Building Blocks A strong business model is hard to copy because it focuses attention on how all the critical internal and external business elements of the system fit into a working whole to make it differentiated in the marketplace. A business model is a multi-level schema of how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value for stakeholders. A viable business model is analytical and quantitative, focusing attention on how all the elements of the business...

Intrapreneurship Challenges and Value Proposition The digital business world nowadays is so information-oriented and change-intensive, designing or reinventing business models is all about foreseeing and applying emerging trends, that’s where you win the competitive advantage. The heart of entrepreneurship is about changes, organizations no matter large or small, all face unprecedented change, uncertainty, and continuous disruptions. Thus, they have to keep reinventing themselves, exploring.

Initiating Intrapreneurship Intrapreneurship has been recognized as potentially viable, it means for promoting and sustaining organizational performance, renewal and enforce competitiveness. Within abundant information and emergent digital technologies, IT is a key component of holistic business mindset to re-imagine “what is possible” - unleashing business potentials and improving business efficiency, effectiveness, agility, and maturity.

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 7600+ blogs 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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Learn to Strike the right Balance

 It is imperative that we are willing to seek out help, break down silos. companies have to keep searching for new opportunities to disrupt, rather than being disrupted, but keep an inner balance to co solve problems collaboratively and move the business forward solidly.

Organizations of the future are increasingly exhibiting digital characteristics in various shades, dimensions, extensiveness, and intensity. It takes inner-balance, greater transparency, mutual trust, and cross-functional collaboration to explore new ways to do things and make a seamless digital paradigm shift which will improve how the enterprise works and interacts with its ecosystem and lift up to the next level of maturity.

 

Connect unconnected: The industrial era behind us is about silo and an overly restricted hierarchy which often slows down the business speed. Digital territories are blurred and digital organizations are hyper connected, a strategic practitioner understands how changes would happen over time toward the future, looks into the unknown future and attempts to define the landscape with its opportunities and risks, connects the previously unconnected dots, and helps to push the future in the direction they want solidly. Digital leaders with clear vision and strong metacognitive abilities seem to have the inner compass which enables them to navigate and lead the organization in the uncharted water or blurred territories confidently.

In fact, the digital era upon us is about innovation, it’s critical to strike the right balance of order and chaos, innovation and standardization, management and governance, etc. Creativity is the process of assembling previously disparate or unconnected ideas into a new idea and has the capacity to explore unusual pathways. Innovation requires thinking beyond, as opposed to outside the box, altering or changing the frame of reference to create previously unconsidered solutions. There are many ways to differentiate and, therefore, there are many ways to pursue innovation. Business leaders and professionals need to capture the big picture, keep inner balances, connect unusual dots, understand patterns, discover the difference between seemingly similar things, and navigate the business context smoothly.

Compete without competing: “Because she competes with no one, no one can compete with her.” ― Lao Tzu. Either individually or at the organizational level, we all face continuous disruptions or fierce competition. Healthy or professional competition motivates us to achieve more, but negative or unhealthy competitions cause mistrust, destructive behavior, unprofessional attitude, deteriorate business relationships, contaminate culture, and decelerate organizational speed.

The digital era inspires self actualization - compete without competing. We all have talents each on our own and unique competency, without negative competition, we would be able to use our talents and capability for the betterment and unleash potential. Organizations should create or nurture a healthier, collaborative and inclusive environment in which people will genuinely feel good, bring up their unique strength, willingly get involved with commitment, and will demonstrate unimaginable contribution. As a matter of fact, collaboration, teamwork, unity bring strength.

Speak unspeakable: Digital boundaries are not static, but dynamic, the digital ecosystem is over complex and interdependent. Dysfunctional management or ineffective processes stagnate the business to move forward smoothly. This is a dilemma that haunts corporations in many cultures: How do you tell the emperor that he has no clothes on? Business leaders or professionals need to be courageous to listen to what they don’t want to hear and to have the guts to speak out. In the digital age, business professionals with fearless minds have more bold perspectives, courage to speak out and take actions.

At the business level, building a “fearless” working environment means to inspire openness, critical thinking, and empower talent to unleash their potentials with less fear. Being courageous is not the absence of fear. It is acting in spite of it, speaking the unspeakable. Most of the time, people are afraid to speak up because they haven't thoroughly researched the issue or their ideas for an effective alternative. Also, people have different experiences and personalities, therefore, they may have different ways to provide feedback. They all bring different perspectives and their boundaries could change based on open dialogues, learning agility, and flexible approach to problem-solving.

Digital transformation represents a break from the past, with a high level of impact and complexity. It is imperative that we are willing to seek out help, break down silos. companies have to keep searching for new opportunities to disrupt, rather than being disrupted, but keep an inner balance to co solve problems collaboratively and move the business forward solidly.

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Learning Brief: Informal-Interactive Learning

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

High organizational learning relates to high response in recognizing and addressing system constraints, adapt to the ever-changing environment. 

 With the increasing pace of changes and the cutting-throat competitions, to effectively respond to the digital dynamics, either individually or collectively, continuous learning becomes an important skill for capability building and prerequisite of developing changeability.

 

         Informal-Interactive Learning

Informativeness Digital learning is interactive, interdisciplinary, informal, inclusive, and integrated. With overwhelming growth of information and abundance of knowledge, one of the true tests for digital leaders and professionals is to know when they don't know, cultivate healthy digital attitudes to keep learning, and sharpen professional skills for adapting to change. Learning, innovation, inclusion, and improvement will come from all of the workforces...

Informal-Learning Learning becomes the life habit for digital talent, and culture style for the digital business. Digital touches every aspect of business and society today, just like work is no longer the place we go, but the tasks we accomplished; now learning is no longer only about taking the courses in the physical classroom, or the education is 'done' in one's youth; it is the knowledge we gain, the insight we capture and the wisdom we pursue in our lifetime...

Interactive-learning The future of learning will require us to break away from the current one-size-fits-all mold and move to more customized learning. People want to grow, develop and learn, in effect, they want to change even though they don't realize it. But it is often the organization which stops them. Continuous learning and training become more important in the digital era due to increasing paces of changes and the exponential growth of information. Learning...

Incremental 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.

Intellectual Learning 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.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with about 7600+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify your voice, deepen your digital footprints, and match your way for human progression.

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Inner-talent-training

Leadership growth comes from identifying opportunities, tailoring development and putting the appropriate level of effort into a continuous process.

A leadership development program implies 'doing things differently' as well as 'doing different things' at all leadership levels. To renew organizational energy and rejuvenate business culture, developing leaders is a crucial investment, requiring time and energy, best practices and next practices. Often it’s viewed as a luxury in today's fast-paced work environment, but it’s a strategic imperative for transformative changes. 

However, the statistics show more than two half of leadership training programs fail to achieve expected results. What are the causes of ineffective leadership development programs, do you grow the leaders or are you training managers? How to make such a leadership development program more effectively & creatively？

Leadership training programs begin with an inner passion for navigating life: Every authentic leader has an inner compass to drive them forward. Begin from the inside out and be completely honest about your fears, weaknesses, misgivings and shortcomings. Good leadership training programs require dedicated effort on the employees' behalf so they value learning in both taking and delivering leadership development training, tailor their own circumstances to build differentiated core competencies, and provide a support network to back in the "real world."

Do everything you can to build up your courage, wherewithal and confidence from the inside out. What companies need are visionary leaders who can drive transformative changes and highly skilled (hard & soft skills) managers who buy into the culture and purpose of the organization. The dull side of leadership programs is that they tend to give participants a false sense of accomplishment, entitlement and expectation. Thus, inner wherewithal, intelligence and a good mentorship program, etc, are all crucial to nurture the next generation of leaders.

Create customized leadership development plans and provide an ongoing follow-up support structure: Leadership development is costly, make leadership investments that target activities which develop "genuine" participant buy-in, respect individualism, create custom development plans, provide an ongoing follow-up support structure and set “SMART” metrics and measurement. It is about leader training for enhancing human capital, as a good leader can unlock performance, and a great leader can unleash collective human potential.

Leadership means work! Specifically identify the right minds, characters, and attitudes, and provide leadership training to high potential. Leadership programs followed by an assignment to test the application of learning in making it a success at both personal and organization levels. The future assignment post completion can help you gauge not only the effectiveness of leadership training being imparted but may add to assess 'attitude' of a person towards learning new things and building new competencies. You can do all of the training you want to do, but if you don't let people get some practical experience at leading, they don't get to apply what they learned to strengthen leadership muscle.

Blended training options to leverage formal and informal training: Everyone is different so the “classroom” alone for leadership development is not enough to make lasting changes and get a good RoI. Informal learning has always been happening but only now are organizations looking to leverage these conversations, creating a knowledge sharing culture and changing the scope of leadership development.

Leaders not only learn themselves but also advocate a culture of learning. They need to be innovative and really consider where there is value and real learning within an organization. Coach, mentoring, on the job hands-on experience are the best forms of learning. Inspirational leaders are change agents and innovative culturists. For senior leaders and talent managers: How to be change agents on their own? how to cultivate digital culture, not only through one size fitting all formal training, but also through informal engagement and participation.


It’s understandable that leadership development and talent management should always be one of the top priorities in business strategy. Leadership growth comes from identifying opportunities, tailoring development and putting the appropriate level of effort into a continuous process. Guidance and assistance along the way is critical, however, it is often missed or under emphasised. You can become an effective leader if you put constant effort to nourish human instincts and nurture creativity.

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GRC Brief: Information-based GRC

Just to clarify governance is simply proactively decided how much and what type of effort is needed for.

The important characteristics of digitalization are over-complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity. Hence, GRC (governance, risk management, and compliance) becomes more critical than ever. Here's the context; how should GRC programs be approached? Should technology be a driver? Can you achieve any level of GRC without automation? Can you achieve any level of GRC without people? What is the real driver of GRC

?

  Information-based GRC

Information-Savvy-Board The information savvy board agenda should be focused on the performance progress toward the goals, targets, schedules., etc, of the value maximization and performance acceleration. 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...

Information-Fit A company that is dysfunctional in digital analytics is going to struggle to make the transition to the digital paradigm. Big Data and Predictive Analytics are at the top agenda in the majority of organizations. However, most of the businesses are still struggling to provide their users with timely answers to new and changed requirements, relevant, consistent information of sufficient quality at acceptable costs. How can Big Data make the organization...

Informational-Architecture A fine-tuned information architecture streamlines information flow to make sure that the right information is in the right place at the right time and shared with the right persons for making the right decisions. 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...

IT Governance With the exponential growth of information and often technology-led disruptions, IT has evolved significantly in running a high-performance digital business today. The digital paradigm means hyperconnectivity, interdependence, integration, and diversification. Digital technology is often the disruptive force behind change and information is permeating into every core process in modern organizations. IT management and IT governance are interdependent...

Information Governance The value of big data is only multiplied by good data governance. Big Data has big value, it also takes organization’s big effort to manage well and an effective governance discipline can fulfill its purpose, but does Big Data need “Big Governance”? There's a misconception that "data governance" is an inherently heavy weight process. Just to clarify data governance is simply proactively decided how much and what type of effort is needed for.

.The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with about 7600+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify your voice, deepen your digital footprints, and match your way for human progression.

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Unknowingly

"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 “Unknowingly” quotes in “Digital Master.”


If you do not recognize the lens through which you make sense of the world around, you are unknowingly captive to your own predispositions.

Often, we make decisions implicitly, also unknowingly, and sometimes unwisely because we think those things as independent component; rather, when we should think the system as a whole, every component is interdependent with other components, and then the decision can be made more thoughtfully, and wisely.

Workplace management is a microcosm of the larger society and that we are participating knowingly or unknowingly of the perpetuation of our biases and prejudices, the stereotypical thinking and conventional wisdom.

Self-accountability and collective accountability are that we each are creating the knowingly or unknowingly world, environment, culture that we find ourselves in, and we take responsibility and we grow with it.

If you do not recognize the lens through which you make sense of the world around, you are unknowingly captive to your own predispositions.

For a certain specific context, we may decide to treat the Thing as a Component. Often, we make the decision implicitly, also unknowingly, and sometimes unwisely because we think those things as independent component; rather, when you can think the system as a whole, every component is interdependent with other components, and then the decision can be made more thoughtfully, and wisely.

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Business Logic Links

With rapid change, frequent disruptions and fierce competitions in the business ecosystem, the organization simply cannot stand still or survive in silos, never innovate or never make progress. In fact, the very characteristics of digital organizations are openness, informativeness, responsiveness, and innovativeness, etc. 

There are competitions, conflicts, and controversies all over the place in today’s complex marketing environment. It’s crucial to apply innerlogic and interdisciplinary knowledge to solve problems, implement ideas, and guild teams to achieve high performance and unleash potential.

Build the "inner business logic" that links organizational strategic goals and action items: Vision is the destination - it’s about what you want the organization to be. Strategy is what (goals) you are going to do to achieve your vision. Tactics is about how (actions) you will achieve your strategy. The "inner business logic" is a cascading top-down process. First, define the strategic goals; then you determine certain “action items” which become the tactical goals of business units; then determine action items from those goals; and then, align business goals with individuals’ daily tasks, etc. Back to departmental outputs and team/individual work outputs, then the linkage between strategic and operational can be relatively transparent. These linkages help people understand how their work impacts the organization and help the management streamline strategy management.

In high mature organizations, the strategic planning also involves the definition of value chains, functional decomposition, organizational structure tuning, drives an organizational process management and project portfolio mix and trace the deliverables from the valuable products/services, and information to achieve business goals continually. Capability based strategy management has a much higher success rate. Processes underpin business capability. Process management is to manage the known from flows and figure out the inner logic behind it. Selecting a process to improve should be based on the business goal and priority, automation, complexity, etc, are also considered factors for accelerating performance.

Build the "business logic" that links the “enterprise genotype” (enterprise artifacts or assets) and “enterprise phenotype” (performance): To improve business performance and keep digital fit, building a strong link between enterprise assets and performance means successful capacity planning and resource management to ensure that resources are available before they are needed and enterprise artifacts or assets can be managed effectively to achieve high business performance. Capacity planning will not lower the workload, but give management a true picture of activities so a decision can be made on the ideal workload. Business leaders improve capacity management effectiveness by keeping the process transparent, enforcing accountability at all levels, and focusing on long term business prosperity.

It’s important to figure out the “right level” of planning and understand business logic, or take the dynamic planning to keep iterating, adjusting, evolving, and working on a rhythm of sustained products or services deliveries. A quality capacity planning program will enable business to switch to a proactive mode and bring you in control when experiencing high velocity and uncertainty. With emerging technologies, the arrival of capacity and capability on demand helps to move closer to enhance organizational harmony and efficacy, improve business transparency and the overall organizational maturity.

Build the "business logic" that links the workforce data to business outcomes: With all sorts of business links, people are still the weakest link. Humans are complex assets, you need to understand them as a “WHOLE” person, not just the pieces of data. Workforce analytics brings important indicators on how organizations should focus and invest in human capital and organization efforts on people. To reach the organizational goals through the efforts of all employees, the management has to create a very congenial atmosphere with their good policies/incentives to improve employee engagement and performance.

Many companies are having trouble in collecting workforce data needs and advantages. They lack not only technical skill or knowledge on what and why to observe. There is all kinds of data - from observations, surveys, focus groups, field studies, document or software use analysis etc, both qualitatively and quantitatively. You need to make such activities as a routine work and spend a lot of effort to improve workforce analytics efficiency.

In the dynamic digital business, business logic is often nonlinear and multifaceted, coming through different characteristics such as mixed structures, diversity, volatility, ambiguity, unpredictability, and increased flux. The ultimate goal to improve organizational maturity is to improve the business relationship, engage employees, invite stakeholders for participating in broader conversations and build differentiated business competency.

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Innovative-Insight 2/25/21

 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.

Innovativescoreboard Innovation score means an attempt to measure innovation; so the factors included in any scoring system will depend on what you are looking to evaluate.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...

Initiation & Integration To speed up change and spark creativity, the digital business life cycle could be viewed as resulting in emergent means of shaping a vision reflecting the objectives and soul of the company, participation, adaptability, innovation, and people-centricity.Change is inevitable, organizational change has become a practice within an organization, but too often changes are made as a reaction to outer impulses, crisis, and demands.

Innovative-integral Take a multidimensional and integral view to understand the problem. In most cases, you don't understand your business environment because you have never looked outside the boundary of the problem. Problem-solving is about seeing a problem and actually discovering a real solution to that problem. Many of today’s problems are complex, it’s critical to look at problems scientifically, artistically, philosophically, psychologically, and sociologically...

Unimaginable Influence is thought-provoking, insightful, and unimaginable. Defining your true purpose is a helpful instrument to guide yourself, your team, your business, and your relations along the other dimensions."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...

Innovation It’s important to note that innovation is a collaborative effort across multiple organizational silos, and it needs to be managed systematically to improve its success rate.Innovation is a journey which involves brainstorming, experimentation, trial, error, research, applying structured methods or tools for implementation, reviews, systematic analysis, and debugging, and is therefore not possible to pre-describe how it will work out.

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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Magic Governance Formulas

With rising digital tide and cascade change waves, the business ship must get to the digital world to grow and innovate. With high velocity and frequent disruptions, you don't have any choices but to change your sails to move forward. GRC discipline is more crucial in today's digital dynamic. 

Consideration of your current governance maturity-where you are today and how far fast you might change things, coupled with a good definition of roles/responsibilities wrapped around governance processes help to plug in and have impact/influence.

Governance = Accountability: Good corporate governance creates a good decision-making system and good controlling system for decisions and assignment of authority to the appropriate managers. Accountability is to be wise and brave enough as a leader to remove and change in time before the problem becomes overwhelming. The spirit comes from the top, the corporate board sets the tone to enforce accountability. From there it should include the delegation and assignment of responsibilities for carrying out the successful execution of assignments. There should be a governance mechanism embedded in all crucial business processes, and there are governance practices to enforce accountability at every level of the organization. It can assure the corporations’ operation under the correct directions and behaviors correctly. The corporate board monitors a performance management system that encourages responsible communication, enforces accountability, enhances open door listening, improves decision effectiveness, and harness transparency

We have a problem to solve together with the intention to build on morale and real productivity; advocating open leadership, and mutual sharing in successes. Accountability needs to be well embedded in the organizational culture. Behaving accountable is the result of a culture with values that need to be organized and nurtured. Accountability goes hand in hand with the delegation of authority or power, to advocate the digital style of autonomy and self-management.

Organizations have to consciously fight against establishing a culture of no accountability. Holistic GRC approaches enforce accountability at different levels of the organization. If you ensure the individuals have autonomy within their tasks, you will be able to address performance on an equal partnership base. The right formula to reinforce accountability also depends on the organization and what they are trying to accomplish.

Governance - Alignment: Alignment goes beyond conformity and order taking, it needs to include a close partnership with interpersonal communication, value analytics, and governance. The goal of organizational governance is to ensure that businesses working as a whole to improve communication, harness partnership, demonstrate value and engage employees. That is a factor of multiple considerations (culture, personalities, position, strategic impact.) Portfolio management is essential to successful corporate governance and as such, a comprehensive fusing of a firm's strategic capabilities. Those organizations that have a more mature strategic alignment (integration, collaboration, harmony, etc.) outperform their competitors and tend to be more responsive to the business dynamic.

Technically, a governance model is an architectural description that addresses the concerns of the stakeholders of an enterprise who want to ensure that execution is aligned with intent. To that end, a governance model illustrates the governance processes that are used to govern specific activities and establish decision rights, and illustrates the mechanisms of escalation and resolution used to make decisions. The alignment process can become a smooth and harmonized process, approaching a flow zone in which people are ready for moving to a fluid working environment and business executives are eager to set stages for designing and implementing strategies by taking a step-wise approach at the steadfast paces.

Governance= Superior Management: The Board has to have a good understanding of the organization’s strategic direction and its strategic alternatives. Because of traditional management, the business units often do not work in collaboration, as they are driven by a culture of silos, they fight for the limited resource in order to do what they believe is “locally” right instead of working together in order to do what is “globally right.” The Board needs to be engaged at the most senior levels to help influence and shape the business of the future. Governance= Superior Management. At the majority of the time, the board agenda should be focused on the progress toward the goals, targets, schedules, etc. of the value maximization plan. Value proposition of good governance, brand, and compliance should be integrated within and across operations not siloed off in a box.

You need strong GRC disciplines that help executives and management perform a risk analysis, harness cross-domain connectivity (communication, coordination, and control), raise visibility and awareness for many things that are captured at the different levels of the organization. There are often disruptive processes or technologies that need some relaxation of the old governance models during the changeover. It makes sense to have governance processes that are more lightweight, that are more continuous, and that focus more on results rather than detailed plans. The point is those organizations that have a high mature strategic alignment, integration, collaboration, or harmony will outperform their competitors and tend to be more responsive to the business dynamic.

Governance is like a steering wheel, keeps their business going in the right direction, Governance is not just about controlling or compliance, it’s about achieving high performance. As a corporate brand, culture, knowledge, and risk management are all boardroom concerns, and it is the responsibility of the board to accelerate performance, protect and nurture reputation. On the journey of change, if you want the business ship to go in the right direction, you must adjust your sails with the direction of the wind for getting you to the digital world.

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Innovative-ingredients

Nowadays people are complex, businesses are complex, and ecosystems are complex. organizations``become complex," as an evolutionary trend, not for their own amusement, but to respond to environments proactively. In fact, running a high mature business is not to complicate things, but to keep optimizing.

 Logically, simplifying the complicated things, either business process or methodologies is an optimal and smart choice to make business progress. Simplicity is an aspect of “appropriate,” it has multiple ingredients and has a multitude of perspectives.

Clarity: When problems or organizations become overly complex, people get frustrated by not being able to achieve their tasks easily. They start to clarify issues, search for simpler concepts, methods, or practices to improve effectiveness. To get “just right" simplicity, you would have to address the complexities of the subject matter and have the minimum required complexity to enforce clarity.

The opposite of clarity is confusion. Individually, confusion happens when we are not able to properly interpret the inputs we receive from the environment. Confusion consists of many ingredients such as lack of awareness, lack of clarity in expression, ego, a lack of clear and orderly thought and behaviour. At the organizational setting, when the triggering events become overwhelming and are difficult to comprehend, it leads to confusion. It takes wisdom to clear up the confusion in order to articulate the circumstances, clarify the situation, make fair judgement and “keep things as simple as possible.”

Abstraction: Abstraction enables agreement, adapts and improves the organization in the future by abstracting major concerns such as customer satisfaction, business partner relationship analysis, cost estimations as well as those key elements which can be applied to give a holistic picture of what is working or not in order to allocate capital and resources scientifically and reach the "future statement" in a stepwise manner effortlessly.

To simplify and optimize business, abstraction and agreement is the way forward, not elaboration and disagreement. The problem is that many business people are practical, pragmatic, process-driven or results-focused, and they have difficulty in understanding abstract discussions or strategic perspective. From a management perspective, depending on complexity, you can adjust the level of abstraction by applying inductive through deductive logic, talk at a higher, conceptual or more abstract level about what the business can or wants to be able to do, enforce strategic level communication and abstract insight to reach agreement and get work done more effectively.

Elegance: Due to high business velocity, it’s critical to meet the business’s needs timely, eliminate delayed or missed business opportunities and solutions. Not every complexity is bad, the management needs to encourage desired complexity and eliminate unnecessary complexity to make things elegant. The structural elegance of digital organization enforces self-adaptation, self-management, and self-renewal.

From a problem solving perspective, it is a good experimentation to design a product, service or business system with both effectiveness and elegance. Businesses need to gain an in-depth understanding of the problems and understanding the possible means to problems as well. Both of these require some imagination and a disciplined imagination which brings the potential solutions to bear on the problem in a novel, elegant and improved ways.

Intuition: Good product/service design is natural, intuitive, and prioritized in making things likable vs. just making them functioning. The forward-thinking leaders understand how things such as design thinking and simplicity, etc, can fundamentally change organizations, build reputation and make their societal impact. First, by demonstrating quick wins on delivering intuitive products and services, and then, on things such as strategy, manageability, sustainability, and social responsibility. .

Digital is the age of customers, enforcing Intuition + Evidence-Based design. Hide the complexity of IT/technology, what is left visible to the customer should be simple, intuitive, secure, reliable, predictable and easy to use. fluently mix the art and science in trying new technologies, to innovate the products or services and delight customers via intuitive interfaces and “easy to use” features.

The best way for IT/technology to help win customers’ hearts is to make the most of IT/technology "invisible" to the customer. Chat with business executives and customers to know their pains and gains and understand their tastes as well as current and future needs for sparking innovative ideas and championing intuitive business solutions. catalyzes information flow and drives business changes in a proactive mode by making continuous delivery of customer-tailored intuitive products/services/ solutions.

Familiarity: A good User Interface design follows simplicity principle, hide complexity, what is left visible to the customer should be simple, familiar, easy to use, secure, reliable and predictable, hone the design tools to better address the challenges (business, social, political, etc) that people face in their everyday lives in more meaningful ways. Prioritized in making things likable vs. just making them functioning. It requires not just things to work but be delightful and innovative to improve people’s productivity and engagement. That is a critical aspect of our future and a significantly underutilized competitive advantage.

The design-mature teams or organizations work collaboratively and competitively in making things likable and deliver them continually. Familiarity increases user adoption rate. UX is at the frontline to bridge industrial functioning, productivity with digital delight. External simplicity is directly proportional to internal complexity. Design review is necessary to ensure the things are on the right track of on-value and on-time deliveries. The strategic objective of User Experience (UX) design is to understand what your customers need and to help the business orient itself towards those needs in pursuit of its objectives.

Take a close look at simplicity from different management lenses and gain an in- depth Understanding of various ingredients in it. Simplicity is related to so many wanted digital business qualities such as robustness, availability, responsiveness, reliability, or manageability. it means less structure, fewer rules or regulations, changeability, and high maturity.

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“100 Creativity Ingredients - Everyone’s Playbook to Unlock Creativity “ Summary: Innovator’s Inspiration

A digital professional who is comfortable to be different can release more positive energy to influence the surroundings, dare to ask tough questions, and challenge conventional settings.

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.

 

    

Innovator’s Inspiration

Innovators’ Personas Innovators find more viewing spots than the rest. With the increasing speed of changes, fierce competition, and unprecedented uncertainty and ambiguity, creativity is the most wanted skill in the 21st century. But who are the innovators? Are innovators belong to a rare breed, or are innovators just among us and within us? With “VUCA” characteristics, what are important personas do digital innovators present today? Bigger-Box Thinker: Creativity...

Is Innovator ‘Trouble Maker’ or ‘Rain Maker’? Innovators think differently via non-linear or different angles. Although innovation is the light every forward-look organization is pursuing, very few businesses have a systematic approach to managing it, or lack wise eyes to recognize their special breed of talent- the innovators, or worse, when innovators are punished for their initiatives –typically always "Are you a troublemaker?” Being a trouble maker is not a bad thing when it...

Uniqueness A digital professional who is comfortable to be different can release more positive energy to influence the surroundings, dare to ask tough questions, and challenge conventional settings. Digital is the age of innovation and options. Nowadays, knowledge is only a click away, and digital convenience makes an impact on every aspect of individual life and business management. The world becomes more diverse, dynamic, but also hyper-connected than ever,...

Innovative-Team Innovation journey is like taking a hiking trip at the trail very few or even no people ever went before, it takes courage and emotional maturity. Due to the complexity of today’s business dynamic, more often than not, innovation is a teamwork, rather than just an individual’s effort. What are the successful traits of an innovative team, and how to improve the team’s innovation fluency? 1. Innovation Leadership Innovation...

Innovative-leader Innovation leaders are versatile with open-mindedness and learning agility. By etymology, "innovare" signifies "to germinate seeds," knowing that, go ahead and innovate by inventing your future, and the one of your company’s. Business success today depends on innovation. Business innovation depends on innovation leadership. Highly innovative leaders need to have a clear vision, effective communication and make a commitment to roll the imagination...

Innovators-traits Being innovative is simply about thinking differently and doing things differently. Innovators have many traits such as vision, passion, determination, dedication, confidence, disobedience, and resilience, etc. Innovators are not compromised with mediocrity or conventional wisdom, they get less polluted by negative vibes, discover new possibilities and better ways to do things. They focus on thinking positively and creatively.

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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Unless

 Logic and creativity seem to be the opposite; in fact, it’s not unless you misunderstand logic with conventional wisdom.

"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 “Unless” quotes in “Digital Master.”

How do we pay for the innovation we know we need to deploy? Followed up by "where can we refocus?" There is no such thing as what cannot be done unless you make a habit of hiring people that cannot do.

Logic and creativity seem to be the opposite; in fact, it’s not unless you misunderstand logic with conventional wisdom.

Even though we might all have similar guideposts for our inner wholeness, we don't have the same grasp of truth unless we can accept similar wholeness of our inner self.

Unless one enjoys freedom how can he/she understand the meaning of life and unless he/she understands the meaning of life completely what kind of fulfilment can he/she aspire for?

Unless there is a clear culture of accepting some level of failure and budgeting for it on a regular basis, many fail to take the risk of encouraging creativity. Therefore, creative leaders also make others nervous, because they are the out-of-box thinkers and take more transformational initiatives.

It is very true that unless there is a disruption, people very rarely move out of their comfort zones. Growth is not possible unless we are willing to move out of our comfort zone.

Unless there is a credible, rational, and (reasonably) benevolent commitment from the top down to the bottom of the organization to change that is communicated throughout the organization, and unless there is the opportunity for communication upward, attempts to implement substantial changes in cultural, processes, and structure are fated to be extremely painful at best, and may even be doomed to fail.

Knowledge is useless-unless you could use it to create something new. Imagination is delusional- unless you can roll it into reality.

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Initiate & Integrate to Drive Systematic Change Effort

Digital enterprises are inherently complicated, the highly intensive changes do not happen in isolation from each other in predictable ways, but act as a complex system feeding, amplifying and ameliorating change effects and creating business synergy.

In face of “VUCA” digital new normal, businesses will be more successful when they realize that one of their greatest strengths will be their changeability. It takes a lot of efforts and resources to make change happen. It takes planning, information savvy, and adaptability to improve change success rate. 

Analogically, comparing change with a trip plan, destination change, path change, timeline change, speed change, alignment of all members- all are part of the change plan, failure to convey, arrangement and commitment are called reasons for resistance. How to initiate, prioritize, and integrate to drive systematic change efforts to unlock business performance?

Aligning various stakeholders’ requirements to achieve multidimensional business value: Organizations have a variety of stakeholders, behind many critical business initiatives, there are numerous points-of-view and reference points of varying stakeholders. A number of highly influential, highly misaligned stakeholders perhaps distract the management to focus on the strategic perspective of business growth and transformation. In many global organizations, the challenges of stakeholder involvement are real for Change Management effort. Organizational alignment is what is key to fully achieve corporate performance goals. The shareholders encompass the need to effectively manage their issues and values so they do not become a risk to business value. If stakeholder values and issues are well aligned and managed, they should become enhancements to their values. And shareholder values do not begin and end with financial profit only, there are people value, brand value, social value, etc, as well.

In practice, a formal business requirement initiatives checklist includes such as enterprise mission and stakeholder needs analysis, enterprise system requirement development and management. The more stakeholders can impact a change seriously and collaboratively, the better chance the change will achieve or exceed the business expectations. All should be synchronized without compromising. So the management needs to keep checking: What is the vision and mission we intend to accomplish? What structure would ensure the organization's leaders are actively ensuring the organization is walking the talk of its values, connecting with others who are seeking to accomplish the same goals, developing and monitoring programs to accomplish the mission? Smart shareholders know that they live in this world too and focusing only on short-term economics can lead to negative values that may outweigh finances in the long-term. So they need to strike the right balance of short term profitability and long term prosperity.

"Newness" of the scope and approach to the organization: Change is inevitable, and the only differences are the reasons and goals behind the change, the scope, depth/breadth of change efforts (Why do you want to change, what you need to accomplish, what does it consist of and what does it impact). Business Change Management has a broader scope, including such as stakeholder management, process or organizational change, there is also technical change management, etc. Change managers need to clarify the degree, scope, and nature of the change required, etc, so they can apply a structural approach to manage it effectively.

Overall, good anticipation in planning is key for a smoother change implementation, while regular updates and plan adjustments will enhance your chances of success. For the large scale of change, it’s important to establish a cross-functional change team to involve multifunctional management, space and time are made to scope, plan, and execute in a structural way, cross functional communication, interactions, and collaboration amplify the collective capability to change for achieving more business values.

A number of points of integration: Many organizations that get stuck at the low level of maturity often function as sum of pieces, rather than an integral whole. Those organizations that have better integration maturity outperform their competitors and tend to be more responsive to increasing pace of changes and develop long-term business competency. If the situation is very natural and fluid, with a lot of inter-dependencies, it takes a holistic view and cross functional management approach. For change integration practices, shape a “big picture,” to understand the nature of hyper-connectivity and interdependence, open up cross-disciplined dialogs and optimize dynamic processes in ways that perhaps were not possible before.

Every strategic initiative, either at a functional level or corporate scope, has to make sure the business as a whole is superior to the sum of pieces. The goal of a variety of integration is to ensure information consistency, security, interoperability, and coherence for running a high-responsive and high-performance business. By integrating, you are creating a case where you force an organizational alignment to integration to optimization to maximize the value from existing systems and the need for better business performance and responsiveness. To make the large scale of business transformation, the successful integration will depend on the underlying business relationships between all of the crucial points and how they influence each other in improving organizational maturity.

Size of the business initiative relative to the organization's business management maturity and whether or not the organization has ever managed an initiative of that scale before: Maturity is the state of fluency, quality, balance, ripeness, and resilience. Change Management in high mature organizations is not about taking a few random efforts. The challenge for organizations across the vertical sector is to manage its portfolio of cohesive change efforts, to create relevant cross-border strategic synergies, fine-tune the underlying functions and structures, develop high caliber professionals to achieve high performance.

The real challenge is to understand the priorities of your company, and know where and how you can and should improve to amplify change effect. Change Management and Strategy Management go hand in hand. Business Architecture as a useful tool helps to identify gaps, assumptions, risks, etc, shape prioritization of the opportunities, level set scope, and approach. To effectively respond to the digital dynamics, companies must begin thinking about ways with strategic planning to broaden their ecosystems and revenue streams while becoming more responsive and scalable.

Digital enterprises are inherently complicated, the highly intensive changes do not happen in isolation from each other in predictable ways, but act as a complex system feeding, amplifying and ameliorating change effects and creating business synergy. The journey of digital transformation is the full-scale changes in the way business is conducted so that it can generate high value and uplift the business to the next level of growth cycle via multidimensional planning, seamless execution and orchestration.

 

 

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“Talent Master - 199 + Questions to See Talent from Different Angles" Summary: Talent Assessment & Development

Talent could be the right balance between "heart" and "head," the right balance between what is innate and what is developed and trained.

We live in a time of rapidly changing technology and business dynamics at the dawn of the Digital Era, The knowledge life cycle is significantly shortened, and a huge skill gap in the workforce needs to be filled due to the continuously updated technology and regulation, digitalization and globalization, etc. .

 The book “Talent Master - 199 + Questions to See Talent from Different Angles“ is the guidebook to help digital professionals shape their digital fit mindset, improve multidimensional digital intelligence, build a unique set of digital capabilities, inspire creativity, improve professionalism, and unleash their full talent potential.

 

     Talent Assessment & Development

Innate Backed by the proper application of training and practice, talent can become a useful, profitable skill; without training and practice, talent is unmet potential. Digital is the age of people, people are always the most valuable human asset and capital investment in any business, but often the weakest link in Digital Transformation as well. The static and often “one size fits all” traditional talent management and performance management have obvious...

Unique Talent Development vs. Talent Creating The raw talent is precious, and the well-crafted talent is a good combination of willpower + brain power + knowledge power. Connotatively and denotatively, talent is innate, a “raw” ability. It's a natural affinity for something. It can't be completely trained. Talent is not equal to experience, just like wisdom is not always proportional to one's age. What you can and should do is to provide the opportunities (talent development) for people...

Inspirational Dot-Connecting: Talent vs. Skill Talent could be the right balance between "heart" and "head," the right balance between what is innate and what is developed and trained. Talent is an innate, or natural ability to do something well. So it has to be identified as distinct from a skill, which is acquired by learning and practice. Talent is something deeper that empowers or boosts skills, but how to identify it, acquire it, improve it, or stimulate it? Talent is like DNA: DNA defines...

Innovating Talent Management Next Practice: Character and Mindset Assessment The talent performance and potential assessment are not just a stand-alone assessment. It is the foundation of a full-blown, structured personal and leadership development process. Talent performance and potential assessment and management are critical for business’s long-term success because people are always the most invaluable asset in business. However, the traditional performance management approaches focus more on measuring behaviors and...

Unleash Potential: Evaluate an Employee’s Potential Performance keeps the business moving, and the potential makes the business grow, transform, and leap to the next level of maturity. Modern talent management is both art and science. However, most of the HR organizations still use static mechanisms to measure talent performance, mainly based on quantitative delivery, with ignorance of qualitative perspective, talent potential assessment, intangible culture effect, and lack of tailored solutions...

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

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Unity

Inclusion is the new start that awakens in all of us the common-unity we share.

"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 “Unity” (ii) quotes in “Digital Master.”

It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than isolated things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static “snapshots,” to perceive diversity in unity.

Inclusion is the new start that awakens in all of us the common-unity we share.

The system is a self-reflecting or self-observing unity, which functions in a distributed way through one’s ‘human’ forms in the rest of unity; but which also already enjoys a dynamic communications network linking most of the local cognitive filters as a system-wide filter.

If there is unity of purpose and a true Agile spirit while there are different viewpoints, practicing empiricism should help resolve the issue.

Once the staff appreciates their objectives and with a purpose of unity , all the staff and leadership should be able to implement their communication strategy appropriately.

One should pride themselves on being a unique individual, with a cultural perspective, and life lessons. The diversity of perspective and insight, spark creativity, unity for the purpose, direction, and goals.

Complementary and competitive teams can both produce positive results, but more often teams who operate individually, compete collectively and manage collaboratively are usually the winners! Collaboration, teamwork, unity bring strength.

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Good Principles, Outdated Rules of Innovation

Innovations simply benefit from being developed and subsequently commercialized in a more open ecosystem.

Innovation is a journey which involves brainstorming, experimentation, trial, error, research, applying structured methods or tools for implementation, reviews, systematic analysis, and debugging, and is therefore not possible to pre-describe how it will work out.

 Therefore, organizations can no longer rely on a single individual or team to drive innovation. The businesses need innovation silver lining from specific tools rising to an overall problem-solving system environment. The evolution of innovation only exists in a dynamic environment that creates insight and takes advantage of all sources of creativity in an open way and leaps up innovation maturity.

Innovation management processes should enable us to focus on the most attractive opportunities: With “VUCA” new normal, we cannot predict anything beforehand but can imagine with many experiences involved in current or in the past. Innovation happens frictionlessly in an open environment, the emerging markets perhaps also offer particularly fertile ground for exploring innovation opportunities and developing a dynamic innovation ecosystem. Effective innovation management structures creative processes, gets information to bridge knowledge gaps, enables us to foresee business possibilities and focuses on the most attractive opportunities in order to get better results.

There is more flow of creative ideas, the more is happening, the pie gets bigger. The economic environment plays an important role in sparking creativity and catalyzing innovation. It is crucial to see the context, perceive invisible, identify the leverage point of the ever evolving digital ecosystem, allow the organization to explore emerging opportunities and scale up innovation systematically. The more integrated and culturally based innovation or imagination is, the more sustainable and productive such initiatives are, the better chance organizations can reap the benefits and unlock the full business potential.

Externally simple is directly proportional to internally complex when designing and implementing intuitive products/services: The digital era upon us is about people-centricity. Innovation has a certain level of complexity, but keeps things simple, not simpler. Remove the layers of complexity to reach what is simple at the core. Champion the intuitive solutions to delight customers as an important dimension to innovate. The management needs to ask around and collect customers’ feedback such as: How is the end user going to use your solution? Does the new solution help users do their work better than the current solution or do users all together have to change the way they perform their tasks by using the new system? Is the user interface delightful? Etc. Keep in mind, often the business goals of doing innovation is to either delight customers or improve management effectiveness via providing intuitive products/services, clarified processes or step-wise scenarios.

Intuition is a deeper sense which gets activated only if we are aligned with nature and the present. Technically, hiding the complexity of information technology, what is left visible to the customer should be simple, intuitive, secure, reliable and predictable and easy to use. Pursuing the art of possible involves new ways of bringing together ideas and resources to create something novel, achieve business objectives in any way possible. Take calculated risks to explore new opportunities hidden in the volatile and uncertain business environment, and delight customers via products or services with cool design and intuitive interface.

Set good principles, but break down outdated rules: Innovation challenges the status quo, do something better than it currently is. That is important in a healthy, innovative organization. To become creative, you would have to break down some old rules. Rules are about safeguarding the status quo. Consequently, too rigid rules will stifle innovation. The principle-based innovation is not about setting the restricted rules for stifling creativity; it’s about framing and prioritizing the innovation management effort in order to stay focused and improve the success rate of innovation.

With information exponentiality and high velocity, rules need to be updated continually. After breaking the outdated rules, you are "outside the box." Thinking outside the box is all about "rule breaking"; the more "unruly" you are, the more creative you are. You apply principles of approach and vary the resource and tool mix by the ever-changing environment. The right level of guide and process is important, but the overly rigid process or too ‘pushy’ goals will stifle innovation. The guiding principle is like the light tower, navigates people or organizations toward the right direction, speeds up innovation efforts and reaches a well-planned destination.

Innovations simply benefit from being developed and subsequently commercialized in a more open ecosystem, striking the multitude of digital balances which impact with each other in order to achieve a state of flow, a state of zest, and a state of harmonization. It’s important to note that innovation is a collaborative effort across multiple organizational silos, and it needs to be managed systematically to improve its success rate.

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The Essence of Critical Thinking

 It’s important to apply critical thinking to fill out cognitive blind spots, to see through character, to perceive potential, to make sound judgments, and ensure the right people are put into the right positions to solve right problems effectively.

There are many business success factors, people are still the most critical element, but often the weakest link to accelerate business performance. Therefore, it is so important to leverage the real critical thinking for making sound judgments in evaluating talent-from mindset to behavior; from performance to potential, etc. Technically, when you intend to understand, interpret, and judge people or things, you need to form a critical opinion of it based on facts, discerned data, in-depth understanding, and clarified notions. Critical thinking is a cognitive process with some systematic methodology and multifaceted perspectives to arrive at the tangible and reproducible truth.

The essence of critical thinking is careful deliberation, examination, and testing of assumptions, and consideration of opposing views: Whether for career development, self-development, selection, promotion, talent assessments are really about ascertaining the individual's "current state" - a snapshot of where they are at that moment of time; also predict their “to be” state, their potential to be who they want to become. Be aware of your unconscious bias though, keep reminding yourself that you need to observe deeper, respect others, build mind connections, and should not allow your biases to prevent you from making sound judgments. Oftentimes, people misjudge others based on the superficial criteria or wrong standards; people misjudge others based on their own narrow lenses, without listening to the two sides of the story. People get de-energized with the negative vibes, unfair treatment and the business suffers from lower employee morale and engagement.

The business and the world change so fast, you simply cannot make sound judgments based on the mindset shaped decades ago. Either assessing people or situation, in order to allow a correct assessment, the guard has to be lowered and in order to understand correctly, you really need the acumen and power to probe in very deep level, have a strong tool such as critical thinking into the hands of the assessor, which holds the capacity to allow you a much deeper ingress into the heart of problems, careful deliberation, examination, and testing of assumptions, and consideration of opposing views for shaping an objective view or solving problems effectively.

Critical thinkers apparently include reading between the lines; digging deeper about peoples’ mindset, attitude, and behavior: Within every human being, there are core ways of thinking that, when activated, genuinely and authentically unlock their maximum potential to create value. So the company would probably need to demonstrate that their method of selection based on their evaluation of 'mind-set' was related to the job, valid and reliable. From a people management perspective, if you want to create a truly high-performance team, you have to understand your people at the deep level, dig through their mindsets and discover their characters - “the diamond in the rough.” The thought process, attitude, behavior, and outcome need to be assessed objectively and cohesively, to truly understand the talented employee as a whole about “who they really are'' consistently. Insightful digital leaders and professionals with “discovery eyes” can see through the characters, assess attitude, discover potentials, and evaluate performance.

Many talent managers argue that the assessment of people is probably not a single construct, and is simply too vague and ambiguous and not measurable in any meaningful way- valid, reliable sense. The assessment should not only measure thinking, but also teach the person how to tap into their most powerful and brilliant modes of thinking anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances. Unleashing potential either for individuals or businesses is about how to discover the “raw” or innate abilities, and how to strengthen the strength to develop a unique set of competencies. Collectively, think critically and creatively, to reprogram collective minds with new mentalities, norms and behaviors to unlock business performance.

Critical thinking is to apply the objective or rational analysis and evaluation of people or issues to either make judgments or decisions: There is a different talent requirement to fit in different positions, and organizations have their own talent strategy. Each organization must be able to articulate clearly what constitutes “talent.” and how to use talent wisely. Business leaders keep pondering: How can you evaluate the right people with the right mindset, capabilities, skills, how shall you assess evaluators as well? How do you define the right problem, the complexity level of problems, and how can you solve them in better ways? They need to apply critical thinking to do the objective or rational analysis and evaluation of people or issues objectively. It involves multidimensional thinking, multiple smart processes to evaluate people and problems impartially.

There is a need to apply critical thinking to evaluate the performance of employees in a more objective and continuous way. Skill assessment is important to ensure seamless strategy management. Assess job fit or competencies as they relate to performance is part of human capital management. Getting input from a broad range of personalities and cognitive differences of people on the particular matter. Critical thinking is the process with reasoned consideration of evidence, context, conceptualizations, methods, criteria, and rational analysis and evaluation of people or issues to either make judgments or decisions. Study people's performance via assessments, utility analysis and other methods which help companies evaluate the value they are getting from their people.

People are the most important asset, but often the weakest link in the business. The real critical thinking far outweighs the conventional critical thinking techniques, such as reason, logic, calculation, and conscious weighing of expected outcomes, etc. It’s important to apply critical thinking to fill out cognitive blind spots,  to see through character, to perceive potential, to make sound judgments, and ensure the right people are put into the right positions to solve right problems effectively.

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