Practicing Prefund Leadership- Innovative, Inclusive, International

Leadership comes in all shapes and sizes today. It’s situational and unique, local and global, intuitive and informative.

The world has been interwoven through the internet and the latest digital technologies, any leadership role, needs to be better-rounded than to have a title of "logical," “global,” or "creative." Great leaders should be good at all of those characteristics. A logical mind can follow directions and take a step-wise approach; a creative mind can make a difference and connect the dots, a global mind can gain empathy and be more thoughtful. In brief, leadership today becomes more innovative, inclusive, and international to drive progressive changes and business transformation.

 
Being able to gain profound understanding of variety of differences and diversity of diversity: Nowadays, the business leaders must create an inclusive organization with every dip in the business lifecycle, from individual thinking to collective mind (culture); encourage different voices and unique viewpoints. Inclusive leaders facilitate and orchestrate a variety of differences such as cognitive differences, value differences, knowledge difference, cultural differences, etc, clarify the opportunity and articulate the vision, develop and manage the process of innovation, promote a healthy climate for creativity.

From a management perspective, the organizational inclusiveness efforts need to focus on cognitive differences, skills, abilities and the wealth of ideas since the value lies in the contributions of the individual to the organization. Leading companies appreciate the diversity of diversity such as cognitive differences, differentiated capabilities, diverse experiences, the spectrum of skills, complementary perspectives and personalities, as well as cultivate a collective habit to enjoy the delight of inclusion.

Be alert, diversity can create a lot of confusion and conflict if people cannot communicate effectively and are not well prepared for it or if the leaders are unaware of how to embrace inclusion and manage diversity seamlessly. Therefore, effective communication is important, as different perspectives, and fresh points of views lead to well-rounded ideas and solutions. Business leaders and professionals need to understand the value of harnessing the differences and proactively build inclusive teams and organizations. It’s meritocracy at its best – a highly diverse set of people collaborate seamlessly to represent the nature of how successful organizations work today.

Being willing to experiment, as a basis for then being able to think differently, independently, and globally: Adaptation is the approach to foresee the business dynamic, global trends, and prepare the best scenario to adapt to it. A global leader is a diplomat who has a global mindset involving a personal intention to focus on being global, with global leadership qualities such as tolerance of ambiguity, cultural cognition, learning agility, mastery of handling complexity, and the skills of communicating virtually and working across cultures. Developing global insight and foresight requires strategic thinking, systems thinking and forecasting capability. Global leaders are able to apply discovery thinking or the skills needed to both develop insights about emotional, economic, or functional customer needs and to create new options for meeting those needs. They then give people the voices, tools and experiences of how to effectively communicate even if they perhaps speak diverse professional languages, unify and understand each other with empathy, and build trust across these diverse cultures.

Understanding the people and the organization through an ecosystem lens, then makes it possible to allow the organization to explore digital in all directions, develop the company as a living thing, and perceive the business through multidimensional lenses such as the lenses of technology, sociology, psychology, anthropology, etc. Companies today need to understand the dynamic competitive landscape, find global ecosystem partners that can help the business succeed, orchestrate a broader beyond functional or business borders, and demonstrate the benefits to the ecosystem in ways that might have happened in the past but at a much faster rate with much broader impact in the digital era.

Being able to adapt, model and influence change, create, manage, and exploit at the broader scope: Many legacy businesses come with a legacy mindset, the old way to do the things, and lack the competency to spark innovation and progression. Changing the culture is the mindset, if you want an innovative culture, it’s important to empower innovators, hire, retain, and recognize innovators who can help the organization develop an open and optimal environment for innovation. Technically, innovation alignment requires continuous business optimization through a serious amount of positive communication whilst continuously looking for fluid functional structure, dynamic processes, tightening coordination and collaboration with business partners. Innovative leaders are able to apply discovery thinking or the skills needed to both develop insights about emotional, economic, or functional customer needs and to create new options for meeting those needs. Inspire team members to create a portfolio of new ideas, concepts and scenarios through 'exploratory thinking' methods and encourage them to take bold actions with a risk intelligent attitude.

Statistically, the innovation leader is not only a dreamer but also an action leader with 20% planning plus 80% action. They can recognize innovative ideas, fight for resources and political cover, connect ideas and teams together to deliver an innovative result are also critical to achieving innovation excellence. They are able to develop execution skills by managing uncertainty and approaching innovation projects as an experiment, testing ideas, and assessing results. Coach team members on innovation management practices and how to overcome the barriers to innovation. Innovation leaders must be strategic and must take a risk in order to discover new opportunities that would lead the correct path to achieve the art of possible.

Leadership comes in all shapes and sizes today. It’s situational and unique, local and global, intuitive and informative. There is no magic formula. The top leader’s influence is based on the courage to inspire, confidence to assert, wisdom to negotiate, and uniqueness to bridging. There are many ingredients and various factors you need to weigh in to reach up to the next level of maturity, and the society as a whole is advancing to the next stage of evolution.

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All Sorts of Ineffectiveness

Considering how awesome the synergy of a highly innovative organization could create, to make people happier, customers delightful and the business as a whole accelerating growth.

Even businesses step into the hyper-connected digital world, many business managers and professionals still apply old silo management mindsets to new ways of organizing, and this legacy of the old economy causes most of the organizations across vertical sectors today are process and control driven, those processes become inflexible and stifle changes. 

Also, lagging companies have an overly rigid organizational hierarchy, and outdated procedure, their business is still the sum of pieces rather than a holistic whole, having all sorts of barriers to changes and deficiencies that get their business stuck and go nowhere.

Ignorance: Digital is full of uncertainty, velocity, complexity, and ambiguity, ignorance of the unknown is a pitfall which could fail change or transformation effort. there is no prescribed change formula, or one size fits all change scenario. As businesses are different, people are different, the very goal behind each change initiative is also different. There are those who think logically, others focus on the bigger picture, and others are a lot more emotional in their decision-making.

Therefore, you have to be humble and realize there are many things you know you don’t know and perhaps even more which you don't know what you don't know. But it doesn’t mean you should just ignore the unknown, the positive leadership approach is to analyze circumstance objectively and even predict the future with a certain degree of accuracy, to prepare the “VUCA” new normal wisely. Ignore the trivial, but pay more attention to the significant details, to seek out knowledge, and address ignorance and the assumptions you make to minimize it.

Knowledge traps: Knowledge is important, but having a lot of knowledge about something can be a box that closes one's mind to innovation in that area. “Too much knowledge" in itself is not an impediment to the imagination, but failure to recognize how vastly ignorant you are at the same time leads to an arrogance that will not admit new thinking. Every individual, including the leader, has limited knowledge or viewpoint, openness is the most difficult thing to refresh your mind. Both willing and able to acquire various types of information begin with an understanding of purpose; what is it we want to achieve? Willingness to acquire additional information begins with acceptance you do not know enough to achieve your purpose; you recognize a gap in the knowledge you have and value in closing the gap.

To deal with knowledge trap smoothly, organizations today need to have an integral information and knowledge management discipline and take the multifaceted approach to handle knowledge transferring, understanding and driving the change of knowledge stock at minimal cost in a way that fits the strategy of the business the best. With effective information and knowledge management, collectively, they can amplify their knowledge power to solve business problems

Groupthink: Teams work because they bring different perspectives and information to the table. They help to balance out the biases from which they all suffer. They help generate more of everything (viable alternatives, criteria, etc,), all of which is shown to improve the quality of decisions. However, the real problem with groups is that they are not usually high-performance groups. Homogeneous group setting enlarges cognitive gaps and causes decision ineffectiveness. Anecdotal observation is that group decisions are worse, mainly because most of the members of the group don't have expertise in the situation presented and/or won't be held individually accountable, and also because of value differences.

Furthermore, the homogeneous team setting will make team members more vulnerable to peer pressure, risk avoidance, making biased decisions and sticking to the comfort zone. As leaders, you facilitate eliciting the views if they don't think of them on their own. Some people contribute better one on one, and others can handle group debate effectively. The value considerations and differences make a different outcome. It’s important to embrace diverse viewpoints and make sound judgment.

“The Lost in Translation” could happen at any level of the organization; barriers can be daunting, yet overcome them, and don’t let them cloud your vision. There are soft barriers such as communication gaps, internal politics, bureaucracies, or finger-pointing cultures, etc. It’s important to integrate both hard and soft elements into differentiated organizational competency. Considering how awesome the synergy of a highly innovative organization could create, to make people happier, customers delightful and the business as a whole accelerating growth. Constantly improving and seeing change as an opportunity while keeping a holistic overview of the business are the core messages of “Going Digital.”

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Good Boards Inform, Great boards Innovate

Good boards inform, great boards innovate.

The Corporate Board's role is to oversee business strategy, monitor performance, and pull management out of the trees to see the forest. Great boards consist of independent directors who are “rowing together in the boat.” They see the development of strategy as a collective effort between themselves and management, rather than a question of “us versus them.” They spend more time on strategy development, innovation enhancement and improve their leadership maturity, Ultimately, they become the proficient and profound mastermind behind digital transformation:

Envisioning: The corporate board of directors as top directorial roles need to envision and lead the organization towards its future. They are responsible for authorizing and monitoring business strategy, developing good policies offering further constraint/guidance to implementation of strategy, monitoring performance, and managing risks across all domains of interest. Thus, the corporate board directors need to be able to guide the senior management team through effective questioning, coaching, advising, and making an assessment of the business strategy and the organization's strategy execution.

The Board of Directors can direct management effectively and appropriately by establishing objectives and defining operational and management parameters limiting management authority. They should be mindful, and insightful, understand the difference between being a Director and the Operator of the business. They need to be able to guide the senior management team through effective questioning, coaching, advising, and assessment of the business strategy and organization's execution of the same.

Advising: Corporate board directors as the top business advisor role should build solid thinking blocks; have sufficient knowledge and unique insight to understand the business ecosystem and sense that the digital transformation is multifaceted. So, they can make good policies to ensure a smooth digital paradigm shift, awaken the ecosystem consciousness, start thinking about ways to influence their ecosystems and create new revenue streams while becoming more responsive and innovative.

Understand the people and the organization through an ecosystem lens, then makes it possible to allow the organization exploring digital in all directions, develop the company as a living thing, and perceive the business through multidimensional lens such as the lenses of technology, sociology, psychology, anthropology, economics, organizational and communication sciences, etc, understand, adapt to, and purposefully plan and orchestrate a hyperconnected and interdependent digital ecosystem seamlessly.

Delegation: The BoD as the governing body must define the management’s job, which is embraced in the purpose, objectives, strategy, and policy of the organization, and must monitor the management’s performance and conformance in order to verify that what was specified is what is actually happening. the Board of Directors monitor and evaluate management and operational performance to ensure efficient and effective progress toward objectives and compliance with operational and management parameters.

To some degree, conformance is inherent within the value-driven performance. In practice, corporate board meetings can be intense with the much more in-depth questioning of management, plans, results, etc, accompanied by much higher levels of holding management accountable. In essence, it is about savvy business people digging in to make the business the best and most valuable it can be. There is no doubt that the board only fulfills its role to shareholders and the management team when it is focused on performance, both corporate performance and their own performance.

Good boards inform, great boards innovate. The “elephant in the room” question for directors, corporate boards and directors' institutes is authenticity. Many directors are aware of “how time should be prioritized,” but in the heart of the engagement, a different pattern emerges, or so it seems. Ultimately, the corporate board takes the praise or blame depending largely on their ability to influence the business outcomes and drive transformative changes.

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Uplifting Leadership by Praising

It’s not about praising people for the sake of praising people. Appreciation of cognitive differences and thanks for people’s contribution.

Leadership is both art and science. One of the ways we build people up is to praise them - leading by praising. There is power in praising people! Something begins to happen in them, in you, and in your relationship when you praise someone, for encouragement and engagement. If criticism is stick, praise is carrot, you need to balance them well to improve leadership effectively.

Looking for and praising positive character traits and action of others around you: Praise and appreciation are sincere. Don't lie to people. If they have done something wrong, correct it, but when they do something right, Praise It. Your leadership and influence grows when you praise someone. Who is going to have greater leadership and influence capacity in the lives of their followers: the one who tears down or the one who builds up?

However, in a world that has become far less trusting, even praise and appreciation may not be viewed without suspicion. Genuine leaders who neither try to lead by flattery nor even praise, would try to lead through principles, vision or accomplishment etc. Put self as an example for others. If the team member has done something praise worthy, certainly needs to be appreciated, but that is not the principle characteristic of a leader to hold in front.

Praise can be genuine and part of appreciation for a job well done: What one cannot do another can. Sharing a heavy burden gives one confidence “I'm not alone.” If all the good things are meant for so-called Knowledgeable. Remember a time when someone told you something about yourself in a praising manner? It was great, wasn't it? You probably liked that person more after they praised you, didn't you? Our differences make us strong. Embracing the diversity in one another brings the full circle of the connectedness, interdependence of life; uniqueness of an asset rather than hindrance.

If something that somebody does is praiseworthy, it should be praised. At the same time, confident and worthy people are never unduly swayed by praise. They are led by transparency and truth. Flattery is insincere praise, usually meant to massage a brittle ego, or sometimes even with an intent of subtle leg pulling. We all know this fable: The crow, caught up in the flattering remarks being given by the fox, opens up its mouth and lets out a squawk, causing the cheese to fall from its mouth down to the ground where it’s snatched up by the fox. As the fox walks off with the cheese, he tells the crow “Do not trust flatterers.”

Appreciation is an essential driver of meaning and progress for many people. And, it functions as a driver for both the giver as well as the receiver of the expressed appreciation. What do we mean by appreciation? The recognition and enjoyment of the good qualities of someone or something. Gratitude for something. Appreciation has a creative aspect to it in that value is perceived through being created by the perceptive observer. Appreciation also reinforces relationships. When someone is grateful for someone else, it uplifts the other’s spirit and encourages that person to move forward or to persevere in difficult times. This support, given generously by someone, without underlying motives inevitably deepens the relationship.

The pervasive digital means change is the norm and happens the whole time thereby delivering faster and increasing market share. Praise and appreciation touch all things. And it’s from our heart flow into our mind, we can come together in an effective way bringing about change we want to see in the world because we live it in our lives.

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The Art and Science of Integration

Comprehensive planning, well defined framework approach and a set of technology and methodology are all crucial to improve integration effectiveness and business maturity.

Contemporary organizations are informative and interdependent, but often with silo setting and overly rigid hierarchy. In large complex enterprises in which there are many revenue streams, many business units, many geographies involved, many products and services will have a variety of data and different information streams, as well as a variety of systems to handle the assets of the business. 

Therefore, integration is an important step with technical “know-how” for running a holistic organization to ensure the business as a whole is superior to the sum of pieces.

Integration is key to ensure that the application ecosystem offers real value and also is necessary for future agility: Integration is very simply the task of connecting business systems so that they can share and consume each other's resources. Sounds simple, but in practice, it is extremely complex. It has to be done with an architecture in mind that supports business strategy and business objectives like customer satisfaction, revenue growth, and margin improvement. Keep in mind though, the first thing to understand is that "integration" is not always about cost effectiveness, what drives the need for better integration of information technology systems, especially with highly disparate systems, is to improve the value from existing IT systems and the need for better business intelligence, applications optimization, performance acceleration, etc.

A holistic integration strategy and framework is a key for building an effective application portfolio with a variety of abilities: It’s the ability to extract data from source systems into decision support tools and refine it into invaluable information, doing data mining -enabling business to understand what has been achieved, how business has performed in a detailed way, predict what could happen with historical data, etc, and improve business value of information. It’s the ability for applications to integrate with each other and enable workflows between them as part of a business process value chain. A holistic integration framework with well designed dashboard and scoreboard enable the business to build effective application portfolio with a variety of abilities, as well as the ability to measure integral performance holistically.

How effective integration is depending on how you calculate the ROI: Integration can be very difficult, costly and hard to justify the ROI. integrating the right systems for the right business reasons can be extremely valuable. It might not be cost effective in the short term but in the long term, it will be. Integration is key to ensure that the application ecosystem offers real value and also is necessary for future agility with a compelling story. For the large enterprises where integration of legacy systems was found to be not cost effective. The issue was not integration but efficiency of legacy systems and inability to streamline through integration, perhaps you had to replace the systems to further integrate them. IT management needs to understand the business drivers for the integration to align the technology investment to the business value. Also, having clear measurements (KPIs) in place will (hopefully) demonstrate the value of the integration over time

To quote Newtonian: "To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction" that each "integration" effort can spin off into a chain reaction that may not be recognized until the budget is gone. Thus, comprehensive planning, well defined framework approach and a set of technology and methodology are all crucial to improve integration effectiveness and business maturity.

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Organizational Structure Design Maturity

Forward-looking organizations experiment with different types of organizational structure design to enforce business alignment, enablement, communication, collaboration, and harmony.

The organizational structure carries inherent business capabilities as to what can be achieved within its frame. The pyramidal structured organization brings up a certain level of efficiency, but an overly rigid hierarchy becomes the very obstacle to stop the digital flow. Misaligned structures or disconnect functions reinforce a non-innovation friendly climate and stifle business changes. With increasing changes, horizons and speed are crucial for business success today. Organization development is to help organizations get better by providing an environment within which employees at all levels are inspired and allowed to commit their best in the organization's long term success.

The diagnostic shortcoming is where most organizational structure development processes get off to a poor start: Traditional organizations are often silo-based and strictly hierarchical. In many companies that get stuck at the low level of business maturity, take an accurate diagnosis of the organization's current state, identify any barriers to excellence that may exist, then develop strategies for lowering or removing those barriers. Thus, organizational design and development could regain some of the reputation it once had if we focused more on the root causes that employees are not engaged fully and not spend so much time chasing and trying to treat the symptoms.

The main reason corporations need to create new structure schemes and organizational designs is because business goals are not being met with current design and structure. To break down silos and overcome bureaucracy, a limited hierarchy works best in a creative environment where the free flow of ideas and their prompt implementation is a key element of business success. The digital organizational structure design should delayer the unnecessary business hierarchy to enable digital flow, encourage cross functional communication and collaboration, as well as inspire “digital holism.”

Identify the potential gains from organizational design efforts: Change is never for its own sake, but for achieving business benefit. Very few managers understand all the gains they will enjoy from such initiatives in their organizations. Gains like profitability, agility, new learning, sales growth and market domination for starters. Gains in culture change for improving adaptability and responsiveness. Gain in innovation rate and employee retention for a second level of gains.

Digital organizations need to continually fine-tune a successful structure, create a business context where people can collaborate, they are empowered and encouraged to develop their creative capacity to solve problems and explore opportunities in innovative ways. Rather than ignoring employees' growth potential or pointing out their areas of weakness, encourage career rotation, offer proper training and encouragement, catch them doing something right. A little goes a long way. The behavior change comes first; right at the top-reward the team and not individuals.

Organizational design is the structure, and sometimes the strategies themselves - that facilitate the people-centric priority: The realizers of strategy must appreciate that this is our world with the mixed package of old and new, physical and virtual, and unknowns are commonplace. From the organizational structure design perspective, the challenge will continue to be: 'How to achieve a balance between virtual worlds and the human connection. Many classic organizations and managers can be presence based when 'newer' employees increase their engagement; when they feel trusted to get the job done; when and where they think is most opportune.

In today’s hybrid businesses, the physical organizational structure, relationships, and virtual platforms and social connections wrap around each other to ensure clear responsibility, smooth information flow, seamless alignment, and engaged workforces to accelerate changes A hybrid nature of organization well mixes the virtual social platform with the physical functional structure, and the official structure and unofficial structure co-exist antagonistically or harmoniously, to enforce cross-functional collaboration and dot-connecting innovation.

The organizations that have high-mature alignment outperform their competitors and tend to be highly responsive to changes and good at innovation. Forward-looking organizations experiment with different types of organizational structure design to enforce business alignment, enablement, communication, collaboration, and harmony, fine-tune the business structure and systems to ensure both system effectiveness and efficiency in order to achieve high level organizational maturity.

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Quote of "Uniformly"

Organizations are able to adapt quickly in a sustainable manner to changes (threats, opportunities) of any dimension in the operating environment and grow, and embrace the changes at a fast and uniform pace across the length and breadth of the organization.

"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 “Uniformly” quotes in “Digital Master.”

Broadly speaking, Information Technology is about distributing and sharing intelligence on the scale and assisting individual, business or social needs, uniformly, fairly and effectively.

IT is about distributing and sharing intelligence on the scale and assisting social and purpose needs of the company uniformly and scientifically.

IT is about getting the right information to the right people to make the right decisions at the right time; it’s about distributing and sharing intelligence on the scale, and assisting business, social and lifestyle and purpose needs uniformly and proactively.

For problems that matter, it cannot be done asynchronously and uniformly. One of the key insights about Agile is that they are the principles and their methods or practices are merely tools to help you work towards some principles and values or to shape habits.

Organizations are able to adapt quickly in a sustainable manner to changes (threats, opportunities) of any dimension in the operating environment and grow, and embrace the changes at a fast and uniform pace across the length and breadth of the organization.

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12 CIO Personas: The Digital CIO’s Situational Leadership Practice via Innovation Inquiries

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.

Innovation Inquiry 

IllustrateInnovationviaInquiries Although almost all serious digital leaders and professionals today understand the importance of asking the right questions, they are not afraid to challenge the status quo and they have the unlimited curiosity to ask questions.The digital environment is full of uncertainty, velocity, complexity, ambiguity, fierce competitions, and continuous disruptions. And the digital era upon us is about innovation. Making logical inquiries and applying...

Inquiry Design and validate your business model via inquiries and take a systematic approach to develop it into a more solid form.A business model is "why this business works" and how a business operates. It defines customers, needs, and solutions as well as a competitive advantage. It includes the components and functions of the business which generate revenues and expenses of the business. Business leaders explore the concept of a business model by addressing...

Innovatingby QuestioningYou can't solve a problem on the same level that it was created. You have to rise above it to the next level." - Albert Einstein Innovation is the new way to do things; innovation creates change to the next level of performance. However, innovation management cannot be a one person challenge and needs careful planning, recruitment, and support to cover everything from fundamental research through experimentation, evaluation, and.

Insightful Questions to Overcome the Panic of Breakthrough Innovation Innovation is not serendipity, it’s a mindset, a process, and a business competency. Innovation is to transform novel ideas for achieving its commercial value and truly meeting people’s needs. Breakthrough Innovation is disruptive and will change the business in many fields. It can achieve the higher ROI but with much greater risk. Often, there are no best practices to follow for managing breakthrough innovation as it is in the future.

Igniting Innovationby Questioning The art of questioning is to ignite innovative thinking; the science of questioning is to frame Systems thinking, with the progressive pursuit of better solutions. We’ve been living in such a dynamic world, change is the only constant, actually even change itself has been changed and expedited. There is information abundant and even overloading, but problem solving does not become easier, but turns to be harder. And first things first, you should...

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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Best Quote of "Untie"

From the boardroom to the contact center, the touchy-feely conversations need to truly connect the minds and untie the knots in people’s hearts.

"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 “Untie” quotes in “Digital Master.”

Unnecessary complexity arises not from nothing. Humans create, though unintentionally in most cases their own problems. Therefore, they have to untie the knots they made themselves.

There’s “lost in translation” in cross-functional conversations, how to overcome such challenges? Is communication the bottleneck in decision making, how to achieve the expected outcome? Understanding the logic behind these inquiries can untie the communication knots.

Analysis and synthesis are both scientific methods which always go hand in hand. In general, the analysis is defined as the procedure by which you break down an intellectual or substantial whole into parts or components (loosen, untie, set apart).

From the boardroom to the contact center, the touchy-feely conversations need to truly connect the minds and untie the knots in people’s hearts.

Humans create, though unintentionally in most cases their own problems. Therefore, they have to untie the knots they made themselves, shoot the tangles to see from the different angle, and leverage creative thinking to discover the alternative way for problem-solving.

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How to Enforce the corporate board's GRC Discipline

The contemporary board needs to have all sorts of ingredients to enforce GRC discipline, and they have to play an instrumental role in exemplifying leadership, influencing changes and orchestrating digital transformation.

The corporate board is like a steering wheel, and plays a crucial role in overseeing business strategy and setting policies. Ideally, business insights captured either from the BoDs or other top leadership teams are like the guiding light to gain an in-depth understanding of people or things for making sound judgments and effective decisions.

Their GRC disciplines including varying elements such as leadership, values, strategy, culture, resource allocation and controls, can help to clarify the vision and bring new insight about how to steer the company in the right direction.

Value clarify: As the value of the firm beyond economic value or shareholder value. Businesses value view is multi-faceted and it’s interesting to see how business value is in the eye of the beholder including BoDs, with a clear business value stream view, all parties can agree on the common value proposition.

BoDs need to monitor whether the management approach drives the enterprise strategy and creates business value by checking. Does your organization have common values and a dynamic enterprise business model that takes into account initial business investments, life cycle of products/services, economical cycles, market shifts to ensure flexibility and positive results throughout? What value does the investment provide the business? How balanced and effective is the value chain? and how to improve ROI? Etc.

Strategic oversight: Nowadays, the Board of Directors see the development of strategy as a collective effort between themselves and management, rather than a question of “us versus them.” Highly effective boards oversee corporate strategy, they should be long-term oriented, their perspective must encompass the past, present, and future. As the strategy management is about creating tomorrow's organization out of today via lessons learned from the past. Therefore, the corporate board’s strategic oversight is critical to identify and strengthen the weakest link and determines how each part of the organization, including all of the key functions must "put it all together" to be successful in implementing the strategy to achieve tangible results.

To keep their leadership relevant, how can boards move up the continuum to be more strategic? They perhaps should spend more time on participating in strategy development, they listen a lot, ask, prevent, explore, challenge, seek results, from highly reactive to strategic, bringing tangible business results and reaching the business vision ultimately. They inspire and nurture the evolution of businesses, “talk the walk” to foster digital orchestration.

Resource allocation governing control: The corporate have limited resources, which needs to be assigned scientifically, to make sure that the company can manage people, assets, and resources to meet the business goals. The corporate board’s oversight of resource usage appropriation - matching priorities and resources is to ensure that management can see and agree on what has been done and what should be done next, all these with proper check and balance, to drive high performance business results.

To improve process management transparency, there needs to have clearly defined roles and authority structure, processes, and dynamic prioritization all wrapped up in an adaptive operation plan that turns out to be most critical. Thus, the corporate board’s needs to have a sort of “balance” skill for acceptance of complexity and its contradictions, the tolerance of ambiguity, and know when to take the gas pedal to harness change and when to take the brake to control the risks to unlock business performance.

Due to the “VUCA” digital new normal, the directorship in any organization must have the ability to inspire, guide, motivate, innovate, and adapt. In fact, the contemporary board needs to have all sorts of ingredients to enforce GRC discipline, and they have to play an instrumental role in exemplifying leadership, influencing changes and orchestrating digital transformation.

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Gaining Culture Empathy via Sociology

Learn, improve, adapt and evolve. And it’s the nature of evolution.

The emerging digital world upon us is about hyperconnectivity and interdependence. When organizations start maturing, a key transformation must take place and it takes multidimensional thinking and cross-disciplinary knowledge. As such a large scale of changes, more than not, needs to gain the anthropological understanding of human society, instill desired culture value, and learn historical lessons all the time. It involves people, process, and technology, and enables ecosystem orchestration with a multipolar and interdependent digital world.

The digital transformation views via an anthropological lens deepen the understanding of how relationships, ecosystems, market dynamics, and the connections between related business functions: Sociology is the study of human interaction, usually within the context of organized groups, communities, or "societies." It is the systematic study of human society, especially present-day societies. We define most societies by shared patterns of beliefs, attitudes, and actions. It helps business leaders and professionals understand and enliven the varied social contexts in a better way, and enable them to take a progressive approach to solve many complex problems facing business today.

Society is an organization that belongs to us and the way to change it is to modify our individual, group, and collective practices so that they facilitate both the development of our fellow citizens and the functioning of our collectivity. By applying sociological discipline, digital management fosters communication, collaboration, and accountability so the large group of people can interact, form, and amplify collective capabilities to deal with common business challenges and achieve well-set goals. We can identify individual, group and collective best practices that we can then choose to implement in our own societies, with the goal to advance human society systematically.

For businesses to work in a self-sustaining (emergent) way, they need to be the dynamic, hyper-connected, and interdependent system that keeps evolving: The digital transformation view via a historical lens helps today’s business leaders and professionals gain lessons learned, avoid repetitive mistakes and open the new chapter of humanity. One can always see farther when standing on the shoulders of others: If we do not accept our choices and mistakes in the past, we can never really move forward. The study of history is important because history repeats itself; therefore, we can discover the pattern of the future by studying the past.

People repeat history, not the other way around, and that is why we need to learn about our history as a species, all the way back. Looking at history needs to come from a genuine respect for difference and we must see the entire picture for the good and bad reality. Many versions of history can all be simultaneously "true." The point of view and the personal biases of the teller of "His or her story" will always factor into it. Independent thinking and critical thinking are critical to learn history, without setting limits to one version of truth; and transform hindsight to insight and even foresight to guide through the future journey more confidently.

Culture is collective mindset, attitude, and behavior, which are inherited and evolutionized via years of human footprint and historical refinement: Culture is the sub-branch of sociology and a crucial aspect of anthropology as culture is a residue of learning. Culture and brand are the most important "soft" elements that a company will make since they will define how the company interacts with its various stakeholders and build the differentiated business advantage. Culture eats strategy for breakfast! It means the way things are done and allowed to be done every day. Humans are vehicles of natural and cultural solutions.

In a culture savvy digital organization, self-motivated leaders, teams, and employees have a passion for challenging themselves, advancing their thinking ability, making things happen. People have to be given the opportunity to be creative, they have to become empowered and discover the innovative way to do things. In fact, culture is the competitive advantage of the business and the cultural aspect is an intrinsic factor that drives the organization's business longevity. An organization with excellent culture is arguably capable of providing great results in their competencies. The culture of an organization is an indicator of the competency parameters at their best.

Contemporary society is the product of the past. So we need to understand it, we need to know the facts and more importantly the underlying patterns. We should study sociology to understand the deep insight of human society, study history to learn from the past without experiencing it, study cultures today to stretch our minds and views of ourselves. We learn, improve, adapt and evolve. And it’s the nature of evolution.

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Understanding the Value of Inclusiveness

Inclusion only happens when the ‘inclusiveness mindset’ is available with top management. Creative energy from top down can rejuvenate the culture of innovation,

Contemporary organizations have the very characteristics of interdependence, hyper diversity, and information exponentiality. The challenge is to get people to recognize how inclusion improves communication, engagement, and retention, etc.

 However, many people in the workplace don't really understand the true power and potential of inclusion. There are plenty more questions one can ask to illustrate the importance of inclusion and it’s important to have an intentional strategy in place to not only increase awareness but to link the power of inclusion to key business initiatives and team effectiveness.

Inclusion initiatives can be a delight, either for communication or collaboration: Everyone is unique, there are all kinds of differences that exist between individuals. The organizational inclusiveness efforts need to focus on cognitive differences, skills, abilities and the wealth of ideas since the value lies in the contributions of the individual to the organization. Therefore, effective communication is important, as different perspectives, and fresh points of views lead to well-rounded ideas and solutions.

Generally speaking, an inclusive working environment can harness creative communication, stimulate creativity, and nurture innovation success as the value of inclusiveness lies in the contributions of the individual to the organization. Even though people have different intent, personality traits, working styles, effective inclusion efforts and empathetic communication can bridge leadership and innovation gaps and build a complementary team to generate creative results regularly and frequently.

Build a culture of inclusion and improve staff engagement: Diversity can create a lot of confusion and conflict if people cannot communicate effectively and are not well prepared for it, and if the leaders are unaware of how to embrace inclusion and manage diversity. The business leaders must create an inclusive organization with every dip in the business lifecycle, from individual thinking to collective mind (culture); encourage different voices, listen to those without being said, focus on learning new things and how to surge forward in creating success stories.

Having an inclusive culture always helps us learn from diverse people, and engages people to achieve the “art of possible.” There should not be stagnation in engaging the talent from different demographics, industrial verticals, or cross domain professions, Orient people and make them aware of the diversity in their organization and help them understand the value of harnessing the differences, and then giving them the voices, tools and experiences of how to effectively communicate even if they perhaps speak diverse professional languages, unify and understand each other with empathy, and build trust across these diverse cultures. So the organizations as a whole can be competitive enough to keep surging further and reap the benefits of inclusion.

Make a smooth transition from looking for inclusion as a "check-the-box" compliance tool to a healthy working habit via daily activities: It is about how to work in harmony for amplifying collective skills and abilities and make a leap of transformative changes. Identify a list of situations in your day to day transactions in which diversified viewpoints can improve decision effectiveness and a wide range of opinions could contribute directly to the business results - bottom line in terms of productivity, efficiency and top line in terms of business growth and profitability.

Effective communication is important, since different perspectives, and talent, lead to well-rounded ideas which have to be communicated thoroughly in order to come up with alternative business solutions and build trust in a dynamic digital and global working environment. Leading companies appreciate the diversity of diversity such as cognitive differences, differentiated capabilities, diverse experiences, the spectrum of skills, complementary perspectives and personalities and cultivate a collective habit to enjoy the delight of inclusion.

Inclusion only happens when the ‘inclusiveness mindset’ is available with top management. Creative energy from top down can rejuvenate the culture of innovation, have an open session and tell people that organization would like to embark upon the road of total inclusion as that appears to be the only way to move forward and realize long term business prosperity.

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Excellent "Unified" Quote

Vision is the unified view of the future!

"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 “Unified” quotes in “Digital Master.”


That diversified team is a mighty strong one, composed of many layers and shades, but unified in the sense of purpose, dedication and accomplishment.

A logical view provides a unified context for further analysis of the high-level functions of the IT organization, and ultimately guiding decision making.

IT leaders today not just reactively look through and respond to the business ecosystem; they should actually proactively plan and architect the digital landscape. From an architecture perspective, the unified and dynamic views of the “digital IT landscape” has many dimensions.

When it comes to the business of producing products for a customer, the focus of the workplace should be that of a unified team under a banner of that organization. At that moment, the organization is your tribe with the sole purpose of coming together for the common good of working together to achieve a goal.

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.

To succeed, top management needs a unified “one sight” focus, strikes a dynamic balance between the inner and outer success factors of the business, understands the relation and dynamics between consciousness (thinking), energy (emotions) and information deeply, and builds differentiated organizational competencies for driving progressive change confidently and unlocking business performance smoothly.

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Innovating Business Model

Business Modeling is the basic and key business system you need to design, test and validate to keep companies viable.

The effects of an increasingly digitized world are now reaching into every corner of businesses and every aspect of organizations. Digital is the age of creativity and innovation, creativity is the most desired trait for digital leaders and professionals today, and innovation is the light every organization is pursuing. Which themes shall you set to advocate digital transformation? How to lead toward the digital future effortlessly?

    Innovating Business Model

InnovatingBusinessModels 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...

InnovateBusinessModelsviaVariousApproaches There are different approaches and various tools could be taken to innovate business models & accelerate business growth cycle.The fundamental purpose of an organization is to produce value for its customers. Every corporate venture comes with a business model, a business model is a description of the way in which an enterprise intends to generate value to its shareholders and make profit. It is an entire frame of critical elements that describe...

InnovationofEntrepreneurshipBusinessModel The creation of corporate entrepreneurship is to cultivate the culture of innovation and build business capability. Many established large organizations are struggling with innovations, due to the lack of the culture of innovation or the internal business capability & capacity to support it. Especially for business model innovation, it runs up against a "not now, later" obstacle. As a business leader, you know you may be vulnerable...

TakeDiversePathstoBusinessModelInnovation Business Modeling is the basic and key business system you need to design, test and validate to keep companies viable. A business model is a description of the way in which an enterprise intends to make the profit. It’s an entire frame of elements that describe the intents and constraints of a business or organization. Tuning business models is all about foreseeing and applying the emerging trends, that’s where you win the competitive advantage....

BreakthroughBusinessModelsbyTrendingEmerging Technology Innovation leaders are the digital adventurists who can practice bold leadership for capturing business opportunities, foster breakthrough innovations, cultivate business model innovation as a living thing, When we jump into the digital future of “VUCA” new normal –volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, organizational leaders should be able to envision and determine what the future needs to look like, what the transformation must look...

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with about #7700th 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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Nice "Unimportant" Quotes

“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 “Unimportant” quotes in “Digital Master.”

Einstein also said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge." He's not saying knowledge is unimportant, we absolutely need knowledge. But knowledge is what is and what has been.

Want more effective communication? Build stronger teams and make effective cross-functional communication. For example, if something important needs to be communicated across departmental boundaries, those doing the communicating might "leave out" information they deem trivial or unimportant, when in fact, it is pertinent.

One way to overcome this is to rephrase the question, instead of seeking agreement to the decision, ask if anyone has any reason why this decision should not be made. 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.”

“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.

Although you may reasonably choose to prioritize certain ONR (Objections, Negativity or Resistance) issues over others, be aware people feel particularly peeved when they get the message that what they have to say is irrelevant or unimportant. Ultimately, the management of ONR is a critical component of change management.

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Reusability is both Art and Science

 The sooner the organization's maturity reuse is leveraged, the sooner the organization will be able to be both global and locally flexible.

With rapid changes and fierce competition, businesses should avoid reinventing the wheel and accelerate the products/services delivery cycle, decrease the development or support costs, and decrease your time to market. From a management perspective, how does re-use be managed and validated for fit-to-purpose? Have little faith in either accidental (emergent) or speculative reuse - build it and they will come. 

Reusability is both art and science. It’s important to diagnose current problems, build a good reusability strategy, generate the value based on shared components or any fair reasons with scientific practices that make economic sense.

Figure out the very reasons to reuse: Knows when to reuse and when not to reuse: where it may be bad, where there may be risks, but also where, if appropriately mitigated, the reuse could be good. Know how to handle reuse at both strategic and tactical level. The goal of reusability is to manage cost scientifically and shorten the development cycle significantly. The management should enforce the governance/oversight to guarantee that reusability development maintains conformance to that business need, and the combination of quality and price for any given service feature is competitive for delighting customers and comparable to the marketplace from a cost/performance perspective.

Changes to reusable components have to be acceptable to a wider body of customers, you need some way to get consensus for any change. You need to test the change against all parties requirements to ensure you don't break anything, but that extends the time required. Help stakeholders balance quality and functionality and help them decide when to invest in testing, in reviews, and in defect prevention.

Leverages common maintenance and standard features: Re-usability is about creating simple building blocks that can be applied over and over to minimize design cost and maximize value over the products/services delivery cycle. When implemented seamlessly, it will bring in required simplicity at an enterprise level and speed up product delivery cycle. Resource, talent, etc, are all critical factors in product research and development. Throwing up services because "everyone's doing it" is only going to waste time and money. Reuse is science in this regard.

Reuse happens at many levels, although in most cases the upside of reuse out-weights the penalties. Just keep remembering that everything has downsides and they should be considered along with the benefits. But give a thought to the negatives as well as the positives, in order to measure application reusability via the lenses of efficiency, effectiveness, and agility.

Raise associated ROI: The business value of application reuse is easiest to communicate after educating the business on the different stages of technical maturity, the advantages and costs of each stage. Technically, the management needs to clarify the engineering disciples behind reusability. Where is it deployed (multiple sites, outsourced cloud infrastructure, etc.)? Which modules are used by which people in which processes? )What are the integration points (people, process, technology) for these modules? Are there technical standards issues with the product? Are there SLA issues?

Known bugs can be fixed, ignored or tolerated; and understanding a reasonable set of choices is based on the circumstances and impact of the defect. You can only manage what you measure. Do know why you are collecting the metrics. Establish a good root question. Identify the purpose of the information and the stakeholders who will use it. Ask whether the metrics can reveal anything meaningful for the identified purpose of reusability, and how to raise associated ROI.

Reusability is both art and science. There are different dynamics at work in each area, and therefore different paths to reusability success. The sooner the organization's maturity reuse is leveraged, the sooner the organization will be able to be both global and locally flexible.

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Innovative-Insight

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

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with 7700+ 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.

Unconventionalism Today’s business is hyper-complex and interdependent, business managers need to have an unconventional understanding of the business elements underlying the surface, and solve information intensive business puzzles systematically. With the increasing pace of change, the deep problem that reveals is to understand what are the evolutionary pathways implied by disruptive technology and abundant knowledge, as well as how we can understand and solve crucial...

InnovativeGRC The Corporate Governance rules and principles need to be followed to improve the functioning and transparency of the company, Remember governance isn’t just about putting restrictions on what you can do, it is also about monitoring and knowing when things are not going to plan so that you can take appropriate action at the right time. How to enforce the organizational governance discipline depends on the nature, scale, and complexity of the organization,..

IterativeContinuum The digital organization can reach the stage of ripeness, when it acts as an organic system which continues evolving and adapting, informative and innovative.The digital organization is a complex and adaptive business system. The degree of planning has a positive correlation with the degree of uncertainty and unpredictability. Forward-thinking and well-managed companies need to keep doing strategic planning, implementation and improving.

Irrelevant, Ineffective, Inflexible Business Architecture contains the organizational context, provides guidance that does not make it tactical by nature, and is strategic in that it gives direction to the large-scale business transformation while tactical realizations are underway. It is a framework focusing on all crucial success factors integrated to build business capabilities; the communication tool to facilitate change and the glue between strategy and execution.

Integration 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. From one generation to the next, the substance of leadership does not change, it’s about the future, change, and influence. However, digital leadership trends will continue to emerge.

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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Amount of Self Management to Improve Innovation Maturity

As a person, you need to be optimized with a growth mind and a right mix of skill sets to get the work done innovatively. As an organization, you need to measure the innate change capacity and develop business strengths to reach the maximum potential.

Going digital is an evolutionary path of pursuing the next level of organizational maturity and collective human progress via empowerment, engagement, and democratic meritocracy. Part of the digital transformation journey is to prepare people to get digital ready psychologically and intellectually. 

Building a people-centric organization is both art and science. It’s important to make an assessment of people based on the following factors and nurture a culture of innovation to unleash collective potential.

The innovation of work and the level of organizational innovations maturity: With rapid change and the power of digital technology, creativity is the most desired professional quality and innovation thrives in every little thing people do. Aptitude and skills will vary from front-end to back-end. The business management needs to keep knowledge professionals engaged and create greater value via continuous contribution of employees. It is critical to put the right people in the right position from sowing the seed of creativity to reaping innovation benefits.

Either individually or collectively, the increasing role of employee knowledge, and knowledge growth would be most valuable if employees wanted to utilize and share it, as well as generate novel ideas to catalyze innovation. Make an objective evaluation of the quality of the output delivered (new ideas, multidimensional value, positive culture influence, etc.); the time ratio spending on production, innovation and administration tasks. In the organizational scope, hyper-connectivity can foster innovation through broader scope collaboration, and create synergy for achieving innovation success of the business.

The level of communication with colleagues: Organizations are social realities that emerge from the communication patterns of people. Communication is the coordination mechanism that makes organizations possible and makes a group of people as a team. Communication effectiveness is the prerequisite condition to improve digital flow and improve organizational maturity. It's important to open digital dialogs for enforcing communication and encouraging cross-functional collaboration. Digital adaptation is faster if made with the full involvement of people by breaking down hard communication barriers such as outdated rules, processes, procedures, or the soft elements such as culture, politics, or bureaucracy, etc.

Great communicators are working to spread their messages throughout the organization with clarity and verification, in a diverse set of activities with clarified messages and mixed communication styles to tailor the needs of different audiences, and creating multiple pathways for enforcing communication effectiveness and impact. The top business communicators can practice strategic communication to handle stress because of throwbacks/resistance/conflicts, etc, overcome dissonance between upper and middle management or dissonance between middle management and the frontline employees, streamline business flow, and achieve digital synchronization.

The amount of responsibility: From top down, it’s critical to define the strategic goals, responsibilities and competencies are required to achieve. There is a logical scenario to responsibility enforcement and good delegation practice. Find the right person to do the job. The right people are able to adapt themselves and their organization through delegation and adaptation and achieve the right set business goals.

Human action integrates purpose and power. If responsibility didn't follow power, distributed to co-workers, the manager would be in trouble. However, in most circumstances, the person with a lot of power does not like to delegate responsibility to lower levels. Business leaders need to define who you need to have those responsibilities and talents, forecast the skills and roles you need to navigate the changes driven by digital trends and ensure calculated business results are achieved.

The amount of flexibility: Though the meaning of the word flexibility in general refers to physical movement capable of being bent; but from a psychological perspective, it is about adaptation to the changes, the alternative way to do the things; and the resilience to survive or thrive from the failures. Logically, break down silos and be intentional about developing processes that encourage cross-functional collaboration and enforcing business flexibility. People with a flexible mind can work as a team professionally, they are able to do other tasks if needed, not restricted to rigid processes and always challenge conventional ways to do things.

Flexible people love choices, enjoy making differences; have adaptability to use the wide range of leadership skills available to them and show self-awareness to know when and how to use and develop the professional skills of those that they lead. Flexible people demonstrate a variety of skills, be comfortable with ambiguity, and respectful of the process, identify common, yet flexible processes focused on outcomes without micromanagement, and create a sense of urgency to make meaningful change. A flexible organization is a complex social system starting to appreciate such attributes as full open communication, customized structuring, partnerships and integration.

The lever of self-management: Self-management taps the inner and outer resources of strength, and to get yourself doing things with discipline, practices and achieve the ultimate goals. Individually, self-management is about knowing and comprehending how you can manage emotions and behaviors and as an individual recognize what is best to think and do, in relation to the betterment of his/her own life, including effective communications. You know the team will deliver the best outcome and give them the freedom to do it on their way.

The digital leader’s role is to empower their people to reach their full potential by building a work atmosphere to encourage creativity, autonomy, and mastery. A self-organizing team has the full authority on the business practices, processes, tools, engineering methods they would like to use to build business competency. High level of autonomy is the symbol of digital maturity by streamlining the digital flow from top-down to bottom-up and putting an eye on the big picture to achieve common desired outcomes.

Digital is the age of people-centricity. People management plays an important role in determining what energizes the individual at the most. As a person, you need to be optimized with a growth mind and a right mix of skill sets to get the work done innovatively. As an organization, you need to measure the innate change capacity and develop business strengths to reach the maximum potential.

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Develop Innovative Workplace

Revitalizing digital workforce won’t happen overnight, it takes planning, experimenting and scaling up.

Digital makes a significant impact on every aspect of the business from people, process to technology, both horizontally and vertically. Digital becomes the very fabric of high performing business, being outside-in and customer-centric is the new mantra for forward-looking and high mature digital organizations today. 

 From an organizational structure perspective, how can you fine-tune the digital dimensions of your organizational development to harness innovation?

Innovative workplace

IdealWorkplace & Workforce Building an ideal digital workplace won’t happen overnight, and organizational structure optimization takes planning, experimenting and scaling up. Compared to traditional industrial organizations running as a mechanical system, digital organizations are more like the living things which need to grow more organically and become more fluid to adapt to changes with self-renewal capabilities. In an ideal digital workplace, the organizational structure...

Innovativeworkplaces&Workforce The creative workplace is based on a triangle with three vertices: culture, method, and people. People are always the most important business asset and investment, but also one of the weakest links in organizations. The important perspective of digital transformation is to put people at the center of the business, and to both engage employees and delight customers. One of the key determinants of whether an organization can move to new digital structures...

InnovatingDigitalOrganization The creative workplace is based on a triangle with three vertices - culture, method, and people. Many forward-looking organizations are shifting from the industrial silo mode to interconnected innovation mode. Innovation is a systematic process to transform novel ideas for achieving its business value. Everyone possesses a certain level of creativity. But collectively, how does creativity manifest itself in the workplace? What's the best work?

InnovatingWorkforce Revitalizing digital workforce won’t happen overnight, it takes planning, experimenting and scaling up. With the faster pace of changes and continuous disruptions, companies across vertical sectors have huge pressures to survive and thrive in today’s hypercompetitive economic dynamic. They are at the transition stage from operating a mechanical organization to running a dynamic digital living business. Digital organizations are the mixed bag...

InnovatingOrganization As changes are expedited and information is exponential, neither business nor life is linear these days. The digital workplace has fewer boundaries and blurred territories. to avoid fast obsolescence, besides focus on operational efficiency, or incremental improvement, business models need to allow space for innovation. Running a future-driven digital organization is an adventure to explore the concept of a business model by evolving emerging trends...

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with about #7700+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. blog posting. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom, to inspire critical thinking and spur healthy debates. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

Read More