Innerprogress

Whether we can set a progressive tone to make a transition from survival to thriving of our whole civilization may depend on how we make the mind shift to structure shift to behavior shift.

Change is the new normal; it is nevertheless true that the change itself has become unpredictable and evolutionary. Progress represents upward change or improvement. More often, progress is not a universal truth, but a relative truth; each person or organization needs to take their unique path to the journey of progressive change with many accumulated steps and a few leapfrogs.

 It takes a lot of effort and resources to make improvement, and it takes even more effort and management disciplines to sustain progressive changes.

 

Improvement: Progress itself is a change, either by individual or group efforts or induced by environmental and cultural tangible and intangible forces to make improvement. With the dynamic business environment, change with improvement in mind is a proactive approach that allows for planning and support considerations to be made. To explore the art of possibility and accelerate the progressive change, don’t always take a shortcut or control the behavior, it’s crucial to shape a progressive mindset, clarify the vision of changes. If we could come to some agreement on our collective purpose, our goal, our direction, then we can view progressive change from the perspective of accomplishing a well-defined goal, making improvement and fulfilling this purpose..

As the saying goes "practice makes it perfect": it brings the importance of the daily pattern of one's personal involvement to her/his improvement which would do a great job to shape a culture of improvement in the organization. When an organization develops a progressive culture, people feel supported and confident they will be developed and valued. Confident employees are more likely to be open, learn, grow and make continuous improvement. They can contribute meaningfully for a period of time before they are ready to move to the next level of accomplishment. Collectively, an improvement is a form of desired change, change can also be leapfrogged into business transformation.

Learning & training: Progress goes hand-in-hand with one of the digital principles-to learn constantly so we continually improve. In fact, progress cannot be made without continuous learning. Well trained and happy staff are needed to improve business performance and make continuous improvement. Developing and adapting learning and continuous improvement culture involves gathering data, doing analysis, defining areas to be improved, developing training and coaching programs, and building measurement scale for the improvement. That means fine tuning a progressive climate for learning and growth takes a structural effort, rather than a few random initiatives because it instills a culture that constant evolution and learning is taken seriously. In fact, building a dynamic workforce is to provide a progressive working environment with the necessary resources to improve productivity, innovativeness, and employee engagement.

In the corporate setting, having the senior people in operations and varying professional areas incorporates the inputs or outlooks into in-house training programs so that the business knowledge is shared with others who can then try them out and hopefully improve them. This is one way of developing a continuous cycle of corporate learning and improvements. Individually, all of us have talent, so build on the talent you have, seek to be apart from the crowd and set your own professional goals and pace, preparation builds positive outcomes, practice daily, remain coachable, do not let ego drive the outcome, your personal character will, in the end, drive your performances, your progress, your accountabilities, and enable a team's attitude to all you do each day.

Leapfrog progress with “paradigm shift”: The radical change from one era to another is often called paradigm shift. The digital paradigm has many dimensions sociologically, technologically, philosophical, psychological, etc, interacting and mutually influencing each other. In an industrial era, the fixed mindset is perhaps considerably ok to survive because the business and the world are slow to change. However, in the digital era, information is exponential and knowledge is only a click away. The growth mindset is a strategic imperative to adapt to the changes and transformations which are reshaping our thinking and recasting the way we view ourselves, reimagining what is possible.

Compared to incremental improvement, the transformative change often requires changing underlying beliefs, culture, or conventional wisdom, etc. The leapfrog progress is made via deprogramming old mindsets, letting go of "the voices from the past," reprogramming the collective minds with new perspectives, norms, and attitudes; to rejuvenate the environments in which we live, and the way we view the world. A digital paradigm is an emerging digital ecosystem of principles, policies, and practices that set certain boundaries, also offer the guidance for problem-solving or creating something new under the updated rules, keep information flow, let imagination sparkling, allow knowledge to repurpose or recycle, and achieve a state of dynamic balance. Thus, the accelerated mind is needed to make continuous improvement and speed up leapfrog progress with paradigm shift.

Whether we can set a progressive tone to make a transition from survival to thriving of our whole civilization may depend on how we make the mind shift to structure shift to behavior shift. Individuals should have a humble attitude and learning agility to make continuous improvement. Organizations should strive to explore the “digital-seek practices'' throughout their organization to accelerate the progressive journey of “seeking, experimenting, improving, innovating, and transforming.”

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innateprofessionaloversightofbods

To bridge gaps and improve leadership maturity, great corporate boards are heterogeneous, inquisitive, intelligent, innovative, and professional.

In a world of rapid changes, governance is a discipline which continually requires stroking and attention. Otherwise, it will stagnate and lose its ability to steer the business in the right direction.

 The corporate board of directors as the de facto guardians of modern organizations consisting of experienced, insightful, independent, and reputable specialized generalists, plays a critical role in business governance and steering their company in the right direction.


Strategic oversight of business Principle, Planning, Prioritization, Process, Performance, Practice of business management: Corporate governance and management are complementary disciplines to ensure business effectiveness and efficiency. Excessive management complexity enlarges functional gaps, limits performance and slows down change speed. It’s important to look for the linkage between management and governance to unlock business performance rather than overly emphasizing on compliance only. The corporate board's role is to pull management out of the trees to see the forest by enforcing governance disciplines and steering business transformation. The corporate board’s strategic oversight includes co-setting business principles and planning to adapt to the dynamic business environment; scrutinizing business prioritization and processes to improve asset/resource management; monitoring business performance and developing the best and next practices to influence business outcomes.

Technically, corporate governance needs to have direct links to each crucial business management discipline and its processes to make sure that management is doing its job properly. Setting policies is the co-responsibility of the governance body and management team. Implementing policy is a management activity, and monitoring policy compliance is a governance activity. Effective governance ensures that the management stays focused on top prioritized business activities to achieve high performance results and builds a balanced portfolio/program management to build a unique set of business capabilities for unlocking performance. The corporate board’s oversight of key processes at strategic level ensures core processes are “SMART” and dynamic; allows the advantages of standardization, decreases in duplication of efforts, and minimizes risk of violations that can occur.

Systematic oversight of corporate innovation altitude, aptitude, and attitude: Innovation is not serendipity, but a management process. It needs to become an important component of the business strategy in order to present the altitude of innovation impact. Corporate boards as one of the top leadership pillars should practice open-minded leadership, make commitment to support innovation initiatives, create the space for cross-boundary dialogue and debate, set the right risk-taking appetite, tie innovations and the innovative culture to the organization's strategy and scale innovation effect systematically.

Innovation strategy has to be practiced by management in true spirit. Highly innovative leaders or professionals are great in altitude, aptitude, and attitude. The corporate board’s innovation strategy oversight and process/capability scrutinization helps to identify innovation management bottlenecks, de-bureaucratize processes, identify innovators, leverage information technology, derisk innovation implementation, establish clear proofs-of-concept before making the investment to launch and scale. Shift the governance conversation from availability of business resources to the most productive uses for the enterprise's scarce resources and capitals to harness innovation. They can work closely with the management to orchestrate an innovative ecosystem in which employees, customers, channel partners, suppliers, and all other ecosystem participants as active agents can innovate collaboratively to create new concepts, ideas, experiences for innovation to blossom.

Professional oversight of corporate culture, character, competency: Corporate culture is collective mindset, attitude, and behavior; corporate character means many things, it’s a sort of collective values, attitude, integrity, intelligence, sharpness, dynamism, and reputation, etc. Corporate competency emerges from a blend of collective corporate mindsets, capabilities, and disciplines to take certain activities for achieving business results. The corporate board’s oversight of business culture, character, and competency is to ensure that all different hard and soft success factors are aligned seamlessly to enable strategy implementation, performance improvement, talent development, and reputation building.

By practice, the corporate board and top leadership team sets culture tones, builds up a positive emotional climate, and embeds governance in cycles of the multitude of business management. Reputation is part of the business brand, and the business brand usually reflects the enterprise culture. Corporate reputation management can be at least classified into culture/brand management, knowledge management, or crisis and risk management. The corporate board’s oversight of reputation management is to protect and nurture a strong brand, enhance a healthy knowledge cycle of information-insight-intelligence, improve crisis and risk management effectiveness, and harness corporate value and purposes.

Governance provides monitoring, measuring, and enforcement mechanisms to corporate management. The more complex contemporary organizations become, the broader scope of corporate governance turns out to be. To bridge gaps and improve leadership maturity, great corporate boards are heterogeneous, inquisitive, intelligent, innovative, and professional, oversee business strategy, monitor organizational performance and enforce a strong business brand.

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Innovationcompetency

Innovation is not serendipity, it is a management process and business competency.

Due to the fact that innovating in today’s digital world has become increasingly complex in nature. Oftentimes, organizations can no longer rely on a single individual or team to drive innovation. It is a strategic imperative to develop the organizational level innovation competency by tapping organizational potential to innovate, investing in the cultivation of capability and capacity for innovation, and nurturing a culture of innovation and believe in people are the most critical component in building innovation competency.

Innovation navigation: Due to the increasing pace of changes, innovation can happen anywhere across the organization and its ecosystem. To develop unique innovation competency, it’s important to craft a good innovation strategy and build a powerful innovation navigation system that involves tapping the organization's ecosystem for capturing opportunities to innovate. The real challenge is to understand where and how you can and should innovate to get the biggest effect and scale up the best innovation practices across the digital ecosystem effortlessly. Thus, innovation navigators are the critical role to envision the future trends and capture potential innovation opportunities. Through great navigation, a healthy innovation portfolio can be integrated with the annual strategic planning process and financial investment model.

Where are innovation hotspots? Innovation happens in which the business interacts with customers; or at the intersection between business and information technology, etc. Focusing on customers' needs should be an easier path to grow the innovation fruit. People-centric innovation is in strong demand because digital is the age of choice. To explore great ideas and discover opportunities to innovate, the robust process and tools that enable any entity to generate winning concepts for innovation management on a consistent basis, is the prerequisite for sustaining long term business advantage and growth. Insightful innovation management continues to clarify: Do we really need innovation, who will be held responsible, what will be the cost, risk, and ROI?

Innovation portfolio: It is a strategic imperative to develop the organizational level innovation competency. Organizations need to have a balanced portfolio of innovation projects, across the matrix of different types of innovations (incremental, substantial, breakthrough). Incremental innovation generally brings short-term value additions but breakthrough innovation differs from incremental innovation to be a "game changer." Generally speaking, all businesses should have a handful of "bets" in the breakthrough innovation category due to its high potential to lift the business up to the next level of organizational growth. It’s also important to fine-tune many critical business factors, including “hard” factors such as policy, process, practice, performance, and “soft” factors such as culture, leadership, communication, etc, to shape innovation capacity of the business.

In reality, innovation fails because many organizations lack a cohesive strategy or a systematic approach to manage both opportunities and risks in a structural way. It’s important to identify innovation capacity bottlenecks, such as resource limitation, process ineffectiveness, skills deficiency, or culture inertia, etc. Bridging innovation execution gap to achieving the business objectives requires a logical execution scenario with well-set decision-making parameters, performance thresholds, and adaptive, iterative experiential processes, etc, as part of the wider holistic system for innovation, encompassing other key aspects such as culture, leadership, and strategy, etc. Build a focused but balanced innovation portfolio that maximizes the output from the innovation team, in terms of adding value to the organization by delivering alternative solutions to the aforementioned attribute and building differentiated innovation competency.

Innovation culture and talent: Innovation success depends on many factors, people are always the most critical one. It’s critical to cultivate a compelling future vision, a culture which inspires creativity, accepts external ideas and rapidly integrates them into a holistic idea/innovation management system. The difficult challenge is not just launching successful teams, but maintaining the motivation and focus of the people. It requires much more time, energy, passion, courage, experimentation, practices, retreat, reflection. Only in an open trusting space, creativity can flow smoothly and innovation can be catalyzed effortlessly. The appropriately configured innovation platform creates a scalable means for brainstorming, designing and building ideas throughout the enterprise. The evolution of innovation only exists in the more open environments that create insights, take advantage of all sources of creativity in a more open way. As a result, innovation becomes a persistent, shared reality even across silos and geographies.

During the whole innovation process, make sure that all staff are aware of the planning, processes, schedules, or potential pitfalls, and they are ready for taking responsibilities of building innovation competency, either individually or collectively. From innovation talent management perspective, the emergent digital technologies and practices make it possible to expand the talent pool, build highly innovative teams with coherent diversification from cognitive difference to complimentary experiences & skillsets. To evaluate innovative potential, it’s also important to define the updated competency model, assess the talent's overall capability to solve problems, strike the right balance of cognitive difference, learning plasticity, characters, skills, experiences, personalities, and energy within the teams.

Innovation is not serendipity, it is a management process and business competency. Environment either encourages or discourages innovation, the ease or difficulties inherent in surviving. From the pre-planning stage to post-implementation check-up, innovation management should continue to take different scenarios, handle innovation streams for different goals and different time frames, create new value, even become a game changer, for broadening the “innovation scope” and focusing on building a healthy innovation portfolio to establish differentiated business competency, position a strong business brand, and reach the next level of organizational maturity.

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Innervalueofemployees

People need to keep learning and growing day by day, and their value should be assessed via competence, performance, potential, business results, and culture fit for the role.

From the past, present to the future, people are always the most critical factor for corporate success. To compete, businesses rely so much on their people to reach their goals and succeed. The true value of an employee is a total of what the employee brings to a business, now and in the future, including many tangible and intangible factors via multi-dimensional lenses (quality, creativity, and productivity) 

Thus, it’s important to assess the performance, influence, and competence of their invaluable people in order to not only keep their business lights on, but more importantly, also explore the collective human potential for leading business growth.

Performance: Performance is based on the employee productivity - the amount of work well done with acceptable quality. At an individual level, it might come down to the annual assessment of how he or she did against the objectives that were set, or if they had ownership of business initiatives. There are both hard and soft factors, leading and lagging indicators in performance evaluation. The analysis takes into account financial and non-financial measures, qualitative and quantitative improvements, past outcomes and ongoing requirements as indications of future performance.

.Measuring/improving employee performance is more about having the visibility and insight into the non-productive time (NPT) and focusing on reducing that or optimizing that. The other concern could be how people are evaluated when their contributions are interdependent with others' contributions. Employee performance assessment shouldn’t be an annual event, but a continuum that involves both self-assessment, feedback-feed-forward management, with the goal to improve future performance.

Influence: Performance is motivational; influence is inspirational; performance is often incremental; but influence could be exponential. A valuable employee is a self-leader who makes a positive influence on business culture; impacting on the performance of others. stays current in their field/profession; freely innovates, creates new efficient ways of working; mentors and coaches others, etc. Influence is a skill to be learned, persuasive communication, exemplary leadership, all held together by a collection of confidence.

Influence is based on such a simple logic: In order for you to add value to people, you need to become more valuable. And in order to become more valuable, you need to grow yourself. In order to find a way to contribute something of value, something should be greater than yourself, something unique to make an impact on our surrounding and global societies; it’s important to make influence via asserting, to present ideas via confidence & persuasion and expertise, to get others’ see your point of view. Knowledge is power, present strong "intellectual persuasiveness" skill, clarify vision, share insight, and wisdom to make a profound influence.

Competence: In the face of “VUCA” digital new normal, business professionals will be more successful when they realize that one of their greatest professional strengths will be their well-rounded competence which need to be developed by the right mix of technical and business acumen, professional attitude, capabilities, skills, flexibility, intelligence, practicality, or pragmatism, etc.The integrity and suitability of professional competency are tested through traits such as attitude, passion, entrepreneurship,, multidimensional intelligence, maturity, and wisdom. etc.

Competencies have been embraced around the world. In specific, there are a variety of professional competencies such as change competency, problem-solving competency, creative competency, or leadership competency. Change is never for its own sake, it is always for something new and advancing. Changeability gives you confidence because you know you are able to positively adapt to any given situation via learning, exploring and making disciplinary movements. Problem-solving is not about fixing the symptom only, but about digging into the root cause, framing the right problem, developing the right mindset and capability to solve the problem effectively. Creative competencies can be built via thinking differently and doing things differently; and can be assessed via delivering something to generate unique value to benefit others or societies.

People need to keep learning and growing day by day, and their value should be assessed via competence, performance, influence, potential, business results, and culture fit for the role. Talent management should be a continuum of practices for identifying, acquiring, developing, deploying, and retaining well-qualified people throughout an organization to maximize employee value and unlock the full business potential.

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Innovativechangeagentpersonas

Innovative change agent personas have the right dose of confidence, courage, intelligence, and risk appetite to lead change forward determinedly.

Change is inevitable, and it is the voyage which needs to continually discover its own landscape, with unique scenes. Business transformation should not be undertaken lightly because it must align diverse and divergent stakeholders' interests toward common goals. 

A change agent can think out of the box, continuously evolve, adapt, and prepare for changes, motivating others to change as well. The varying change agent personas are in demand to envion the unfolded future, promote the culture of learning and innovation, steer change and create momentum for making high achievements and creating sustainable results.

Cognitive mind shaper: In the industrial era, a fixed mindset is OK to survive as the business and world are slow to change; however, in the age of knowledge and creativity, a growth mind is a strategic imperative to adapt to the changes, and an accelerated mind is needed to match the digital speed. In fact, human minds are perhaps one of the most powerful but mysterious things in the universe, as they continue to imagine and invent things for changing the world. Every person has degrees of both open and closed mindsets in different contexts. We are all works in progress; learning, growing and changing. Forward-thinking change agents are innovative mind-shapers who can understand their people from the top of their mind and the bottom of their heart, help them shape the new thinking boxes; shape a more inclusive and collaborative mind to achieve win-win-win.

Mind shaping is a tough journey because oftentimes you need to change people’s beliefs, perceptions and perspectives, or their thinking habits or traits (positive vs. negative; reactive vs. proactive, egoless vs. egotism, etc) An insightful mind shaper can read the people’s attitude and behavior patterns, diagnose the root causes at the mindset level, help people having learning curve awareness, install a learning wheel for shifting their perceptions and improving cognitive abilities to keep growing and making progressive changes.

Visionary trendsetter: We live in the exponential digital era with abundant information growth and rapid change. There isn't really much of an organization without the massive oceans of data that flows through the company at any given split second. Opportunities and risks are co-existing these days and companies need to feel more comfortable to step into the uncharted water full of uncertainty. The trend setting change agents are in demand to provide an information-based insightful outlook about what the future of the organization should be and what the existing problems and challenges are. How to not only ride above the learning curve but also set the tones and trends to co-create future together.

They have unique eyes to envision what is possible; and strong sense to smell emergent opportunities and predict potential risks, changes the course of the business by seeing further than what all others see and by understanding existing or emerging issues from new angles, broadening perspectives, or deepen perceptions. This role is seen as a visionary change agent who pulls the rest of the organization in the right direction. Their vision should be attainable subject to current times, make a concerted effort to attain it and dynamic enough to be able to react to any change in business direction or context.

Innovative pathfinder: Innovation is the light every organization is pursuing. Being creative means you need to get used to stepping outside that old box to unfamiliar territory, you discover and explore your own path. An innovative pathfinder is in demand to help the organization discover the journey of change as each day we discover something previously unknown to us. Technically, discovery is the choice to look at something differently and by that choice never look at anything the same. You need to be versatile for adapting to changes, persistent to lead change and flexible to discover an untaken path to explore the change and systematic to make change happen in a structural way.

Because innovation comes with the 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. 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 the business growth opportunities. Innovative pathfinders have scientific disciplines and artistic touch. Vision expands and insight deepens for those who learn to see and enter into the experience of simple perceptual connection with the wide open personal completion into the moment's happening.

Innovative change agent personas have the right dose of confidence, courage, intelligence, and risk appetite to overcome the “fear of failure.” as they have been an invaluable source of knowledge, business direction/insight, and support, etc, to explore the future confidently and lead change courageously.

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Initializepersonalizedintelligence

It's an interesting personalized world emerging ahead of us. Now with analytical intelligence capabilities combined with social pulse, the organization has more visibility of people's sentiments and can work to make a motivating environment and run a people-centric business.

The effects of an increasingly digitized world are now reaching into every aspect of organizations and provide impressive advantages in terms of the quality of information for decision making, high performance of the workforce, and the speed of products/services delivery. 

Forethoughtful business leaders show enthusiasm and confidence about the information potential for shaping the future of the business. To run a people-centric organization, they also apply personalized intelligence/analytics tools to improve customer satisfaction, employee engagement and unleash the potential of the business growth.

Capture customer insight and improve customer experience: Customer Experience is the sum of all thoughts, experiences, feelings, reactions, attitudes, etc, that customers have or will have in regards to using your product or service. Customer/user experience comes from all touchpoints, in order to run a customer centric business, make information available and useful, exert lots of intelligence to capture customer insight. Organizations with personalized intelligence have a clear understanding of how customer-centric approaches such as customer experience design and intelligence enhance the business model and extend profitability. Too often, business intelligence is limited to a methodology to be included as a technical process or marketing/visual effort as an afterthought. In order to truly live up to the customized way of thinking, an organization has to use it as predictive or prescriptive tools to optimize the end-to-end customer experiences.

Approaches to building personalized intelligence upon customers tend to look at the past behavior of individuals to try to determine the segments that they belong to and forecast future behavior. Personalized intelligence/analysis has become a powerful tool for creating an intimate and stronger relationship with a wider range of customers. In practice, businesses are using social media, sentimental analysis tools, and collaboration platforms to improve customer relationships, monitor online customer behavior, take track of customers’ online activities, interpret customer sentiment; create and support customer communities, develop multi-channel communications, and deliver personalized products or services to optimize customer experiences.

Assess and increase the true value of an employee: The value of an employee is a total of what the employee brings to a business, now and in the future via multi-dimensional lenses (Productivity, Quality, Creativity). Employee Experience itself has layers of optimization - direct work environment related and employment-related. Workforce analytics tools or personalized intelligence for employee experience enable the business management to make proactive workforce planning, assess employee value by analyzing different aspects of their individual traits, work ethic, influence, creativity, experience, capability, and performance, and the hidden potential each employee has if given the opportunity to excel within the work environment; enable intellectual stimulation, trust, and reliability.

It's an interesting personalized world emerging ahead of us. Now with analytical intelligence capabilities combined with social pulse, the organization has more visibility of people's sentiments and can work to make a motivating environment to increase employee values and optimize employee experiences. Such workforce analytics tools could be diagnostic, or prescriptive, when productivity is low, further analytics is needed for an understanding of the cause whether it is due to the change or learning curve. When certain business problems need to be solved, the talent analytics tool can help to locate the right people for getting the work done; When businesses need to explore the alternative talent pool or build up a strong talent pipeline, they can find the right talent who not only fulfills the required needs of the work at the moment but also has the collective potential to lead organizations up to the next level of the business growth and maturity.

Practice personalized intelligence to harness business innovation and branding: In face of fierce competitions and rapidly changing marketing conditions, businesses with a variety of personalized intelligence can become more interconnected and interdependent with its macro-environment by engaging in conversation with employees, partners, customers, community group, and industry expertise. Social analytics enables the business to track competitors on social media and understand how competitors are leveraging social platforms for brand promotion or customer engagement; help the organization collect feedback, analyze context and quickly draw an inference from unstructured social media and convert them into actionable business insight. Organizations also start to use customized analytics tools to make formerly invisible patterns of social interaction more visible; and apply such information to boost social engagement, find segmentation of populations with certain characteristics and understand their impact on others, or what turns into certain actions such as purchasing, collaboration, and encourage behavior changes.

The organization should have the maturity to leverage and optimize analytics/insights to make critical decisions rather than looking at it as mere data and continue to launch and drive programs that operate as an island. Innovative organizations are using personalized intelligence tools to source new ideas and refine current products or services, to manage different types of innovation in a systematic way. It helps to fuel ideas and contribution, provide inputs on customer preference, predict the future trend, and capture collective wisdom.

Though many businesses just start experimenting with enterprise personalized intelligence tools, they would feel more comfortable to use them for exploring the full potential of the business from multidimensional value perspectives. The effective personalized intelligence practices have the ability to create indicators and measures; show validated ROI; act or suggest actions to move key metrics to benefit the business based on the analyzed data rather than just reporting the results. All of those become cohesive efforts to run a people-centric organization and achieve high performance business results.

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Innovateviapersonalizedcommunication

Great communicators deliver personalized messages with their unique style to persuade, inspire, and innovate, to break down silos in people's mind, emotional barriers in their heart.

We live in the complex, rapid change and hyper-diverse world, communication is much more complicated because there are differences in goals and contexts. These contexts can shift based on circumstances and communication personas. 

It is critical that communication needs to be personalized, directly related to your audience situation, how it affects them. It’s critical to communicate, challenge, debate, and learn, open dialogue to close blind spots and bridge cognitive gaps. Continuous, personalized, and consistent dialogues should replace the 'business as usual,” and “command-control” communication style to develop an open atmosphere and fortify cross-functional coordination based on information, expertise, and responsibility.

Personalized business relationship: Relationships are undeniably the root of all business. Business is changing and the need for networking is based on building relationships. Business relationships are critical to organizations both internally and externally. When there is a lack of communication, it is the lack of trust among people or lack of personalized business relationship with empathy. Good relationships with the right people make a business work. It does not necessarily take a lot of social interaction or face-to-face meetings to build personalized relationships. Instead, it’s about how to read each other’s mind, gain empathetic understanding, build trust and allow predictability and stability in the relationships.

The business relationship is part of what creates the exchange of goods or services for that profit with a positive experience or a negative experience. Without personalized business relationships, every communication perhaps only touches the surface, and every decision becomes an argument. The deeper the trust, the more valuable the relationship, the more effective communication could be. In business reality, there are varying business relationships such as peer/shareholder relationship, customer relationship, vendor relationship, etc. Therefore, either making communication or providing the solution, leaders and professionals should target the different audience, tailor their special needs in order to build up the long-term personalized relationship.

Personalized message: There are different business relationships and there are many ways to communicate. There are strategic presentations at the roundtable or the tough negotiations with vendors, heart to heart conversation with employees or touchy-feely chats with customers, etc. Our thoughts with clarity have intention to influence; our words have power to spread the message out. Personalized conversations matter to focus on convincing, persuasion and collaboration. Clarity of personalized messages are based on “empathy, effectiveness, enlightenment” communication principle.

We need to be mindful to ensure that our words have been understood in the same sense that we meant them, to reflect our thoughts and improve communication effectiveness. To deliver personalized messages, business leaders and professionals need to listen before talking, and understand others in order to be understood. It is not about what you say, it is what people hear; it is not what you speak or write, but about what we think and how to convey our thoughts fluently to minimize the chances of being misunderstood. Great communication enables effective problem-solving; it means to point out the issues or share the insight, but also be thoughtful to deliver personalized messages empathetically. Communication in the worldwide scope is about knowing how to collaborate with stakeholders of all stripes, being able to facilitate and orchestrate the multitude of differences, values, cultures and gain a profound understanding of the global business ecosystem.

Personalized style: Besides communication context, personalized communication style helps engage audiences, and enhance interactive relationships. Communication of bodily feelings in a modern society does not have to be 'in person,' but can be projected by various means of communication. When someone is sharing a thought with you, do you focus on what’s been told contextually and listen objectively with an open heart and mind. If your communication message is valuable, but the style is too conventional or tedious, perhaps people get distracted and do not capture the essence of the communication. Use the right language with the right style to fit your audience, gain mutual understanding. Listen, comprehend, and understand the people, the problems and the business they are part of, before embarking on any business initiatives.

Business communication is not for its own sake, it’s essential that the person communicating should also be equally aware of what he/she wants to communicate, how he/she communicates and above all ensure that he/she has communicated properly. Communication has truly occurred when the message is received and understood. Encourage people to speak, actively listen to what they say, engage in candid “giving and taking” communication. The emerging collaboration platforms and technologies are effective tools to break down communication barriers, rejuvenate traditional business communication with some fresh styles and flavors, to harness cross-functional interaction and collaboration.

One’s mind directs one’s communication attitudes and behaviors. People and organizations are becoming more interdependent with each other. It’s important to build a working environment in which different stakeholders can find their role in initiating empathetic communications, engaging in varying communication activities proactively; providing and giving feedback with mutual respect, negotiating back and forth professionally; coaching and learning interactively, etc. Great communicators deliver personalized messages with their unique style to persuade, inspire, and innovate, to break down silos in people's mind, emotional barriers in their heart, for solving problems large and small, and move humanity forward effortlessly.

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Initiatingportfoliointegration

Application integration and optimization are the keys to ensure that the application ecosystem offers real value for future business competency and agility.

Applications have become an integral component of an enterprise’s profitability, flexibility and maturity. Cross-organizational leaders today need to strike the right balance of ease of management and capacity elasticity. Portfolio is a collection of programs and IT-enabled business initiatives that are designed to help the organization achieve its targeted performance. They are the means through which a vision is translated into practice. 

If organizations do not have a mature portfolio management process in place, it causes issues with the strategic alignment of programs and portfolios. Portfolio Management plays a significant role in portfolio prioritization, integration, and optimization.



Strategic prioritization: The goal of running a business is to create customers. Organizations need to develop the right strategy and build a set of differentiated business capabilities to implement it. Strategic application portfolio is the vehicle to implement business strategy. Thus, an effective application portfolio needs to set the right strategic prioritization for bridging the “gap of opportunity” between where you are and what you want to become; to get to the point where there is enough differentiation between capabilities that you can build the map against different roles in the organization to achieve business objectives and make continuous deliveries.

“Being strategic” is simply about keeping the end in mind, embracing emerging business properties. For strategic business initiatives and application development, a vision provides the guiding light and direction to keep eyes on what matters, identify what generates the most value for the company and express that in strategic objectives, set the right priority, and analyze potential pitfalls.

Customer-centricity: Organizations are transforming from inside-out operation driven to outside-in customer-centric. Great customer experience with personalization themes has become the norm, the management has to understand the value to become supportive. In fact, people-centricity is on the top of forward-looking business leaders’ agenda nowadays. Having a strong sense of how to develop customer-centric app programs within the business means to build an integral and unique set of business capabilities to delight customers and build a people-centric organization. Learn to communicate effectively, and balance competing requirements so you know which hills are worth climbing on.

Many times, a lack of user adoption is one of the issues to fail new applications. Value creation means the company management knows enough about their customers, and takes action to fill that type of need, being transparent to an extent where you don't lose profits. Building customer-facing applications is both strategic to delight customers with new solutions and tactical to improve application success rate. Customer involvement often elicits highly invaluable information to design tailored applications or solutions to meet customers’ needs. The personalized solutions give customers an impression on how the organization can tailor their needs to solve problems and achieve higher-than-expected results.

Manage the interdependencies of the business applications: Dependency, interdependency are the natural relationship between things (applications, capabilities, people, etc.) in the hyperconnected world. The more complex the application or capability is, perhaps there are more interdependent pieces that need to be integrated with. To provide an insight into condition and relationship/dependency of business applications and capabilities, business executives are sufficiently aware of the general condition of the various capabilities and provide input into a qualitative assessment of capability effectiveness, adequacy, coherence, differentiability, resilience, or maturity.

To identify interdepencies and make seamless integration, there are multiple perspectives of organizational capabilities, the top tier is a common executive view of the condition or suitability of capability to support a well-defined business strategy. Then, go down to a second-tier - the program portfolio tier to build business capabilities. A better approach to tackling the application portfolio complexity is to integrate the multitude of business management including implementation of concepts like Business Architecture, Program/Project portfolio management, application management for managing the interdependencies of applications and implement the overall application portfolio effectiveness.

Eliminate unused or underutilized applications: Organizations have limited budget and resources. Good business sense suggests that knowing an application's utilization and resource consumption is necessary to make an objective assessment of the application portfolio effectiveness, and then, it also helps to make good investment decisions. Unused or underutilized applications that consume a disproportionate amount of resources when compared to their value, need to be addressed and taken care of. The application architecture is a practical tool to help the management gain a holistic understanding of application health, have visibility and traceability between costs and the assets consuming those costs. It is through this comprehensive understanding, application management would be able to identify true cost savings, workflow optimizations, and additional revenue opportunities.

Many organizations have a "set it and forget it" mentality; they continue to add new applications, and application vendors continue to upgrade to keep in step with the newest goodies. Some organizations are faced with serious application sprawl and a growing backlog of out-of-date and often unsupported applications. Too many applications overlap functionality, too old applications stifle business changes;some of these older applications often require other legacy applications that are used for management and maintenance purposes. Successful application rationalization must be a business led initiative. For the actual process of rationalization, share some best practices about how to rate/rank/optimize. Assess all applications on maximum different criteria such as business value, training cost, support cost (business & IT), technological alignment, availability of skills, vendor viability, etc. Based on such a comprehensive analysis, make some quick wins and use this to support other initiatives focusing more on governance and long-term benefits.

Application integration and optimization are the keys to ensure that the application ecosystem offers real value for future business competency and agility. It’s the co-responsibility of business and IT to keep consolidating, modernizing, integrating, and optimizing the application portfolio, paying specific attention to quality, standards, regulations, etc, to ensure that the application ecosystem offers real value and also is necessary for future agility.

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Innatercharactertraits

  Character means many things, which is inbuilt, the innate self, the individual's intelligence, sharpness, and dynamism, it’s the combination of values, attitude, and integrity.

Character is human's blueprint, both natural and nurtured. Character reflects one’s inner world, the combination of perception - how they interpret the world, and personality - how they interact with the world. Trials and suffering expose one’s character for who they really are. Some demonstrate virtue; others show compliance. 

Character-based leaders and professionals have consistency to be who they are regardless of circumstances; persistence to do what they need to do to fulfill the vision and achieve the goals; as well as resilience to overcome barriers and fail forward. Here are three key factors in building strong characters.

Authenticity: Being authentic is defined as being real or genuine, discovering your strength and uniqueness, being yourself, even if you are not perfect, and nobody is. Authenticity is perhaps the prerequisite for character development and defining your true purpose is a helpful instrument to guide yourself toward the tough journey continuously through lots of challenges to test your character. There are psychological and personality factors in character. The mind of every individual is different, the actual mental understanding and subsequent manifestations in action will be different for each individual as well. Character-based leaders and professionals show integrity to make sound judgment, think and act authentically to enhance accountability. Independent thinking differentiates an authentic and character-based leader from a followers and defines an outstanding professional from mediocre employees. It takes the character to be confident, energetic and persistent.

Strong character reveals authenticity, improves professionalism, and highlights uniqueness. As authenticity comes from self-awareness, value proposition, and fair judgment. In many traditional organizations with cultural inertia, people feel unsafe to express themselves or try to imitate others but lose their own identity or character. Collectively, they encourage mediocrity, overly emphasize on compliance, So the corporate culture - their business character is also weak, gradually, they become irrelevant in their industry or the society. Ideally, organizations should cultivate the culture of authenticity - encourage people to be authentic and inspire inclusiveness. The organization can develop a strong brand and great reputation.

Courage: Character is the backbone of- mental toughness and professional fitness. Character based leaders and professionals show courage to break down old rules or “we always do things like that” mentality. Without courage, character cannot shine through. Being courageous is not only about being brave or bold, but it is also the combination of vision, passion, and intellectual risk-taking. The character needs to be built. The content of character may come from nature, part of DNA, but the context of character can be developed via life experience - to be courageous to do something you believe it’s right; to be courageous to listen to what you don’t want to hear; to have the guts to make tough decisions; to be courageous to walk through trial and adversary without losing your confidence. Adversity may test what you are made of at that particular moment only. But you can improve character from these experiences and learn to be more resilient. Once you have formed and built your character through cognition and experiences, those experiences define who you are and clarify your identity.

Character-based leaders and professionals are more purposeful. Being courageous is not the absence of fear. It is acting in spite of it. Without courage, there is no innovation or character based leadership. Character is neither the same as stubbornness nor inflexibility; because character inspires people to hold on their belief and shows courage to do something meaningful with persistence; while being stubborn perhaps implies you head toward the wrong direction or insist on doing something that does not make logical sense; being inflexible means you don’t know how to reach your vision and destiny via alternative path. Character based leadership won’t compromise principles or discipline, but it’s technically fine for them to make compromises on using different methodology or practice; so they show flexible ways to achieve their purpose. To simply put, without character, you cannot turn around tough situations. Without character, leadership cannot reach the high level of maturity.

Consistency: Character-based leaders and professionals are more consistent with their thinking, saying, and doing, ensuring that their voice and actions are in synchronization by combined action, endurance, and with the right spirit. Change is only constant, the character based leaders and professionals define their values and follow the leadership principles with consistency; can strike the right balance, capture the leadership substance and trace the root at the heart of change dynamics. Being consistent means being true to that in every aspect: thinking, saying and doing. If this standard is internalized, then it should guide behavior. Not only do character-based leaders keep consistent on themselves; but they also look for consistency in their teams, in their organization as well as in the ecosystem, as consistency harmonizes humanities.

To be consistent means to be who you are, keep your authenticity and demonstrate character. Characters can synchronize one’s mind and heart. Consistency enforces trust and increases credibility and integrity, or better said, "consistency" is essential in earning and holding the trust of each other. You are what you continue thinking and doing in a consistent way. Character enhances competency development and competency comes from sharpening your strength, while competent leaders also reveal character, courage, present the ideas with confidence, pursue the meaningful goal with persistence, and practice the leadership discipline with openness.

Character means many things, which is inbuilt, the innate self, the individual's intelligence, sharpness, and dynamism, it’s the combination of values, attitude, and integrity. The character is like the seed, with the uniqueness & color theme, the nurturing environment helps to strengthen it further.Character-based leadership is more trustworthy and influential. Character building is a life-long journey at which each individual refine themselves via test and trial, explore purpose & meanings and develop competency and strength.

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Initiateresourceintegrity

Without effective resource management, talented people simply cannot unlock their full potential, and organizations cannot improve their business.

Although we live in a society with unprecedented advancement with abundant knowledge and technology enabled convenience, each one of us has limited time and resources. In the organizational level, besides hard resources such as physical assets, capital funds, there are invaluable soft corporate resources such as people, intellectual property and reputation that need to be managed effectively to ensure that resources are available before they are needed to improve the overall organizational management discipline and maturity. 

When resource management becomes a bottleneck for organizational learning and digital transformation success, no wonder companies across the vertical sectors get stagnation.

Information/intellectual resource: We are experiencing a paradigm shift from information scarcity in the industrial age to information exponentiality in the digital era. Information is the real asset and invaluable resource because it's consolidated, consistent and reliable to extract business knowledge and insight about customers, operation and future trend of business. From chaos to order, to manage information resources in a proactive manner for achieving business value, the business management needs to identify how information is associated with the valued tangibles of businesses, products and services, refine and reuse information to generate invaluable knowledge, and manage the information cycle effectively to improve organizational responsiveness and agility.

Data is messy somehow, but to say that data isn't an asset is to say that a forest isn't an asset. Amassed data like the forest is a resource and can be processed into information (wood) or crafted further to knowledge (goods) to turn it into useful business insight (solution) strategically, methodologically and economically. To pull out the old cliché, information is the lifeblood, and knowledge is power. That's what data provides. Data is an asset and information is a crucial business resource as long as it stays accurate, consistent, and reliable. Any information you can leverage from your data has the potential to be a productive asset as intelligence. If data is organized and analyzed properly, great decisions or sound judgments can be made to ensure prosperity

Human resource: People are the most invaluable resource and asset of the company. Human capital is the skills, knowledge, and experience gained in an organization by people that represent a value investment or resource to that organization. Technically, human resources have two definitions: one is the function within an organization responsible for people administration and the other is the actual resource of people including knowledge, education, training, employee commitment, leadership ability, trust, experience, insights, etc. When an organization is making a seamless management shift from managing people as the human cost to treating humans as resources to investing in people as the capital, they are on the right track of shaping high-intelligent and high performance business.

Effective human resource management helps to do fact-based planning, improves productivity, boosts creativity, and improves the success rate of strategy management. Human resource is a bit static; Human Capital (as people have great potential) should play a leading role, but, until today, it still plays an administrative role. Talent Management professionals are trained to be sensitive towards the integration of human needs with that of the operational needs of a highly insensitive corporate environment. Therefore, it takes great effort to rebalance resources and redirect people to learn and achieve for reinventing the business to get digital ready. There's the process of continually aligning abilities, talents, aspirations, etc., to important work that an organization needs to be done and of providing feedback to employees on how well the organization feels they are delivering on their commitments

Reputation/brand resource: It’s critical to set up priorities, divest non-core capabilities, free up resources that can be used to and deepen core capabilities in order to unlock organizational potential, and stretch the unique strength continuously. A company's brand is one of its most valuable assets and corporate resources - it reflects the business purpose and value. The corporate brand is the consistent image the organization presents to its customers, employees, business partners or other stakeholders. Not only when they walk into your store, interact with your product and speak to your staff, but also when they get in contact via multiple purchasing channels and gain a full set of customer experiences.

Reputation management, brand protection become increasingly intertwined and crucial due to the overwhelming growth of information in the internet age. We are all in this together and have our passions focused on a goal with a cohesive leadership to build a strong business brand and use corporate reputation resources wisely as it directly impacts the long term business prosperity. It is the responsibility of the board to protect and nurture corporate reputation/brand resources by keeping close monitoring of reputation management for transparency and analysis of potential long-term consequences. Branding is also not something that takes time away from the fundamentals of operations, execution, and management. It is instead a methodology, a different way of looking at how you do these fundamental things effectively.

Without effective resource management, talented people simply cannot unlock their full potential, and organizations cannot improve their business effectiveness and efficiency. The organizational processes use resources, specifically the processes to integrate, reconfigure, gain and release resources to match and even create market change. Realigning and rebalancing resources helps the organization take advantage of resources effectively, optimize cost, and strike the right balance of “running, growing and transforming” business steadfastly.

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Innatecompetencycharacteristics

Competency building requires character, determination, persistence, discipline, dedication and practice in the present and a continuum.

Competencies have been embraced around the world, as core practices, due to the huge skills gap among the workforce. To draw attention to the root meaning of the word, "competency," which probably comes from competition, to compete to be the best among the best.

Competencies usually emerge from a blend of mindsets, skills, and disciplines to take certain activities for making accomplishment. The reality is that many individuals may practice a profession for many years but have not matured their practices, lack of well-crafted differentiated competencies. How to strengthen your strength and build professional competencies.

Character and competency are two-sides of the same coin for improving high- professionalism: Character is based on authenticity - who you are inside, and competency comes from sharpening your strength and unleashing your potential. It seems everyone who considers authenticity has his or her own view of it. It is a construct formed in the mind and we know that the mind of every individual is different, the actual mental understanding and subsequent manifestations in action will be different for each individual. Thus we all have some inner strength, perhaps some weakness as well. Healthy competition wins via unique competency, while unprofessional competition is often based on negative emotions and actions, lack of character or authenticity.

We experience all kinds of situations good and bad in our lives that require moral courage to deal with. Capability developed based on character and natural talent via a series of activities and resources make people feel more confident and effortless. When they are authentic, being who they are, they can explore their inner strength and build unique competencies. Character based competency development makes sense because it's about how you can generate a specific energy in yourself to help consciously create the authentic impact you choose, discover your natural talent, not pretending to be someone else, investing in the best of breed capability and integrate them into cohesive and unique professional competency. You are a sophisticated human being because you demonstrate unique character and differentiated competency.

Competency is a combination of capabilities with a focus. Each of these same capabilities may be combined in different fashions to yield multiple competencies. Although we shouldn’t judge the book by its cover; more often than not, we need to make a judgement about professional capability maturity as now we live in a knowledge economy with fierce competitions. Every professional has their own journey of growth either personally or professionally based on their own perception, talent, life experience, training, and refinement. Professional capability is underpinned by various hard and soft factors such as talent, process, motivation, special training, etc to achieve capability coherence. Competency is a unique set of capabilities with focus. It is more related to knowledge and skill for particular work; as well as the performance and the outcome. There are cognitive competency, knowledge competency, or skill competency. All of those could be integrated into core competency to make professional achievement. .

Competencies are interrelated with the traits and experience. Neither one overshadows the other. Dynamic Capabilities are the strategic routines by which talented professionals achieve new resource configurations to adapt to changing environments, building their set of unique capabilities to fix emerging issues promptly. To truly build professional competencies, use the profiles and assess capability portfolios, to identify where the gaps in performance lie, "development, enhancement, and coaching" implies a better mindset, capture both the individual's and the organizational development needs, and take logical steps to achieve well-defined goals and reach the next level of the growth cycle.

Self disciplined to enhance competency management effectiveness: Everything consumes energy. Self-discipline is what supports that moral courage and allows us to act in the right manner and build professional competencies. You sense yourself and that's all you need to let your thoughts and behavior work to keep you motivated. Without discipline, you do not create a new state of awareness where the self is nourished through the experience of positivity and continuous self-development. Letting people explore where their energy is and then align the energy to work at hand and build their professional competency. A sustained motivation will further enforce self-discipline to keep skills updated and grow professional expertise.

Self-discipline is about disciplined thoughts. Thoughts are single pointed and focused on whatever you do to keep building professional capabilities. In fact, a high level of autonomy is the symbol of digital maturity at an individual, team, or organizational level to focus on the most important tasks, or long term goals, spend time and energy on strategic thinking and value-driven activities to develop a set of unique professional competencies that enable business professionals to create something new out of something existing, reaching the new horizon out of an old vision and making professional transcendence for reaching the next level of talent discovery, interdisciplinarity and autonomy.

Talent competency is the digital lens through which people managers can assess talent in a more strategic, analytical, and creative way. Competency building requires character, determination, persistence, discipline, dedication and practice in the present and a continuum. Professional competency development management, in essence, consists of a portfolio or matrix of capabilities that are used in various combinations to develop a unique and coherent set of professional competencies structurally for advancing career path and achieving invaluable outcomes.

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Initiatingpeoplecentricgovernance

Corporate governance is not about governing operations and tactical efforts only; it is or should be equally about governing the evolution of the company. Otherwise the company, no matter how good the governance is, will fail because of a lack of vision and strategic direction.

Governance is like steering-wheel to ensure enterprise running in the right direction, and well head to the destination. Governance is to establish a consensus of what is normal for your organization; manage exceptions as they arise. Update your consensus of normal as the organization changes. Everything else is the detail.

 Can you achieve any level of GRC without people? Is today’s governance over-control, not resilient enough to embrace the change or does it become an impediment to innovation? Culture and awareness are the most critical aspects of GRC, and can only be implemented in humans. You cannot have effective GRC without them. Here are a few human factors for enforcing GRC practices.

There is a critical aspect of leadership in enhancing governance: Governance is a collective mindset; and can be used to raise visibility and awareness for many things that are captured at the different levels of the organization. Passion indeed has a major role to play in conveying conviction and authenticity and builds credibility. A GRC executive who does not truly believe in his/her message will not survive scrutiny! Effective GRC leaders demonstrate passion, savvy people skills, and integrity! They are able to convey a clear message on GRC discipline and direct their organization in the right direction. Organizations should be identifying patterns for good governance and promoting engagement, motivation, and innovation as these are vital aspects of top-performing enterprises in our modern economy.

Corporate governance discipline can fulfill its purpose as a high-level business enabler by providing a structured communication bridge between shareholders/investors and top business leaders such as corporate directors. Effective leaders build governance standards and a set of GRC practices, help to nurture a creative culture with the very characteristics such as strong vision and accountability, improve reliable service/solution deliveries, cost optimization, availability of talents, scalability of operations, or culture cohesiveness, etc.

Innovation, engagement, motivation, etc, are all crucial soft success factors of strong governance: Organizations should be identifying patterns with soft human touch for good governance that sponsors and promotes engagement, motivation, and innovation as these are vital aspects of top-performing enterprises in our modern knowledge economy. Traditional compliance-driven governance discourages innovation. To encourage innovation that has the ability to truly change the course, an organization needs creative people who think out of the box and don't always constrain their thinking with the organizations’ current capability, advocate governance as a discipline to improve the success rate of innovation.

Governance needs to include engagement and motivation because a focus on control and enforcement has the tendency to damage an enterprise's capacity to motivate and engage staff. Likewise for innovation. GRC executives should be able to think strategically and innovatively. Good corporate governance highlights that the board of directors is ultimately responsible and accountable for developing and then sustaining the culture for an enterprise to prosperity meet its agreed goals with the available resources whilst making the most of its opportunities.

Sound governance is to harness people-centricity by improving risk-intelligence: The digital era upon us is about people-centricity. There is a symbiotic relationship between various teams across organizations which leads to realization of higher goals. One point of struggles is governance taking away liberties that are essential to people doing their jobs in a creative way. Governance is important but should be handled and prioritized in such a manner that they're inherent in the way without negatively impacting the working flexibility to deliver premium solutions and to ensure clear and concise information to key decision-makers. It is essential for the entire company to be pulling in the right direction by allocating resources, time, and assets scientifically, policies and standards can be put in the right time and place, and the governance process/mechanism can be embedded into the business process seamlessly.

Autonomy is the tone in running a high-mature people-centric organization. From a people management perspective, with strong governance, appreciate that autonomy and alignment are not rivals but two faces of the same coin, where there is alignment. High mature governance is also high-automated, not all activities within a governance process can be automated but automation certainly makes the process more repeatable and predictable. You can and should automate all areas that don't require human intervention. And in the end, you must understand a task to be automated before you automate it. Strong governance enhances accountability which goes hand in hand with the delegation of authority or power, and accountability is harnessed by autonomy.

Corporate governance is not about governing operations and tactical efforts only; it is or should be equally about governing the evolution of the company. Otherwise the company, no matter how good the governance is, will fail because of a lack of vision and strategic direction. People are both the cause and effect of governance discipline, putting the right people in the right position to practice effective governance discipline for leading progressive changes.

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Innatesysteminsightofpeoplecentricity

The arising new paradigm is all about people-centricity, social, economic, technological, and environmental sustainability issues may be a prelude to paradigm shifts supported by System Principles.

The digital era upon us is about people-centricity. It’s important to understand the organization as a complex people-centric system. With increasing pace of changes and frequent disruptions, adaptation is faster if made with the full involvement of people by applying systems principles to break down silos and embrace emergence. 

Being people-centric is a transcendent digital trait and the core of the corporate strategy in today’s digital organizations. System wisdom is more as philosophical wisdom rather than just scientific intelligence. Here are a few systems analysis  and insight of people-centricity.

Interaction: People have purposes that arise from their interactions with others and environment. They too are influenced by unconscious emotions or the surrounding environment. These interactions manifested with social, political, technical values, etc, tend to be dynamic. System Thinking is about understanding the interconnectivity between parts and the whole and enhances people-centricity. Business leaders have to keep developing their best and next practices, focus on harnessing cross-functional collaboration through iterative communications, robust processes, and efficient technological tools, to accelerate business performance, maintain and fix any imbalance in key business elements such as people, process, and technology, update structures, methodologies, and cultures, inspire teamwork and collaboration which are the route towards building a people-centric organization.

Business is a system, people are systems; every system has its position in the hierarchy of systems. System hierarchy provides system stability and resilience. From a system perspective, high-mature people-centric organizations are not the sum of functional pieces, but an integral whole.The most effective workplace is in which sharing and collaboration are the norms, understanding, and recognizing that everyone plays a “piece of the pie.” Today’s organizations are at a crossroads where the siloes of business functions are at a need to reach across the aisles and respectively work with each other to achieve common goals. Organizational leaders need to take a holistic look at the variety of business relationships and interconnectivity, appy interdisciplinary management to enforce cross-functional communication and collaboration, in order to maximize the company's performance and achieve customers’ expectations.

Nonlinearity: We are what we think and read; human thoughts are characterized by expansion in multiple directions, rather than in one direction, and based on the concept that there are multiple starting points from which one can apply logic to problems. System is nonlinear. Non-linear thinking is less constrictive – letting the creative side of you run rampant because of its wild imagination or inherent divergence. The beauty of human thoughts is its freshness as the hyperconnected people-centric organizations always seek fresh ideas and explore the new opportunities, 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 purpose of Systems Thinking is to frame-solve problems and create desirable futures. Applying a system's lens to understand how the people factor affects the business system, and then, manage the complex business system as the organic living thing. Just like our thoughts and ideas are often spontaneous; systems have emergent properties. Idea Management takes the good alignment of people, process, and technology, the capabilities of managing innovation in the organization is part of the value of innovation. People centric organizations need to keep evolving, renewing, managing ideas and knowledge in a structural way and achieving the state of flow and business continuum. Instead of being rigidly grouped around a specific function or business. The purpose of operating a people-centric organization is to build an intensive and effective working environment enabling the organization to get all the right people with the right capabilities in the right position to solve the right problems systematically.

Coherence: A fully functioning system is coherent, in which people as a subsystem also need to be coherent by harmonizing your thoughts, attitude, and behavior in order to achieve the collective purpose. Traditional organizations are process-driven, but digital organizations are people-centric. The structural design shows how well the different parts of the system work and how they fit together cohesively, and people are always the center to achieve business system purposes. To scale up and amplify business impact, people are the center of the interwoven business ecosystem within which there are multi-layer and multi-dimensional stakeholder relationships. With ecosystem involvement, companies will become more open to diverse opinions and feedback, be more people -centric, and be more resilient to failure forward.

The purpose is the source of all power. It is amazing what people can do when they see they have a source of all power within themselves, a system can be seen to have a purpose of its own when it produces unexpected behavior or ideally creates synergy all the time. Some complex systems produce behavior that is hard to fathom and sometimes impossible to understand. But these properties function together as one interactive, dynamic, multi-dimensional system of purpose that is at the heart of any human system. There are many components in an effective people-centric environment or ecosystem. Each component by itself may not cause a good environment, but collectively, they can and weave an ecosystem such as leadership, culture, capability, practices, tools, recognition system measurements, risk approach.

The arising new paradigm is all about people-centricity, social, economic, technological, and environmental sustainability issues may be a prelude to paradigm shifts supported by System Principles. People become the center of management and they are the major focus for business process and accomplishment. It’s important to apply hard and soft science wherever possible, to diagnose problems, look at the whole picture, with the interaction and relationships holistically, and involve the sequential alignment of a series of steps in building a people-centric organization

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Innerperceptionrefinementcycle

Oftentimes, conflict occurs when there are discrepancies in perceptions. Our perceptions form our personal realities within actual reality.

Perception is the way our eyes see the world, and our mind interprets it into reality based on our cognitions, conditioning or beliefs, culture, etc, leading us to make judgment of people or things.

Even though everyone lives in actual reality, we experience actual reality through the filter of our personal realities, which is ultimately based on individual perception. So it is subjective and varies from person to person. Thus, it’s important to enhance a healthy perception refinement cycle to improve judgmental intelligence and improve professional maturity,

Subjective perception: Everyone is unique, we have our own set of work/life experience, personalities and hobbies, culture. Philosophically, there are two types of reality: personal reality and actual reality. An individual’s perception is his/her personal reality, and this reality is transient. The actual reality is not transient. We think differently, spend time on different activities; follow different media and make different friendships. Therefore, no two people's realities will be totally identical at a given time. No wonder when we use personal perception to interpret reality, there's a discrepancy between subjective reality and objective reality. To put it another way. Even though two people take the same trip, go to the same place at the same time, they might stimulate different emotions and tell completely different stories. Even though everyone lives in actual reality, we experience actual reality through the filter of our personal realities, which, again, is ultimately based on individual perception.

Our perceptions form our personal realities within actual reality. We live in an actual reality that we might never truly experience or interpret accurately. The upside of that is one’s perception is not static, can be altered and influenced by variables and tests introduced to his/her reality, ultimately changing the individual’s reality permanently or temporarily. Just like you went to the same place twice with the same set of ternary, you might have different feelings or experiences, and you might get different subjective perceptions. Why, perhaps because you gain an in-depth understanding of that place or you have different emotional workload, etc. How variables and tests may change one's perception depends on the individual's reality during the time at which these variables and tests are introduced.

Objective perception: The downside of subjective perception is that sometimes it causes confusion, miscommunication, poor decision-making. People misunderstand or mistrust each other because of pre-conceptual assumptions or cognitive biases. It creates varying problems even though their intentions are to solve problems. How to shift from subjective to objective perception for improving judgmental intelligence? To perceive objectively, you need to update knowledge, and gain insight; do dispassionate analysis and make logical reasoning. Being insightful is the ability to see through things, either from the broader lens or deeper perspective.

Perception is based on one’s thought processes which are influenced by one’s beliefs, thinking style, knowledge, and cognitive understanding. We must have enough knowledge, not just any knowledge, but relevant and updated knowledge to make objective perception and sound judgment. To find the truth, one must remove the “old box” shaped via the conventional wisdom or group thinking, but think more critically, independently and in an out-of-box way. Objectivity is an art we try to develop in our personality, revealed through our perceptions, a value addition to our character by which we will be able to handle our life situations without result orientation, fear, anger, stress, worry, anxiety, etc.

Progressive/Creative perception: Perceptions matter because people act or react based on their perceptions, to either create or solve problems. A solution is nothing if the real problem is not perceived. To truly dig into the root cause, and perceive the real problem, takes self-awareness and insightful observation, tolerance and inclusiveness. A perceptive mind with positive thinking creates processive changes; proactively responds to “what happened”; works across the boxes, broadens their perspectives, and connects wider dots to shape creative perceptions.

Progressive perceivers can always see the two sides of a coin, listen to the stories from different perspectives; and understand things via interdisciplinary perspectives to solve problems and make improvement. Creative perceivers with a positive mindset not only interpret what they see, but reimagine what could be, with the intention to solve problems innovatively. Without perception intelligence, people continue fixing symptoms but allow real problems to grow under the surface, out of sight, and become out-of-control.

Oftentimes, conflict occurs when there are discrepancies in perceptions. Absolute objectivity is perhaps impossible to achieve. After all, we are social beings with individual histories built upon both our own experiences and the life stories of those around us. Relative objectivity is a continual process in which we skirt the edge of what is possible. Perception is our mental logic to visualize and interpret the world, see things in progressive lens and reimagine what it could be in order to shape a problem-solving mindset and a better human society.

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