Innovativegovernancepractices

The balancing act of governance discipline is taken along a continuum of risk and reward, for enhancing multitude of organizational management cycles and accelerating business performance.

Governance complements the management approach. Without governance, the management could “get lost” or become too trivial. When companies become bigger and bigger, they try to overly control processes and administrative procedures that make it difficult to reach the strategic goal of the company effectively. 

In a high mature organization, governance must be viewed and assessed at the senior leadership level such as corporate board. High mature governance enhances information management cycle, iterative strategy management cycle, as well as an investment portfolio cycle, etc, to drive high performance results.

Information governance, for the most part, relates to the maintenance of quality data: Information as the most invaluable asset besides people, needs to be protected and used properly. Information governance is critical especially as we move to an on-demand model. Information is a resource over which the governing body should exercise oversight, delegate certain responsibilities, as well as define good policies regarding how decisions are made across the organizational hierarchy. A strong governance model illustrates the governance processes that are used to govern specific activities and establish principles for effective decision making.

As you will not be able to understand the performance of your company or measure it without quality data, and information governance ensures that you can get your hands on it. Information governance is essential for providing meaningful and insightful reporting or business intelligence by enabling information to flow smoothly; and enhancing a healthy information management cycle. So the organizational management can leverage fresh business insight to improve organizational agility, customer satisfaction and competitive advantage.

Good governance enhances a strategic alignment seamlessly: Alignment is fundamental and multidimensional to ensure a smooth strategy implementation and it is key to fully achieve corporate performance goals. Alignment goes beyond conformity and order taking, it needs to include a close partnership with interpersonal communication, value analytics, capability/ capacity enabled execution. Governance mechanisms can be embedded into core processes to enhance an iterative strategy management cycle for accelerating performance and managing risks effectively.

Governance models need to be flexible. If governance is top down or even dictate, you'll have a revolt on the ground and foster a culture whereby people look to bypass governance. If it’s consensus from bottom up only, perhaps you lose the big picture view that compromises governance effectiveness. An effective governance illustrates the governance processes with the mechanisms of escalation and resolution used to strengthen the weakest links of strategy management for improving its success rate.

Governance can be used to judiciously authorize and manage the portfolio of business investments and resources to produce multidimensional business value: Governance is a concept that applies to making decisions where multiple stakeholders need to be taken into account for improving business effectiveness. It is a neutral term which is useful in having the ability to eliminate waste, corruption, inefficiency etc. Governance approaches are nowadays customized, without “one style fits all” approach. If you can integrate governance mechanisms into the investment decision cycle and develop a balanced investment portfolio, it makes instant conceptual sense to the top leadership team for clarifying financial returns, return timeline and risk.

Governance can be enhanced via effective communication and policy setting. It is important to provide a structured communication bridge between shareholder/investors and the board. The corporate governance bodies and management teams should work closely to ensure policy coherence across the business investment portfolio for improving multifaceted value creation of the company. It’s also important to clarify whether the corporate planning aligns corporate priorities, sector business plans, and resource allocations smoothly to manage a balanced investment portfolio for achieving desired business results.

Governance and risk management are important but should be handled and prioritized in such a way that they're inherent in the way to improve business effectiveness, employee productivity without negatively impacting their flexibility to deliver clear solutions and concise information to key decision makers. The balancing act of governance discipline is taken along a continuum of risk and reward, for enhancing multitude of organizational management cycles and accelerating business performance.

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Initiativestopredictplanprevent

 To survive the “VUCA” new normal and thrive with the long-term business advantage involve more prediction, planning, adjustment, and speed.

We live in an era full of uncertainty, velocity, complexity, and ambiguity. In business, every day is a risk, there are downward risks (loss of value) or upward risks (opportunity to create value); there are internal risks or external risks; some risks can be quantifiable; some can only be approximated.

 To predict and prevent, deal with threats or disruptions that organizations face, it’s important to look for something “hidden,” which is not always so obvious, leverage quality information for making better assumptions and improving forecast precision.

Ambiguity: In a world where change is significantly speeding up, business leaders couldn’t predict the future with a certain degree of accuracy, things cannot be described clearly, ambiguity is the new reality. To deal with ambiguity, it’s important to collect relevant information, develop a predicting model based on the information you have, and apply quality data to forecast what will happen in the business. Often, the quality of your data defines the quality of your prediction technically.

Know your information, then see what it predicts. Understand the limitations of information technology, talent ability, process agility, etc. To make effective decisions, organizational leaders and professionals need to have the right dose of tolerance of ambiguity; become more comfortable with uncertainty, unpredictability, conflicting directions, and multiple demands, capture business insight, define more than one way to achieve the business goals, and take different paths for experimenting and exploring to achieve high performance.

Complexity: Things are complex in many dimensions. Organizations are inherently and intensely complex. It is no surprise that there is a tension between “old and new,” from the mindset, business model, process or practice perspectives. People and processes interact with each other, the complex organizations do not operate in a linear, predictable way but have the added complexity of dynamic relationships or nonlinear interconnectivity. They act as complex and unpredictable systems, amplify, or ameliorate the effects of others.

Technically, the complexity of aggregate layers of organization is a burden that often causes conflicts. Organizational management needs to enhance desired complexities such as design complexity, but eliminate unneeded complication. Always keep in mind, organizations become complex, as an evolutionary trend, not for their own amusement, but do it to respond to environments proactively. The forward-looking view of the organization is to determine what the future needs to look like and how business leaders can navigate “VUCA” new normal smoothly. Be flexible to deal with complexity in a structural way and improve overall manageability.

Uncertainty: Uncertainty is a state of having limited knowledge where it is impossible to exactly describe the existing circumstance, and often the management thinks that there is not so much they could do about such an uncontrollable situation. It’s important to make dynamic planning -planning in a short time and take incremental effort, allow the acquisition of new information along the way, identify external business factors and a structural process that can enable an organization to walk around the externals, supply the framing context in understanding uncertainty, mitigate risks, and encourage optimism to deal with emerging events or hidden pitfalls effectively.

Timing is everything; there is known unknown and unknown unknown. Can we predict the "unpredictable"? In the past, many business leaders believed their organizations’ long-term goals could wait until they had dealt with the current crisis. But information intention and high velocity bring a sense of urgency for organizational management to do scenario planning, do analysis and prediction based on quality information, and continue to improve business resilience. Preventing problems requires information technologies, people, processes to analyze and predict the possibility of problem happening, and apply risk intelligence to almost every discipline of management such as people management, financial management, asset management, reputation management, customer relationship management, organizational structure design, products/services/solutions development and so on.

To survive the “VUCA” new normal and thrive with the long-term business advantage involve more prediction, planning, adjustment, and speed. Information based prediction helps to prevent risks at either strategic or operational level across ecosystems. Organizational management needs to strike the right balance of information and intuition, doing data-based prediction, preventing or managing emerging business opportunities and risks smoothly; they should also be courageous enough to take calculated risks, make sound judgments on the way, solve problems that really matter and improve organizational agility, resilience, and maturity.

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Innovativeglobalviewsii

To enhance an up cycle of global leadership and professionalism, a holistic viewpoint of people related growth issues and innovation perspectives enables us to set the common principles for encouraging desired changes, making professional transcendence and collective progress.

We live in the hyper-conencted global society, business leaders and professionals need to shed the tendency to share their unique viewpoints on common concerns, leadership perspectives on value proposition, life experience, world view; information technology, culture quintessential, as well as education, to bridge the multitude of differences, shape the true global mindset and professional competency for building an advanced human society.

Information Technology view: Nowadays, information technology interweaves a hyper-connected global world. What is IT though? People in different professions perhaps perceive information technology from different perspectives. Most people may think IT is the same as the fancy gadgets they play with or the social network they use to spread messages. Those views only touch the surface of information technology. Most consumers enjoy more seamless sourcing/purchasing/working experience online or offline, compared to decades ago, we all should appreciate complex IT systems behind the scenes. Information Technology systems are designed to integrate computer programs, databases, and other pieces of IT components, with how users go about accomplishing objectives. IT is also shifting from monolithic technology led to mosaic information driven. In fact, IT framework and software infrastructure is the foundation to build a real time intelligent society in which information can flow smoothly for solving the right problems and IT enabled automation can free people from doing certain repetitive tasks, so they can do more creative work for achieving goals with purpose.

Keep in mind, misinformation or compromised IT systems will make the organization vulnerable or intimidate the survival of the business. Thus, an objective view and necessary education about information and technology for all professionals cross the industry help them become more professional by delivering quality information; more logical by understanding sequence and consequence of solving problems; more productive by using efficient apps/ tools; more knowledgeable by sourcing the right information; more objective by understanding the limitation and potentiation of IT enabled modern society. The high professionals perhaps need to ponder deeper: How to integrate varying IT enabled subsystems into a seamless societal system in which people can unleash their full potential and businesses can reach the high level of organizational maturity with people-centricity, automation, and profitability.

Culture view: Culture is a collective mindset, attitudes, behaviors. People are gregarious by nature, they tend to organize themselves and it gives rise to a collective set of attitudes, beliefs, educational systems, notions of time and space, etc. Culture shapes how we think about human society in which different groups, organizations, communities develop their own set of subcultures based on certain beliefs or common senses. Besides peeling through the organizational rules printed in their manual; the slogans posted on the wall, business leaders and professionals need to shape an in-depth viewpoint about cultures by digging into the core business value and belief; the essence of diversity in characters, cognitive difference, skills, styles, generations, ethnic background, religious beliefs, etc. Make observations on how people make decisions across the organizational hierarchy, the interaction attitude with their customers or variety of stakeholders, occasions/activities they take, etc, all of which shape the invisible culture that can impact the organizational maturity and long term business prosperity.

We are all part of cultures, most people are culture followers; some are culture irritators, only very few can make an influence on shaping an innovative, progressive and high performance culture. Outdated culture is like the glue that stifles change, how to break down conventional wisdom and rejuvenate a global culture? Generally speaking, being “global” involves a personal intention and intellectual curiosity to understand a variety of cultures, and has passion to deal with complex issues that make global impacts. The spirit of culture comes from the top. Culture is reflected and influenced by policies, practices, rewards and incentives. Global leaders and professionals certainly have to take into account cultural intelligence and how that affects things: how they interact with one another, how they manage, and what’s their thinking process and how they make decisions; from cognitive intelligence about others - as well as themselves!

Education view: If experiences enrich life; education improves life quality. Fundamental education provides basic training for building cognitive skills and abilities to accomplish tasks with a certain level of complexity; advanced education should help people explore deeper about themselves, expand their knowledge base and encourage them to develop more integral competency. It’s a strategic imperative for high professionals to keep integrating the existing building blocks or recombine existing capabilities into the more sophisticated capabilities for making high accomplishments. Quality education should be thought-provoking, promote all positive perspectives of humanity such as freedom to imagine, confidence to criticize or create, empathy to understand, discernment to judge, capability & capacity to innovate; and discipline to commit.

The purpose of education is to instill the art of learning, adapt in a changing world. The future of learning and training will require to break away from the current one-size-fits-all mold and move to a more personalized learning, set the guide for the life adventure, really encourage people to discover who they are and who they want to be; think of future needs, think outside the box, refresh knowledge; build people’s strengths and unleash their potential. Qualified educators/coaches can help receivers recognize opportunities, give them the ability to evaluate the opportunities, ability to select and opt for what is best suited to the individual, inspire them to cultivate thinking and learning habits and drive professional progression

Regardless of differences, all human beings are more similar than different. To enhance an up cycle of global leadership and professionalism, a holistic viewpoint of people related growth issues and innovation perspectives enables us to set the common principles for encouraging desired changes, making professional transcendence and collective progress.

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Imaginingviaabstraction

Abstract is to –simplify and optimize; simplicity can be –expressed via-comprehensive abstract, optimization can be achieved via-structural abstract; abstract is- a framework thing.

Abstraction is –

the blueprint of

concrete thoughts;

foundation of –

collective insight…

Abstract is the art to-

inspire imagination;

the science to

unify common understanding;

abstract your thoughts and words,

to grasp deep meaning.

abstraction is -

a profound thing.


Abstract is an open space,

in which we can-

design a landscape;

sow the seeds;

plant the hope;

grow food for thoughts,

freely;

abstraction is -

an inspirational thing.

The art of abstraction is-

to imagine,

the science of abstraction is –

to unify;

the philosophy of abstraction is –

to convey wisdom.

Abstract allows us to

step in,

stay out

look further;

look deeper,

situationally.

Abstraction is -

a flexible thing.



Abstract is to

refine thoughts from-

the words;

streamline order from-

chaos;

discover logical clue from-

puzzling reality;

differentiate substance from-

styles,

grasp quintessential from –

knowledge;

Abstract is-

a brief thing.


Abstract is to –

simplify and optimize;

simplicity can be –

expressed via-

comprehensive abstract,

optimization can be-

achieved via-

structural abstract;

abstract is-

a framework thing.



Abstract is to

develop timeless principles

via compelling stories;

scientific scenarios.

Abstract is about

applying inductive through-

deductive logic,

talk at a higher,

conceptual level;

to reach-

a point of agreement

with color of difference,

wide base of diversity;

Abstraction and agreement is-

the way forward,

for thread holding-

a harmonized society.

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Innovativeglobalviews

Global professionals should co-develop a set of principles that can unify professional values, enrich life experience, sharpen global mindset and professional outlook, develop global viewpoints of problem-solving and present high mature professionalism.

A professional is an individual who strives to represent professional competency and delivers quality. High professionalism is an important quality for today’s multigenerational, multicultural and multi-devicing workforce to realize collective potential and overcome common challenges.

 Innovative global professionals should shape their perspective of value proposition, life experience, world view; culture quintessential, as well as education viewpoints. Professionalism can be ripened to maturity through the combination of authenticity, capability, quality, credibility, and accountability.

Life experience view: Life is a journey with a series of personalized experiences along with a set of subjective perception. We are what we think based on what we experienced. Whatever we are today - our knowledge and our capabilities are on account of our cumulative experience which were created consciously and subconsciously; some are positive, and some are negative; some help us grow, and some are undesirable and become the stumbling blocks. Experience in most of the cases is a mixture of success and failure. Experience is not about doing the same things again and again; it is about always learning the new things through it. You learn lessons from the past experience, you can also enrich your life through absorbing new knowledge, gaining diverse experiences, and capturing deep insight.

Global professionals need to accumulate enriched life experiences including such as oversea education experience, international working experience, entrepreneurial/intrapreneural experience, coaching/mentoring/parenting experience, interdisciplinary/cross-industries or other cross-boundary experience, failure/frustration experience, etc. The pace of change is increasing, the world becomes flattened, and information is exponential. As people have different character and diverse personalities, there's a discrepancy between subjective perception and reality. Everyone’s life experience is unique, how they express what they experience is also different. That makes our shared world diversified and confusing. Therefore, experience can no longer be measured quantitatively only, quality counts, dynamic counts, lesson-learned counts, etc. You just have to broaden or deepen the experience continually for cultivating the fitting mentality, following a professional attitude with the right mix of confidence and humility, building a unique set of professional competency, developing creativity and refining wisdom on the way.

Professional value view: We are all unique in many ways and no two people are exactly the same across the globe. Value is an informal term and could mean different things to different people. Professional value is usually based on virtue, quality; it’s about how people enable growth with quality solutions in a progressive perspective; demonstrating the high level of excellence and essence of character. Value is not something that can easily be measured and is very subjective. Global professionals today need to articulate a set of values that they can bring to the table, such as inclusiveness, respect, trust, empathy, innovativeness, learning agility, fairness, etc. They show the mindset, attitude, and behavior consistency in conveying those values.

In the contemporary organization and modern society, the true value of an employee is demonstrated when the employee brings the advanced mindset, updated knowledge, professional competency and personal attitude that translates into expected performance outcomes. To make an objective assessment of people’s professional value, you need to look at all aspects of their individual traits, work ethic, professional competency, creativity, influence, performance achievements, and the hidden potential each employee has if given the opportunity to excel within the work environment.

Global view: Compared to the industrial era with static information and overly restrictive boundaries in the last century, today’s internet-based world is much more hyper-connected and interdependent, with dynamic aspects: stacking of tolerances, variability, etc. It requires us to be willing to listen to diverse viewpoints, broaden the perspective to fix misperceptions, and develop a more enriched profile that advocates inclusiveness, innovativeness, and progression.

Global professionals today have to continue sharing their viewpoint about things or events happening in their surroundings, their perspective of future global society; their roles on making desired changes, their professional strengths & weakness, as well as how to team up for building competitive global team for co-solving common problems at the worldwide base and developing professional competencies.

We live in a diverse global society with a multigenerational workforce, multipolar knowledge centers, multi-cultural wisdom, and multidimensional innovation, etc. It’s strategic imperative to frame the new mind to see the ever changing world via the multi-dimensional lenses, it means deepening understanding of how others think and value empathetically; it means proactively gaining cognizance of your environment and adapt to it; it means instilling thoughtfulness, intelligence, and influence in the organizations, communities, or societies. The key elements that future leaders and professionals in all realms of the global perspectives should acquire to effectively familiarize themselves with the psychological, geopolitical, anthropological, philosophical and sociological effects of globalization.

We live in a world where change is the norm and if we don't embrace it, accept it, roll with it, or make it happen, we're not able to run an advanced global society. The internet and collaborative platforms and tools flatten the world to a certain degree, there's transparency in the digital era of the twenty-first century. Global professionals should co-develop a set of principles that can unify professional values, enrich life experience, sharpen global mindset and professional outlook, develop global viewpoints of problem-solving and present high mature professionalism.

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Innovativeinsight

 Isn’t it a tough journey to celebrate 8300 blog postings - to pursue the digital way to brainstorming, innovating and sharing….

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with 8300+ 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 innovation leadership, IT Management, and Talent Management.

Innovative Collaboration Human progress is achieved through three stages- dependent, independent, and interdependent. Thanks to emerging technologies and abundant information flow, the functional, geographical, or industrial borders are blurred, people are encouraged to break down silos, seek out help, brainstorm fresh ideas, and co-solve existing or emerging business problems collaboratively. Collaboration, teamwork, and unity bring complementary strength and amplify collective potential.

Innovate Via Leadership Integration Leadership comes in all ages, forms, and styles. It is a soft discipline with hard professional competency. With hypercomplexity and rapid change, leadership is to bridge, not to divide; to adapt, not too rigid; to move forward, not backward. Leadership effectiveness is based on the breadth of expertise and depth of impact. Often, leadership is not one dimensional, but needs to integrate lots of great ingredients, with a “big picture” in mind for harnessing collaboration and enhancing unification.

Innovategovernance 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. Organizations should be identifying patterns for improving governance maturity, and promoting engagement, motivation, and innovation as these are vital aspects of top-performing enterprises. In today’s modern economy. Sound governance is to improve the management effectiveness and eliminate risks. Technically, the governance structure is independent of the management structure, but the governance process/mechanism can be embedded into key business processes seamlessly in order to improve the organizational manageability and maturity.

Innovativelogic Complexity, ambiguity, uncertainty are the reality today; it’s important to deal with the nonlinear, hyperconnected situations in today's digital dynamic. The most important capability of the cognitive mind with coherent logic is the willingness and ability to seek out knowledge, gain an in-depth understanding of people or things, identify problem areas, dig into root causes, make effective decisions and come up with novel solutions for moving forward.

Insightofpitfallsinstrstegymanagement Many companies spend a significant portion of time formulating rock solid strategies, but execution does not go smoothly for achieving the expected results. There are varying reasons why strategy management fails, and there isn’t always a right or wrong choice in any situation, there are a lot of gray areas, varying blind spots, capability gaps in strategy management. As a matter of fact, execution is often more difficult due to its complexity and the culture resistance. The senior manager should set policies, adopt the posture of "we are in this together," to manage the collective insight and clear up the blind spot, bridge capability gaps and handle gray areas thoughtfully to ensure the pieces of the puzzle can be integrated into a clear business picture, and the organization can reach the clearly defined destination step-wisely.

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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Innovativesociety

More often, progress is not a universal truth, but a relative truth.

Nowadays, information is exponential and knowledge is only a click away. Most human societies are moving from agricultural or industrial societies into information/knowledge societies, and very few are on the way to shape a creative economy. The radical change from one era to another is often called paradigm shift. 

The transformative change often requires changing underlying beliefs, cultures, or conventional wisdom, etc. Whether we can set a progressive tone to make a seamless paradigm shift may depend on how we make the mind shift to structure shift to behavior shift; as well as how to drive progressive changes sociologically, technologically, philosophically, psychologically, evolutionarily, etc.

More often, progress is not a universal truth, but a relative truth. Different communities, groups are perhaps at the different stages of the progress journey. It’s important to architect, reimagine, and co-develop an innovative society via an expanded lens and hold on to a strong belief that collective progress leads to societal advancement.

Interactive: Due to unprecedented convenience and advancement brought by information technologies, we are entering the era of empathy, choices, collaborations, and personalization. To build an information-based innovative organization or society, organizations have to be linked to the many and varying touchpoints between itself and its ecosystem environment in which organizational interactions and relationships are intertwined and information flows in a non-stop way. Highly innovative organizations need to become “Choice Generators,” provide choices for customers on how to solve their issues fitting their needs; provide choices for talented employees on how they would like to get the work done creatively and cost-efficiently.

Top corporate leaders need to apply a holistic view, orchestrate the business interrelationship between people and process, facilitate the planning and communication of innovation, align resources and talent, take customized approaches to each critical problem, and make the continuous adjustment. By pursuing abundant choices and options and becoming more interactive and innovative, we are shifting from the knowledge economy to the creative economy.

Agile: Agility is the ability to "pivot" and change direction in response to environmental pressure, or to create the growth opportunities dynamically. Organizations or societies need to become agiler for adapting to changes or creative change momentum proactively. Agility is not a process you can implement, but rather, a set of leadership philosophy and a change of culture, with a set of principles to refine business culture and management discipline. Running an innovative organization implies constant changes, discovering new ways of thinking, working, collaborating, delivering value by overcoming varieties of friction and challenges.

Agility promotes great flexibility and opportunity to change, harnesses self-organization which directs the individual perspectives into creative, adaptive, iterative, and incremental problem-solving approaches. An innovative society has an agile tone: Encourage progress and advocate a culture of improvement, always have the planning to be getting better, and take an iterative improvement continuum.

Integral: Integration means alignment, collaboration, orchestration. An innovative organization or society is highly integral by cross-boundary collaboration, people engagement, link strengthening, relationship harmony, governance convergence, or change orchestration, etc. Technically, there are technical information technology integration, operational integration, governance (GRC policy) integration or customer experience integration, etc. Integration has to be done with a “big picture,” having the architecture in mind that supports the strategic goals such as growth, improvement or people satisfaction, etc. Seamless integration leads to innovation and harmony.

In a highly integral and informative organizational society, people can work anytime, anywhere, to access any necessary information to create any innovative ideas with partners outside the organization, for making innovation happen and sustain its value. In reality, every organization is at a different level of business maturity, has its own struggles and conflicts. What’s “best” yesterday will not always be the best tomorrow. They have to keep developing their best and next practices, maintain and fix any imbalance in key business elements such as people, process, and technology, update structures, methodologies, and cultures, to catalyze innovation and achieve high maturity.

Collective progress leads to societal advancement. The paradigm has many dimensions compared to incremental improvement, top leadership needs to illustrate the very characteristics of the digital business open system such as hyper-connectivity, diversification, collaboration, and flexibility. They can architect an interactive and innovative society in which people are able to deal with increased innovation intensity and drive transformative change effortlessly.

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Innateprinciplestomakegreatorganization

Principles provide a robust foundation that makes it possible to straightforwardly derive solution-level governance and ensure problem-solving consistency.

Principles are statements of belief that reflect the values, culture and concerns of the organization. The purpose of setting principles is to build an effective workplace where collaboration and sharing are the norms, creativity is encouraged, and accountability is enhanced.

The good principles are “shareware,” all parties should benefit from following them, to make the working environment more open and societies fairer.

Mutual trust, mutual respect: Trust, but verify. Trust can create a great positive impact on team members and encourage progressive changes. Conversely, the lack of trust can accurately predict the demise of any collaborative effort including innovation. In fact, creating and nurturing trust is one of those meaningful things that takes chunks out of our diminishing currency of time in the world of work. Doing the right thing under the given circumstances will earn professional respect.

Respect is based on being trustworthy and authentic. No blind trust or trust too little. Respect others as you want to be respected. Being respected with fair value. Respect for others' ideas, respect for truth, respect for process, respect for knowledge. To develop and maintain trust requires respect, repeat or predictable behavior, dependability, and the fulfillment of promises. All these things take time, but it is worth the effort.

Empathy makes the world equal: Empathy is an ultimate level of human cognition of being non-judgmental, active communicating and balancing between tolerance and respect to achieve equality. As the world moves into a hyper-connected and interdependent digital relationship age, empathy is the defining quality that develops professional relationships and solves common problems thoroughly. One can empathize with someone else without agreeing with their perspective. Without empathy, there cannot be a rapport and thus no sustainable business relationships.

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. Empathy means using the right language with the right people to gain mutual understanding. Empathy is a need for people to be able to relate to other people's feelings and bring out their potential and develop them to be in line with the vision and mission of the organization. There is no completely empathetic relationship established until we tune into the right frequency we receive what is sent out through our own channels.


Communication is the tool to gain mutual understanding in problem-solving: Communication is much more complicated in hyper-diverse contemporary society because there are differences in goals and contexts, dialects and cultures. These contexts can shift. If communication has to develop authentically and empathetically, it is essential that the person communicating should be aware of what he/she wants to communicate, how he/she communicates and above all ensure that he/she has communicated correctly. Both content and context count. Good communicators have the expertise and integrity to substantiate what they stand for, make sure the message they want to communicate resonates consistently and effectively for solving problems proactively.

There are multiple causes for poor communication, but by far the problem most often is the inability of the "speaker" to adequately accept the real nature of the message or the environment. Highly effective communication is the lubricate to solve problems. Effective communication should tailor audiences, so the solution lies in using the right language and style; as well as leveraging the proper communication channels upon how the message is delivered.

Consistency in mindset-attitude-behavior conveys authenticity and high professionalism: People think differently and act accordingly. Consistency means what you think and what you do are coherent. Business professionals with consistency are consistent in the habit of learning and effective problem-solving. Not only do they keep consistent on themselves; but also they look for consistency in their teams, in their organization as well as in the society, as consistency harmonizes humanities.

The information exponential era upon us makes things so transparent, people’s professional life is converged with their personal life, not only their words, but also the thoughts behind the words can be interpreted, or sometimes misinterpreted, or amplified via the speed of the internet. Thus, consistency enhances professionalism and builds trust, based on the simple logic: Unprofessionalism leads to bad judgment and causes long-term stagnation.

Accountability is part of professional integrity: Professionals are responsible for their actions. They should be accountable to themselves or their conscience, their organizations or societies. Accountability needs to be well embedded in the organizational culture, to encourage responsible communication, decision-making, and action, with the intention to build on morale and real productivity. Accountability goes hand in hand with the delegation of authority or power, and can be enhanced by sequence & consequence reasoning for making decisions or solving problems in a way that considers consequences to others.

Accountability is harnessed by autonomy. People with accountability have the freedom to do whatever needs to be done, and the responsibility to ensure they do their best to bring about a good outcome. If you ensure the individuals have autonomy within their tasks or initiatives, you will be able to address performance on an equal partnership basis. Shared accountability or collective accountability involves shared ownership, because most breakdowns stem from silo behavior where people aren't communicating, coordinating. Accountability is an integral component in building high performance culture and moving up the organizational maturity.

Defining principles are both science and art. Principles provide a robust foundation that makes it possible to straightforwardly derive solution-level governance and ensure the effectiveness of the management practices and problem-solving consistency. So people can live a fulfilled and progressive life with energy and balance; organization can grow organically for achieving its purpose and become truly people-centric.

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Innovatesocietalsystem

Contemporary leaders should avoid mismanagement symptom, take necessary actions to transform a lethargic, disconnected organizational system into a thriving workplace and an innovative society.

 Human society becomes hyper-connected, over-complex, and interdependent. Economic and political models provide some insight into the tradeoffs associated with running an innovative organization. 

Top leaders need to clarify their vision, apply interdisciplinary knowledge to understand interconnectivity between processes and systems, expand the new horizon for people to collaborate smoothly, compete fairly and solve problems innovatively, in order to unleash the full potential of human society.

IT as a glue to interweave an innovative human society: Information and technology catalyze today's businesses and modern society. Information brings about business ideas; business ideas generate lots of information. Information comes from the analysis of that data, technology allows for the capture, manipulation, and presentation of data. Information is one of the most intensive puzzle pieces of doing people-centric innovation and Information Systems are the backbone for running a real time innovative society.

In specific, information management systems include policies, structures, programs, portfolios as well as the interwoven relationships between those elements, so managers can leverage them to improve information flow – to ensure people are getting the right information to solve problems effectively. Information system potential would directly impact on the innovation capacity of societal systems because information is the most intensive component in managing a healthy portfolio with the right mix of incremental and radical innovations.

People are fully developed to enhance the career upcycle and make an influence on building an innovative human society: Employee disengagement is a widespread symptom in organizations, causing economic loss, employee dissatisfaction, and work lives lacking true value. It further causes organizational and societal stagnation. People are the most crucial human capital that organizations need to invest in, rather than human resources only. An essential aspect of unleashing human potential, both at the individual or group level, is the ability to challenge different assumptions, subjective conclusions, traditional beliefs, outdated methodologies/practices. In an innovative organization and society, people are encouraged to get out of their comfort zone, bring unconventional wisdom to the table, practice creative communication and take innovative initiatives for unlocking performance.

In practice, training, teaching, coaching, role modeling, self-managing, etc, are all effective methodologies to develop talent. Greater personalization leads to better understanding and application in workforce management to improve professional upcycle career development. Building an intelligent society is about keeping talent flow, integrating competitive teams to innovate, and overcome common challenges. Either individually or collectively, for human beings to function to the best of their ability, they require recognition to fulfill their obligations, encouragement and opportunities to progress in order to gain a measure of self-esteem and contribute to society through a fair system of remuneration. Contemporary leaders should avoid mismanagement symptom, take necessary actions to transform a lethargic, disconnected organizational system into a thriving workplace and an innovative society.

Preventing problems is superior to fixing problems: Opportunity and risks co-exist. The major source of limitation in any opportunity/risk management is because of the risk of the unknown. There are unknown interactions and very high inner dynamics in business complexity. Innovation implies higher risk and higher return on investment. In order to develop a creative workforce and build an innovative society, predicting risks and preventing problems are crucial to enable unconventional problem-solving and connecting wider dots to spark innovation.

Risks are simply potential problems. Solving problems requires people who have excellent analytical and problem-solving skills. Preventing problems requires people, processes, or systems to analyze and predict the possibility of a problem. With the introduction of information and application of intelligence, it is the aggregation and assessment of information that creates the intelligence required to predict trends with a fact-based vision of where to aim and how to get there, defining the rules and strategies in driving the organization forward smoothly. Effective risk prediction and prevention requires cultural changes and leadership support, and optimized processes for identifying, assessing, preventing, and resolving problems. In an innovative society, preventing problems is superior to fixing problems; being innovative is more important than taking a few innovative initiatives. People are the center of change and innovation.

We live in the hyper-connected and interdependent modern global society now, humans are part of the natural world, full of potential, full of variety. We have to be determined to not get limited by conventional wisdom, make real progress somehow. We need to gain an in-depth understanding of numerous visible and invisible factors that perhaps influence the cycle of balance and growth. We can shape a people-centric society based on the realization of sameness and difference; process and flexibility, standardization and personalization. We should experiment with unconventional practices, with a better result to innovate a human society.

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Innatecharacteristicsofpotentiality

It is only then we will see 'Human potential' really show itself, and then come together as a group, will we see real human potential achieved and human society are making leapfrog progress.

The potential is the people’s ability and interest to take on more responsibilities in the future for achieving more. To continuously grow and unleash professional potential, we need to discover innate talent, encourage autonomy, and develop creativity. 

Each one of us has limited time and resources. Without strong discipline and self-management skills, talented people simply cannot unlock their full potential.

Cognitive capacity: We are what we think. We can raise the total cognitive threshold by understanding ourselves deeply at the mindset level. One of the important aspects of unlocking potentiality is to understand cognitive differences, explore mental strength, and develop cognitive intelligence. Cognitive intelligence is defined as capacity for logic, abstract thoughts, understanding, self-awareness, learning, reasoning, understanding; aptitude in grasping truths, facts, meanings, etc.

Each person has a different level of knowledge -the consciousness about a problem, and reacts to environmental changes. To unlock cognitive potential, the most important capability of the cognitive mind is the willingness and ability to seek out knowledge, gain an in-depth understanding of people or issues, and fill out cognitive blind spots in problem-solving. People with strong cognitive abilities keep expanding their cognitive threshold via learning and deepening understanding. Step wisely, people can master different thought processes skillfully, and improve cognitive maturity to keep unlocking their potentiality.

Self-actualization: Maslow defined self-actualization to be "the desire for self-fulfillment and being all you can be, namely the tendency for the individual to become actualized in what he/she is potentially. When people develop professional skills and build unique competencies based on natural talent, they are more passionate to explore new opportunities; more self-motivated to learn and act. In fact, self-development is the full cycle of self-actualization.

To unleash their potential for self-actualization; people think, create, and self-actualize by architecting themselves, experimenting with new things and exploring the art of possibility. Potential can be unleashed via discovering the innate strength and setting disciplines to shape cohesive professional skills and capabilities, as well as taking calculated risks. It is also important to have superior time management and prioritization skills. Talented people have the fitting mentality, aptitude and attitude, and concentrate their energy on developing their own strength and building their unique set of capabilities.

Creativity: Potentiality includes the overall ability of a professional to perform in the future by shaping an innovative mindset, discovering innate strength, and building core competency. Questions, doubts, uncertainty surely do trigger creative thinking and thought-provoking because the human mind is made to want to find better solutions to problems.

Unlock potentiality by focusing on an individual's capabilities and potentialities to innovate as creativity often imposes a higher cognitive load as you think harder and consciously use different kinds of thought processes and thinking tools like association, perspective shifting, opposites etc. Make an objective assessment of people’s learning plasticity, the tendency to constantly question the status quo, interdisciplinary skills and knowledge, intellectual engagement, capacity to adapt, social linkage skills & competencies, etc.

Potential is about the future performance. Either individually or collectively, potential is an investment. We all have potential, but we also need to be humble, admitting our limitations. Collectively, we need to respect and encourage change, difference, and uniqueness. It is only then we will see 'Human potential' really show itself, and then come together as a group, will we see real human potential achieved and human society are making leapfrog progress.

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Innovativeglobalists

Professional globalists demonstrate a global mindset involving a personal intention to focus on being global, with global abilities such as tolerance of ambiguity, cultural cognition, learning agility, mastery of handling complexity.

We live in a global society with enriched knowledge, variety of culture, and diversity of talent; being global is about crossing not only borders but also cultural divides between business, nations or social sectors. 

The true globalists usually require high level skills such as global cognition, inclusiveness, adaptability, empathy, as well as multifaceted competencies to work in a global environment, attract global talent, and co-develop a hyperconnected and harmonized global society.

 


Global cognition: The global society means a hyperconnected business environment, cross-boundary communication and collaboration, and interdisciplinary management approach. Business leaders and professionals can develop global cognition by embracing the variety of perspectives to opens their mind, harnessing multifaceted cultural values, understanding global intellectual/social capital, enhancing professional relationships with trust, and facilitating world-wide dialogues. Well-blended global insight and information-based foresight can drive competitive value and collaborative global growth.

Insightful globalists can broaden their viewpoints based on enriched global content; and deepen their understanding with global contextualism. They play a significant role in setting the common worldwide principles to bridge the difference, enhance a diversifying (ideas)-clarifying (concepts) -unifying (beliefs) cycle of world class insight. They know how to collaborate with stakeholders of all stripes, be able to facilitate and orchestrate the multitude of differences, values, cultures and gain a profound understanding of the global business ecosystem.

Inclusiveness: Inclusive professionals facilitate and orchestrate a variety of global differences such as cognitive differences, value differences, knowledge differences, cultural differences, etc. If diversity allows us to appreciate difference; inclusiveness encourages us to reinforce mutual understanding, clarify common values & beliefs, and enhance harmony. Being an inclusive cross-boundary globalist means you need to have a clear vision to bridge the difference; interdisciplinary knowledge to understand problems at the global scope holistically; differentiated competency to solve thorny issues innovatively.

It’s important to create an inclusive global organization with every dip in the business management lifecycle, from individual thinking to collective mind (culture); encourage different voices and unique viewpoints. Focusing on inclusiveness will force you to confront new ideas, and possibly embrace a new concept that you may have never imagined. Focus on convincing, persuasion, and collaboration at the global scope, unify the diverse perspective into a clear vision for driving desired change steadfastly, and solve problems that have global context collaboratively.

Adaptability: Global adaptability is the ability for adapting to the dynamic global environment. Develop global adaptability through openness, creating cross-geographical mutual interest communities, being able to seek ways and means of adjusting your perspective and those around you, negotiating win-win outcomes, increasing self-confidence and performance in others. Global professionals are able to apply critical thinking or the adaptive skills needed to both develop worldwide insights about emotional, economic, societal factors for driving needed changes, creating new options and solutions for meeting those needs.

Adaptive globalists with a growth mindset are able to push the right buttons and pull the right resources to co-develop a collaborative global society by setting commonly accepted principles, building and scaling change capacity. Global organizations give people the voices, tools and experiences of how to effectively communicate across the world even if they perhaps speak diverse professional or national languages, and build trust across these diverse cultures.

Culture empathy: Culture is one of the most intangible and strongest glue weaving inside human society and organization. Culture is much deeper than the customer or a language. It is a corporate or national character. Global professionals have cultural empathy. Empathy means that you have to not only see through the eyes of someone who is different, but you also have to think through that person’s mind. True culture empathy springs from personality, early nurturing, curiosity, and appreciation of diversity of thoughts and characters. It is further developed by people’s in-depth knowledge about culture via historical, sociological, psychological, philosophical lens, etc.

Empathy is the characteristics that allow you to speak to a person from the space they stand, not where you think they should be. Culture empathy is a critical ingredient to orchestrate globalization benefits by harnessing cross-boundary communication, as understanding the values of your audience will facilitate your ability to develop empathy, cohesion, and strategic alliance across boundaries, and abstracting various perspectives into world class insight based on an updated global view.

Professional globalists demonstrate a global mindset involving a personal intention to focus on being global, with global abilities such as tolerance of ambiguity, cultural cognition, learning agility, mastery of handling complexity, the skills of communicating virtually and working across cultures for solving global level problems and leading transformative changes.

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Itledinnovation

IT plays a significant role in managing information-knowledge-insight cycle and fostering innovation by leveraging disruptive technologies and enriched information flow.

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

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

IT Led Innovation 

IT Innovation Management Playbook Technology is pervasive and the information is abundant, business initiatives and digital transformation today nearly always involve some form of technology implementation or information processing. IT plays a significant role in managing information-knowledge-insight cycle and fostering innovation by leveraging disruptive technologies and enriched information flow. One of the most appropriate titles for CIOs is “Chief Innovation Officer,” who plays a critical role in orchestrating innovation symphony. Here are five critical components in the IT innovation management playbook.

Uncover Science Behind Breakthrough Innovation Innovation is to have a new perspective on things. Innovation is what leads to differentiation. Being able to innovate or close is being able to think and create new things based on the business or the customer’s needs. The goals of innovation, especially breakthrough innovation, should focus on people, the long-term trends and business vision. Innovation is both art and science. It's about creating something new or better based on a combination or modification of previous attributes or approaches. Every organization is different, every innovation initiative is also unique, there is no one size fits all formula. Innovation is a process which can be managed, In this regard, innovation is more science than art.

IT Enabled Organizational Capacity & Capability on Demand With “VUCA” digital new normal, IT continues to grow in importance to organizations, both operationally and as a competitive advantage. Digital IT organizations achieve high-performance business results and strategic flexibility by developing a set of differentiated business competencies. The emergent IT consumerization trends transform IT from monolithic to mosaic; the arrival of capacity and capability on demand will change the organizational mission, structure, and skillsets of enterprise IT and reinvent IT as a strategic business partner.

Information Management as a Core Digital Capability Compared to digital laggards, high-performing organizations can manage two most invaluable assets in business well: People and information. Nowadays, organizations large or small, process an enormous amount of data, information simply becomes the lifeblood of businesses. Information Management is all about having the right people to have the right information to make the right decisions at the right time. Given this assertion, there is no limit to the value of information in running a high mature digital organization. Information Management is, in fact, becoming the core digital capability of the business.

ITforrechargingbusinessmodel A business model is a way that a company generates revenues and profits. It’s a multi-level, zoom-able schema of how a business or an organization creates, delivers, and captures value for stakeholders, employees, customers, investors or society. When do you use a Business Model? Regularly you use it to review, adapt or redesign the basic building blocks of a business. With rapid changes, a business model is structural and can be both created and changed very quickly. The emerging digital trends bring significant opportunities for businesses to pursue growth through the methodical examination of alternative ways to solve business problems; the abundance of information and the lightweight digital technologies also play the crucial role in recharging business models and renovating traditional organizations to reach the next stage of the business development cycle. What are the multitude of influences IT can make to catalyze the business growth, how to leverage IT for recharging business models and accelerate digital paradigm shift?

The blog is a dynamic book flowing with your thoughts; growing through your dedication; sharing your knowledge; conveying your wisdom, and making an influence through touching the hearts and connecting minds across the globe. The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with 8300+ blog postings. Among 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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Innovatevialiftingcognitivecompetency

Cognition is a perception, sensation, and insight.

Cognition is one’s ability to think and make logical reasoning. When we explore the mental process of acquiring new knowledge through thoughts, experiences, and senses; the cognition involves exploring varieties of meanings or thoughts and abandoning old and establishing new relations. 

Cognitive gap is one of the serious problems because it disconnects many things which are supposed to be interconnected and causes blind spots for either defining the real problem or solving it smoothly. Business professionals need to understand the level of cognitive differences, keep learning and sharpen their thinking ability to improve cognitive competency.

Cognitive functioning: The brain is like an organic computer that creates an energy or operating system called the mind. The mind creates programs called thoughts. People do think or rethink habitually. The actual “thinking” is a conscious or nonconscious effort to reorganize memories (meanings) and integrate newly acquired knowledge (new meanings). Cognitively, the cognitive functioning brain has abilities to call on as many neural circuits to “connect the dots” in the wider brain area for generating thoughts. There are possibly thousands of thoughts created by active minds everyday. A thought is a meaning; thoughts wrapped around with thoughts can generate fresh ideas.

People think and learn differently. Cognition reorganizes parts of one’s belief system, and thoughts navigate within one’s present belief system as it is. Technically, the more we know, the more relevant thoughts can be generated. The most important capability of the cognitive mind is the willingness and ability to seek out relevant knowledge, filter a set of information we are interested in, gain an in-depth understanding, address our ignorance and the assumptions we make to minimize it.

Cognitive agility: Each of us has a defined cognitive threshold - an upper limit to the level of complexity that we can handle at any one time or on any one topic. Each cognitive mind has a perceptual difference, the out-of-date perception is like the time glue that keeps you still while people with cognitive agility move on which creates another problem-resentment and more negative thinking and emotion. To close the gap between subjective perception and objective perception, the mind needs to be open enough to embrace other minds’ perception, always understanding things via different angles.

To improve cognitive agility, brainstorming or communicating to others raises your total cognitive threshold. Continuing learning and updating knowledge allows new pieces of information to be synthesized for generating new knowledge and fresh insight to fill blind spots, break down or challenge conventional thoughts or common belief, etc. Too often assumptions and prejudices get in the way of understanding. To close the understanding gap and improve learning agility, we have to really dig beneath the superficial layer, see around the corner and transcend the interdisciplinary knowledge to get to the heart of the matter,

Cognitive competency: At the higher level of cognitive maturity, cognitive competency refers to growth mindset, clarified logic, and creativity. People with strong cognitive abilities keep expanding their cognitive threshold via learning and deepening understanding. The paradox is that we all have potential, but we also need to be humble, admitting our limitations. The truth is that each of us is a complex blend of contrasts - positive and negative; intuitive and logical with imperfect judgment. We can raise the total cognitive threshold by understanding ourselves deeply at the mindset level; continuous learning, and practicing a variety of thinking and reasoning.

High professionals with cognitive competency can establish links between concepts of “thinking,” “feeling,” and “willing,” strengthen cognitive ability of acquiring knowledge through thoughts, senses, learning and experiences to make effective decisions or sound judgment. The most important capability of the cognitive mind with cognitive competency can make more objective perception, integrate thoughts to address ignorance, minimize assumptions for making sound judgments, developing creativity, and reinventing new knowledge.

Cognition is a perception, sensation, and insight. Cognitive gaps disconnect many things that are supposed to be interconnected, and cognitive competency unlocks the potential of professionals and catalyzes innovation. It’s critical for professionals to keep improving their cognitive competency. Collectively, it’s important to be surrounded with people having cognitive differences, they can provide friendly feedback, complement each other’s strength for improving problem-solving effectiveness.

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Initiatefrictionlesstransition

A high mature organization can approach such a flow zone when people are ready to move to a fluid structure, digital leaders are eager to set stages and drive a frictionless, immersive, and relentless digital transformation.

Friction is a balancing mechanism that says something isn't aligned or set right. The variety of fricitions stifle progressive changes and generate numerous problems large or small. Any business friction existing is interference to decrease productivity, diminish innovation, or decelerate business speed. 

It’s important to understand the causes behind frictions, remove organizational, systemic, culture, barriers, break down decision bottlenecks, and lubricate communications and relationships, with the goals to unlock performance.

Process friction: Processes underpin organizational capabilities and enable business strategy. Static or overly rigid processes would cause business friction. There are event driven processes and goal driven process. To run a customer centric organization enabled by people-centric processes, business managers need to make an objective observation on the critical process maturity; as well as how their group works with other groups, any frictions existing to decrease productivity, diminish innovation, or decelerate business speed.

The digital collaboration platforms enabled by emerging technologies, efficient apps, and tools, help to lubricate processes, flatten organizational hierarchies, keep information and ideas flow smoothly, allow people across the business ecosystem to share knowledge for solving problems and overcoming common challenges. A frictionless organizational system with dynamic processes and flexible structures allow staff to get out of their comfort zone, figure out alternative ways to do things, and build a dynamic business to accelerate performance.

Culture friction: Culture is a collective mindset, attitude, and behavior. High performance culture is the vehicle through which the business strategy is executed and defines the environment where the talent can unleash the potential. In many companies that get stuck at the low level of maturity, the management continues to practice “command and control” style and employees do not feel fully engaged. There are culture fricitions around the business hierarch. When different shareholders holding their own subgroup cultures, push the business to different directions, change gets stuck and business transformation is stalled. The organizations cannot unlock their full potential.

The culture differences are by far the largest source of friction. Many organizations are not integral so seamlessly, often internal politics comes to the play for fighting the limited resource or taking the credit, negative culture cause frictions between people, functions, and geographical locations. To lubricate culture fricition, you need to understand people psychologically, intellectually, and anthropologically; make a seamless transition from silo setting to continuous flow; rigid hierarchical management to networked management; from command and control to self-organization; from managing products to managing processes; from training for fixed roles to learning to fit the purpose.

Productive friction: Frictions are not always negative; the idea of 'productive friction' is a way of encouraging and instilling a creative innovative environment. Creating productive friction is about flow, quality, and creativity. That means productivity seems to decrease, but you spend more time on creative activities for unlocking potential. In the environment with productive friction, creativity is stimulated via cross-functional communication, cross-generational brainstorming, and cross-industrial dots connection.

Many organizations are not fertile ground for ideation, there is the negative vibe surrounding their working environment, silo thinking, bureaucracy, and internal politics all stifle innovation to a certain degree. A creative working environment with “productive friction” ecourages intellectual curiosity, appreciate humility, allow staffs to explore alternative ways to do things, makes the work not just a job, but a career journey full of discovery and adventure.

A high mature organization can approach such a flow zone when every department in the company needs to work together cross-functional borders when necessary, to ensure that the business as a whole is superior to the sum of its parts. People are ready for moving to a fluid structure, digital leaders are eager to set stages and drive a frictionless, immersive, and relentless digital transformation.

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Innovatevialeadershipintegration

Leadership integration is about bridging gaps, building trust, practicing visionary and strategic thinking with enthusiasm, and demonstrating unique personal leadership styles.

Leadership comes in all ages, forms, and styles. It is a soft discipline with hard professional competency. With hypercomplexity and rapid change, leadership is to bridge, not to divide; to adapt, not too rigid; to move forward, not backward.

Leadership effectiveness is based on the breadth of expertise and depth of impact. Often, leadership is not one dimensional, but needs to integrate lots of great ingredients, with a “big picture” in mind for harnessing collaboration and enhancing unification.

Integrate hard and soft skills, interdisciplinary knowledge and multi-dialect fluency into leadership competency: The soft leadership discipline has hard components such as interdisciplinary knowledge expertise and multicore professional competency. The "hard-core" of leadership also has soft touch such as communication and reputation. The leadership maturity is based on the right mix of hard and soft elements, substance and style.

When cataloging the "hard" skills in the leadership discipline, there are groups of skills that might be considered, such as vision, strategic thinking, innovation, decision effectiveness, technical proficiency, business dialects fluency, or problem-solving competency. The soft factors of leadership include authenticity, character, vision, creativity, empathy, humility, psychological health & resilience, wisdom, etc. Only by integrating all those hard and soft elements seamlessly, modern leadership can reveal advanced mindset, clear vision, positive influence, and leapfrog progression.

Integrate diverse perspectives or multidimensional viewpoints into a holistic leadership perspective: Leadership is about direction and change. When jumping into the digital future of “VUCA” new normal, people often talk about change as though it is unidimensional, or a universal commodity. Contemporary leaders need to be open-minded, leverage multidimensional viewpoints and integrate diverse perspectives into a holistic perspective that can close blind-spots and lead to effective decision-making and structural problem-solving.

Business leaders today shouldn’t reactively look through and respond to the business ecosystem only; they should proactively seek to create a “living” environment in which people can grow, and businesses focus on dynamic resource management, harmonized relationships, the long-term perspective, and scalable organizational performance.

Integrate leadership and management into successful business transformation formula: Many organizations that get stuck at the lower level of maturity are divided by so many gaps across leadership, management, and innovation, etc, losing their collaborative advantage as they are being over-managed and under-led. Leadership and management, in fact, are two sides of the same coin; you can't get an organization to perform by using one side.

Leaders inspire people to think about and reach for what can be; managers execute to what is. In most human endeavors, leadership and management skills are not mutually exclusive but mutually reinforce with each other. A great manager does need to lead "at times" and a great leader does need to manage "at times," People have to play both roles based on the team or organization's overall needs and maturity.

In today's information overloading business dynamic, leadership integration is about bridging gaps, building trust, practicing visionary and strategic thinking with enthusiasm, and demonstrating unique personal leadership styles. Great leadership manifests respect, caring, core value, professionalism, etc, to reach clearly defined vision and strategic goals of the organization.

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