Innovativeleadership

Leadership mindset is open to change, deep to make profound influence; inclusive to embrace diverse viewpoints; empathetic to understanding others, and innovative to do things differently.

Digital leaders today should lead by influence, not via brute force. Great leadership is a good combination of advanced mindsets, humble attitudes, unique insight, proficient expertise, and exemplary behaviors, etc.

 Leadership is both natural and nurtured; it’s about trying to determine which competencies or capabilities should be used in which combination, and with what level of weight for each, for different situations, in order to improve leadership maturity. Leadership is intangible, but there are many tangible ingredients to make it shine.

Competency: Competency is a set of cohesive capabilities to achieve. The often described attributes of leadership competency with transcendent skills include such as intelligence, creativity, learning agility, empathy, adaptability, influence etc. Great leaders can integrate their professional competency with leadership vision and influence to create a ripple effect and make deep influence.

Leaders should keep focusing on building the new and nonlinear skills and shaping multi-layer, recombinant core competency for problem-solving and innovation. At the level of leadership competency, people are not only fluent in making professional deliveries, but also becoming more influential on innovating, coaching, and driving transformative changes.

Confidence: Confidence means the right dose of ego, not about egotism, arrogance or complacency. Confident leaders are open-minded, determined, adventurous, experimenting new things and exploring the art of possibility. Being humbled is not a lack of confidence, confident people with a positive attitude do amazing things and make differences. Confident people with a positive thinking and optimistic mental attitude usually focus on strengths, opportunities, and develop professional competency through continuous learning-doing practices.

Leadership is about change and direction. To clear the path, whether that be the elimination of obstacles or to provide coaching and guidance to make an influence. Confident people keep on recreating themselves. Being a confident leader means giving people confidence on where to go via a clear vision and how to get there via a good strategy, supporting them, also stretching them to live to their full potential, both individually and as members of a high performing team.

Consistence: Consistency enhances professionalism, builds trust, increases credibility based on the simple logic: Being consistent means being true to that in every aspect- thinking, saying and doing. Being consistent during the good and tough moments is difficult for leaders as they advance in their career, but it directly impacts leadership effectiveness and maturity. Leaders also look for consistency in their teams, in their organization as well as in the ecosystem, as consistency enforces balance, unlock growth, and harmonizes humanities.

Consistency remains a favorite mantra for leadership and management. Consistency and trustworthiness reflect the very substances of leadership – being authentic, building trust, and making deep influence for advancing humanity. Consistency facilitates efficiencies in operations to deliver a shared brand promise across boundaries, highlight some unique and outstanding ones as a brand and a personal tagline.

Interdependence: As we move forward and upward, we will understand that leadership is an inclusion process as global human society moves to the stage from dependence, to independence to interdependence. People are leaders in different arenas. Leadership can be collectively driven and shared through a connection of situational expertise in order to solve both strategic and technical problems facing in business and overcome numerous challenges.

If an independent thinker is good at critical thinking ability to identify blind spots, compliment diverse viewpoints, and make constructive criticism to make a better world. An inclusive leader views the world as an interconnected and interdependent globe, gains cultural empathy, refines knowledge into abstract wisdom to unify and harmonize. The thorny problems can be solved smoothly when they are the right person at the right time in the right place, demonstrating the right set of competencies to overcome barriers and lead transformative changes under complex, uncertain and ambiguous circumstances.

Congruence: Organizations or societies must build agility for adapting to changes timely and seek processes for collaboration, accountability, and integration to maximize coherence and congruence. The greater the excess of resources and diversity; the greater the need for team collaboration and the greater the need to keep them motivated. An effective leader is a means toward reconciling all the different factors toward a unifying and driving motivation. They practice leadership discipline through agile mindset, congruent attitude, empathetic communication, or exemplary behavior to keep the change moment and sustain change effect.

In practice, great leaders develop great teams, open to criticism, accept others' opinions to improve, evaluate and take corrective actions, give the credit to the team, recognize and value differences. They ask right questions, not get stuck in corporate bureaucracy, become part of the solution, not part of the problem. They harness empathetic engagement, deal with ambiguity and uncertainty via analysis and synthesis, coach next-gen leadership and professionalism, have a sense of urgency to lead progressive change timely.

Resilience: In businesses, every day is a risk, either at the individual or business level, resilience is the ability to respond to changes proactively, stay positive, focus, and flexible, fail over or fail forward. The level of leadership resilience depends on how people can prepare for changes or disruptions on the way, increase learning agility, build multiple core professional competencies to make progressive movement. The level of organizational resilience depends on how they can manage the gray area effectively in today's “VUCA” –Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous business environments.

The key is balance, giving enough autonomy to the people or business to make its own decisions or manage risks effectively, encourage learning from failure quickly and cheaply, avoid having failures that are too frequent or too expensive. It's about a human or organization being able to maintain its recognizable essential characteristics in the face of "disruption"; that could look like "bouncing back" or it could look like "growing around" obstacles to build strength and improve resilience.

Persistence: Leadership is the right combination of vision and communication; character and charisma, thinking and action, consistency and persistence. Some can have enough grit for a long time, others can only do it in bursts. Great leaders have a grit mind that involves persistence and a set of strengths that make difference. Character enhances leadership capability development via continuous discovering innate talent, sharpening professional strength, building courage and showing persistence.

Persistence is not the same as stubbornness. Persistence is about leading in the right direction and doing things worth the effort; while stubbornness sometimes implies inflexibility or even moving in the wrong direction. Achievements require persistence over time which inextricably involves a projected / longer-term goal/outcome. Character and capability mutually reinforce each other. It takes the breadth of understanding of situation and depth of cognitive insight upon circumstances to improve leadership effectiveness and maturity.

The digital era upon us is about hyper-diversity and innovation. Leadership is more about the future but starts at today. Leadership mindset is open to change, deep to make profound influence; inclusive to embrace diverse viewpoints; empathetic to understanding others, and innovative to do things differently. Competent leaders reveal character, courage, present the ideas with confidence, pursue the meaningful goals with persistence, show discipline to solve problems and produce expected outcomes effectively.

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Inspirational Lunar New Year Celebration

 Isn’t the lunar new year, a turning point to –seasonal change, with a full spectrum of colors, gradients, traditions, awake our consciousness, to grow rapidly, make a progressive leap, determinedly.

Plum blossoms,

bamboo is growing,

remind us of-

Spring festival is-

coming…





Seeds germinate,

gradually,

air flows,

freshly…

nature starts-

waking up,

overflowing with,

delight,

make us,

feel wakefulness,

deep inside,

accelerate the pace of-

growing;

the Year of Tiger is –

approaching…



Isn’t the lunar new year,

a turning point to –

seasonal change?

with a full spectrum of

colors, gradients, traditions,

awake our consciousness,

to change rapidly,

make a progressive leap,

determinedly.



If winter is-

the hibernating season,

to build inner strength;

Spring spreads with –

fluid energy.

Ice starts –

melting down;

water flows smoothly;

When there is-

movement,

there is-

active circulation;

When there is –

progress,

there is upcycle of –

change;

the new paradigm is –

emerging,

extensively;

another lunar new year is –

here promptly…



Are we reaching –

the inflection point to-

progression?

With culture enrichment,

We all become-

global citizens;

with a plant,

all the growth-

takes place,

at the growing tips.



Isn’t the “Year of Tiger”

the symbol of-

courage,

strength,

vibrancy,

energy,

prosperity,

rejuvenate our spirit,

to take an adventure,

roll imagination –

into reality,

boldly?

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Innovativeness

People are the human capital worth investing in a smart way, not just cost or even resource, to catalyze business transformation and drive long term business advantage.

We live in a time of rapidly changing technology and business dynamics at the dawn of the Digital Era, The knowledge life cycle is significantly shortened, and a huge skill gap in the workforce needs to be filled due to the continuously updated technology and regulation, digitalization and globalization, etc. . 

The book “Talent Master - 199 + Questions to See Talent from Different Angles“ is the guidebook to help digital professionals shape their digital fit mindset, improve multidimensional digital intelligence, build a unique set of digital capabilities, inspire creativity, improve professionalism, and unleash their full talent potential.

        Innovative Talent 

Innovation Being innovative is a growth mindset and a proactive attitude. With the mixed bag of new information and outdated knowledge, order and chaos, people must learn through their interactions with the environment continually, generate and share fresh ideas, adapt to changes promptly.

Innovateplatformofpeoplemanagement People are the human capital worth investing in a smart way, not just cost or even resource, to catalyze business transformation and drive long term business advantage. The part of building a people-centric platform business is to deliver holistic people management solutions by integrating talent management, performance management, culture management, information management, change management for unleashing collective potential.

innovativeinfluencerInfluence is thought-provoking, insightful, and permeating. Influence competency is based on vision and purpose with effective styles such as participation, coaching or delegation. Defining your true purpose is a helpful instrument to make influences; the deeper you can think, the broader your vision is, the more articulated and empathetic you can communicate, the deeper influence you can make.

InsightfulperceiversPeople think differently and act differently. Even though everyone lives in actual reality, we experience actual reality through the filter of our personal realities. In fact, people’s perception reflects who they are and which lens they apply to make the judgment. If people’s perception is close to the actual reality, they are more objective in decision making. Great perceivers are in demand to broaden our perspective of crucial issues that need to be solved and deepen our understanding of cause-effect in conventional problem-solving. When the collective perception is closer to the perception of the most advanced mind, humans as a whole can accelerate the progress.

InnovativecommunicationpersonasCommunication is the bridge between thoughts and acts. Communication could happen anywhere, anytime. Communication has occurred when the message is received and understood. Communication is complex because there are different goals and contexts. Ineffective communication creates friction, conflicts, tensions. Without effective communication, human society simply cannot function smoothly.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 7 million page views with about 8600+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify your voice, deepen your digital footprints, and match your way for human progression.

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Innovatecompliance

Besides automation, a good compliance system must have morals and ethics incorporated into it, something a software application cannot do.

In the digital age, with overwhelming growth of information and fast pace of changes, the knowledge life cycle is significantly shortened. The digital workforce today has to practice real critical thinking, learn and relearn all the time, and then apply those lessons to succeed in new situations. 

Either individually or collectively, performance and compliance are the two sides of the coin, critical thinking as an important cognitive process is the very clue to enhance both disciplines for making sound judgment to prevent or solve problems effectively, and driving progressive changes smoothly.

Critical thinking is crucial to improve compliance maturity: Compliance is the management discipline of designing and implementing effective steps to ensure that the organization actually complies with the laws and regulations relating to its operations. Compliance should be in the frontline of developments to provide guidance to the business, not only what they cannot do, but they can also point into the direction of alternatives and opportunities within the regulatory frameworks. Critical thinking as the skill for analyzing, synthesizing, evaluating, and producing coherent argumentation by examining inference is crucial to improve compliance maturity. It spurs thought-provoking debates such as: How to strategically align compliance as part of the overall process to manage risks?

How to make compliance and risk management work more effectively, how do they cover the areas that cross over? How well do they cover the gaps? Can you really understand the risks in a solution if you don't understand it from end to end? People, process, technology, what’s the weakest link in compliance practices? What's the correlation between performance and compliance? There are a number of activities that need to be carried out to make proactive compliance possible. It’s important to leverage critical thinking to point out the real problems, apply objective rational analysis to assess the maturity of compliance discipline, optimize processes and procedures, and enhance overall GRC discipline.

An effective compliance platform provides a framework for setting good policies, improving processes and ensuring overall compliance coherence: Compliance obligations is a mostly unrewarded risk, something you have to do and keep the regulator off your back to ensure your business maintains its license to operate. Thus, evaluating risk for compliance obligations is needed to better manage compliance programs effectively. Traditional compliance management is largely as a means to preserve value, rather than to create value. Organizations must seek a process for collaboration, accountability, and most importantly, integration of policy-setting and processes to make compliance more proactive.

An effective compliance platform carries high-level accountability and provides important input into the feasibility and appropriateness of policies that have a direct impact on the architecture. The management then works with implementers to ensure they provide solutions that move toward proactive compliance. Ensuring and overseeing compliance is an essential part of the governance body. There’s a correlation between corporate governance and business performance. GRC should influence the level of performance of all the members of the company.

Compliance is very much a strategic issue: Companies that do not recognize this are blindfolding to a great extent. Compliance is or should be more than just looking at internal directives, it is also about looking at the outside world - how the world and society are developing; If the organization does not take this into consideration and advice, the governance bodies such as corporate board may disregard external sentiments or external social and political developments, so their policy-making could be outdated or biased to a certain degree.

The effective compliance tool monitors change, alerts the organization to risk conditions, and enables accountability and collaboration around changes impacting each firm. To make compliance more strategic rather than tactical only and improve its maturity, it requires a common process to deliver real-time accountability, enhances transparency across regulatory areas with a common system of record to monitor regulatory change, audit and measure the impact, update policies, implement appropriate corrective actions, and provide training for certain personnel.

The emergence of a compliance mentality among corporations has been one of the strongest deterrents to genuinely constructive corporate governance known. Besides automation, a good compliance system must have morals and ethics incorporated into it, something a software application cannot do. Having a good understanding of the business vision and mission will ensure that an appropriate compliance management discipline is realized without being bureaucratic or misaligned with business objectives. Governance as an integral component of GRC not only provides bottom line impact on “keeping the lights on,” but identifies opportunities for business growth and societal advancement.

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Innatecauseeffectanalysis

Highly effective problem-solvers are capable of highly complex cognition to do cause-effect analysis, with the goal not to complicate the situation, but to figure out premium solutions.

Contemporary society is getting more and more complex due to exponential growth of information and frequent disruptions. Problem-solving in the majority of organizations today is woefully inadequate, as people often try to fix the wrong cause of problems but the real issues still exist and are getting worse. Or people ignore the problems around us because they can't figure out the exact cause and effect so the solutions are vague, variable or unknown. 

In many circumstances, people fix the issues, but the symptoms continue to get back, so they stop the effort. But their ignorance perhaps becomes the pain and causes more serious issues later on. How to diagnose the root causes and solve problems effectively?

A transparent reflection of cause and effects which need improved business capability and management effectiveness is the key thing you need: Running business is an iterative problem-solving continuum. When the business gets stagnated, with culture inertia, people disengagement, lack of synergy, the management needs to detect the symptoms of performance suffering when productivity is low and synergy is missing, and figure out the root causes: Is it caused by silos=lack of cross-functional understanding of things and people? Is it caused by bureaucracy = process inefficiency? Bottleneck = dissonance between different layers of management? Etc. Trying to fix the wrong cause of a problem will waste time and resources, increase anxiety, and cause chaos.

When different shareholders push the business to different directions, change gets stuck and digital transformation is stalled. When people are not working via the system to solve the real problems but play the system to stifle change, they are problem-makers; when people lack the right information to make effective decisions and lack accountability to get the work done on-value, on-time, they become part of problems. When continuously solving the wrong problems, it’s no surprise that you are at a state of problem-solving impasse. Miscommunication, misunderstanding, or simply wrong people put in the wrong position to solve the wrong problems becomes the very causes of numerous problems that are ever-evolving.

Insight is the understanding of a specific cause and effect in a specific context: Insight is the ability to perceive clearly or deeply penetration of situations by looking around the corner or seeing underneath. From a problem-solving perspective, too often people may take the easy path, think and work at a superficial level or blindly follow others rather than spend the time on the understanding of what is going on underneath. Insight is the most wanted and abstracted knowledge to gain the understanding of a specific cause and effect in a specific context, do the objective analysis into the root cause of a problem, or figure out the core issues of a situation which leads to resolution.

In dynamic digital business environments, there must be a capacity to respond to new and emerging opportunities and to create new opportunities. It’s not the acquisition of knowledge that makes you a great problem-solver. It is the desire to acquire and apply that knowledge, transform into the insight that will make you more effective for solving various complex issues today. Keep in mind, more often than not, the logic behind problem-solving is not so linear today, applying techniques of linear mathematics logic to the world very quickly, come up against insurmountable difficulties, cause confusion and dysfunctional processes or systems. Insight is an understanding of cause and effect based on the identification of relationships and behaviors within a model, context, or scenario, identify root causes, and solve real issues or perhaps the chains of relevant problems effectively.

A simple variable can be both cause and effect as the digital ecosystem is complex and volatile, being digital is the state of interconnectivity: Digital organization is complex, it becomes complex if things do interact, particularly in the case of nonlinear processes and interactions. You can't separate things properly or you cannot predict the actual effect of interactions straightforwardly. Because of interconnectivity and the many potential options in a complex system, a small effect in one place can cause a cascade of events that produce a nonlinear big impact. System thinking helps to understand the interrelation between parts and the whole, and define how to perceive problems objectively.

It’s not so effective to use linear logic to understand highly complex, nonlinear cause-effect relationship scenarios to solve complex business problems. It’s important to leverage System principles to understand the interconnectivity and do an in-depth cause-effect analysis. The predictive “cause and effect” in system dynamics can include nonlinear cause and effect models, predict outcomes, find the factors involved in the “incorrect" outcome; build a hypothetical equation that describes your "incorrect" outcome. See how changing any getting better or worsens that outcome. Effective problem-solvers can apply systems thinking, develop nonlinear business problem-solving scenarios, simplify complicated things, and deal with uncertainty smoothly.

A problem often leads to opportunities because they challenge us to address something that is not working before. Highly effective problem-solvers are capable of highly complex cognition to do cause-effect analysis, with the goals not to complicate the situation, but to simplify and optimize problems on hand via understanding the interconnectivity between issues, digging through the root cause, creating multiple pathways via interactions, associations, and expansions, etc, in order to solve them effectively and make cohesive changes.

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Incoherence

 Organizations rise and fall, not on the quantum of plans and resources, but on the capabilities to lead and manage, yet most important to execute. 

Digital makes a significant impact on how we think, live, and work. There is the mix of old and new, physical and virtual, order and chaos. We are in a time of tremendous change, the dawn of the digital age, the path to the next level of digital maturity, also in the era of confusion and information overload. Therefore, it’s critical to identify, understand, and avoid pitfalls, discover strategic and predictive pathways to change, increase confidence, position a brand and leverage resources to make the digital paradigm shift effortlessly. Slideshare Presentation

     Incoherence

Incoherence Organizations rise and fall, not on the quantum of plans and resources, but on the capabilities to lead and manage, change and innovate, yet most important to execute. The most obvious symptom of business distress is the widespread problem of incoherence, illogic, and ineffectiveness. The degree of planning has a positive correlation with the degree of uncertainty and unpredictability. Do not fix the symptom only, but dig through the root cause of business issues, deal with them in a structured way and make continuous improvement.

Incoherence Syndromes The digital organization blurs the geographical, functional, organizational, and even industrial borders nowadays. The enterprise is nothing more than a “switch” in the network lattice of the large ecosystem. Hyperconnectivity brings an abundance of opportunities for businesses to expand, also unprecedented risks intimidating their survival at any moment.

Inflexibility Digital era is volatile, complex, uncertain and ambiguous, with increasing rate of changes and fast growing information, organizations across the vertical sectors need to be informative enough to make effective decisions and resilient enough to overcome continuous disruptions. However, many companies which get stuck at the low level of business maturity are too slow to catch the change tide timely and not flexible enough to solve complex problems in an alternative way. To dig into the root causes, inflexibility is often caused by complicated processes or procedures, legacy IT systems, bureaucratic management practices, outdated rules or policies, etc.

Incoherent confusion Organizations rise and fall, not on the quantum of plans and resources, but on the capabilities to lead and manage, yet most important to execute. Disconnect occurs when wishful thinking at higher levels detaches from reality at lower levels; when misinformation leads to misjudgment; when hierarchical business systems are dysfunctional, silo thinking or bureaucracy is propagating; when misalignment of "do what you say, say what you mean, mean what you do" cause culture inertia; when value proposition fails to be translated into meaningful operational deliverables; when the work is not done right and needs to be redone, then business disasters emerge. How to handle all those issues smoothly, ameliorate business fluidity and improve the overall organizational manageability.

Illogical&Irrational Due to fast-paced change, the exponential growth of information, hyper-connectivity, and continuous digital disruptions, the problems facing businesses today turn out to be over-complex, have a very wide scope, and are difficult to solve. In fact, problem-solving thought processes and practices will not be simple for many of today’s complex problems and it takes an interdisciplinary approach to either frame the right problems and solve them effectively.

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 the minds across the globe. The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 7 million page views with about #8600 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 the 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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Innovation

If idea generation sometimes is more art than science, then innovation management is more science than art.

Innovation is the management process to transform great ideas and achieve their commercial value. Organizations can no longer rely on a single individual or team to drive innovation, largely due to the fact that innovating in today’s digital world has become increasingly complex in nature. Ideas take root in unsuspected places and they evolve with time and by unexpected connections. 

It’s important to build a process of a corporate pulse that helps to identify where the passion, motivation, or commitment of the organization lies, who embodies it, and how to build an innovative environment in which people are given free space to be creative without rigid structures to hold them back. Apply interdisciplinary management to strike the right balance of knowledge and imagination, process and creativity, and improve innovation effectiveness.

Innovation complexity has to be reduced to actionable, overriding variables, which must be managed: The organizational management innovation is based on the varying factors, such as the vision of leadership, diversity of teams, speed of decision-making, attitude toward risk, how effective for the allocation of resources; what’s the altitude of innovation impact and the aptitude to manage innovation; how efficient of the innovation processes or lack thereof; when to follow the digital principles, and when to break rules.

Good ideas are multi-dimensional, so execution also needs forces of both "push and pull." Technically, there is an effective feedback mechanism, and there is transparency in follow-up of a system of the innovation process from idea developing up to implementing, to gain management and peer recognition. There are different views of business innovation and evolution. Always challenge your own thinking by asking questions which often lead to discovering situations others do not see at first, gain an understanding of nonlinearity as the very characteristic of innovation management.

The commitment from the top is very important for any change or innovation to be successful: There is a variety of innovation, and there are different philosophies and practices to build innovation competencies of the company. Is there any fundamentally different approach that would provide more flexibility, more sensitivity, and more responsiveness? Etc It’s important to explore opportunities for transformational business directions and improve the long-term viability of the business. Therefore, innovation leadership is critical to identify and close innovation strategy gaps, develop a common understanding of it, encourage innovation and advocate changes.

Innovation needs vision and strong discipline. To gain full awareness of both opportunities and risks, we must see where we are going; we need to see what is behind us, but not at the cost of losing our visibility forward. The first sign of a good innovation leader is that he/she will recognize their limitations and build a team to complement their quality and capability. So they should have their own constitutional innovation personas, with the pattern of required behaviors to face the emerging situation and succeed.

With each flavor of "innovation," the risk is involved. The more disruptive or radical the innovation is, the greater the risk would be: People would like to take calculated risks in experimenting with a new way to do things, as well as having the business model they create to get it done. Some risks can be quantifiable; some can only be approximated. There is no “one size fits all” innovation approach, it’s important to step away from the accepted "best practice" and ask tough questions to dig through the root causes of issues, fix or prevent potential problems timely.

From the birth of a concept and the process of turning it into a reality, lack of the culture of learning and risk tolerance should be blamed for stifling innovation. Failure should not be an offense and actually if there are not a few failures, and then you are not trying hard enough. Learn the lessons, do not make failures happening too frequently or too expensive. Innovation management takes a balancing act to have enough failure and an environment that encourages critical thinking, learning from failures quickly and cheaply,

If idea generation sometimes is more art than science, then innovation management is more science than art. In order to build a global innovative company, businesses need to expand their horizon through connecting wider dots and orchestrating broader collaboration. This is accompanied by growing global diversity and developing culture empathy, taking the different scenarios as an input for innovation strategy, believing in yourself and most importantly in your team to achieve the high performing result consistently.

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Innatearchitecture

Adaptive Enterprise Architecture is not the geeky techie stuff, but a coherent view of how the organization fulfills its pursuit of creating and delivering value to customers and improving organizational management discipline.

Organizations become over-complex and ever-evolving due to rapid change and uncertainty. The business architecture is a useful adaptive tool for a dynamic and iterative long term strategic planning process that fine tunes the internal and external business influence factors, high-level accountability for compliance and provides important input into the feasibility and appropriateness of policies that have a direct impact on improving business effectiveness and maturity.

“Less is more” in architecture perspective means to remove unnecessary complexity and reveal elegance: Overcoming complications and managing a variety of complexity become one of the biggest challenges in business today. Technically, there is essential complexity- the complexity required to provide bare minimum functionality that is necessary to meet the needs, or unnecessary complexity -which is everything else.

There is a relationship between simplicity and clarity. Try to leverage architecture tool to analyze what the impact of complexity is on a business system, including crucial components such as process, structure, customers; also look for the impact of removing some of the complications to improve business effectiveness and efficiency. Also, seek to represent the architecture of an organization in terms of information value, process and capability, potentiality and performance, either as it exists or as it is intended to be.

A business architecture is an instrument for strategic planning and decision-making: Because there would be an increase in the range of planned activities against the potential unplanned, or presumably unforeseeable activities. You need a set of explicit vision, mission-statements and strategic key success factors in strategic planning and decision-making. Business executives who can speak architectural dialect are able to facilitate the digital dialogues between organizational decision-makers and thereby assist in continuously designing and redesigning organizations in pursuit of new and more viable strategies. Business Architecture as a “critical success factor” explorer can help the management clarify effective value propositions, diagnose crucial issues, and avoid the pitfalls on the way.

Openness and closeness are decisions relating to the architecture of the new product generation model. The company has to determine what can be open and what can be closed. The effective architecture should cover all parts of the enterprise, orchestrate the interrelationship between people and process, make strategic alignment, advising, monitoring, deliberating, sustaining a balance of diversified viewpoints, leverage repeatable processes, and master expectation management.

An architecture integrates the art and science to optimize manageability and competency development: Business architecture is an effective tool to facilitate communication, keep strategic planning relevant, develop corporate capabilities for enabling transformative changes. The analysis of architecture enables early prediction of a business system’s qualities, considering the whole, clarify the business purpose to achieve the goals for the thing being architected, to unlock organizational performance and maturity.

A comprehensive architecture encompasses at least some interfaces of the current or target ecosystem, deepening understanding of business relationships, ecosystems, market dynamics, and the connections between related business functions to enhance the scientific discipline underneath it. It’s about the technical abilities to weave the architecture of empathy for self, others, and nature into a vibrant and coherent whole. An effective architecture helps to enhance collaboration, harmony, link, fuse, affiliation, improve business coherence, unpuzzle innovation, and improve customer satisfaction by seeking to understand their wants, desires, and needs

In fact, Adaptive Enterprise Architecture is not the geeky techie stuff, but a coherent view of how the organization fulfills its pursuit of creating and delivering value to customers and improving organizational management discipline. It helps to clarify how much progress has been registered in modeling the parts and if properly designed so that they serve the purpose of stakeholders; how good are the parts integrated in terms of capabilities? With all those advancements academically or practically, we are gaining cross-disciplinary understanding and making a seamless paradigm shift.

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Innovation

Digital innovation has a broader spectrum, hybrid nature, and deep context.

The digital era upon us is about people, innovation, option, empathy, or simply put, "personalization." Providing personalized services or solutions to its customers will become the new normal to run a people-centric organization.

 In the digital era, what the business needs is not only faster speed, but also a hyper-connected ecosystem with information/process synchronization and collaboration-driven relationship harmony. That great personalization leads to better understanding by designing tailored applications or solutions to meet people’s needs and improve customer satisfaction.

Compare & contrast: Creativity is about connecting dots. Good idea generation and evaluation is a critical part of successful new product or business development. To accelerate innovation, it is important to involve diverse talent, create an environment that brings together the people from inside and outside of the company in a collaborative way; build the capacity to hold alternative mind-generated possibilities simultaneously, and then use various criteria to compare and contrast them against unfolding reality, broadening perspectives of complex circumstances, forming unique viewpoints and generate fresh ideas via analysis and synthesis processes.

There is a variety of innovation; efficient processes are used or should be used for incremental innovation, radical innovation, in contrast, requires visionary, divergence, and some other attributes that are seldom found in people’s concerns, needs, and frustration. To stimulate thought-provoking debates and improve innovation success rate, business leaders not only ask the right questions but rather, absorb information, forecast business potentials, risks, and benefits; mitigate, compare and contrast options, facts, assess the various "innovation activities" they perform, and the information that they need. The evaluation questions may include: quantitative estimate of customer value and voice, technical feasibility, performance targets (technical and cost), commercial feasibility (business model, channel to marketplace), business case and value forecast, competitive technologies, GRC concerns, etc. It is important to use the same main parameters, compare and contrast, build a balanced innovation portfolio with the right mix of flavors.

Clarify & connect: In nature, everything is connected with something else. Creativity needs vision to inspire and imagination to spark. Often connectivity triggers creativity and the creative mind has a better ability to connect dots. For solving any problems innovatively, always try to understand this side, that side, as well as the interaction of both sides. Leaders and managers should continue clarifying: What business problem is a business initiative funded to solve? What are alternative solutions? How are responsibilities and assignments allocated to various layers of management/engineering discipline? To break down the silo mentality and communication bottleneck, it’s important to observe, listen, and collect feedback, to truly understand people and things with empathy and clarity in order to come up with innovative solutions.

Creativity is a creative mix of action artifacts and biological or personality characteristics. Being innovative is the mind with the thinking process that holds onto its natural connectivity while being prepared to connect the dots even in the opposite direction should they make sense to generate fresh insight. To be creative, you need to be conscious, curious about things that surround you; be aware and engaged with both the inner world of thought, feeling, choice, and the exterior world of experience and relationship. The interaction between these two parts of our existence is the home of our creativity. Collaboratively, focusing on communicating the insight is the key to restore innovation.

Create, choose with confidence: Whether we know it consciously or not, we are always making a choice. Still, we can't control the outcome of our choices consciously or subconsciously. Business users and consumers are selective nowadays due to the unprecedented convenience brought by digital technologies. Thus, the customer including prospects should be studied, observed, and get involved in innovation processes. It’s important to provide choices for them on how to solve their issues by listening to their feedback, deliver intuitive products/services to meet their needs. The more customer contact points an organization has, the more difficult it is to meet and hopefully deliver on customers' expectations. Personalization is the process of making a company's products and services extraordinarily relevant to the wants, needs or desires of customers - physically, spiritually or emotionally.

Awareness is fundamental to choice. Choice with full awareness is the freedom from the conditioned circumstances. Imagine the true meaning when you say "Teamwork." Giving everyone a voice in how the organization and the people in it can prosper and thrive. Today’s business leaders, especially in the consumer intensive industry need to become “Choice Generators,” provide choices for users and customers on how to solve their issues from their lens; provide choices for talented employees on how they would like to get the work done efficiently. They have to not only provide clear process guidelines but also see that the teams are embracing cross-functional collaboration and taking people-centric effort. Perhaps by pursuing abundant choices and options, we are shifting from the knowledge economy to the creative economy.

Digital innovation has a broader spectrum, hybrid nature, and deep context. You have to systematically develop the business competency to execute it successfully. There is a logic behind any innovation effort, and it's important to manage innovation systematically. Digital innovation management is a system that can be fine-tuned in a structured way to improve its success rate.

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Inclusiveleadership

Leadership is about vision and directions that steer the organization in the right direction.

Leadership is complex yet simple: Complex in that there are so many traits and characteristics that are considered when evaluating a leader. Simplicity in that the substance of leadership never changes, it’s all about the future and change; direction and dedication; influence and innovation. 

The purpose of the book: “Leadership Master - Five Digital Trends to Leap Leadership Maturity” is to convey the vision of digital leadership, share the insight about leadership maturity, and summarize five emergent digital leadership trends Here is the monthly tuning of digital leadership to celebrate #8200 blog postings.

 

            Inclusive Leadership

Inclusiveleadership Leadership is about vision and direction; digital leaders today can lead change and harness innovation by practicing open leadership styles and enhancing interdisciplinary management discipline. To make a smooth shift from silo-based traditional economy to hyper-connected knowledge-abundant creative economy, cookie-cutter leadership needs to be updated toward gap-minding, innovative or situational leadership. Great leaders should build their unique set of leadership competency to support the “circumstantiality” between leadership and achievement. Because today’s business workforce is hyper-diverse with multigenerational, multicultural, multi-divicing characteristics, what are emergent traits and how to shape the new breed of world class leaders and managers to harmonize humanity?


Innovativeleadership Leadership is all about the future, change or innovation. There is a saying that there are leadership opportunities at any given point in time where one or more people congregate to achieve a common goal. This would support the “circumstantiality” between leadership and achievement. Leadership is a philosophy plus a set of best or next practices. Leadership is intangible, but there are many tangible ingredients to make it shine.

Innovativeleadershiplogic The dawn of the digital era is partly responsible for many of the prevailing global problems due to increasing pace of change and continuous disruption. Leadership is an influence, which comes from the good combination of vision and communication; respecting, understanding people and driving progressive changes.

Innovativeleadershipinterface We live in a complex world which has been interwoven through the internet and the latest technologies. The business is complex, with hyper-connected pieces and interdependent pieces. Thus, leadership now becomes more open and trans-disciplinary, influential and innovative.

Innovativeperspectiveofcorporatebod It’s almost the end of the year, corporate board directors make their resolution to shape a clear vision of their organizations, and share fresh perspectives on how to reinvent an innovative company.

 

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 7 million page views with about 8600+ blog postings in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify your voice, deepen your digital footprints, and match your way for human progression.

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Innovationinvestment

Put emphasis on investing in people-centric innovation, build a balanced investment portfolio, enhance the overall economic value of the portfolio.

The business ecosystem is full of complexity and uncertainty, it’s important to understand that there are both opportunities and risks in every investment. The logical investment scenario helps to clarify: Which benefits will be achieved through addressing the key business drivers? Can these business benefits be measured and quantified? What outcomes can the sponsor expect to achieve through investment in the proposed initiative.

Investment justification: It’s about spending the money right, and getting the right results. The logical investment scenario helps an organization assess whether the new business model or initiative is the right investment to be done in the first place, and ensure the expected return on investment. The investment assessment includes things such as resources consumption, growing tendencies, cost-benefit analysis of business capability development; simply compare investment cost to its anticipated financial benefit.

In order to maximize Return on Innovation, businesses have to build cohesive strategy, to consume resources efficiently; make strategic objective alignment by clarifying goals and assessing opportunities to realign resources and investments as appropriate. Analyze total cost, total value, and total impact of portfolio investment, calculate financial & performance indicators wisely. Make sure the venture capitalists or executive team first understands what it needs to drive future business growth and improve cash flow, map the strategic objectives into KPIs and then determine what capital investments will be needed to develop unique business competency to execute strategy.

Investment oversight: Every organization is different, every innovation initiative is also unique, there is no one size fits all formula to invest. Invest in and leverage appropriate technologies and solutions to generate valuable insights to help their businesses open up new channels of revenue and monetization within the enterprise, their ecosystem, and the industry. The objective of innovation investment oversight is to provide visibility of the business innovation initiatives that are supporting the company's strategy and expediting business growth and change. Visibility into each investment is established to provide ongoing reliable investment information as well as enable the management to understand the overall portfolio health and effectiveness.

The management needs to involve more planning, more compromise on budget expenditures, and changing outlooks on profit margins as a result. Evaluate individual and aggregate investments accordingly. Return on Investment tells the business management how well organizational innovation investment repays the company, focus on benefits generation, return on investment and contribution to innovation, even when the business initiatives themselves are primarily justified by cost savings rather than revenue enhancement or innovation. Make sure the # financial investment of the business initiatives are aligned with at least one strategic objective over the total portfolio.

Return on innovation: Compared to other types of business initiatives, innovation performance is more difficult to assess. Goals are the key, but what makes them effective is how they are implemented and measured. It’s important to select the right set of indicators and leverage metrics that include innovation, problem-solving effectiveness & efficiency, and substantiate return on investment. Return On Investment value proposition should be an overall measurement based on the combination of cost, schedule, quality, performance, and satisfaction of the customer, users, and stakeholders. if there was a marketing effort underway for new products/services, all costs incurred in every channel should be included in the final calculation of Net profit and ROI.

In specific, there are idea management indicators or index, implementation process management indicator, innovative culture indicator, or individual’s creativity indicator, capacity (ideation/evaluation) indicators, etc. Even if you have a well-defined set of measurements, it doesn't guarantee you could measure them right. There may be many other factors to include in the 'before and after' measurements, and that was a basic approach. S.M.A.R.T (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely) goals play an important role in assessing the effectiveness and efficiency of innovation.

The digital world moves into a hyper-connected and interdependent relationship under “VUCA” business new normal. People are always the most important capital investment in any organization. Put emphasis on investing in people-centric innovation, build a balanced investment portfolio, enhance the overall economic value of the portfolio in order to get the optimal return on investment to achieve collaborative value or collective advantage and multi-layer ROIs.

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Innovativeness

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

The digital paradigm has many dimensions, it means increasing pace of change and continuous digital disruptions, with high intensity and hyper diversity. It’s easy to get lost without multidimensional thinking. You have to gain an interdisciplinary understanding of the business via different lenses.

 It is important to involve not only putting all pieces together but also blending them in such a way that the emergent whole is somehow more than the sum of its parts. It’s crucial to embrace uncertainty, respond to a dynamic changing environment, strike the right balance of solid and flow, transaction and transformation, in order to run a real time high performance organization.

Interconnectedness of the parts and the whole: In today's hyper-connected digital world, the disruptions come almost overnight, the knowledge management cycle is significantly shortened. A simple variable can be both cause and effect. It's important for digital leaders and managers to see the interconnectedness of the parts and the whole, seeing interrelationships rather than isolated things, focusing on interactions between things rather than characteristics of things for uncovering patterns of changes rather than static “snapshots.”

The organizational structure carries inherent business capabilities as to what can be achieved within its framework, since misaligned structure or disconnected functions create decision bottlenecks, and reinforce a non-innovation friendly climate. To run an agile business that can self-manage and self-renew by adapting to changes, or creating conditions to change, highly cognitive information connectivity is like the nerve system of the business, to collect, process and update almost real-time information with a deep understanding of the decisions that need to be made and their impact, also guide the corporate actions and behavior on the way to adapt to the changing environment with speed and resilience.

Sensitivity to emergence: Reality will not be still. And it cannot be taken apart. The business has all different success factors such as people, process, technology, emergence, etc, to achieve certain purposes, it also has the fragility to fail unexpectedly. The emerging activities, events, or disruptions bring an unprecedented level of uncertainty. For most organizations, they still do have contexts of relative certainty, while simultaneously having contexts reflecting both complexity and chaos. A high-mature organization always looks for opportunities, preventing potential risks across the business via increasing the usage of abundant information and emergent digital technologies accordingly to charter business paradigm shifts seamlessly.

The enterprise is nothing more than a switch in the network lattice of the ecosystem. To accelerate performance and unlock business potentiality, focus on the emergence to create business synergy. Try to digitally connect key resources and assets and build innovation hubs and clusters across the digital ecosystem. To broaden creative impact, the aspect which matters is to ensure that the enterprise is connected to all the appropriate business ecosystems, lattice or otherwise, touch points, for improving information and idea flows, and catalyzing innovation consistently.

Balance of strategic exploration and technical exploitation: In face of fierce competitions and more selective customers, organizations need to manage both their balance and growth cycle effectively. if you stick and restrict, you cannot be dynamic; if you overly spend or expand, you are risky. It’s important to achieve operational excellence by consolidating, rationalizing, modernizing, integrating, securing, or optimizing; it’s also critical to explore the full potential of the business by planning, designing, developing, investing, innovating; build differentiated business competencies to perform in the future so that the organization does not only earn enough from today,' but thrive in the future.’

Performance is the accomplishment, to ensure the business has a solid footing; potential is an investment, improving revenue and catalyzing business growth. It’s important for management to make a strategy and its subcomponents as living things, make certain adjustments for adapting to changes, clarify the interrelationships of many pieces of moving parts, as well as varying scenarios of intended or unintended sequence-consequence scenarios accordingly. Either for individuals or the businesses, balance and harmony are about flowing, to make a strategic alignment internally or across the business ecosystem. Organizations today have to be solid enough to keep the business running but fluid enough to enable information and ideas to flow within the expanded digital ecosystem at the accelerating speed.

Run an innovative company as an organic system that keeps evolving. Forward-thinking businesses should manage both balancing cycle and growth cycle smoothly by exploring the new possibility, as well as continually tuning its structure and process, to become more adaptable and innovative. When the organization has put a stronger emphasis on empowering people, accelerating strategy, catalyzing innovation, and improving people-centricity, it is reaching the inflection point to achieve the next level of organizational maturity.

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Innercourage

Being innovative requires a certain tolerance for and acceptance of failure, which is more than just risk tolerance, it’s courage

It’s not difficult being creative to generate fresh ideas, it’s difficult for you to be understood by others most of the time. It’s difficult to break down conventional wisdoms, overcome obstacles to implement those ideas. 

Creativity requires a certain tolerance for and acceptance of failure, which is more than just risk tolerance, it’s courage - to be courageous to do something you believe it’s right; to be courageous to listen to what you don’t want to hear; to have the guts to make tough decisions; to be courageous to walk through trial and adversary without losing your confidence. Being courageous is not only about being brave or bold, but it is also about the combination of vision, passion, and intellectual risk-taking.

Passion and courage are good pairs: To inspire innovation, people should be encouraged to develop innovativeness as a state of mind. People love changes and innovating especially if they are pioneers in introducing the ideas or changes, always look forward to something different and new, stimulate creative energy, see alternatives, think differently, think positive, think fun, or think beyond your reach, to re-imagining “what is possible.” In fact, human beings need to be enthused to participate and achieve goals courageously by tapping into the most powerful and brilliant mode of thinking anytime.

Being innovative means to deprogram old mindsets, let go of outdated concepts or the voices from the past, keep the mind fresh with updated knowledge to generate novel ideas all the time. Passion and courage are good pairs to make constructive disruptions, break down old traditions, keep learning and innovating. Anyone is capable of innovating if they are capable of silencing the noise in the mind, courageous enough to think outside the conditioned mind without fear, untangle complexity, in pursuit of truth from false or confusing, search for fresh ideas and widen the possibility even if you don't have all the puzzle pieces.

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point: It takes courage to know your authentic self, be creative to think out of the box and explore better ways to do things. Without courage, people simply cannot move out of their comfort zone, and drive any progressive changes. Without courage, there is no innovation or innovators; human society will stagnate. Courage is necessary for people to become more resilient for adapting to the changing circumstances, allowing them to fail, learn and grow from failure consistently.

Innovators need to rise above the status quo and take on a new set of activities that have them involved in shaping big ideas from the get-go. There are tests and trials on the journey of what we call life. Courage is essential to enable oneself to operate beyond ego, become more inclusive by surrounding yourself with a diverse group of other leaders and followers that will provide you with everything that you do not innately possess yourself. Creative leadership is great when you think, act and enable others with a creative spirit to discover, explore, improve, delegate, and achieve great trusting

Being courageous is not the absence of fear; it is acting in spite of it: Fear can paralyze an individual to change inertia, or become a manipulated mentality to spur negative emotions. Fear has always been one of the major obstacles to change-fear of failure, fear of loss of control, etc. Fear will drive you away from your personal goals, your ambitions, your standards, and norms. Fear of consequences stifles creativity. Likewise, fear can paralyze a company to maintain the status quo, refusing to adapt to change or innovate.

Being courageous with a “fearless” mind implies open-minded thinking, bold perspectives, step-wise actions. When people shift from a “risk-avoidance” to “risk intelligence” mentality, they weigh on risk and reward, take prudent risks and find ways to mitigate risk rather than eliminate it. At the business level, building a “fearless” working environment means to inspire openness, critical thinking, and empower talent to unleash their potential with confidence, courage, and focus.

People can be creative and express themselves openly. Being innovative requires a certain tolerance for and acceptance of failure, which is more than just risk tolerance, it’s courage. It takes courage to get out of fear, release creative energy. Innovators are courageous, top management will have to proactively create such a culture of learning and innovation, inspire courageous thinking and acting to make transformative changes, strike the balance between leading and following, pushing and pulling, risk taking and cautious optimism, in accelerating business growth and increasing organizational changeability.

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Insightfulbodassessment

Analogically, governance is not about stopping the corporate vehicle, but to steer it in the right direction with the proper speed.

The more complex an organization is; the more effective governance needs to be put in place for improving management maturity. In the corporate scope, there is a variety of complexity; for example, hierarchical complexity is applied to leaders' minds, their roles, and their organizational cultures. Corporate boards play a significant role in strategy oversight, policy-making, performance monitoring, or talent development. 

The management discipline and GRC practices are more interdependent than ever. High-effective board directors need to scrutinize varying complexity factors of strategy management by digging into the root causes; and optimize governance practices to improve organizational effectiveness, performance, and maturity.

Assess decision processes and decision-makers objectively: Change is the new normal with increasing pace, many say that the multitude of gaps (thinking, knowledge, innovation, strategy execution, etc.) are enlarged because different industries, organizations, functions, and individuals evolve with varying speed. The success of strategy management depends on how effectively and synchronously the organization can make collective decisions across the hierarchy to solve problems timely. Corporate boards oversee business strategy, it’s important for them to work closely with management to scrutinize decision-making processes as well as the quality of decision-makers. When strategy management is ineffective, they need to ponder: Is it because decision processes and decision-makers are in general the unsuccessful kernel? When and under what circumstances do the decision processes show dysfunctional symbols and lead to ineffective problem-solving? When and under what circumstances is information not being handled properly or interpreted accurately and causes misjudgment? When and under what circumstances do the logical thoughts of decision-makers become clouded with mistaken judgments or beliefs? How to improve the overall decision making maturity of the business?

Decisions are necessary as a result of limited resources in time, knowledge, capital, and people. If information is unavailable, or compromised, it will delay or decrease decision effectiveness, complex problem-solving and mislead the business in the wrong direction. Corporate board’s decision oversights help to close gaps, break down decision bottlenecks by specifying the rules and procedures for making decisions in corporate affairs. The entire decision-making processes, especially at the strategic level, include understanding the need, engaging key stakeholders, ensuring effective communication, collecting feedback and weighing them appropriately with the right people, assessing alternatives, developing consensus, planning, executing, and measuring. Good corporate governance enables a good decision-making system and a good controlling system. It can assure the corporation’s operation under the correct directions and behaviors correctly.

Co-develop and oversee talent strategy as an integral component of business strategy: Corporate boards oversee business strategies; good directorship is about creating the greatest value to groom top leaders and guide talent development. Strategy management will fail if people are put in the wrong place to solve problems, as often it causes more problems later on. A solid talent strategy needs to be well-defined based on the business’s long-term perspective well mixing with short-term needs. The corporate board will help to set the principles, innovate talent management, inspire digital fitness, adapt their workforce planning and development strategies to ensure their digital workforce is highly engaged, innovative, and transformative, to unleash collective potential.

To look forward, the businesses must be alert to the digital dynamic environment; it’s a strategic imperative for top board leaders and talent managers to see talent from different angles, forecast talent demand, and embrace futuristic trends. Corporate board directors can contribute to talent development by setting good policies to encourage desired changes, asking the management critical questions such as: How do you define talent? How do you measure talent? How can you help people develop their talent? Today’s BoD and talent managers must isolate and address a much broader array of talent risks and take into account a critical need to craft a solid talent strategy that supports business strategy and human capital investment in a consistent and progressive way to ensure business long term prosperity.

Culture and awareness are the most critical aspects of GRC, and can only be implemented in humans: We can't and won't be able to predict or manage every turn or twist of the business, every business is different with its own set of issues and concerns regarding its strategic and inherent risks. Single dimensional business values further Inhibit companies from becoming sustainable and "future proof." More of the "old" does not work anymore. In reality, sometimes governance "standards" can be taken too far and become their own bureaucracy. In that case, innovation would be stifled. Therefore, solid GRC disciplines need to move more and more to be the hub and harbinger of culture and values, and enforce good policies to improve the functioning and transparency of the company.

Analogically, governance is not about stopping the corporate vehicle, but to steer it in the right direction with the proper speed. Many leaders fail to realize that culture will "happen" whether they understand it or not. It is critical to look at culture, staff training, existing processes and technology first, make improvements if necessary, then determine whether new tools would be a good addition to the mix, and advocate the culture of accountability, learning, innovation. A culture change will become imperative as the drive for revenue becomes a key factor in sustainability. Some of the outdated thinking will be replaced by advanced mindsets, the old ways of doing things will give way to new behavioral tendencies that can create the right environment for business to thrive.

The world becomes over-complex, hyper-connected, extremely uncertain and ambiguous than ever, complexity is diverse, ambiguous, and dynamic with unpredictable outcomes. The corporate board’s oversight of crucial business success factors such as people, process, practice, etc, helps the management set good policies for enabling the business to reclaim the right balance of creativity and process, standardization and flexibility; competition and collaboration, etc, improving organizational agility and maturity.

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Innovativeinsight

Isn’t it a tough journey to celebrate 8600 blog postings - to pursue the digital way of brainstorming, innovating and sharing.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 7 million page views with 8600+ 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 to celebrate 8600 blog postings.

Innovation Being innovative is a growth mindset and a proactive attitude. With the mixed bag of new information and outdated knowledge, order and chaos, people must learn through their interactions with the environment continually, generate and share fresh ideas, adapt to changes promptly.

Innovategovernance Due to the overwhelming growth of information and dynamic business environment, there is a shift of governance to focus on enterprise change and improve organizational maturity. Good corporate governance highlights that the board of directors is ultimately responsible and accountable for developing and sustaining the culture for an enterprise to prosper. Corporate governance controlling and enforcement takes a new meaning such as agility, intelligence, and creativity in the dynamic era of digitalization. The corporate board leaders need to evaluate whether today's governance is over-control, not resilient enough to embrace the change, and how to improve governance effectiveness and maturity.

Inclusiveleadership Leadership is about vision and direction; digital leaders today can lead change and harness innovation by practicing open leadership styles and enhancing interdisciplinary management discipline. To make a smooth shift from silo-based traditional economy to hyper-connected knowledge-abundant creative economy, cookie-cutter leadership needs to be updated toward gap-minding, innovative or situational leadership. Great leaders should build their unique set of leadership competency to support the “circumstantiality” between leadership and achievement. Because today’s business workforce is hyper-diverse with multigenerational, multicultural, multi-divicing characteristics, what are emergent traits and how to shape the new breed of world class leaders and managers to harmonize humanity?

Innovativelogic Digital organizations or society are dynamic and ever-evolving. There is a shift from seeing a societal system as a set of interconnected components to seeing a modern societal system as a set of interwoven threads with nonlinear logic as the very clue.

Innatepolicy Generally speaking, the policy is a set of principles for decision making or guidelines to drive behaviors. Policies need to serve a purpose. Top leaders are both policy makers and followers. The corporate board needs to clarify whether the organization ensures policy coherence across the portfolio; or whether the policy-making and governance are effective enough to improve multifaceted value creation of the company.

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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