Innatechangeacceleration

When the organization has put a stronger emphasis on empowering people, catalyzing innovation, and improving people-centricity, it is reaching the inflection point to achieve the next level of organizational maturity.

Running a business is a thorny journey full of uncertainty, velocity, complexity, and ambiguity, with many curves and bumps on the way. How successful organizations can handle “VUCA'' reality depends on how fast and capable they can adapt to the ever-changing environment, as well as how proactively and creatively they can drive change. 

Change is inevitable, the organization can reach the “inflection point” of change when the business is able to generate new opportunity for growth; hit the point for transformation, as well as reach the moment to be “paranoid” – either disrupting or being disrupted.

Strategic alignment: Change is the new reality, with increasing paces. When reaching the inflection point of change, organizations can stretch out in every business dimension for driving radical business transformation with all essential dimensions. It requires all functions of the company to move in the right direction, make strategic alignment to ensure all organizational actions are directed to achieving common strategic goals and objectives of the business, and driving changes at the synchronized speed. This is characterized as an important step to reach the inflection point of driving transformative changes and improving business maturity.

In order to make smooth transformation, the change management needs to check up: Are your people acting in a way that is consistent with the strategy? Are your processes and people integrated to ensure a consistent ability to change? The inflection point of change is reached when strategic alignment occurs when all parts of the company sing their respective pieces of symphony in harmony to achieve high purpose. As strategic alignment occurs on multiple levels, it presupposes the ability of each link to articulate strategic intent, build changing competencies and deliver results consistent with the strategic goals.

Structural flexibility: The degree of business responsiveness depends on how business systems and functional subsystems interact with each other, and those interactions can be structural, technical, informational, or human. Traditional companies are often inflexible, slow to change due to overly restrictive hierarchy, rigid structures or processes, redundant procedures, or outdated rules, etc. When the organization gets stagnated, the top management feels frustrated and the bottom feels the pains, it’s time to speed up the pace of change by fine tuning the organizational structure for reaching the inflection point of business transformation.

From a people management perspective, the goal of improving structural flexibility is to enforce mutual trust, harness cross-functional collaboration, to respond to change fast and get things done smoothly. The company can approach the flow zone and reach the inflection point of change when the positions in its hierarchy have clear and accountable tasks and an optimized organizational structure that helps to empower people, build up agility for both creating changes and adapt to changes to deliver better business performance at higher speed.

Culture agility: Inflection is a bend, a fold, a curve, a turn, a twist; such change can mean an opportunity to rise to new heights, or a risk to hit the uncertainty. Behind the scene, there is often underlying cultural, value, leadership changes needed to get ready, set to go. Daily business change may be mechanical, but the large transformation is more radical and culture agility is a prerequisite condition for reaching the change inflection point. Business transformation arises when the scale of the interrelations, interactions, or interrelational interactions amplifies the collective capability to achieve multifaceted values for the organization.

Corporate management needs to ponder whether there is a burning platform or a burning ambition (or both) that compels your business to become much faster, better and mature at delivering change. Make sure there is dissatisfaction with the current situation. The people that make up the organization must see a compelling need to change from risky practices, obsolete ideas, outdated processes; and do so proactively before issues get worse. Otherwise, companies may begin a decline from their previous good performance. It also helps when people believe things will improve by changing, innovating, or transforming, etc. Companies can reach the inflection point of changes if the top management has a sense of urgency, people can get out of their comfort zone, and the organization has developed a culture of inclusiveness, innovation, learning agile, etc, to reach the next level of business growth cycle and agility.

The rate of change has accelerated, indicating that business must learn how to strike a balance between managing complex issues today and predicting the emerging events of tomorrow. When the organization has put a stronger emphasis on empowering people, catalyzing innovation, and improving people-centricity, it is reaching the inflection point to achieve the next level of organizational maturity.

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Innerbalancedscoreboard

A balanced scorecard is a great tool for facilitating communication, prioritization and performance improvement.

Scoreboard is a way of consolidating and comparing metrics relating to a holistic assessment of organizational or functional performance. It contains a good mix of the outcome measure of long-term strategic value along with performance drivers to track the operational progress in the short term. 

An effective balanced scorecard with well-selected metrics can harness information-based communication and make tangible improvement both qualitatively and quantitatively.

A balanced scorecard is very useful to provide a “balanced” view of tradeoff variables for facilitating information based communication: A well-defined scorecard should contain a good mix of outcome measures, with the long-term strategic value along with performance drivers to track the progress in the short term operational value, ensuring decision makers understanding the various trade-offs and making the strategic balance.

A balanced scorecard can facilitate data based communication and performance review. As people can see what the outcome will look like throughout the transition, and then there should be a consideration for a balanced scorecard that measures the progress of the strategic goals you want to achieve. 

A well-designed scorecard allows you to focus on the most critical issues, and put all things in context: A balanced scorecard is necessary to practice holistic performance management in a structural way, allowing the most effective initiatives to be planned for achieving corporate goals. Prioritization is critical, as the alternative is a land grab for resources. It is usually suboptimal and deteriorating performance, especially when legitimate top priorities are delayed. The scorecard allows you to focus on the most important things and tailor the needs of varying business stakeholders.

A scoreboard is a great way of selecting, scoping, and aligning specific projects to overall strategic objectives and the budget. It's also up to the business leaders to show that they add value by implementing end to end metrics on performance and availability, put key success enablers in the spotlight for all team members, and unify their efforts to achieve common performance goals, and insist on KPIs to measure business outcomes.

A balanced scorecard is a concise report about strategy execution: The success of the strategy is not only based on how well you have planned but how well it is executed. The scorecard helps you a lot when it is into execution mode, not in the paper mode. Scorecards translate your strategy into concrete terms and help you track its implementation in a measurable way.

A scorecard assesses the progress to strategic goals, provides a holistic view about the progress of strategy management and offers a way for a corporation to gain a wider perspective on its strategic decisions by considering the impact on finances, customers, employee satisfaction, business dependencies, and constraints between components, individuals, and overall risk exposure.

The goals of applying scoreboard are to translate the vision and strategic planning into operational goals; communicate strategy and link it to individual performance. People can see what the outcome will look like throughout the transition, and then there should be a consideration for a balanced scorecard that measures the progress of the goals you want to achieve. It is a great tool for facilitating communication, prioritization and performance improvement.

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Innatecapabilitycheckpoints

Capabilities are processes and competencies viewed strategically; they are also the resources required for business purpose and goals.

Organizational capability presents a high level view on how business can achieve certain goals. It provides a level of abstraction that allows more open consideration of business success factors such as people, process and technology. 

There are capability necessities and capability differentiators. Some are linear, some are integral; some are static; some are dynamic; Top business leadership teams need to set the right checkpoint, make an objective assessment of their investment on business capability development and improve the overall organizational competency.

Checkpoint is a generic progress checking that inspect different layers of capability granularity: High performing businesses depend on their differentiated sets of business capabilities which are underpinned by the well-managed business processes matrix within the organization. Business capability is synthetic in nature, embedding agility in processes and focusing on building the long-term organizational competency. A capability can be decomposed to finer grain capabilities with different layers of granularity. One capability may be implemented by multiple business processes for multiple products and services. The evaluation of capability helps to clarify: What the business does - capabilities; how the business does it - processes/functions, and what performance results have been achieved; how to fine tune capabilities to improve business performance.

The digital capability is modular, dynamic, having many visible and invisible business elements. You design the capability, then model, execute, monitor, optimize then again back to design; to enhance an iterative cycle of capability development. The deliverables of business capability by which the scope and granularity of the solution models are created and information keeps updated. The management should manage large volumes of information, activities and run simulation events to identify areas in a capability portfolio that can be changed and optimized to improve coherence; as well as leverage the right information as the glue to integrate them into dynamic competencies. Loose coupling makes it possible to change the components without affecting the system; updated information makes sense to accelerate the performance.

Checkpoint = a point at which certain criteria are assessed or reassessed, so that a decision can be made about an initiative: A capability is the defined or emergent property of an organizational system. It means that the parts or components interact to create or realize the ability. The integration of a linear functional capability into a holistic portfolio of capabilities across all enterprises builds unique and sustainable business advantages. A checkpoint is what you have in agile design or capability management at the end of each iteration or intra-iteration. You check to see if you're on course what adjustments are required, and where to go next. The term is in tune with the risk-driven, adaptive nature of agile management.

Business capability is an acquired and organized "ability" within a company and takes hard work to put in place. The core components of an organizational capability are people with the appropriate skills, knowledge, experience, attitudes and behaviors, process and associated activity/decision and input/output descriptions; technology including information systems, or other tools. Conduct a fit/gap analysis of capability vs requirements, facilitate the process of deep analyzing, to identify areas in a capability portfolio that can be changed and optimized, such as duplication or ineffectiveness, etc. The maturity of a business capability would be based on the abilities to deliver on customer needs or to achieve the desired outcome.

Checkpoint review for capability governance: Capability can contain many services, processes, and functionalities to perform a set of activities for achieving successful outcomes, whether financial or brand. Corporate governance is most often viewed as both the structure and the relationships for enabling business capability building or determining performance. There should be a governance mechanism embedded in all crucial business processes, and there are governance practices to enforce accountability at every level of the organization to accelerate corporate capability development and optimization.

Governance is a neutral term which is useful in having the ability to discuss bad governance with terms such as waste, corruption, inefficiency etc. In disciplined agile approaches, the team recognizes that there's more needed than just delivering potentially shippable software at each iteration. There are other risks that aren't well addressed by just doing that, and that you should have more sophisticated governance practices to enhance the structure and processes of authority, responsibility and accountability in a business. Governance shouldn’t become the other layer of complexity for its own sake, but needs to be more interactive, flexible, have a definite goal and exactly know the kind of problem they would like to solve for the business and once solved and unlock capability-based performance.

There are different views and multiple perspectives to understand a capability. Capabilities are processes and competencies viewed strategically; they are also the resources required for business purpose and goals. Top executives need to take a strategic perspective, set the appropriate checkpoints, and identify the capability patterns or gaps of the company, make the risk profile of the enterprise performance deficiencies, and assess the overall capability maturity based on the management view of the condition/suitability/adequacy/viability.

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Innovativecoopetition

It is time to step into the creative era of coopetition (cooperation + competition) and reach the next level of advancement.

 

The purpose of the book “Digital Hybridity: How to Strike the Right Balance for Digital Paradigm Shift” is to shed some light on how to strike the right balance of stability and changes; being transactional to keep spinning and being transformational to leap forward for making a seamless digital paradigm shift.

Digital organizations should apply the hybrid management approach, focus on building a diverse, networked, and extended modern working environment in which the powerful digital platforms and computing technologies enable seamless conversations, delayer overly rigid organizational hierarchy, inspire idea sharing and brainstorming, and engage employees and partners to achieve the high-performance result.

Innovate via Coopetition

“InnerCoopetition” as the digital Characteristic Competition is part of the natural dynamics of life. In nature, competition is for evolution; in business, competition is for surviving and thriving. In the silo industrial age, the competition is about commanding and controlling to keep the status quo; and now we are steadily stepping into a deeper and also far more advanced digital era . The goal of healthy competition in human society is to encourage innovation and accelerate the speed of progression.

Innatecompetition Competition has different connotations and meanings under different situations or context. Competition is part of the natural dynamics of life and societal evolution. Good competition pushes us to grow, innovate, and mature; bad competition causes confusion, frustration, and downgrades humanity.

Unfoldingdigitalorganization The organization as a whole is more about people, process and technology integrated into a set of business capabilities for achieving business results at both strategic and operational level either consciously or subconsciously. With high velocity and unprecedented uncertainty, the future of the workplace will be shaped by changes that take place in the way people relate to themselves and to the experience of their environment and others around them.

Improve Digital Maturity by Pursuing “Hybrid Truth” Digital organizations are all about information savvy, adaptation, innovation, people-centricity, high-performance, and speed. They are expanding both horizontally and vertically. The high mature digital organizations are highly conscious about what’s happening in their environment, take a holistic understanding of relationships between parts and the whole, strike the right balance and leverage the pairs of business factors for pursuing the “hybrid truth,” to improve the overall organizational digital maturity.

Innercomplimentaryteamvscompetitiveteam Digital businesses are hyper-connected and interdependent; the nature of team is also shifting from homogeneous setting into heterogeneous characteristic; the further debate is: Complimentary team or competitive team, which can build more trust and achieve the high-performing result? What's the strategy and tactics to improve digital fitness and shape a high mature digital master?

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with about #8300+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. blog posting. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom, to inspire critical thinking and spur healthy debates. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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Innovativenessii

We all should broaden the points of interest and try new things to develop creativity, spur innovation all the time.

Creativity is an innate ability to think and produce, connect the dots to generate novel ideas. Innovativeness is a state of mind that requires the proper psychological level of mental balance, inner security, positive attitude, and genuine autonomy. 

Innovators show creative energy, proactive attitudes, and the blend of knowledge and ingenuity. The right dose of intellectual curiosity, confidence, and humility are all valid within the context of his or her creative intelligence.

Innovativeness & invention: Innovative ways of thinking lead to value-added inventions or improvements to current inventions. Innovation is more process driven, to transform a great idea for achieving its value while invention is more product oriented, to develop something new, with the transformation of capital to a new product/process/idea, etc. Analogously, invention is the creative storyline; innovation is a compelling story; invention is a picture snapshot to stimulate excitement; innovation is a dynamic slideshow to create momentum.

Invention transforms challenges and problems into creative answers by designing or engineering something functioning, which did not exist before. Innovation is the bridge between art and science for achieving value from invention. Invention is more about design/producing logic; innovation is more about process logic; Invention creates; innovation realizes value. Innovation is the practical application of new inventions into marketable products or services. Invention is making ideas from capital, innovation is making profit from ideas.

Innovativeness & ingenuity: Creativity is one of the most important ingredients in ingenuity. Ingenuity implies sudden insight for solving problems effortlessly without following routines or conventional processes. Ingenuity usually demands creativity as a mixed ingredient for puzzle-solving. Often, creativity is at the edge of consciousness and sub-consciousness, imagination and knowledge; ingenuity is at the edge of art and science, functioning and delight.

True creativity has an inner origin, suspends or defers judgment, keeps mind opening for new perspectives or fresh knowledge. Being ingenuous seems effortless, but there are many variables, elements, and connections involved for understanding things thoroughly and making decisions promptly. Without creativity, ingenuity cannot keep fresh; without ingenuity, creativity is not so goal-driven. Creative thinking is artistic, imaginable, novel; ingenious solutions are usually inventive, evolutionary, sometimes revolutionary.

Innovativeness & improvement: Being innovative is a state of mind to break down conventional thinking or common belief, being inspired to spur creative ideas and make breakthrough changes. You bring a different twist to what is currently perceived or established. Continuous improvement is usually made by tweaks of things in the conventional way or fine tune processes to improve efficiency.

Improver is often a professional specialist who enthusiastically sharpens their skills, making product/service more efficient, organized, intuitive; from functioning to firm, up-to-date to the consumer needs. Innovator most often is to instill drive, passion, expand the thinking box, gain interdisciplinary knowledge for transforming novel ideas to achieve great value; from functioning to delight. Both improvers and innovators continuously seek new challenges, solicit direct feedback, self-driven, and accomplish their work resourcefully.

Being innovative requires not only a single type of thought process, but multidimensional thinking; not only one skill, but many; not only old experience, but a new perspective. It requires internal motivation and self-awareness; intersections of consciousness, subconsciousness, and superconsciousness. We all should broaden the points of interest and try new things to develop creativity, spur innovation; empty the mindset of how things are "usually" solved, and become open-minded to experiment with different ways to do things and have the risk tolerance attitude to explore many possibilities continually.

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Increasingprofitabilityofit

An effective IT organization should focus more on vendor/customer relationship management, process optimization, portfolio management, and make an influence on business innovation profitability and maturity.

Contemporary organizations leverage information technology and tools in harnessing cross-functional collaboration, dynamic processes and case management in improving business effectiveness and efficiency. IT management is encouraging their teams to spend more time with the business side, becoming customer-centric. 

These engagements are leading IT to be much more proactive in proposing, instead of responding to ideas for new ways to generate value and improve business profitability. The performance driven IT management can align its business activities that have a three-way impact - revenue, cost and investments at the same time by choosing an environment to compete, collaborate accordingly.

Strong IT management can improve business profitability: The digital evolution means that channels to customers. Without customers, an organization cannot survive. To keep relevant, IT needs to transform from a back office function to a strategic business partner that not only impacts the bottom line business survival, but also the top line business growth. In specific, IT makes an influence on everything from how pricing is affecting close times and support calls to referral business activity triggered by high customer satisfaction, etc. Without profitability, an organization cannot grow and thrive. The challenge for IT management is getting out from the daily burden, spending more resources and time on innovation-related activities. In the end, it is not about technology, but what technology can do when it is enabling and integrating with change management and business processes to deliver strategic differentiation.

Information Technology can drive the business but it should be in conjunction with the business strategy. Otherwise, IT will be seen as in competition with the business. In practice, how does IT become strategic? How does IT deliver maximum value? If you understand that upfront by doing the right strategic questioning, you can later go back and ask if you achieved the value that had been set out to attain. When IT becomes only the mechanism for realizing a vision described by other C-level executives, it becomes a commodity. As always, IT needs to work closely with internal customers to improve business operations. But more crucially, IT can digitize the touch point of end customers' experience. IT is the key ingredient of any competitive business capabilities. IT value is measured by optimization and consumption of IT assets in support of the business functioning and growth with tangible revenue generation.

Inherently generates more revenue per unit cost compared to competition across every demand pattern: IT can help business improve net by reducing cost of doing business with various means such as right sourcing & sizing, keeping IT cost flat while at the same time maximizing its output so when the business revenue increases. The business evolution means that channels to customers. Without customers, an organization cannot survive or create value and profitability. It is all about understanding the essential customer requirements, why they're needed and what the benefits are. Only then, should the technological aspects come into play for implementing the tailored business solutions to either delight customers or build differentiated business competency cost-effectively.

There are no rules for how you deliver business benefits, a good suggestion is to ensure that IT enabled innovation efforts are focused in the strategic direction of the company, to deliver some combination of the benefits of affordability, convenience, and ease-of-use compared to higher-performance existing solutions. Improving revenue alone without improving net will become meaningless as stakeholders will be more interested to see how much net profit generated from the business rather than revenue. Achieving visibility of costs as a key IT strategic initiative today provides a pathway into technology optimization and justification of IT value contribution to the organization's bottom line performance within each revenue stream.

Create and sense new markets before competition, thus, making it much more sustainable than the competition: Rapid change and fierce competition are the new normal. Customers become more demanding and selective. Customer-facing applications/solutions are critical as at the end of the day, they generate revenue for the business. Trending business growth opportunities and creating new markets are important to keep business evolving and increase customer-centricity by asking: What new opportunities could you capture that you can’t address with your current business model? Who are your target customers, and what do they want next based on their current needs? There are frequently “fundamental differences” between the organization's view of value and that of customers. Build customer-centricity consistently in a way that delivers the right experiences to the right customers at the right times.

Nowadays, customer-centric innovation is in strong demand because digital is the age of people, choice, and empathy. When IT can really understand or attempt to capture the insight about what customers actually want, it is when IT can reach the “long-tail” customers by introducing new products or new methods of production, opening new markets or utilizing new resources. Otherwise, you might produce the most-sophisticated-in-the-market product, but no one needs and buys it. That will waste the talent, time and resources of the business, without making profit for the company.

The business transformation shift comes with an information shift, a shift that organizations will take advantage of emerging technology to optimize business processes and capabilities; use abundant information to gain knowledge and insight; a shift to drive culture and transformation towards a more intelligent enterprise. IT becomes more critical strategically, tactically, economically, metaphorically. There will be no magical solutions for IT generating revenue, though when rationalized and optimized IT investments are restricted to meet a short time goal, in the long run business will be on its course to generate minus revenue. An effective IT organization should focus more on vendor/customer relationship management, process optimization, portfolio management, and make an influence on business innovation profitability and maturity.

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Innerframeworkofimplementation

A framework provides guidelines, checklists, standards, processes, tools and building blocks, do & don't practices, to address diverse business perspectives and practicalities.

Reimagining the future of business is exciting, but investigating the different paths for unlocking business potential needs to take a systematic approach. Business executives are eager to set stages for implementing strategies and driving continuous performance management. 

Balanced Scorecard-based engagement management framework helps the business management translate strategy into business objectives and monitor key results. So people can see what the outcome will look like throughout the transition, and then there should be a consideration for a balanced scorecard that measures the progress of the goals you want to achieve.

The business strategy framework of engagement is set out by the members of the board, stakeholders and investors that drive business strategy, value, harness corporate responsibility and manage risks: There are interrelated terms - vision, strategy, and tactics in strategy management. There are nested relationships under organizational hierarchy and it’s important to close the linkage between strategy and tactics by enhancing business strategy alignment, scenario planning, and program cycles. Strategy management is a cross-functional effort, interdisciplinary and multidimensional planning. A framework provides guidelines, checklists, standards, processes, tools and building blocks, do & don't practices, to address diverse business perspectives and practicalities, unify views of strategic goals, harness cross-functional communication and collaboration.

An established framework provides an “executive” view including impact analysis, reporting and alignment to strategy.  It’s about defining abstract components and hence establishing the way to strategy management, discovering patterns, abstracting concerns, developing the best and next practices to scale, and executing capability-based strategy smoothly. It sets a certain standard for business initiative, prioritization, requirements management, risk management, resource management, governance controls (progress, finance, quality, and change), comprehensive dashboard reporting and value tracking. It allows the portfolio to be fine-tuned over time so that it delivers maximum strategic advantage to the organization

A framework of engagement makes decision-making more of a collective responsibility, creating an atmosphere of transparency: Due to "VUCA" characteristics of the digital normality, poor decision-making can cause business dysfunction, employee disengagement, or customer dissatisfaction. Given the complexity and uncertainty of the business world and given the fallacies of individual decision-making, more often than not, lack of knowledge and scarcity of insight lead to poor decision-making. In the strategic level, often decision-making is a cross-functional team work, ensuring that the right people are backing the big decisions and communicating them to their areas of the business.

Decision making is both art and science. Decision agility based on the hybrid of individual decision-making and collective decision-making. There is no “one size fits all” formula for all decision making, there are all sorts of decision-making styles depending on the decision maker's cognitive ability, knowledge, perception, or personality. Information allows you to build an actionable insight on how to move from one level to the other. It applies to the context and environment in which decisions are made. A framework of engagement makes decision-making more of a collective responsibility, creates an atmosphere of transparency, improves information quality and reliability, and ensures that people can leverage the right information to make right decisions timely.

Monitoring, identifying gap areas and taking corrective actions: To bridge “as is” and “to be” state of the business, it’s important for the management to identify both execution blind spots and capability gaps, as well as clarify the destination, as strategy guides and touches all aspects of the organization. Being willing and able to acquire various types of information begins with an understanding of purpose: What do you want to achieve? What initiative is being taken in identifying and determining what problems need to be improved based on the results of the evaluation? Begins with an acceptance you do not know enough to achieve your purpose; but knowing what questions to ask to close the variety of gaps. You recognize a gap in the knowledge you have and value in closing the gap seamlessly in order to realize positive outcomes. Any initiative, even though a very technical one should have a business objective associated with it.

Organizations have limited resources and talent, the real challenge is to understand your priorities, and know where and how you can and should improve, leverage available resources, focus on the most important things, handle sequence & consequence of initiatives smoothly. The steps, processes, tools, and products that organizations use to effect the transformation from strategy to deployment need to be scrutinized and tracked to ensure high performance results. To manage end-to-end performance, it requires the necessity to establish clear, understandable and easily calculable metrics. If at some intermediate stage, one measures something that is not congruent with the final outcome, then dysfunctional behavior arises, potentially diminishing the end-to-end performance. 

Celebrating success is important, but understanding what’s blocking overall business achievements, targets, and performance are paramount. A clearly defined framework provides a basic building block for setting right policies to engage employees, developing “institutionalization methodologies” to build business competencies, refining optimized processes to implement a strategy and manage a high-performance organization consistently.

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Informativescoreboard

A scorecard assesses the progress to strategic goals, providing the management a holistic view about the progress of business transformation.

Corporate Performance Management is a management control from strategy to the shop floor. "If you can't measure, you can't manage," legendary management guru Peter Drucker once asserted. Managing performance means understanding results, setting metrics, fixing plans, and making decisions to ensure it happens. 

It takes multifaceted approaches from multidimensional perspectives to unlock digital performance and catalyze change.

                Informative Scoreboard

Informative-scoreboard Effective scorecards are by nature, consciously and purposefully constructed to help business leaders make better decisions based on data, not just gut feelings, and improve organizational manageability. It provides the business management a holistic view about the progress of business performance, a prediction tool to optimize the actions of the management, a prioritization tool to focus on the most critical issues, and a facilitation tool to enforce information-based communication.

Informativedashboard Senior business executives focus on strategy management, performance oversight, and governance enhancement. A dashboard is a tool to visualize key performance indicators and as such, it certainly must show the metrics of the values and the effectiveness of the measured activities produced. As each executive has his/her own special area that they like to peek into knowing everything is on track. Transparency works for everyone. With the right tools, the top leadership team has significant influence on implementing performance management into practice in the right way.

Uolockperformanceviafeedbackscoreboard Good feedback is the information that enables you to improve, lack of effective feedback management will enlarge gaps and create barriers to drive progress changes. A feedback scoreboard is a way of consolidating and comparing metrics relating to a holistic assessment of feedback management, harnessing information-based communication and leading to continuous improvement.

Innateviewviascoreboard A scorecard assesses the progress to strategic goals, provides the management a holistic view about the progress of business transformation by considering the impact on finances, customers, internal processes and employee satisfaction, Scoreboard is a strategic decision support system, and change steering instrument.

Value of Scoreboard Corporate Performance Management is a management control from strategy till shop floor. A good balanced scorecard measures key strategic measures along with the things that drive those measures. A KPI Balanced Scorecard is a great idea, however, the success of that scorecard will be determined by the components of the scorecard and how meaningful those components are to the successful implementation of the change.

The blog is a dynamic book flowing with your thoughts; growing through your dedication; sharing your knowledge; conveying your wisdom, and making influence through touching the hearts and connecting minds across the globe. The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with about #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.

The "Performance Master" Book Amazon Order Link

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The "Performance Master" Book Introduction 

The "Performance Master" Book Chapter 1 Introduction

The "Performance Master" Book Chapter 2 Introduction

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The "Performance Master" Book Chapter 4 Introduction 

The "Performance Master" Book Chapter 5 Introduction 

The "Performance Master" Book Conclusion

The "Performance Master" Quote Collection I

The "Performance Master" Quote Collection II

The "Performance Master" Quote Collection III

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Innovativeness

Individual contributions provide the building block of innovativeness, it is the collective consensus on what to do with them that is exciting – to co-create great ideas and co-solving problems continually.

Being innovative is a state of mind. Indeed, it’s all about how to disrupt the outdated thinking and the old way to do things. As innovators are people who can let their mind "free" of constraints in the environment in which they can stimulate the "invisible" by spurring creativity through a sounding board resonance or vibration. 

Innovativeness and insight mutually reinforce each other. Intelligence is the word we use to describe mental ability to recognize patterns; being innovative implies an ability to identify patterns or make unusual connections. Innovators can amplify their influence by connecting wider dots and bringing fresh perspectives.

Innovativeness & insight: Insight is the ability to see underneath the surface, understand context; it is the integration of learning and thinking scenarios that not only fuel creativity, but also make creativity more tangible and embed creativity with other thought processes to create value and produce new knowledge; and make our mind more innovative.

Insight is a unique perception which needs to be gained by each individual who need to keep deepening their understanding of things and connecting the dots that can spark creativity as well. Being insightful is about penetrating and often sudden understanding of a complex situation or problem. It is about digging underneath, seeing around the corner or reading between the lines for truly uncovering the truth; embracing multiple opinions and integrating them to great ideas and spurring innovation all the time.

Innovativeness & Influence: To "influence" means to be able to shape other people's views or opinions towards one's own views or perspectives. Innovative thinkers can break down conventional wisdom, convey their vision, ensure multiple points of view are explored to spur creative ideas, and apply creative communication to amplify their influence.

In fact, being able to engage in the successful creation of innovations is a very hard work and does include a lot of thinking, observation, brainstorming inquiries, and unusual connections, Innovators seek to understand the mindset of all related parties, demonstrate openness, courage, temperance, adaptability, creativity, sound judgment, inclusiveness, shape the breakthrough thinking to arrive at creative outcomes and develop their influential competence dedicatedly.

Innovativeness & Intelligence: Intelligence is one's cognitive capacity for logic, abstract thoughts, understanding, self-awareness, creativity, and problem-solving. Creative intelligence can spark fresh ideas or new knowledge to solve critical problems in alternative ways. At present, we cannot separate creativity and intelligence if we want to stay competitive, the updated and interdisciplinary knowledge enables wider dots connections and develops creative intelligence.

Intelligence is the ability to break any complex thought or problem to the most rudimentary parts whereas they either can be acted on or dismissed. Creativity is an open ended or divergent thinking to generate ideas for solving problems innovatively. Without innovativeness, intelligence is a mechanism only; without intelligence, innovativeness cannot solve complex problems by engaging multi-dimensional thought processes, taking nonlinear logic or cross-disciplinary knowledge. People with high intelligence can observe deeply, think profoundly, climbing the Information - Knowledge - Intelligence -Insight -Wisdom effectively.

Creativity can be enhanced by connecting dots boldly; and it manifests in a collective environment. Innovativeness can be scaled and multiplied collectively. While the individual contributions provide the building block of innovativeness, it is the collective consensus on what to do with them that is exciting – to co-create great ideas and co-solving problems continually.

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Initiativeinquiries

The very goal of business initiative management is to set the right priority, align key success factors of the organization, streamline business resources, process, capability, capacity to improve overall organizational effectiveness and maturity.

Every business initiative is to achieve certain goals. Any business initiatives, especially change should be viewed as an "opportunity" for solving business problems, improving employee productivity/engagement, or customer satisfaction, cutting costs or optimizing products/ services/processes. 

There are two reasons to pursue change initiatives: Become better at what you do or be able to do something different. The management needs to manage business initiatives, navigate management blocks and improve the success rate by asking deep questions, clarifying the logic, optimizing processes and improving business competencies.

Uncover the big why: Every business initiative is to solve problems large or small. A business case provides the description and reason for starting an initiative to solve certain problems; the user case to justify logical reasons for initiative, sponsorship, pros & cons. Unclear goals or too many variables attached to it make it more confusing. The organization has to continuously understand its customer needs and business requirements, have a clear understanding of how customer-centric approaches enhance the business model and extend profitability. Facilitating requirements negotiations is very beneficial to keep everyone involved.

Uncovering the big why starts with the business requirements definition and requirements. As requirements are gathered and managed and discussed with executives and teams, focusing on those requirements whose improvement has the most benefit to the business. The customers, users and all stakeholders including suppliers, partners, and all internal functions hold a stake in the requirements. The business management needs to clarify the big “why” by pondering: Does the business initiative situates the organization within a growing and highly profitable product market niche? Do the business initiatives build processes/capabilities that differentiate the organization from its major competitors? Etc. Set the right priority to solve the most critical problems for the business’s long term thriving.

Clarify the “what” factor: Behind many critical business initiatives, there are numerous points-of-view and reference points of varying stakeholders. It's important for management to clarify the scope, specification of business initiatives by collecting stakeholders’ requirements, and making insightful inquiries such as: What are the key drivers behind this initiative? What problem or event is driving the need for the project? What immediacy does this problem or event have and why does it need to be addressed now? What is the current state? What are the concerns with the current state (costs, inefficiencies, top line impacts etc.)? What is the proposed state? What is the cost, time; other resources needed to get to the proposed state?

Without customers, an organization cannot survive, and without profitability, an organization cannot grow. Any initiative, even though a very technical one should have a business objective associated with it. Due to rapid changes and dynamic business environment, from a management perspective, high-level user stories are the way to go for planning sessions and introducing detailed functionality at the last possible minute, rather than attempting to decide all of it way too early and too much in depth.

Improve the how: The management needs to scrutinize implementation phases of business initiatives, as well as the business processes & capabilities to realize it. Keeping track of business activities is surely helpful in being proactive. In many organizations, there is a discontinuity or a chasm between desired and delivered performance and corporate processes/capabilities. Management needs to provide coherence between actual capability and the objectives that have been defined for business initiatives management, and addresses in outline how the objectives will be achieved.

Design, cost effectiveness, and customer satisfaction all have a big impact on the implementation success. To improve the management effectiveness, It’s important to focus on proactive planning, process optimization or rule updating for collaboration, accountability, and most importantly, integration. The good managers help to explore the center of business gravity or bridge capability and culture gaps such as, an inability to build momentum and increase the tempo of implementation; a waste of time, emotional energy and other resources invested in work, etc.

Identify the “who”: People are still the weakest link many times in any type of management. Effective leaders should work with the right mindset to recreate an inclusive organization with every dip in the business life cycle, always look for the capabilities and skills that they don't have so that they can build a winning team and complement each other to achieve successful outcomes, whether it's about financial, brand, or double bottom line. Every factor about the large-scale business initiative is rooted in the fact that people need to understand what is changing, what the impacts of those changes are, how they fit in the new world, and how they can participate in the change. Leaders should demonstrate disrupt complacent and conventional thinking, and manage business initiatives systematically.

Lack of the right talent with mixed strength and skills working on the initiatives is the reality. The emergent technologies and practices make it possible to expand the talent pool, to build inclusive teams with coherent diversification from cognitive difference to complementary skill sets. The management needs to do the check up by asking: Who is accountable for a vision for the change? Who leads the execution of change? Who is accountable for achieving the milestones? Who is accountable for the quality and the cost of transformation? Who is accountable for change in capabilities at the core, enabling implementation, etc. The most important thing is to put the right people in the right position to solve the right problems timely.

Predict and figure out when or where: For complex business initiative management, besides goal setting and process clarification, it’s also important to build a practical roadmap which is contextual, informative, with clearly defined key performance indicators. Depending on the nature of the requirement of the stakeholders, the road map will take on different characteristics. If the road map is an overall business justification for funding, then the map will be more inclusive with roads and detours describing the enterprise taking into consideration the technical nuances as well as all the business artifacts that make up the road map by which the business management can predict or figure out when or where to make a difference.

A "roadmap" is simply a plan for moving or transitioning, from one state to another. If the roadmap focuses on a specific "road" within the map, then the map is more tactical and in turn determines the importance of what artifacts are necessary to define the road. Big granularity means progress checking in an iterative way; it is important in overall progress and if the associated objective is not fulfilled, some important analysis and decisions are needed; it is associated with phases and iterations or other important points and it could be related to formal progress tracking.

Organizations today are inundated with the sea of information, overwhelmed with too many initiatives, and overloaded with operation and short term business concerns. The very goal of business initiative management is to set the right priority, align key success factors of the organization, streamline business resources, process, capability, capacity to improve overall organizational effectiveness and maturity.

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Initiativefailuresrootcauses

The point is to avoid the repetitive mistakes and focus on lessons learned from failures, as well as enhance strong governance discipline.

Nowadays enterprises are inherently complicated, uncertainty is around almost all industry sectors, the highly intensive changes do not happen in isolation from each other in predictable ways, but act as a complex system feeding, causing frequent disruptions.

There are various reasons for business failure or getting lower than expected business results: Is it because the organization fails to build cohesive and differentiated business competencies? Is it due to the management ignoring the external environment or business ecosystem affecting the business? Or is it caused by people- the mismatch in requirement from a role and expertise? Business management needs to know which factors contribute to uncertainty, and ultimately cause the business failing, so they can gain the lessons learned and move forward smoothly.

Change in business priorities too frequently, or lack of strong executive sponsorship: The science of the management is to make things predictable, process repetitive, and procedure under-control in order to achieve high performance results quantitatively and qualitatively. The art of management is to leverage intuition, spur creativity to unleash collective human or business potential. There is no way to create a definitive prioritized list without more business context. Lack of sponsorship from top management would cause failure of business initiatives which are often cross-functional efforts. The soft side should have a bit about the culture of management not meeting or aligning with the organization's values. When a company fails, the top management needs to take responsibility because their planning the way to reach the vision, attitude, methods or practices to the clearly-defined goals are not on the right track. Or sometimes change in business priorities too frequently causes change inertia fatigue, lacking accountability to sustain the business outcome. This is usually down to a lack of enforcement at the top etc.

Organizational initiative management needs strong executive sponsorship, as well as business stakeholders accept ownership for decision-making and accountability. The top leadership of a business is meant to convert the uncertainties of a marketplace to an actionable strategy to be done by the company and its people. For strategic business initiatives, the sponsorship and commitment must begin at the top of the hierarchical authority chain and flow downwards across the entire business. Identifying what generates the most value for the company and expressing that in strategic objectives help managers keep their eyes on what matters.

Inability to show incremental progress and transcendent breakthrough: More often than not, organizations become stagnated if they lack the ability to show either incremental progress or transformative changes. Both quick wins and long term focus are important to motivate people for achieving more and sustaining business growth. Incremental progress improves business efficiency or profitability as it is much more predictable and less risky; transformative change often increases business effectiveness and competency but it involves culture shift and risk intelligence. Compared to incremental improvement, the transformative business effort often requires changing underlying beliefs, culture, or conventional wisdom to make the current business better; look for new business and everything in between. The broader the scope, scale, and impact of the change, the more one leans towards calling such change a transcendent breakthrough.

Desired change amplifies and ameliorates change effects and creates business synergy. Business initiatives with improvement in mind is a proactive approach that allows for planning and support considerations to be made and, therefore, is much more likely to turn into a smooth and successful collaborative transition. Both quality and quantity count. The performance of varying business initiatives should be measured based on the progress made and benefit/cost calculation. Continually acceleration requires faster responses and better performance metrics. Successful organizations must manage a portfolio of business initiatives, prioritized with adequate support, across the whole spectrum.

Immature organizational capabilities: Closer to reality is that change is continuously happening in a dynamic business environment. It is nevertheless true that the change itself has become unpredictable. How effectively companies can manage a balanced portfolio of business initiatives is based on their organizational capability maturity. Ineffective organizational capabilities cause business failures. The size of the business initiative relative to the organization's business management maturity and whether or not the organization has ever managed an initiative of that scale before. There are many causes to fail an initiative such as scope creep, failure to obtain stakeholder commitment, inability to assemble a high-performance team, and failure to plan or execute well.

Corporate maturity is not based on how many years that organizations have been around, but about how well it can design to become nimbler, and how fast it can adapt to the business dynamic by building trust, creating synergy, and shaping competency. Every surviving business has certain capabilities. However, only very few high-performing businesses have a high mature level of capabilities, for not only running the business today but also competing for the future. Business management needs to make an objective assessment, fine tuning coherent organizational capability is always critical to accelerate business performance and improve organizational maturity.

Now with the companies large or small are faced with volatile market situations, fierce competition, emerging digital technology trends, nonlinearity, and ambiguity, etc, either individually or at the organizational level, there are some failures perhaps you can control. But others seem completely out of control. The point is to avoid the repetitive mistakes and focus on lessons learned from failures, as well as enhance strong governance discipline. The very goal of business initiative management is to set the right priority, align key success factors of the business, streamline business resource, process, capability, capacity to improve overall organizational effectiveness and maturity.

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Innovatecorporatestructure

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

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

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

  Innovate Corporate Structure 

Innovation of Organizational Structure Digital transformation is the scalable expansion toward multiple directions. The organization should keep tuning its structure and process to become more adaptable. There are different theories of organizational structure innovation and the format of the future of the organization etc. The whole point is how to build a more creative and productive working environment in which the employees’ potential can be unleashed, and business as a whole is superior to the sum of its parts.

Inneraspectsofdesigningaviabledigitalorganization Digital organizations are the complex ecosystem with the blurring line between functions and geographic locations. Going digital is a long journey with all sorts of barriers and pitfalls on the way. You have to strike the right balance between order and chaos, change and stability, innovation and standardization. Viability is one of the very characteristics of the digital organization. You may leverage design thinking to reinvent an organization that can enforce collaboration and harness innovation by creating business synergy, maintaining viability, and making strategic effects.

Innovateorganizationalstructuredesign Digital organizations are all about information savvy, people-centricity, high-performance, and speed, with an amalgam of socio-systems, techno-systems, bio-systems, and econo-systems, etc. Corporate structure and its impact on business efficiency, agility, and innovation could play either a positive or negative impact.

Initiatives to Fine-Tune the Organizational Structure The digital organization is an integral business system with policies, cultures, work climates, people (employees, customers, partners, etc.) and processes. To keep digital fit, the organization has to keep optimizing its functional or structural design and management pyramid to achieve a high level of autonomy and the state of digital equilibrium. The whole business ecosystem needs to communicate, negotiate and cooperate with each other for catalyzing changes and harnessing innovation. Here are some fair reasons to fine-tune the organizational structure for streamlining digital flow and improving the organizational maturity.

InnerperspectivesofDebureaucratization The root of the word "bureaucracy" is: bureau(fr) = desk and kratos(gr) = rules/ power. The larger the organization and inputs, the larger the amount of 'rules' necessary for its function and to keep dependent variables and outputs delivery stable. However, too many rules will stifle innovation, outdated rules will stop the business from moving forward with accelerated speed. And the overly restricted hierarchy will cause silo, discourage cross-functional communication and collaboration. Hence, dismantling bureaucratization is inevitable because of the ever-increasing speed of changes and expanding interdependence. Here are three perspectives of debureaucratization.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with about #8200+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. blog posting. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom, to inspire critical thinking and spur healthy debates. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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Innovativepersonalizationframework

Comprehensive architectural framework encompasses cross-disciplinary understanding of people, relationships, market dynamics, and current/target ecosystem.

Digital organizations are all about information savvy, adaptation, people-centricity, high-performance, and speed. Going digital with a personalization theme takes multifaceted management disciplines and structural procedures to drill down the critical success factors for reaching long term business success. 

All enterprises are designed to varying degrees of detail and with varying degrees of success, but it does not mean that they are architected seamlessly. Digital is the age of people and options, it provides the opportunity to think about the new way to do things, engage employees, and delight customers. An architectural framework is a useful tool for a dynamic and iterative long term strategic planning process that fine tune the internal and external business influence factors, focus on reality, leverage effective methods and practices to untangle current business puzzles and improve people centricity.

Framework of empathy: The digital era upon us is the age of empathy, choice, and personalization. The purpose of business is to create customers. Customers must be willing to pay for things you provide, whether it is a product, process or service, to meet their needs. One of the long term goals that companies should achieve is to provide personalized services or solutions to customers by seeking to understand their wants, desires, and needs. In fact, personalization and customer experience informs or influences a company's core strategy. That is a critical aspect of the business future and a significantly underutilized competitive advantage. Architecture = Thinking and embodying the quality of human thoughts. An effective architectural framework helps to facilitate people centric dialogues by brainstorming and embracing the quality of human thoughts, building the technical abilities to weave the architecture of empathy for self, others, and nature into a vibrant and coherent whole.

One of the biggest benefits is a focus on planning what areas personalization effort will focus on based on strategic alignment and business agility. A framework approach helps the management understand the evolutionary pathways for people-centricity, how they can leverage different thought processes to stimulate novel ideas, tailor customers’ needs and solve their problems creatively. It enables the company to structure their people-centric effort and brings personalization into overall strategic planning conversations with the leadership team and highlights the value they bring to that process clearly. From the outside-in viewpoint, the customer is the focal point to improve business performance by understanding who the customers are, their preference, how to gain their loyalty and keep developing great products/services to meet their needs. From the inside-out, employees are the key to execute strategy, how to motivate them to deliver higher than expected results. The successful organizations should look at both lenses, build a "business logic" or "behavioral value chain" between the inputs - intermediate steps - outcomes.

Architecture of delight: The analysis of architecture enables early prediction of business quality, capability, competency advantage, considering the whole, and their purpose to achieve the goals for the thing being architected to delight customers and unlock organizational performance and maturity. You need a set of explicit vision-, mission-statements and strategic key success factors in description. Then you can trace how your architecture structures meet the normative and strategic direction. The management can make an objective assessment of how much progress has been registered in modeling the parts and if properly designed so that they serve the purpose of stakeholders; as well as how good the parts are integrated in terms of capabilities for implementing personalization and people-centricity.

The empathize mode for developing an “architecture of delight” is the work you do to understand people, within the context of your design challenge, to fit customers’ needs via personalization. The architecture is an effective tool to bridge strategy & execution, connect customer touchpoints, and close gaps of functional silos. “Openness” and “closeness” are decisions relating to the architecture of the new product generation model. Customer-facing solutions are critical as at the end of the day, they generate revenue for the business, as they are the building blocks of business problem-solving capabilities. The intention is to delight customers by presenting the differentiated solutions to make sure that the end user is getting maximum benefit from the application, with the ultimate goal to build a people-centric organization.

Integrator of people-centricity: A personalized architectural framework integrates the art and science to hardness continuous conversations, deepen cross-divisional communication and collaboration, enhance feedback-feedforward cycle from customers and partners. It enables the management to align their resource and talent with the strategic goals; engage stakeholders in sharing diversity of thoughts, know how to tap their various resources and be inclusive, recognize merit and ideas for coming up with people-centric solutions and building dynamic business competency. The architecture should be evaluated to discover if it covers all parts of the enterprise, or plans to, for orchestrating the people-centric efforts and behaviors to drive expected results.

An architectural framework as a “critical success factor” explorer can help the management clarify effective value propositions, diagnose crucial issues, align, integrate, engage, collaborate, converge, and harmonize, to keep evolving, renewing, and achieving the state of flow and business continuum. It is an effective tool for enabling business transformation by describing how the organization will function when the current vision is implemented and in the various stepping stages on the way to customer satisfaction.

In the digital era, what the business needs is not only faster speed, but also a hyper-connected ecosystem with information-based communication/process synchronization and collaboration-driven relationship harmony. A comprehensive architectural framework encompasses cross-disciplinary understanding of people, relationships, market dynamics, and current/target ecosystem, build a solid foundation that allows the business to orchestrate their personalization efforts, build differentiated capabilities and experiment with new ways to solve problems for achieving people-centricity.

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