“Unpuzzling Innovation - Mastering Innovation Management in a Structural Way“ Tuning: Innovative Culturist

Culture is defined as "the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another."

Digital is the age of innovation. And innovation is what leads to differentiation. There are many ways to differentiate and, therefore, there are many ways to pursue innovation. 

The purpose of the book “Unpuzzling Innovation - Mastering Innovation Management in a Structural Way“ is to demystify innovation puzzles in a structural way. It’s time to celebrate New Year, it’s also the time for individuals and businesses to make resolutions and accelerate innovation.

 

Innovative Culturist       

Innovative-culturist Different cultures may have different thought patterns as our thinking is indeed shaped by our environment and our experiences, Culture is defined as "the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another." Culture is collective mindset, attitude, and behavior. Culture of an organization or our society remains a fingerprint and an identity of the entity. It’s a crucial element...

Innovativeculturist (ii) What a Change Agent most often does is to harness the skills, talent, drive, passion and enthusiasm for the whole organization and direct that to a unifying and shared goal for reaching the next level of business transformation. Businesses are like the switches connecting to the ever-expanding and dynamic digital ecosystem. Culture is collective mindset, attitude, and behavior. In today's work environment, it takes a lot of energy to break old habits

Innovative-culturist(III) Different cultures may have different thought patterns as our thinking is indeed shaped by our environment and our experiences, Culture is defined as "the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another." Culture is collective mindset, attitude, and behavior. Culture of an organization or our society remains a fingerprint and an identity of the entity. It’s a crucial element…

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.

Idealist Ultra-modern idealists are in demand to lighten up the dawn of the new era of change, choices, empathy, and people centricity, to make human progress cohesively, consistently and collaboratively.With exponential growth of information and emerging collaborative technologies, the business functional border, the company border, the industrial border, the geographical border, and even the profession border are blurred; indeed, the world becomes more...

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 to human progression.



"Unpuzzling Innovation" Amazon Order Link

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"Unpuzzling Innovation" iBook Order Link

"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Slideshare Presentation

"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Chapter 1 Innovation Classification

"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Chapter 2 Innovation Principles

"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Chapter 3 Digital Innovators

"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Chapter 4 Connecting Innovation Dots

"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Chapter 5 Digital Innovation Best & Next Practices

"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Chapter 6 Innovation Paradox

"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Chapter 7 Innovation Gaps and Pitfalls

"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Chapter 8 Innovation Measurement

"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Conclusion Mastering Innovation in a Structural Way

"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Quotes Collection I

"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Quotes Collection II

"Unpuzzling Innovation" Book Quotes Collection III

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Abilities of BoDs to Handle the "Shade of Grey"

BoDs need to develop a shared view of crucial issues, promote a deeper understanding of core systems, advise the business management to build transformative competencies, and improve the organizational maturity.

The corporate board directors assume the dual role of guidance and governance steering, whilst leaving the day-to-day leadership/management processes and practices in the hands of the C-level executives and holding them accountable in achieving performance outcomes. 

Fundamentally, the corporate board’s responsibilities include taking control of the softer issues such as strategic thinking of GRC, making good policy, setting risk appetite, etc. In practice, can BoDs gain an in-depth understanding of the shade of grey, make a positive influence, and steer their organization towards the right direction in the “VUCA” new normal?

Understanding the” shade of gray” enables the BoDs to make decisions at strategic level: The emergence of potential opportunities for exploring digital transformation is likely to follow the nonlinear patterns. To survive and thrive amid blurred territories, constant changes and unprecedented uncertainty, corporate leaders such as corporate boards should present multidimensional intelligence to understand the “shade of gray” for making strategic decisions to adapt to the digital new normal, in terms of “right, wrong or marginally right or wrong,” reclaim the right balance of chaos and order, process and creativity, standardization and flexibility, etc.

In order to make sound judgment and advise, today’s corporate board directors are open minded and inclusive to capture varying perspectives, gain empathy from another point of view, more flexible to share the “right” things with others, be open to “wrongs,” not necessarily real wrong, perhaps the complementary viewpoint to co-paint a big picture of the world with full spectrum of colors on it. The key to digitize the boardroom and deal with the “shape of gray,” is to integrate the next generation of leaders, tap into their way of looking at the world, solve problems with very collaborative working styles.

The good policies set by the corporate board help business managers balance control and autonomy: Policies are set at the board level, and it’s the communication from the top. The policies help businesses thrive within the massive gray area of digital management when they are based on the purpose of what value the organization delivers to the customers and supported by appropriate systems, technologies and support to the people. We do need to not just develop positive policies but also align attitude and actions with them. The BoDs share collective insight upon key issues, with ability to address the critical differences between governance and policy issues, practice board rejuvenation processes etc, enable business management to balance control and autonomy.

Both businesses and the world become over-complex, hyper-connected, extremely uncertain and ambiguous than ever. Paradoxically, even the rules, which are made by humans come in for questioning, the governance rules include, but not limited to improving the functioning and transparency of the company, its business strategy, and management performance. Either setting good policies or making decisions at the board level, the effectiveness of strategic decision making has to weigh in multiple factors and needs to search for profound business insight.

Corporate BoDs sets the risk appetite of the organization, etc: Business is still fundamentally looking at risk in a negative context but more often than not, risks and opportunities co-exist in today’s business dynamic. The real BoDs dilemma is that driving the business forward is extremely difficult. In terms of risk avoidance and the risk-tolerance culture, there is grey area in between, the key is balance. There are two types of risks: negative (loss of value, money, and business) & positive (opportunity to make money, expand the business, and create value). There are planning risks, operation risks, innovation risks, expansion risks or reputation risks, etc. Some risks can be quantifiable; others can only be approximated. To improve organizational resilience, corporate boards need to oversee business risks, give enough autonomy to the business to make its own decisions on taking or avoiding risks.

Digital transformation represents a break from the past, with a high level of impact and complexity. Building a risk intelligent board requires multidimensional thinking, asking profound questions, taking a periodic risk assessment; weighing on risk and reward, identifying both business risks and opportunities, and focusing on governance effectiveness. It’s important to evaluate how robust the organization's risk assurance systems are. BoDs do not manage risks but oversee risks, adapting risk context at point of analysis to identify the upside can make a significant impact on unlocking business growth potential, and ensure that management has put in place an effective risk-management process and a set of the best and next practices.

BoDs as senior leaders, need to adjust their attitude to see the full spectrum of colors, understand the “shade of gray,” embrace the seemingly paradoxical point of views in order to practice leadership holistically. They need to develop a shared view of crucial issues, promote a deeper understanding of core systems, advise the business management to build transformative competency, and improve the organizational maturity.

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From information Savvy to Innovation Blossom

The power of information management is to deal with the mountain of information with both technology and human know-how, converting information into invaluable knowledge and catalyze innovation.

The most powerful and differentiating asset in all of today's businesses is information. Information does not live alone but permeates into everywhere in the business. 

Thus, the value of information is not isolated. In fact, all forward-looking organizations across vertical sectors declare they are in the information management businesses. Focusing on the information aspect of the role in the context of the business is part of the digital transformation.

Information drives digital awareness of the business new normal: Information is situated between data and knowledge. In the human context, information drives awareness. In a business scope, there are some of the important bits and bytes of information needed to forecast a new market, an emerging technology trend, or a business growth opportunity. Information can also trigger a sense of confidence, confirmation, validation, and verification. The value of information is to empower the business with real-time insight across the organization in ways never possible before. So information-based forecasting is crucial to bring both insight and foresight of the business, to help the organization align their business reality with digital strategy, develop the future perspective, bring people together in a common and committed effort, and move people in the right direction.

The digital paradigm arises out of abundant information and new knowledge. Organizations can harness the power of information to provide the business with a more fact-based vision of where to aim and how to get there. With these business insights, organizations can acquire the ability to reshape products, services, and customer engagement, reinforce the digital characteristics of the business such as enlightenment and people-centricity, discover unexpected connections between the business and its rich environment, and shape the future together.

Information Technology acts more as a conductor than a constructor for “doing more with innovation”: Information Management makes information available and useful for providing innovative ideas to either grow the business or delight customers. Information is one of the most time-sensitive pieces to the digital innovation puzzle. Information catalyzes innovation; and innovation is production, assimilation, and exploration of a value-added novelty in business, economic, and social environment. The art and science of Information Management are to optimize its usage, and conduct an information-mature, high-innovative and customer-centric digital organization to achieve its full potential.

Behind the scenes, information management is the crucial piece of solving the innovation puzzle by optimizing the value of information while minimizing risks. The quality of information is crucial in understanding the health and well-being of the firm's innovation efforts. The art of possible is achieved by building innovation capabilities because breakthroughs and transformational innovations are not something every business can accomplish, you have to systematically develop and sharpen those abilities which cannot be built overnight.

Shift the “bits and bytes” talk to strategic conversation to improve decision effectiveness: Information applies to the context and environment in which decisions are made. The science of information management is to optimize its usage, refine information into knowledge and business insight and achieve its value. Information based conversations are continuous. Information, with the inclusiveness of data as input, is the primary driver of decisions. There is a pervasive appreciation throughout the enterprise, particularly executive-level management, for adequate, accurate and timely information management as a basis for decision-making.

Foresight is an ongoing conversation. Digital leaders have to keep evolving and gaining new and broader views. The power of information management is to deal with the mountain of information with both technology and human know-how, converting information into invaluable knowledge. If the information is unavailable, inaccurate, lost, stolen, or compromised, it will hinder the achievement of business goals and even mislead the business in the wrong direction.

The responsibility of modern information management is to provide information accessibility and availability, ensure transparency and visibility, enable trust and reliability, and offer integrated information lifecycle management solutions to capture business insight and create a cohesive structure that continually delivers what the business needs and takes further steps to maximize business potential.

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“12 CIO Personas: The Digital CIO’s Situational Leadership Practices” Summary: Innovator & Intrapreneur

The digital CIOs have to wear different colors of hats and master multiple leadership personas and management roles effortlessly.

This book “12 CIO Personas: The Digital CIO’s Situational Leadership Practices” is the extensive brainstorming and logical content expansion of my book “CIO Master: Unleash the Digital Potential of IT,” to reimagine and reinvent CIO leadership via practicing multitudes of digital influence. The important thing is that CIOs as the top leadership role must have a strong mindset, a unique personality, and a clear idea of what needs to be done, yet creative enough to not hold the company back from growth. 

Regardless of which personality they have, digital CIOs need to be both transformational and situational, innovative and tactical, business savvy and technology insightful, communication-effective and operation-efficient.

Innovator & Intrapreneur 

Intrapreneur Intrapreneur CIO leaders with ownership mentality can articulate the strategic rationale behind the venture and apply technology in new ways to stay ahead of competition and industry. With abundant information and emergent digital technologies, IT is a key component to shape the digital mindset of the business and to re-imagine “what is possible” to unleash business potentials.

IT Innovation IT leadership needs to shift from command-control to consultative style, leading by participating and questioning. Intrapreneurship is about creating a new venture from within an established company to look for changes and explore new opportunities. Many IT organizations become the change department of their company and they have to become the innovation engine of the business as well. Intrapreneur CIOs need to be dynamic people with vision, openness,...

Intrapreneur (II) Practicing entrepreneurship in IT starts with the outlier visionary digital leadership, building the innovative culture - the collective attitude to experiment better ways to do things. Contemporary CIOs have multiple personas, "Chief Innovation Officer," and “Chief Intrapreneur Officers,” are the most pertinent titles for CIOs to fit the digital leadership role in running IT as a business. Companies are recognizing that IT is roughly coupled...

Intrapreneurship Practicing intrapreneurship starts with tuning the digital mindset of IT leaders and professionals. IT organizations play a critical role in the organization’s digital transformation. Many forward-looking IT organizations have built a partnership with startup companies to accelerate changes and deliver innovative and cost-effective business solutions. And high-performing enterprise IT organizations also leverage the startup culture for catalyzing...

Intrapreneur (III) The character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as think. - Ralph Waldo Emerson Intrapreneur-executive leadership is an emergent trend, if entrepreneurship is to look for changes, deploy it as an opportunity, then, intrapreneurship is about creating new venture from within an established company-

Modern organizations have their own sophistication with silo functions, the sea of information, and the pool of talent. The CIO is an inherently cross-functional role, to bridge the business and IT; the data and insight, the business’s today and tomorrow. The digital CIOs have to wear different personas and master multiple leadership and management roles effortlessly. They need to lead at the strategic level for conducting a complex digital orchestra; they should be handy managers to plumbing information and keep it flow smoothly; they also have to be like diligent gardeners, to build a unique IT landscape via tuning technology, removing waste, nurturing culture, and empowering people.

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"Ignore" Quotes & Thoughts

"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 “Ignore” quotes in “Digital Master.”

Past is behind us-many ignore it, some repeat it. But the wise learn from it.

Often, lack of objectivity is caused by the narrow lens, see the tree, but miss the forest; know the part, but ignore the whole; take a snapshot, but ignore the dynamic.

Because innovation comes with a foresight to envision a need that others overlook or ignore and a willingness to forge ahead to satisfy visions, in spite of a risk of failure. Discovery is 'the journey of life' as each day we discover something previously unknown to us.

The word "Discovery" refers to "Knowledge,” or more precisely, insight, you discover something others ignore, or you take the path without just following through others’ footsteps.

For some companies, it is enough to view an enterprise through the process lens and virtually ignore the information lens. For others, it is essential to view an enterprise through the information lens and virtually ignore the process lens.

Sometimes, metrics motivate people to game the data, rather than make real achievement; encourage mediocrity, rather than creativity; or the metrics only tell part of the story but ignore the full pictures, etc.

However, with status quo and inflated ego, often leaders feel that they can only be the solution when in fact they are actually the problem in some situations. They ignore the soft factors or invisible elements in effective problem-solving, just getting them to consider the list of intangibles would be a breakthrough.

Nowadays change comes so fast, when business leaders or managers are comfortable with the status quo, they often miss the big picture and become complacent. They ignore the sign that their business is in danger, because they get used to reacting, not being proactive, or lack an effective governance system or mechanisms to test it.

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Paces of Digital Transformation

The digital transformation is likely to follow non-linear patterns, with high intensity and hyper diversity.

Change is a fact of life. Nowadays, change is intensive, shouldn’t be just some random business initiatives, it needs systematic planning, it has to enable cohesive teamwork and build coherent business competency. Human society is forced to "grow out" of a paradigm because of dynamic changes in the physical world or other major shifts such as technology breakthroughs. 

Therefore, business leaders today should navigate through velocity, uncertainty or ambiguity in a dynamic business environment and internalize changes effectively. Change is dynamic and it’s in small adaptations that tilt scales, but also in big paradigm shifts that rebuild the scales.

The pace of digital paradigm shifts is quickening: Change has many causes, there are different types of changes: incremental changes and radical change, people change, process change, or technology change, etc. Fundamentally, there are two reasons to pursue change: Become better at what you do, or become able to do something differently. Any change that doesn't reduce the friction people experience in doing their jobs will be perceived as misdirected. Becoming better means removing obstacles or overcoming barriers, getting the “better version” of self or getting things done smoothly. Doing something differently means fundamental reinventing business model or retooling that may call for different people as well as different processes.

The pace of digital paradigm shifts is quickening. Change starts with a "sense of urgency" which can only come from top management who can capture the signal for changes now, reboot mindsets, leverage tailored management approaches to fit specific circumstances. You cannot deliver value without "de-complexitizing" and making transparent on what is being delivered and how or what is being delivered. It’s important to retool processes, train staff with digital fluency to solve critical business problems, proactively anticipate business value delivery with accelerated speed.

The pace of small adaptations is quickening aggregating to bigger shifts in scales quicker than previously: Change is inevitable, adaptation is faster if made with the full involvement of people in organizational change. Up to the next level of digital transformation, businesses need to aggregate their efforts, scale up their best and next practices, adapt faster to grasp organizational opportunities for marketing expansion, shaping unique business competency, building up a transformative change momentum. Methodologically, implementing a large scale change requires a buy-in and push from upper management. Once there is support from them, then it becomes easy to get that change implemented and scale up seamlessly.

In practice, to scale up, making a paradigm shift does not always mean to make "big plans" or "blueprint,” but starting from cross boundary communication and collaboration. Organizations approach the flow zone when the positions in its hierarchy have clear and accountable tasks, ideas are shared and managed effectively. Create liaison and business partnership, figure out what the business needs, share unique business insight as to what capacity can provide, retool management processes to model powerful collaboration, and ensure that the business capacity plans are in line with the corporate direction to achieve the well-defined business goals.

The pace of exploration is quickening renewing in a multidimensional manner: Digital organizations are the dynamic systems that are able to re-configure their own structure and change their own behavior during the execution of its adaptation to environmental changes. The key factor to the digital paradigm shift has been the endless self-exploration and self-renewal in intellectual, emotional, material, or spiritual dimensions that need to co-evolve together. Forethoughtful digital leaders understand where and how you can and should improve to get the biggest effect and scale up across the digital ecosystem effortlessly. However, for those lagging organizations, the ecosystems have evolved without much attention or planning.

Emerging technology tools and abundant information allow a company to speed up and move into a more advanced stage of digital exploration. They help to set trends and models that work best to meet the business goals which are needed before new schemes and designs are created and agreed upon across the business. Within system engineering, self-adaptive concepts are applied in order to control system risks that evolve due to dynamics and variation. The purpose of self-assessment, self-adaptation, self-organizing and self-improvement performance cycle is about inspiring change, nurturing growth mindset, building trust, and encouraging creativity for unlocking the superconscious state of the digital organization.

Digital means increasing the pace of change and continuous digital disruptions. The digital transformation is likely to follow non-linear patterns, with high intensity and hyper diversity. Business leaders should look forward and actively position their business in the right place to take full advantage of opportunities and risks. At the high maturity level, organizations have to stretch out in every business dimension for driving the full-fledged digital transformation. It is an overarching approach that has to dig underneath the surface of businesses and take a structural way to integrate both hard and soft business elements to build the long-term organizational competency.

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“100 Creativity Ingredients - Everyone’s Playbook to Unlock Creativity Inspiration": Innate Creativity

Creativity is indispensable because it’s about thinking beyond conventional wisdom, and creating new knowledge.

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.      

    

  Innate-creativity

Inner-coherence How creativity as an innate process to generate ideas and manifest itself in each of us is unique, and then such interlinks often fuel new thoughts, perspectives, creativity, and imagination to spark the abundance of creativity. Creativity is a complex, multidimensional thought process, it is infused with an inner cohesiveness and comes from a vision of uniqueness.

InnateCreativeLogic Creativity is the wings of our mind, a constructive disruption, and a flash of insight. Creativity is not lack of logic. Creative logic is divergent and often nonlinear; understand things from different angles, and solve problems in different ways. Creative minds with cognitive differences are good at asking thought-provoking questions, bringing fresh perspectives, connecting unusual dots, and releasing positive energy. Creative expansion...

UniqueCreativity Creativity is full of colors and has many dimensions, with multifaceted truth and myth, manifold knowledge and incredible imagination. Creativity has many faces, the creative thinker is unique. Creative personality seems to be more colorful and paradoxical. Analogically, creativity is like a color spectrum, there are commonalities that are relevant to all colors which reflect the spectrum of light. Such a metaphor connects the dot back to nature...

Indispensable Creativity is indispensable because it’s about thinking beyond conventional wisdom, and creating new knowledge. Creativity is an innate process to create novel ideas. The collective creativity converges with the concept of innovation that is the management discipline to transform innate ideas and achieve its business value. Digital is the age of innovation. Organizations starve for creativity and thrive with innovation because they are differentiated...

Inner-creativity Every person has the ability to be creative, set aside time daily, weekly or monthly and truly take a step back to reflect and exercise to flesh out their “creativity” muscles. True creativity has an inner origin and “self” driven. It keeps surfacing from within and keeps expressing and flowing. It simply a thought process to generate novel ideas. The interaction between what is within us (the Self), and how we project to the exterior world is the...

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with about #7600th 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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"Upfront" Thoughts and Quotes

The business knows what good ideas are, what has been done before, and can evaluate the ideas. Also upfront (pre-ideation), you need to agree on next steps and who will be responsible for the follow-up.

"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 ”Upfront” quotes in “Digital Master.”

To put another way, autonomy or self-management is an emerging digital theme. Therefore, it’s important to lay out the ground rules upfront as a team, make a real shift from micromanagement to macro-management, set clear goals and measurement to guide the team without over controlling.

The quickest way to learn something is to admit upfront that we don't know when we don't. Transparency and simplicity go together, thinking fast (Intuition) and thinking slow (analytics) need to go together in order to make a sound judgment.

The business knows what good ideas are, what has been done before, and can evaluate the ideas. Also upfront (pre-ideation), you need to agree on next steps and who will be responsible for the follow-up.

If you understand upfront by doing the right strategic questioning, you can later go back and ask if you achieved the purpose of the information that had been set out to attain.


Spend the time upfront organizing and unifying the data you collect across systems and services, so you can build common performance analytics tools that allow you to spend their time investigating data-based performance results.

Change is unavoidable. There is often no shortcut for change. It should be made incrementally. It could be stirred up by the executive management, but needs to be embraced by all stakeholders. It should also be purposeful and needed. All departments have to have the stake in it. Their buy-ins should be gained upfront to mitigate resistance.

Enterprise Architecture as a type of upfront analysis would not only let you measure the impact of Enterprise Architecture, it would also help you steer the program to drive maximum benefits in the right direction.

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Innovation, Improvement, Investment Indicators

The well-selected performance indicators should be based on the alignment of strategy management and performance management as well as the comprehension of decision-management and performance management continuum.

Performance management is not an isolated management practice, but a holistic discipline to evaluate multidimensional business value. Managing business performance means translating strategy into operational terms, and mapping collective goals to individual tasks, to make the strategy everyone’s everyday job and a continual process. 

The effective performance measurement approach should enable business managers or professionals to define a set of key performance indicators, keep track of the progress made toward the predefined set of goals in a consistent manner. There are seemingly pairs of “opposite” aspects of performance indicators and measurements: objective vs. subjective, qualitative vs. quantitative, leading vs. lagging indicators, etc.

Objective vs. subjective: You can only manage what you measure. Performance measurement and management is both art and science. In modern socially responsible companies, performance assessment has a human component, which could be subjective. Because businesses today need to break down “we always do things like that” mentality, inspire creativity and alternative ways to do things. That means, to evaluate staff performance, it isn't just about “WHAT” you have achieved, but also about “HOW” you have achieved it. If your work involves a standardized process where you have to follow a procedure to get to a desired outcome, then performance is highly measurable. If the work demands creative problem-solving, there is more than one road to an outcome, measurement could be subjective.

Some say, Performance Management is always subjective, controversial, and contentious. The more meaningful and important the thing we want to assess, the harder it is to measure objectively. The performance evaluations should be a combination of both an objective and a subjective measurement. When the subjective measurement is included, it becomes a chance for the manager and the employee to start a two way communication. As the “HOW” aspect is unavoidably subjective, because it stems from perceptions. Besides “hard numbers,” there are “soft aspects” for assessing performance, so the good guidance needs to be formulated and deployed on consistent measurement.

Qualitative vs. quantitative: You can only manage what you measure. Without measurements, it can be hard to tell whether attempted improvements make the situation better or worse. From a business management perspective, quality is a function of scope, budget, and resources. Quantity is about workloads, productivity, products/services delivered, etc. From a data management perspective, by “quality data” – it means clean, organized, actionable data from which to extract relevant information and insight. The qualitative measurement intends to improve organizational effectiveness, the quantitative measurement helps management continue improving business efficiency.

The scorecard should have pre-built key performance indicators that reflect best practice measurement areas across the organization holistically. It is an effective tool to enable executives and leadership teams to improve business management via quantifiable and qualitative data. Executive scoreboard needs to be information rich for helping business leaders make effective decisions and enhance data-based communication in order to adapt to the fast-paced business new normal.

Leading vs. lagging indicators: The concept of leading and lagging indicators, relies on an understanding of the cause-effect relationships between Key Performance Indicators in the different perspectives. The lag and lead indicator concepts "warn" businesses that there is a multitude of relationships between KPI and there are multifaceted perspectives on different indicators. If the indicator allows you to take actions prior to having a bad result? If the answer is yes, it is a lead indicator. If it is no, it is a lag indicator. An indicator can be a lead for one person or team and a lag for another.

Learning and growth KPIs are “lead indicators.” Investment in new information technology provides new capabilities and competencies. Leadership and talent training are “lead factors.” So investments in leadership training affect the corporate culture and values, especially on innovation and empowerment. Financial KPIs are "lag indicators." In any time period, when evaluating the KPIs, the financial results are seen as the result of activities in prior periods. By clarifying the concepts such as leading indicators and lagging indicators, organizations can develop strategy maps, execute and measure things holistically and effectively.

Select the right set of indicators of improvement, innovation, and investment, and measure them effectively. It's important to collect the right data and measure things in the right way, for motivating teams to achieve better business results; for helping connect contextual dots and focusing on the overall business objectives as well. The well-selected performance indicators should be based on the alignment of strategy management and performance management as well as the comprehension of decision-management and performance management continuum.

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Critical Success Factors

Digital management is fundamentally an iterative cycle to design, develop, scale and optimize business competency.

The digital business today is not just working within the industry, but permeating a cross-ecosystem which is dynamic, continuous and interactive. An information-abundant, hyper-competitive economic environment makes the world more complex than ever, businesses can no longer perform better without deliberate planning and dedicated implementation. 

An organization of today or the future needs to be organized in such a way that it is a part of the modern world. There are different critical success factors and there are a few important things that will be important in interdisciplinary management.

First, it is gaining the knowledge necessary to understand macro environmental Critical Success Factors and manage holistic digital ecosystems: Organizations today are like switches hyper-connected into the ever-evolving business ecosystem, lattice or otherwise, touch points, for improving information flow, idea and knowledge sharing. It’s important to gain an in-depth understanding of macro environmental Critical Success Factors, such as technological, political, and economic, etc. Nowadays technological advancement is often the major force of continuous disruptions and also a critical factor to drive transformative change. The political climate is important to set policies and give the business a “warm up” handshake or proper push. The economic factor is significant because an organization needs to understand the market in which it will be selling its products and services. To run a high performance and highly innovative business, the hyper-connected business ecosystem can create insight and take advantage of all sources of creativity in a more open way.

With ecological insight, digital organizations can explore the new opportunities beyond their own company, treat customers, channel partners, suppliers, and varying industry ecosystem participants as active digital agents who can brainstorm and share thoughts and ideas regardless of their physical location. The leading organizations can apply a holistic management discipline to create momentum, see change as an opportunity, break down outdated rules or standards and lead digital transportation proactively. The businesses can only be re-invented right after their struggling industry being rebooted, the whole business ecosystem needs to communicate, negotiate and cooperate with each other to create synergy.

Identify management Critical Success Factors so the digital organization as a whole has to function coherently in order to achieve high-performance business results: There are different views of business evolution. The most commonly useful view includes influencers, drivers, business models, and initiatives for change, etc. It’s important to explore management Critical Success Factors such as people, process, technology, etc, and handle complexity, bring together purpose, usage, aesthetics, and more to create an environment to suit the purpose. For example, Information Technology becomes so critical, many times, it is a determining success factor for the long-term organizational strategy to achieve business growth and sustainability.

One of the problems with views in the enterprise today is that they are not fully integrated and completely coherent. It’s important to understand complex business problems via multidisciplinary perspectives such as socio-cultural, socio-technical, socio-economic, just to name a few, etc. To enforce critical success factors, organizations need to keep re-defining, re-naming, re-interpreting, and reinventing the enterprise components and their relationships, and apply interdisciplinary management methodologies and practices to drive transformative changes.

Temporal Critical Success Factors are a set of critical factors knitted into tailored solutions to overcome complex organizational problems or challenges: Organizations generally consist of varying intersecting and interacting systems that can be perceived through the lenses of sociology, psychology, technology, anthropology, and economics, etc. It is about applying a system's lens to understand how the critical success factors affect the business system, and then, manage the complex system and the people of the complex system as the organic living thing.

It’s important to define a set of Temporal Critical Success Factors knitted into tailored solutions to overcome complex organizational challenges. Digital leaders should empower people with effective tools, motivate people to explore growth opportunities, understand the learning curves, seek additional knowledge and experience, develop problem-solving competency, and truly make change happen and sustain its impact.

Digital management is fundamentally an iterative cycle to design, develop, scale and optimize business competency. It needs to break down silos, update the “divide and conquer” methodologies, and take a holistic, integral, and iterative approach to go digital. Organizations can identify and enforce the variety of success factors for adapting, optimizing, innovating and achieving the desired effect under specified performance standards and conditions, and build digitally competent organizations continually.

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Irrelevant, Inconsistent, Incoherent

A viable digital organization can deliver impressive business outcomes and improve its performance by taking continuous digital practices to keep things relevant, consistent, coherent, improve manageability and develop business competencies.

It is a continuously changing world with hyper-connected and interdependent “VUCA” new normal. No organizations across vertical sectors can afford to stick to its old ways of problem-solving. If the organization understands itself in relation to its context, it should be able to determine whether it requires designing and changing organizational structure to become viable. To accelerate business maturity, a highly complex and dynamic organizational system needs to be elaborated in the design-led management effort.

 In reality though, most organizations today still get stuck at the low level of business maturity due to irrelevant information, inconsistent communications/actions, as well as incoherent processes/capabilities. They cannot move fast enough in the digital era, becoming irrelevant due to outdated management disciplines, overly rigid processes, or enlarged skill gaps.

Irrelevant information: Business operates in the real world, and the real world is muddy and chaotic, with exponential growth of information and increasing pace of change. Information permeates everywhere in the business and the data environment is often fraught with inconsistency. Different information is required at different points in the decision and operational delivery chain. You will not be able to make effective decisions or understand the performance of your company or measure it without good quality data or information. If information is irrelevant - unavailable, inaccurate, lost, stolen, or compromised, it will hinder the achievement of business goals and even mislead the business in the wrong direction. To dig into the root cause, incoherent or broken business processes result in significant information inconsistencies or irrelevance which causes decision ineffectiveness.

Information is one of the most invaluable assets of the company, but you should always keep in mind, information only has a value when it has been used effectively. By “quality data,” it means clean, organized, or actionable data from which to extract relevant information and insight. Information is scattered and needs to be collected, processed and refined into business insight. Data cleansing, transformation, and sorting are vital in the data world and Data Management lifecycle is the overall business process of aligning the use of information through information accuracy and assurance management. Information is the gold when it has been used to make an informed management decision to develop the right product, enter a new market, explore a new channel or having the information to be able to conduct day to day operations which have an output value, etc. Incoherent, redundant, or broken business processes result in significant information inconsistencies. Information synchronization is the process of establishing consistency among data as well as the continuous harmonization of the data over time.

Inconsistent communications/actions: There are both “hard” communication barriers such as out of date procedure or practices, inefficient processes, and “soft” communication pitfalls such as internal politics, bureaucracy, silo, poor or inconsistent communication down or across the organization, etc. Words alone are only crude tools of communication and terribly inefficient at conveying the feeling of a message. Their interpretation is quite varied from person to person and when overused or not complemented with actions, words quickly become rhetoric or noise.

To strengthen communication like, it should categorize what kind of communication bottlenecks existing and which communication gaps should be closed. The management needs to clarify: How would you describe the prevailing business mood? What are the needed changes in communication, behavior, process, accessibility, or engagement approach? Do you inspire open conversations about the work environment? Leaders are real when they can openly admit when change is needed. Actions are incredibly clear and very consistently interpreted and send messages far more efficiently and effectively than any amount of words.

Incoherent processes/capabilities: In many organizations with lower-level of maturity, the business is the sum of pieces, such as silo functions, incoherent processes, overly rigid hierarchy, fractal structure, or bureaucratic management style, not running as a premium whole. Traditional organizational management with siloed processes often causes bureaucracy which is criticized for its inflexibility, inefficiency, silo, stagnation, unresponsiveness, or lack of innovation. Incoherent management processes further cause culture friction and decelerate performance. Inconsistent process management is often caused by lack of policies and governance procedures that define processes, and lack of talented people to streamline and optimize processes.

Progressive leaders should, in fact, take the lead in introducing process management into the company and integrate processes across organization. The goal of process management or procedure optimization is to eliminate unnecessary complications, improve operations to reduce the burden on the company. The simplified, end to end processes enable speed of execution and enable the organization to act in a coherent manner. To improve the organizational maturity, what can be unifying is looking at each function in the enterprise as a subsystem and then finding a unified means of looking at the essence. When productivity is low and change is stifled, further analytics is needed for an understanding of the cause whether it is due to the change curve, inefficient processes or procedures. It’s important for business leaders and professionals to think about the systemic wholeness and take a logical management approach, keep renewing their knowledge, and develop differentiated business competencies to shape an ambidextrous digital organization.

The business will become more successful when the corresponding learning curve has reduced uncertainty to the point where the information can be synchronized, organizational interdependence can be structured, and the strategic synergy can be created. Digital organizations today should be a complex but flexible ecological system starting to appreciate business attributes such as readiness, autonomy, open communication, people centricity, and multifaceted partnerships. Trying to fix the wrong cause of a problem will waste time and resources, increase anxiety, and cause chaos. A viable digital organization can deliver impressive business outcomes and improve its performance by taking continuous digital practices to keep things relevant, consistent, coherent, improve manageability and develop business competencies.

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Book “Digital Capability - Building Lego-Like Capability into Business Competency “ Insight: Innate-Integral Capability

The value of contemporary business is multilateral, the value-based management needs to be driven by concepts like multidimensional collaborative value or collective advantage and multi-layer ROIs.

The purpose of the book “Digital Capability - Building Lego-Like Capability into Business Competency “ is to provide an insightful understanding of assessing, developing, and managing organizational capabilities in a structural way. The organization’s competency is based on a set of cohesive capabilities and how fast and effective they can be built upon. 

The high-mature organizational capability is the digital business differentiator, to keep the business unique, competitive, and innovative, to improve business maturity significantly. The capability views enable dot connections and help the business identify “actuality, capability, and potentiality,” build Lego-like capabilities into core business competency and improve the success rate of strategy execution and overall business maturity.

      Innate-Integral Capabilities

Innate-Integral Often, capability cannot be transferred because of the degree of organizational learning, unique culture ingredients or management expertise that the organization goes with.The characteristics of digital businesses are dynamic, volatile, uncertain, and hypercompetitive. Business capabilities are what abilities or competencies an organization has or need and they are the resources required for achieving a certain mission or purpose of the business.

InnateCoherence High performers seek to make multidimensional business value they create visible to their internal and external stakeholders and deliver premium products/services/ solutions consistently.Consider digital organizations as the coherent, self-organized but interlaced and hyper-connected ecosystem, coherence is about logic and consistency. “Business logic" comprises business rules that express business policy, workflow or information flow from one person..

Innate-integral-capability To keep the business unique, competitive and innovative, the objective assessment of business capability is important to design, build, and preserve core competency even as management expands and redefines the business.The digital era upon us is about exponential growth of information, increasing speed of change and continuous disruptions. How successfully the organization can handle digital disruption depends on how fast and capable they can adapt...

Inner-interdependence Either digital organizations or modern societies are loosely defined as dynamic entities and the hub of cultures within a geographical location.The digital business today is not just working within the industry, but permeating a cross-ecosystem which is dynamic, continuous, interdependent and interactive. Imagine the organizational complexity that comes in due to very characteristics such as less structure, rules and regulations, diversity, volatility,...

Invaluable The value of contemporary business is multilateral, the value-based management needs to be driven by concepts like multidimensional collaborative value or collective advantage and multi-layer ROIs. Organizations across industrial sectors face hyper-competition and continuous disruptions. Running a successful business is about creating value to stakeholders. Business value is multi-faceted, not all business value is directly related to ROI.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with about #7600th 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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Quotable Thought: "Urgent"

“Delegate”: The decisions should be made for the whole team. The remedy is to question why it is urgent and dismantle that. Unfortunately, Urgent/Unimportant tasks are often political.

"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 ”Urgent” quotes in “Digital Master.”


Certainly when you get a group of managers together and allow them to establish a culture, the culture they build will be very hard to change, even when the need for change is urgent and obvious. And by the nature of cultures, the need for change is rarely obvious until it is urgent.

It has worked to remove the logjam on multiple occasions; then, phase (or time-manage) is using the Important/Urgent decision space, where actions are ‘Do it, Defer (non-urgent), Delegate (unimportant) or Dump.” This decision matrix is good most of the time but it does sometimes fail.


So the business managers can embrace uncertainty and manage complexity by focusing on information adoption to ensure the right people get the right information to make the right decisions for learning lessons from the past, diagnosing dysfunctional management patterns, making continuous improvement or preventing upcoming risks, and delicately balance and re-balance the results toward urgent, but hard to predict outcomes.

A well defined IT prioritization roadmap helps IT leaders sustain the technological vision, enable business strategy, take commitment and discipline to stay focused on the real priorities of the business instead of being distracted by what seems to be more urgent at any given moment.

With the overwhelming growth of information and rapid change, IT touches both hard business processes and soft human behavior. Keeping IT dynamic is crucial for adapting to unforeseen urgent changes in the business or other fields.

“Defer” tasks ultimately become urgent. You ideally want to do them before that happens. A good way is to start the task as a background task.

“Delegate”: The decisions should be made for the whole team. The remedy is to question why it is urgent and dismantle that. Unfortunately, Urgent/Unimportant tasks are often political.

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Characteristics of Initiatives

Developing a compelling strategic business case which describes the initiative’s benefits and costs flow is especially critical when an initiative is difficult to monetize. 

Digital enterprises are inherently complicated nowadays, with rapid changes and fierce competitions, organizations have to continue to build new business capabilities and “keep the lights on” by taking business initiatives and making solid deliveries consistently. 

Every business initiative is to solve a certain problem and achieve certain goals. There are strategic initiatives and tactical initiatives. The transition from a small initiative to demonstrate value to a completely integrated solution is a journey that continues as the organization's information needs continue to evolve with the business. Organizations have limited resources and budget, thus, it’s important to plan well, keep the “big picture” in mind and improve the success rate of business initiatives.

Initiative differentiation - can the business initiative differentiates the organization from its major competitors: Perhaps every business initiative has an “idea person,” a sponsor, and an implementer, etc. And behind many critical business initiatives, there are numerous points-of-view and reference points of varying stakeholders. For strategic business initiatives, a vision provides the guiding light and direction, if being implemented successfully, there is a significant impact on building differentiated business advantages. Thus, the management needs to check how the business initiative differentiates the organization from its major competitors? Are they competing for best quality, cost advantage or efficient value chain? Can their processes do what they promise? Without a clear vision and strategic planning, leaders often miss the big picture and become complacent or comfortable with the status quo.

Developing a compelling strategic business case which describes the initiative’s benefits and costs flow is especially critical when an initiative is difficult to monetize. That is, attaching believable dollar values to identified benefits flows. To manage a balanced business initiatives portfolio, a formal business requirement initiatives checklist includes such as enterprise mission and stakeholder needs analysis, enterprise system requirement development and management. So the management can make tough choices upon - when you reap the quick win, when you focus on long-term growth. The goal is to build base, competitive, and differential business advantage.

Initiative popularity - can the initiative restore the organization to competitive parity by reversing erosion in employee/customer loyalty? The digital era is about people and innovation. Any business initiatives should be viewed as an "opportunity" for solving problems effectively, improving employee productivity, delighting customers, cutting costs or optimizing products/services/processes, and improving people centricity. It’s an importance of looking for business initiatives which will directly benefit external end customers, improve business competencies and in-turn bring in increased revenue.

In many organizations that get stuck at the lower level of maturity, silo mindset, cloudy vision, poor strategy, overly rigid business processes, low mature business capability, or disengaged employees, etc, are all causes of business erosions. To overcome the challenge, there is an investment that is needed and initiatives should be taken in order to achieve the business goal and build competitive advantage. Sometimes, when one business area has a popular product or service that can be used by another, business leaders can connect the dots to come up with new innovative solutions and amplify their business value, restore the organizational competitive parity and reach the premium level of digital maturity.

Initiative effectiveness- can the business initiative ensure the organization’s compliance with regulatory requirements, etc? Organizations today are inundated with the sea of information, overwhelmed with too many initiatives, and overloaded with operation and short term business concerns. Effective business initiatives require the highest risk-taking at a strategic value chain; including investments and manageability. Highly responsive organizations leverage effective risk management or compliance tools to monitor business initiatives & portfolio, alert the organization to risk conditions, and enable accountability and collaboration around changes impacting each firm.

However, in many organizations, much of risk and compliance is reactive in the sense that there is a lot of rushing around trying to fix problems after they have occurred. To improve organizational maturity, it’s important to set up governance initiatives in an organization for identifying those common risks which various stakeholders and actors in the organization have to deal in and aim to minimize; various rules and regulation the organization has to comply with in a holistic way, and all this in a composed fashion. To improve business effectiveness, keeping track of business activities is surely helpful in being proactive. It’s also important to focus on proactive planning, process optimization or rule updating for collaboration, accountability, and most importantly, integration.

There are functional initiatives and cross functional initiatives, quick win or long run focused initiatives, identifying what generates the most value for the company and expressing that in strategic objectives helps managers keep their eyes on what matters. Only initiatives that support the achievement of those objectives should be implemented. For the large scale of business initiatives, it’s important to establish a cross-functional team to involve multifaceted management, space and time are made to scope, plan, and execute in a structural way, and improve business maturity effectively.

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"Digital Gaps -Bridging Multiple Gaps to Run Cohesive Business” Analysis: Illogic & Ineffectiveness

Soft gaps often generate the deepest chasms and hardest challenges to drive people-centric digital transformation.

"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.

                       Illogic & Ineffectiveness 

Illogic & Intricacy The opposite of critical thinking is mindless thinking. There are many types of thinking. Many of them overlap with each other. They are all happening in the same sphere of influence of an individual human or groups of humans, or humans interacting with knowledge of the past, or connecting with some "super-conscious" field. Critical Thinking is the mental process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and.

“Irrational & Illogical” There are often multiple and inter-related dynamics behind complex problems, you need to look for patterns rather than isolating causes and integrating different pieces of the puzzle to come up with a holistic solution.Due to fast-paced change, the exponential growth of information, hyper-connectivity, and continuous digital disruptions, the problems facing businesses today turn to be over-complex, have a very wide scope, and are difficult…

Illogical Problem-solving thought processes and practices will not be simple for many of today’s complex problems and it takes an interdisciplinary approach to either frame the right problems and solve them effectively. Digital makes a significant impact on how we think, live, and work. There is a mix of old and new, physical and virtual, order and chaos. We are in a time of tremendous change, the dawn of the digital age, the path to the next level of...

Identify-Soft-Gaps Soft gaps often generate the deepest chasms and hardest challenges to drive people-centric digital transformation. Due to rapid changes, the exponential growth of information, and continuous disruptions, modern organizations are complex systems that tend to be non-linear and hard to predict the upcoming changes and there are both promises and perils on the way to go digital. Besides hard barriers such as outdated infrastructure, processes, or.

IneffectiveDecision There are many variables in complex decision making, there are tradeoffs you have to leverage, and there is no magic formula to follow. With exponential growth of information and frequent disruptions, decision and problem-solving in complex businesses is difficult due to various reasons such as uncertainty and ambiguity of business circumstances, lack of priority, unconscious bias, outdated knowledge, or scarcity of business insight, etc. Business...

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with about #7600th 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.


"Digital Gaps" B&N Order Link

"Digital Gaps" iBook Order Link

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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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"From-To" Digital Paradigm Shift

Digital transformation is a journey. There should always, at every turn, be a taste of better days, of continual improvement of retrospective action planning, incremental goal achieving, creative idea brainstorming, and effective change management. 

Complexity, velocity, ambiguity, etc, are the business new normal, leading business forward is extremely challenging because there are many distractions or disruptions on the way and there are so many things going on with a mixed bag of opportunities and risks. Therefore, top business leaders need to envision the future of the business, continue doing consolidation, integration, optimization, keep the business synchronized to ensure that every part of the organization operates in harmony to make a seamless digital paradigm shift.

From autocratic to autonomous organization: In the traditional business environment with an overly rigid hierarchy and silo mentality, many organizations are autocratic with “command & control” management style and top down one way communication only. Thus, they are perhaps fragile, get stuck with change inertia. To speed up and drive transformative change, it is critical to get democratization right, it will need to be thought through and "architected" from push power (autocratic) to pull power (democratic), and encourage autonomy. In practice, it evolves from capital centered structures to knowledge-centered structures, dissolution of rigid organizational hierarchies into self-managed relatively autonomous units that use local knowledge to address the unique market dynamism, and develop self management teams to unlock performance.

Alignment on key things is critical for autonomy at scale. The team should be as autonomous as possible, and the stakeholders should be aligned as well. People and cultures are inherently complex and intentional organizational structure design in this area will have a positive benefit for any organization. The autonomy of the enterprise is the one which provides the greatest effectiveness and efficiency, and depends, in large measure, on the nature and purpose of the enterprise. There is a symbiotic relationship between various teams across organizations which leads to realization of higher goals. It is also helpful to visualize concepts and relationships in relation to each other, this way of looking helps to appreciate that autonomy and alignment are not rivals but two faces of the same coin, where there is alignment, then autonomous actions ought to be possible while still aligning with an organization’s vision.

From complication to simplexity: Many traditional organizations are complicated and redundant, slow to change. Either at individual or business level, we should follow the “simplicity” principle to handle over-complex digital reality with “VUCA” characteristics -Velocity, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. There are hierarchical complexity, environmental complexity, information complexity, collaboration complexity, governance complexity, design complexity, productive complexity, value/cost/risk ratio complexity, etc. The art of digital management is not to complicate things, but to eliminate unnecessary complication, but encourage desired complexity.

The emergent digital characteristics include hyper-connectivity, hyper-diversity, hyper-dynamism. “Simplexity” is the pertinent portmanteau word mixing with two words "Simplicity," and "Complexity," which well-describes the digital new normal philosophically.“Less is more” needs to become the digital principle for tuning modern enterprise structure and design, to optimize complexity, improve business adaptability, responsiveness, flexibility, speed, and equilibrium. It’s a process of de-bureaucracy that simplifies and optimizes the business for reaching the next level of maturity.

From process driven to people centricity: People-centricity is a transcendent digital trait and the core of corporate strategy in today’s digital organizations. To make a smooth transition from running a mechanical process-driven organization to building an organic people centric business, the organizational managers need to accept that sustainable business success requires happy employees and satisfied customers, and that satisfied staff is more likely to satisfy customers. Organizations should focus on building people-centric business by leveraging the latest technologies to enforce cross-functional communication and collaboration. How you engage people will directly impact how their remuneration and performance management systems reinforce the organizational strategy.

An enterprise is never going to be architected and designed like the mechanical system. You have to look at the problem domain holistically and design a sociological organization and proactively plan the total enterprise ecosystem to either make a profit for shareholders or generate prosperity of constituencies. Running a business is an iterative problem solving continuum. People-centric problem-solving means that you have to involve customers and different stakeholders, listen to their feedback, involve them in both idea generation and process implementation, take different propositions and approaches to a problem or a new interpretation.

Digital transformation is a journey. There should always, at every turn, be a taste of better days, of continual improvement of retrospective action planning, incremental goal achieving, creative idea brainstorming, and effective change management. A high performance organization is a company that can align all critical elements of change seamlessly, quickly and safely assess all of the consequences of a possible change and devise effective plans to provide a combination approach to go digital confidently.

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