Inovategovernance

Structured governance today is informative, proactive, interdisciplinary, and automated to enable changes and improve innovation management effectiveness.

Governance is steering, it's neither linear nor single dimension nowadays because the speed of change is increasing and business disruptions are happening frequently. Re-imagining the future of business is exciting, but enforcing management and governance as complementary disciplines is crucial to improve business effectiveness and fluidity.

 There are too many different types of business management initiatives, so there are different styles of governance approaches. As “over-controlling” governance perhaps stifles change, and decelerates business speed. In a high mature organization, governance must be viewed and assessed at the enterprise level, applying different styles properly, to reach the high level of governance agility..

Reactive governance: In many organizations that get stuck at the lower level of business maturity, governance is reactive, focusing on controlling and risk mitigation. When business leaders or managers are comfortable with the “we always do things like that,”static mentality, get stuck at the daily busyness, they often miss the big picture and become complacent or compliant only. They ignore the sign that their business is in danger at a certain point, because they get used to reacting, not being proactive, and lack an effective governance system to improve business risk intelligence and resilience.

Overly focusing on control and enforcement has the tendency to damage an enterprise's capacity to motivate and engage staff, causing change inertia. Sometimes governance standards can be taken too far and become their own bureaucracy. Reactive attitude is simply not enough to overcome numerous barriers and hidden pitfalls on the way of business transformation. In practice, governance needs to become more proactive and “loose-control” for enhancing iterative planning-acting business management continuum in the organization.

Relaxed governance: The concept of relaxed governance discipline is to ensure your organization optimizes the "traditional" governance to which you refer, and then make the governance more flexible to drive changes, lubricate business interrelationships, harness collaboration, and encourage innovation. Organizations should identify patterns for good governance that sponsors and advocate engagement, motivation, autonomy to improve organizational effectiveness and agility.

The governance can be “relaxed” to a certain degree if its processes are information-driven, and intelligent enough to identify or prevent potential issues. It focuses on prioritization, value-adding, and change agility. It’s less about controlling, more about enabling; repurposing, realignment and integration, to bridge the multitude of business management gaps, break down bottlenecks, lubricate the rigid processes with valuable feedback, and fine-tune hybrid functions or organizational structures to improve organizational flexibility, changeability and resilience.

Interdisciplinary governance: At this level, governance is not only a business enabler, but also a change orchestrator, frame innovation management with trust and flexibility. The right level of guidance and process is important, but overly rigid processes or too pushy goals will stifle innovation. Reengineer or redesign the old fashioned governance control, focus on encouraging meaningful changes and developing innovation in a structural way. It's worth keeping in mind that “engaging, motivating, innovating” are cultural issues, which need to be embedded in the policies, processes, procedures, and practices of the organization, and harnessed via a strong governance approach.

In practice, take a consideration of your current governance maturity - where you are today and how far and fast you might change things, coupled with a good definition of roles, responsibilities wrapped around governance processes. If governance is deemed to stifle innovation, then it is wrongly understood or implemented. Governance needs to set a framework for interdisciplinary innovation management. So it can be understood via multidimensional lenses such as effectiveness, innovation, people-centricity, to create multifaceted value accordingly.

Improving governance principles, practices, and mechanisms can improve the quality of corporate performance. Structured governance today is informative, proactive, interdisciplinary, and automated to enable changes and improve innovation management effectiveness. High mature governance provides a platform for determining sound corporate attitude, behavior and structured decision-making for improving business agility and maturity.

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Initiateholism

By applying holistic management discipline, organizations can deal with complexity and improve business effectiveness.

The shift to digital cuts across industrial sectors, geographical locations and business personal roles, now spreading rapidly to enable organizations of all shapes and sizes to reinvent themselves. The increasingly dispersed nature of organizations and the growing workforce are two factors that break down the traditional hierarchy, harness collaboration both within the enterprise and with external stakeholders. 

The interdisciplinary science should be applied to management with integrated technology & methodology to identify the right problems from multi-faceted lenses and solve them smoothly.

An anthropological perspective opens one’s eyes to a spectrum of things with many different shades and colors of the world: The business world become hyper-connected and interdependent, an anthropological perspective expands people’s view of human society with enriched knowledge and cultural diversity, making them more open to fresh insight and new ideas. Anthropology enables one to navigate a variety of cross-cultural situations and has greatly helped in improving cognitive intelligence and communication skills. That further creates greater self-awareness, increases cognitive threshold, spur creativity, encourages different ways of doing things, and becomes more tolerant of a variety of differences.

From a problem-solving perspective, anthropology is people oriented, analyzing human activities and behaviors; opening our eyes and expanding our perspective to discover the amazing and fascinating things that human beings do; it brings a positive outlook of human beings all being unique, full of potential. It helps us shift our thinking to a variety of perspectives when dealing with people who do not share the same values. So we would more appreciate our world as a great place in which we could explore ourselves, refine our perspective, and renew our energy to generate multifaceted values.

A philosophical lens is always important to better understand evolution and harness its power to serve human purposes: Philosophy is broader, abstract human knowledge into deep wisdom. Philosophical questioning raises “big why” concerns about humanity; so applying philosophy-based management discipline allows people to see the cause and effect of problems thoroughly; abstract knowledge into unique insight about themselves, their organizations, as well as the ecosystem they live in for advancing human society.

Philosophy is broader, abstract human knowledge into deep wisdom. It is the compass of human civilization and the foundations of principles behind breakthrough innovation. Thinking through philosophical dimensions allows people to abstract and balance flow and solid, brightness and darkness, positive and negative; so they can get the true understanding of the complexity of issues, human society, uncover the clue underneath, in order to identify the root causes, for solving, or dissolving the problems effectively.

Architecture is a cross knowledge domain platform and discipline to facilitate strategic planning, communication, manage enterprise knowledge with business context: The "schools of thought" in architecture are an ongoing and emergent process to understand and articulate organizational context, encompass strategy or enhance governance. It embraces the enterprise ecological school of thinking, engaging varying stakeholders in understanding issues from different angles and shaping a big picture for strategic problem-solving.

Enterprise architecture is a blueprint of the enterprise, with various stages of abstraction: contextually; conceptually; logically, etc. It provides the broader lens to understand the business from different angles, orchestrate the large scale of business transformation. It needs to be abstract enough to dig into “why,” clarify the purpose of business philosophically, also practical as a great planning and communication tool for strategic problem-solving.

The hyperconnectivity nature of the digital era breaks down the functional, geographical, or even organizational border, businesses today become much more nonlinear, interconnected, and interdependent than ever. Even though you couldn’t predict anything beforehand, you can always apply interdisciplinary knowledge to understand issues objectively; imagine different scenarios based on “lessons learned” involved in current or in the past. By applying holistic management discipline, organizations can deal with complexity and improve business effectiveness in a structural way.

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Initiateobservativelogic

 Observe, observe, observe more, through your fresh eyes, inquisitive mind, enriched experience.

Things are complex, people are complex, businesses are complex, and the world is complex. Observation is one of the most important activities for people to interact with the world, understand the surroundings and improve cognitive abilities. 

Particularly when you observe deeper, look at a situation and wonder how on earth things could have evolved in a certain way, this is the clue that you should first seek to understand the complex problems before jumping into the scenario on how to fix them effectively.

 
It’s important to keep fresh eyes and try to understand what your observation is all about: Keep fresh eyes, with the beginner's mind to stay a novice of some sort, in order to observe and capture the objective information of what you are observing. At this stage, you just see what you look at on the surface, you see the altitude, the shape, the color, and capture the physical characteristics of things you observe. Then try to deal with the very things you've been observing because it will bring much more insights when you try to fiddle with it. Observations and inquiries can mutually reinforce each other if only you ask thought-provoking questions, gather adequate information, and make extensive observations in a logical way.

From a business management perspective: Observe your people, are they satisfied and fully engaged with the work? Observe your management, are they consistent with what they think, say, and do? Observe your culture - the collective mindset, is it innovative, or the opposite is true? Observe how things get done in the organization, do silos or bureaucracy block the way? Does the business management make logical sense? The business transformations of a system are located in its environment, observed from the classic developmental rates of change over time initially, identify varying directions of regular proportional change in order to understand and deal with varying issues holistically.

Observe based on different expertise and personas to gain an in-depth understanding of issues: There are quite a lot of angles to observe, and there are many ways to deepen observation. What you see depends very much on what you are familiar with and on the parading. Each one of us is unique, we have cognitive differences, different interests, expertise, or experience, At such logic level with role-based view, the answer is not about “single version of truth” because nobody can agree on what the truth looks like, it's a matter of perspective from which angle of the process you are looking from.

People play different personas in professional or personal life. From a process perspective, if you put three process observers based on their role in a room, you will hear four interpretations of how that process works, it’s all based on people’s observation and experiences. Everybody involved with the process thinks they know how it works and where the issues are, but putting independent eyes upon it almost always ends up painting a somewhat different picture. Therefore, the truth is in the eye of the beholder. On-observation, ask further: what’re the disciplines, stages, tools or frameworks to help you observe insightfully? And how to create multifaceted value when integrating all related parties’ viewpoints?

Observe objectively, holistically, what you see cognitively depends very much on your goals and on what you concentrate on given the limited amount of working memory available: Observation is the means to an end. Usually the end is about problem-solving. It is not necessary to observe irrelevant details; there is no way to absorb every bit & byte of information flowing to you, you need to be selective in order to be more informative without getting distracted or inundated with overloaded information. You have to stay focused on the issues you need to solve, otherwise, you might get stagnated, causing more issues or concerns later on.

Either observing or acting, laser focus on things that really matter, be selective on the knowledge you want to gain, Upon increasing paces of changes, the reality is that there are a lot of things that can go wrong and it is not always easy to identify what is important. Make goal-driven observation and understanding. Problem-solving is about seeing a problem and actually finding a solution to that problem, not just the band-aid approach to fix the symptom.

Observe, observe, observe more, through your fresh eyes, inquisitive mind, enriched experience. To practice deep observation, apply different tools and provide a paradigm to observe objectively by leveraging contexts and multiple viewpoints. See underneath the symptoms and dig into root causes. See around corners, understand different perspectives without pushing toward the one that you think is the truth. The goal is to clarify, deepen understanding, identify patterns and solve problems smoothly.

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Initiatelogicalreasoning

Given the value that information is playing in the change and growth of organizations today, business leaders must become information-savvy.

“Decision Masters” refer to the digital leaders or professionals who can leverage multidimensional thought processes, information and intuition, and take a step-wise scenario for making effective decisions consistently. 

Decision Masters also refer to the businesses or organizations that follow a set of well-defined principles, leverage fine-tuned decision processes, efficient information management system, decision frameworks, tools, and metrics to enable people across the organization making effective decisions collaboratively.

Initiate Logical Reasoning

Initiatlogicalreasoning Change is inevitable in circumstances full of complexity, uncertainty, and unpredictability, to deal with varying complex issues in today’s “VUCA” world, it is important to take cross-logical approach to analyze, discover patterns, make objective perceptions, leverage multidimensional thought processes and nonlinear logic to diagnose the root causes, understand interconnectivity, make sound judgment, and handle problems step-wisely.

Improvedecisioneffectiveness Decision making is in less mathematical or fancy methodological consideration but as a sociological problem. With fast growing information, there is evidence that business professionals, managers/leaders who leverage fact based analytics with an evidence-based approach to decision making do better than those that don't.

Innerdecisionindex The decision is about the future, and the future is full of uncertainty and ambiguity; Decision-making is difficult due to varying reasons such as uncertainty of business circumstances, fear of failures, unsure about priority, unconscious bias, lack of knowledge or profound thinking process, etc. There is fuzziness in the decision because there is fuzziness in conflicting criteria, there are various parameters in the art and science of decision-making.

Initiateanalysis Given the value that information is playing in the change and growth of organizations today, business leaders must become information-savvy. Information analytics tools and techniques are going to play an increasingly larger role in business.

Integrating decision logic In the world where change is significantly speeding up, business leaders couldn’t predict the future with a certain degree of accuracy. Decision-making is difficult due to varying reasons such as uncertainty and ambiguity of business circumstances, fear of failures, unsure about priority, unconscious bias, lack of knowledge or profound thinking process, etc. Thus, it’s crucial to take logical steps in achieving decision smartness.

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 10 million page views with about #9900 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.


Decision Master Book Summary

Decision Master Amazon Order Link

Decision Master B&N Order Link

Decision Master iBook Order Link


Decision Master Introduction

Decision Master Chapter 1 Decision Intelligence

Decision Master Chapter 2 Decision Principles

Decision Master Chapter 3 Digital Decision Styles

Decision Master Chapter 4 Decision Pitfalls

Decision Master Chapter 5 Decision Maturity

Decision Master Conclusion Five Pillars in Achieving Decision Excellence

Decision Master Quotes Collection 1

Decision Master Quotes Collection 2

Decision Master Quotes Collection 3

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Illustratelogic

 Logic is the hidden clue that weave all crucial ingredients into business reality.

Modern society has the very characteristics of hyperdiversity and interdisciplinary connectivity. Human history is an evolutionary journey; we are on the advancing journey when we move from information scarcity to knowledge economy to creativity economy. All generations need to realize they need to keep refreshing their mindset, learn from each other, share fresh insight. 

Running a real-time organization or an advanced human society starts with applying quality information to predict emerging trends & risks, clarify advanced logic, and conquer dynamic digital management challenges.

Advanced logic based on predictive analytics that can be used to help drive changes and improvements in business practices: In face of fierce competitions and frequent disruptions, timing is always important to leverage the right information for making effective decisions by the right people at the right timing. Predictive analytics refers to the flavor of analytics where current and historical data is exploited using techniques from data mining, statistics, machine learning etc to enhance future oriented business logic for improving decision coherence. Just-in-time information management is crucial; as the power of information is to empower the business with real-time insight across the organization in ways never possible before.

Nowadays, the business environment is dynamic, forward-thinking companies leverage information-based analytics to provide business foresight and customer insight about upcoming opportunities or risks. Advanced analytical logic will give all kinds of businesses the capability to anticipate the future. This is more imperative when uncertainty, velocity, complexity, and doubts are major hindrances to problem-solving. Business leaders are asking for real time analysis, and it means information processing as soon as the data is ingested. Technically, predictive analysis involves techniques such as regression, forecasting, simulation, and risk analysis, navigating value position. With accurate forecasts, business managers can navigate their organization toward the right direction smoothly, expediting business transformation..

The logic of personalization is to deeply understand customers via empathy and delight them with customized solutions: People are complex systems, there’s convergence of hard and soft sciences of humans from an cross-disciplinary perspective. Personalization based on the logic of empathy is about how you feel about the whole process of being a customer- the sum of all thoughts, attitudes, experiences, feelings, reactions, etc. When managing a personalization cycle, gaining a deep understanding of customers through empathetic observation, customer involvement. So your design will serve as you seek to understand their wants, desires, and needs, focus on creating value for customers in every step, clarify "design logic" or "behavioral value chain" between the inputs - intermediate steps - outcomes.

Personalized solutions give customers an impression on how it can tailor their needs to solve problems and achieve higher-than-expected business results. One of the biggest benefits of clarifying empathetic logic is a focus on planning what areas personalization effort will focus on based on strategic alignment. It’s important to lean on customers, often eliciting highly valuable information to design tailored applications or solutions to meet customers’ needs. So personalization brings a unique perspective of innovative problem-solving to tailor customers’ requirements even before they know them. It is a critical aspect of the business future and a significantly underutilized competitive advantage.

Preventive logic based on information-based forecasts enables the business to prevent problems from happening and deal with uncertainty effectively: Uncertainty and risk are inherent in every venture, information exponentiality and change is the new normal. Forecasting and brainstorming scenarios for failure in the future helps everyone be clear about what they don't want to happen and what can be done to avoid it. Preventive logic allows business leaders to step into the future confidently, identify emerging problems or risks effectively, and lead the change smoothly.

The information based prediction is optimal to predict risks, prevent or solve problems scientifically. In practice, it’s important to make data more “visible” for shareholders, apply the real time analysis model to predict the potential problems from happening and prevent or manage them smoothly. Forethoughtful organizations are seeking to exploit the value found in convergence technologies - advanced analytics, making accurate forecasts; also taking interdisciplinary logic to prevent problems from happening psychologically, sociologically, and philosophically, etc.

Modern society is a dynamic continuum with collective human thoughts, attitudes, and actions. Logic is the hidden clue that weave all crucial ingredients into business reality. Real societal advancement is made through the work of forwarding-looking minds, updating knowledge, clarifying advanced logic and making collective progress constantly.

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Illuminatejudgment

Knowledge pertains to-knowing, to intelligence; wisdom has to do with -soundness of judgment…

When you judge-

something,

you form-

a critical opinion of it,

based on facts,

discerned data,

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judgment,

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should increase-

confidence,

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identify what causes -

manifestly intelligent people -

to make poor judgment,

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knowing,

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wisdom has to do with -

soundness of judgment;

many times,

people make-

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not because of -

ignorance, but

because of -

lack of insight.

Can you think,

independently;

make critical reasoning,

logically?

Are you able to-

be both kind and tough to -

make judgment, 

fairly;

can you analyze deeply, 

without losing big picture,

holistically?

The wiser you become,

the better judgment,

you can make;

know-

what you don't know,

deepen understanding,

Are you -

a discerning individual-

better equipped to -

make sound judgments,

consistently?

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Initiateinnovativeleadership

 Innovative leadership is far-sighted, influential and interdisciplinary.

Leadership is about the future and direction. It is the ability to influence the values, mindsets, decisions, and actions undertaken by others. Leadership in the coming decade will need to be more innovative and distributed -the opposite of the command-and-control that has dominated the twentieth century.

 From top down, a leader with a far-sighted vision can change the course of the business by seeing beyond what all others see or by charting new revenue or growth through the creation of innovative products, services, business models or market. You have to adjust the assumptions, overcome the roadblocks in order to inspire creativity and catalyze innovation.

Share the far-sighted vision, represent the overall quality of leadership, make a sound judgment, empower changes, and inspire innovation: Leadership vision is to be a guiding light and show the direction to find hot spots for innovating, share their perception of future trends of business such as innovation or globalization. Forethoughtful leaders provide insight into where an organization needs to go, take their organization through the necessary steps to achieve that vision from a coordinated innovation effort.

The problem is that many organizations do not set the right conditions for the innovation strategy to occur within, something along the lines of the right people with the right mindset in the right roles doing the right work with the right interdependence. From a broadly strategic perspective, "cision" and "innovation," are complementary skills. Vision is a destination and innovation is the better process, tools, cultures, etc, to get you there, solve problems alternatively.

Altitude inspires leaders to be far-sighted, focus on the big picture and long term innovation perspective: Environment either encourages or discourages innovation, the ease or difficulties inherent in surviving. Innovation, especially breakthrough innovation has high risk in it because it’s new to the world; often you have to break down the old ways to do things, take risks to do things you never did befores. The flashes of inspiration we now see in retrospect as groundbreaking innovations were driven by leaders not only far-sighted but determined to make their ideas succeed.

Innovation has a low success rate; you have to overcome different barriers courageously and manage innovation in the right way. Differentiation between incremental and breakthrough innovation relates to the degree to which a particular innovation changes the competitive landscape, potentially making entire industries obsolete. Innovation leadership needs to be far-sighted, strike the right balance of incremental innovation for quick wins and radical innovation for transformation. The size and mix of the innovation initiative portfolio depend on the business situation, leadership foresight, strategic objectives and severity of external challenges/changes.

Be farsighted, see further, but be practical by taking the step-wise approach to innovation management: In high mature organizations, innovation strategy is an integral component of business strategy. Innovation implementation is an integral part of strategy execution. Organizations have limited talent and resources; it’s important to set the right priority by selecting the ideas which can have a better opportunity to implement and maximize business value; develop different innovation approaches, scopes, and practices.

An effective innovation strategy based on a farsighted vision enables companies to leverage their various environments and ecosystems to capture growth opportunities and unlock their performance. Innovation implementation is more science than art. To avoid being disrupted by taking too many risks, business leaders should be farsighted and cautiously optimistic, weave together defined strategic initiatives, set up a prioritization process to remove inefficiency, and change things which really matter for the long-term prosperity of the business.

Since innovation is fundamentally about challenging common beliefs, breaking old ways to do things, having more assumptions uncovered will lead to greater innovation. Innovative leadership is far-sighted, influential and interdisciplinary. Innovative leaders value collective wisdom, harnesses cross-functional collaboration, which helps you actually understand the problem from different angles in order to solve it in a better way and lead transformative change smoothly.

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IlluminateUp

Can you - plugin imagination switch, pull up -information string; to lead upward, gravitationally?

Change is like-

the upward spiral,

opens up-

new possibilities;

there is -

a mixed bag of -

positive & negative emotions,

pre-conceptual assumptions…

do you have-

independent eyes,

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embrace-

diverse opinions,

inclusively?

A change agent mind is-

like spring,

bending over,

in order to -

stretch up;

retreating to-

move up;

recharging to -

accelerate up,

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can you -

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do you have-

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conscious, subconscious,

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brighten up -

shadow thoughts,

darkness of surroundings,

take -

iterative, progressive routes for-

move the world forward,

inspirationally?

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Initiativesforambidexterity

 Companies are gradually opening up to the next practice to build up differentiated competency with a set of unique capabilities.

In the face of “VUCA” reality, people and organizations are at the different stages of learning, growing, maturing cycle. Individually, ambidexterity means people are versatile, building a unique set of professional competency for achieving high performance, unleashing potential all the time. 

Collectively, an ambidextrous organization can strike the right balance of listening & telling, innovation and efficiency. practice innovative leadership for improving business agility, resilience, speed.

To reinvent a digital organization, it’s important to balance” listening & telling” for improving its agility and maturity: Due to exponential growth of information and rapid change, many of yesterday’s solutions are not fit for the new circumstances. Organizations need to become listening organizations, their management should strike the right balance of listening & telling, make continuous information savvy conversations. As there are always two sides of the story; you need to listen carefully to gain true understanding. So the outcome of a successful discussion would be new perspective, fresh knowledge in improving decision coherence and problem-solving effectiveness. 

Listen and hear what people are saying or trying to say, even try to figure out what’s in their mind, not being said yet. Communicate carefully about the reasons for changes, and be honest about the impact. So you have to learn the hard way to improve management effectiveness only if you have both a listening and telling organization. If you do not listen, you will lose full support of the collaborators, if you don't tell, your collaborators will not know what is required, and thus, you cannot achieve the results you want to achieve. Actively listening and communicating to one another also creates excitement which propels good ideas to be formed and actions to be taken. People down the organization need to be encouraged to speak up and work cross functionally for optimizing business processes and achieving business excellence.

An ambidextrous organization can strike the right balance of harnessing innovation and improving efficiency: Innovation is a unique advantage that differentiates leaders from others. An "ambidextrous organization” is an organization that can handle innovation streams for different purposes and with different time frames, and also keep optimizing processes to improve business efficiency. Innovation explorers develop unconventional solutions, then, when ideas are fully developed and a prototype built, innovation implementers take over and work on serial production, to make products or services more reliable, easier to make, and cost-effective.

Innovation ambidexterity means that the organization can manage a healthy innovation portfolio with the right mix of incremental innovations and breakthrough innovations. Because incremental innovation is usually top-down, but breakthrough innovation is often bottom up. Businesses with innovation ambidexterity can develop competitive teams with different focus, separate teams focused on disruptive innovation from teams that focus on implementing and sustaining incremental innovation. Organizations can build a balanced portfolio to achieve higher-than-expected business results.

The art of digital management is to build a high performance organization with “simplexity”: Due to the “VUCA” nature of digitalization, business complexity is unavoidable. . It becomes complex if things do interact, particularly in the case of "nonlinear" business relationships, you can't separate things properly; and you cannot predict the actual effect of interaction straightforwardly. Over-complexity in a business may be hiding simple and innovative ways to do things. The art of digital management is not to complicate things, but to eliminate unnecessary complications.

The emergent business complexities include hyper-connectivity, hyper-diversity, hyper-dynamism, and non-linear complexity. The management needs to ponder: How do you know you have the minimum required complexity, as to support flexibility without hurting the support costs? “Simplexity” is a portmanteau word to reflect the digital reality. One one side, complexity is a property of intelligence. On the other hand, complication will stifle innovation and decrease productivity. In the core of simplicity lies complexity. The management needs to encourage desired complexity, simplify and optimize the business for reaching the next level of digital maturity.

Companies are gradually opening up to the next practice to build up differentiated competency with a set of unique capabilities. An ambidextrous organization must leverage all of the relevant disciplines in place and actively monitor emerging business opportunities in order to strike the right balance of growth and stability, process and flexibility, the best and next practices to solve problems structurally in a time frame that will yield strategic advantages.

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Initiatives

Human progress is fundamentally achieved via an iterative problem-solving scenario.

The purpose of “Problem-Solving Master - Frame Problems Systematically and Solve Problems Creatively“ is to throw some light on how to understand, frame, and solve today’s multilayer, interdependent, and over-complex business problems effortlessly. 

Digital leaders and professionals should be self-aware of their role in problems, show professional maturity, and develop a good reputation as the problem-solver.

      

Initiatives

Initiatives The world we co-shared becomes more hyper-connected and interdependent, the emergence of potential opportunities and risks for exploring digital is likely to follow a nonlinear pattern with exponential speed. Thanks to the exponential growth of information and advanced technology, the global society is making certain progress technologically or methodologically. However, there are still numerous problems that need to be solved thoroughly; quite lots of common challenges that have to be overcome collaboratively.

Initiativesviaassertiveness Due to the complexity and ever-changing business dynamic with frequent disruptions, behind many critical business initiatives, there are numerous points-of-view for varying stakeholders, as well as different assumptions of sequence & consequence.

Initiatlogicalreasoning Change is inevitable in circumstances full of complexity, uncertainty, and unpredictability, to deal with varying complex issues in today’s “VUCA” world, it is important to take cross-logical approach to analyze, discover patterns, make objective perceptions, leverage multidimensional thought processes and nonlinear logic to diagnose the root causes, understand interconnectivity, make sound judgment, and handle problems step-wisely.

Initiatives Organizations today are inundated with the sea of information, overwhelmed with too many business initiatives, overloaded with operation and short term business concerns. There are strategic and tactical initiatives, management initiatives or GRC initiatives, identifying what generates the most value for the company and expressing that in clearly-defined business goals helps business leaders keep their eyes on what matters, strike the right balance of long term perspective and quick benefits.

Uncovercauseeffect Every meaningful thing has a logic underneath. Some problems usually have many causes; thus, the cause-effect of the problem is not always linear, a small effect in one place can cause a cascade of events that produce a nonlinear huge impact somewhere else. A structural problem-solver contemplates in a systematic way: What is the problem, what is the symptom, what could be the root causes? Which perspective should I consider? Did I overlook anything? What are the cause-effects, how to solve the real problem without causing further issues later on?

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 7 million page views with about 9900+ blogs 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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Initiativesofgovernance

Taking part in governance discipline should be seen as a leadership style and effective tactics to achieve high-performance business results with consistency.

Governance is like steer-wheel, to ensure enterprise running in the right direction and well headed to the destination at the premium speed. It’s important to set up strong governance initiatives in an organization for identifying those common risks which various stakeholders in the organization have to deal with and aim to minimize.

Technically, how to enforce the organizational governance discipline depends on the nature, scale, and complexity of the organization, as well as understanding its risks and conduct.

An effective business architecture is an important governance tool to monitor varying governance activities: Governance is an internal control to monitor the path of strategy execution, create good performance and enhance compliance. An effective business architecture helps to monitor varying governance activities such as delegation of authority, auditing, or strategy monitoring, etc, to improve business effectiveness and efficiency, enforce business supply chains, influence collective attitude & behaviors, comply with relevant regulation, manage its partnerships, in the global scope. It is a strategic imperative for business architecture to eliminate risks and improve value-creation, and scale up organizational changes.

Integrated GRC provides a check and balance on harnessing strong management disciplines to lift up corporate agility and maturity: Most people have come to believe it's easier and safer to adapt to the environment, rather than promote or initiate change. If your current management and governance practices generate your irrational business activities, behaviors; it needs to be changed to avoid creating more of them. Agile governance is in demand for improving the functioning and transparency of the company, business changeability, its business strategy implementation, and management performance. The more diverse, regulated, and geographically dispersed an organization is or becomes, the more integrated GRC approach becomes. Governance and risk management are important but should be handled and prioritized in such a way that they're inherent in the way to improve decision coherence without impacting business flexibility to deliver alternative solutions.

Governance as a learning tool needs to be well understood and accepted: Strong governance clarifies business vision, encourages learning, enhances commitment, and improves business effectiveness. Enhancing governance discipline can be implemented by setting good policies to encourage fitting mindsets, positive attitudes and good behaviors. Governance is like a brake, the purpose is not to stop the car, but keep it running smoothly. Corporate governance discipline can fulfill its purpose as a business learning tool and a high-level corporate enabler by providing a structured communication bridge between shareholders and top business leaders such as corporate directors to initiate frequent conversations. It is a learning tool to rejuvenate business energy and reinvent business management.

Taking part in governance discipline should be seen as a leadership style and effective tactics to achieve high-performance business results with consistency. Good governance harnesses an effective decision-making system, which can assure the corporations’ operation under the correct directions and behaviors correctly, lubricate the business value chain, ensure the people crossing the boundaries will pull in the same direction, improve flexibility in planning, build business agility, and improve organizational maturity.

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Initiateguidance

The goal of the business forecast is about predicting what will happen and taking steps further, what shall you do upon it. 

The effects of an increasingly digitized world are now reaching into every corner of businesses and every aspect of organizations. Digital is the age of creativity and innovation, creativity is the most desired trait for digital leaders and professionals today, and innovation is the light every organization is pursuing. 

Which themes shall you set to advocate digital transformation? How to lead toward the digital future effortlessly?

                      

     Initiate Governance

Initiateleadershipguidance The multidimensional digital effects provide impressive advantages in terms of the business speed, the abundance of information, and the quality of the workforce. If running the business in a transactional mode only can cause digital ineffectiveness in the long run. Today’s business leaders must be forethoughtful to read business sentiment with clarity, set guidance to drive changes, catalyze innovation, and solve problems effectively.

Initiateguidance We are in the age with the mixing of old and new, physical interaction and virtual collaboration; abundance of information and scarcity of insight; the birth of new technologies and legacy infrastructure, etc. It’s always important to break down silos or outdated concepts, set clearly defined guidance to shape fitting mindsets, desired behaviors, for making continuous improvement, encouraging innovation, leading business transformation, reinventing knowledge and creative economy.

Initiatingforecast The speed of change is increasing, uncertainties and complexity are a common occurrence in any walk of our progress. The goal of business forecasting is about predicting what will happen and how to act on it by making effective decisions and solving complex problems.

Uncoverfutureviaprediction Nowadays the perspective of rapid change and abundant knowledge unfolds into a wider multi-dimensionally systemic business continuum. The goal of the business forecast is about predicting what will happen and taking steps further, what shall you do upon it. To predict and respond to the emergent business properties and make information more “visible” for shareholders decisions, promotions, and even chart of accounts will create a richer value return from the enterprise data asset and improve the overall business decision effectiveness.

Unfolding Future via Forecasting We live in a complex business environment with a high degree of unpredictability and ambiguity, the highly complex and dynamic system needs to be elaborated in a well-organized effort. The business leaders today need to see further than what all others see; seek input for future adjustments, and orchestrate dynamic competencies via managerial activities, and ensure the company capabilities fully support the strategy as well as improve the overall business agility and maturity.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 7 million page views with about #9900th blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The “Digital Master” book series includes 29 books to share insight from the multidimensional digital lens and perceive the multi-faceted impact the digital era upon us is making to businesses and society. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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Initiativesofinvestment

The best point of view is to perceive investment as structural management activities, capable of delivering multifaceted business value.

Every organization is different, every investment initiative is also unique, there is no one size fits all formula to invest. Good investment approaches help their businesses open up new channels of revenue and monetization within the enterprise, their ecosystem, and the industry. 

The objective of business investment oversight is to provide visibility of the business initiatives that are supporting the company's strategy and expediting business growth and transformative changes.

 

You should spend to make a return; invest to generate differentiated business value: The focus point should shift to assess whether the business improvement is the right investment to be done in the first place, which business investment would provide the greatest return; and which should be invested in the future. The evaluation needs to be based on financial metrics and projections for future revenues, cash flows, and return on investment, etc.

 Make sure the investment management first understands what it needs to drive future business growth and improve capital flow. The logical investment scenario helps to assess whether the business models associated with emerging trends is the right investment to be done in the first place, and ensure the expected return on investment. Make sure the # financial investment of the business initiatives are aligned with at least one strategic objective over the total portfolio.

It's also important to show the clear business goals of the investment with critical elements such as returns and risk assessment. The Return On Investment value proposition should be an overall measurement based on the combination of cost, schedule, quality, performance, and satisfaction of varying stakeholders. But to take the step further, understanding the satisfaction of customers, stakeholders is what allows the measurement of multidimensional values investment can bring up to the business.

 Identify related risk issues about investment, The risk assessment and management process helps investment management prioritize the activities they are committed to resourcing. What are the best methods for calculating ROI? How to accurately project the economic impact and multifaceted value of the proposed initiatives. It’s important to align resources and talent scientifically, go beyond short-term gain, take a calculated risk and make a long-term investment. So organizations have a better opportunity to shift from surviving to thriving mode.

It’s important to continue to make an objective assessment of the investment 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. usually return on investment and risks are proportional. The best judgment or a qualitative approach is given for assessing the investment portfolio. When people speak about making an investment for generating new revenue, visibility into each investment is established to provide ongoing investment health information as well as enable understanding overall portfolio health. 

There are both opportunities and risks for every investment. The insightful management needs to check up: Are the investment portfolio diversified? What investments, or even portfolios, should you direct more assets to? What, and where, are there talent gaps? What is the relative health (risk, value, strategic importance) of the portfolios? How to improve the overall effectiveness and maturity of an investment portfolio.

The business ecosystem is full of opportunities and risks. The best point of view is to perceive investment as structural management activities, capable of delivering multifaceted business value. The success of investment is usually based on how to align resources, talent, processes to enable business growth, and play the number game wisely to demystify the puzzle of investment.

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Initiativesofvaluegeneraton

 IT needs to re-energize itself and fortify digital transformation by contributing to business growth, innovation, or customer experience optimization.

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

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

        

Initiatives of Value Generation

Initiativesofvaluegeneration Generating value is the very goal of all meaningful human activities. Value plays a bigger role in determining which task needs to be addressed first by setting the right priority, creating a business justification case, and fitting organizational purpose.

Initiate quality improvement Quality is about doing certain things, meeting well-set criteria for achieving high performance results. You have to define what you mean by “quality”; then the required quality with all its aspects should be defined and understood by associates for producing desired outcomes.

Initiatives of implemmentation In adapting to the rapid change and fierce competitions, the success of business management undoubtedly lies in the timely implementation and this can be achieved only through effective leadership, employee engagement and collaboration, continuous persistence and follow up with strong governance discipline.

Initiativestoreinvent As the business world becomes hyper connected, interdependent, surviving in today’s business dynamic requires structural flexibility, cross-functional collaboration, goal-driven, people-centric process, and intuitive user interface to reduce business friction, deal with conflicts or disruptions, and build competitive business advantage continually.

Initiative to innovate Our business world is becoming more connected and interdependent, the crucial issue for many organizations though is that they don’t have an integrated approach to solve complex problems holistically. They haven’t reached the next level of business growth and maturity.

The blog is a dynamic book flowing with your thoughts; growing through your dedication; sharing your knowledge; conveying your wisdom, and making an influence through touching the hearts and connecting minds across the globe. The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 7 million page views with 9900+ blog postings. Among 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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Initiativesofglobalbods

Innovation, personalization, globalization are a few digital trends that are worth the corporate board’s attention.

The organizational ecosystem environment is complex, dynamic and informative, corporate board directorship is about setting directions and inspiring changes. Forward-looking organizations across the vertical sectors are on the journey of digital transformation which involves a renewed understanding of the future of business, as well as how to update underlying business values, reinvent organizational structures, and recharge business energy. 

Effective corporate board leaders today are often specialized generalists, having multidimensional thinking ability, broad business acumen, interdisciplinary expertise, to set the right tones for innovation, integration, personalization, globalization, and practice expert power to amplify leadership influence continually.

BoDs oversee innovation strategy and practices: Innovation is what leads to differentiation and unique advantage. Although the major responsibility of the corporate board is for practicing governance, which doesn’t mean to stifle innovation, on the contrary, it means to establish good principles and next practices for managing innovation in an effective way. Corporate boards oversee strategy, and therefore, they need to pay more attention to innovation. Innovation has a considerably low success rate. There are different innovation bottlenecks such as idea, process resource, implementation, talent bottleneck, etc. Thus, the commitment from the top and corporate directors’ oversight is very important for innovation to be successful.

In practice, there are many ways to differentiate, and therefore, there are many ways to build innovation into a corporate strategy. Corporate boards as one of the top leadership pillars should set the tone for practicing open-minded leadership, close innovation strategy gaps, create the space for open dialogue and debate about digital innovation, develop a common understanding of it, and create the necessity and motivation for innovation to blossom. One important role the corporate board must play is to oversee innovation strategy and integration, making sure management reports on whether and how investments in innovation are yielding forecast results.

BoDs oversee personalization and design as a sub-component of business strategy: The digital era upon us is about people, choice, and empathy, or simply put, "personalization.” The purpose of business is to create customers; how to improve customer satisfaction by providing personalized products/services to fit their needs. As the ways of doing business and meeting customer expectations both tend to be more flexible than the siloed industrial age. Forward-looking organizations are shifting focus from inside-out operation driven to outside-in people-centric. Creating the digital paradigm means how to shift from the classic management approach to differentiation and personalization.

Forward-thinking organizations today explicitly consider personalization and interaction design as sub-component of business strategy, and set a top priority to build a people-centric organization. BoDs can make insightful inquiries to the management about people centricity: Do your customers want to engage with the business in different ways than in the past? Did you invite customers in the conversation for constructive feedback? How do you optimize customer experience and improve customer satisfaction? One of the major drivers of change continues to be the impact of technology. Digital technology now allows for both more focused communication and consequent customization than ever before. Senior leaders should take the outside-in customer lenses to oversee customer-centric strategies, and understand the needs of customers. So organizations are getting closer to customers’ needs, also looking beyond today’s solution to improve people centricity in the long term.

BoDs needs to be able to gain the world-class insight which is based on the update global view and interdisciplinary knowledge fluency: The global business world we live in is in the digital paradigm shift, the change from a “multinational” organization that adapts the operations of each country or regional unit for local needs to a “global” firm with holistic, agile, and horizontally integrated information technologies and processes. Global BoDs present global leadership qualities such as tolerance of ambiguity, multi-dialect communication fluency, cultural empathy, learning agility, complex problem-solving skills, etc. In fact, the global leadership is shifting toward grooming interdisciplinary expertise embodying effective communication in networks of global conversations that inspire innovation in diverse domains of expertise.

Insightful BoDs can frame and solve problems by gaining global perspectives with the technological, anthropological, sociological, psychological, or philosophical effects of globalization. Corporate board directors should develop global cognizance and navigation competency by framing a holistic mindset to see the ever changing world via the interdisciplinary lenses, scanning the external environment and making sure that they can see patterns and trends that are going to have an impact on the company’s ability to continue to thrive and grow in the global scope.

Innovation, personalization, globalization are a few digital trends that are worth the corporate board’s attention. Developing global insight and foresight requires holistic thinking, system understanding, and forecasting capability. The senior corporate board leaders need to be future-oriented, see further than what all others see; understand issues from expanded global lenses.The world-class board of directors with leadership traits such as self-awareness, independent thinking, critical reasoning, creativity, influence, global ethic & value, and cultural intelligence, etc, are in demand to deepen directorship influence, inspire and nurture the evolution of businesses, walk the talk when it comes to innovation as well as orchestrate global innovation in a structural way.

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