Saturday, November 28, 2015

The Five Principles to Manage Digital Workforce

10:50 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

The value of an individual is measured based on productivity, creativity, and contribution to the organization today and tomorrow.

People are the most invaluable asset in the business, however, in many organizations, talent management, and performance management are dysfunctional, silo, quantity-driven and short-term focused, lack of holistic approaches to managing performance, innovation, culture, and talent more cohesively. So what are the set of principles to follow in managing today's digital workforce effectively?

Long-term Perspectives: Workforce performance improvement must take the long-term view and may require a core DNA transplant. There is no single initiative or program or the "theme for the year" that will suffice to raise the performance of a company or business unit. The key, of course, is not to choose one path over the other, but to tailor the solutions depending on the situation and advantages you want to gain.

Future-Driven: The purpose of reviews is an improvement in the future. The past is over. Move the purpose of performance reviews away from "evaluating" the past, and to improving success in the future. The only reason to do the performance management process is to work with employees to improve their performance regardless of the current level, so they can better contribute to organizational goals. HR not only makes ‘Apple to Apple” comparison but also manages the “Apple to Apple Pie” style insightful talent analytics.

Measure thinker performance and doer performance differently but objectively: The effective talent management next practices should be more structured and focus on digging deeper into mindset level. Both "ends" and "means" must be balanced, so you can easily and consistently differentiate future high performers from the mediocre mindset in your organization. Performance assessment is a combination of many factors and shouldn't be quantified so easily. Behavior and outcome are all important elements in performance assessment. Value the thinker who can translate his/her thinking to deeds. The thinkers that do and inspire others to do is a true leader.

Encourage creativity: Create a measure that assesses the different dimensions of organizational creativity adequately while keeping it general enough to assess this in a wide range of organizations and job roles. People have to be given the opportunity to be creative, they have to become empowered. Business leaders obviously aware that a quantitative measure would not be a perfect solution, but the importance of creativity for organizations is well-known, it’s important to find an adequate way of assessing the concept in the workplace.

The convergence of performance management and talent management: Performance management supports the organization. Talent management supports culture. They work hand-in-hand. The performance management system takes a top-down synergistic approach from the definition of vision, mission, corporate objectives, policies, procedure, critical success factors, KPIs, etc. In order for people to achieve these, the organization needs to provide appropriate training to its talent (people) and build a high-performance business culture. Talent management cannot work in a silo, it has to be well aligned with the overall strategic performance management system of the organization and supporting performance management.

The value of an individual is measured based on productivity, creativity, and contribution to the organization today and tomorrow. Avoid falling into the value assessment trap and looked at each person as a valuable team member, the value is multidimensional and situational; there is a tangible value and intangible value as well. and follow the set of talent management principles in adjusting, realigning roles and responsibilities and optimizing output - making the best use of all of your valuable people.

The Weekly Insight of the “Future of CIO” 11/27/2015

11:15 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.1 million page views with 2300+ 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. Here is the weekly insight of the “Future of CIO” blog - The collection of the blog “Sum Up” to celebrate the holiday season.

The Weekly Insight of the “Future of CIO” Blog 11/27/2015

The Monthly Digital Leadership Brief Nov. 2015: The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached about 1.2 million page views with about #2350 blog posting. Among 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. Digital LEADERSHIP is the hidden GEM, Here is a set of featured digital leadership profiles:

Happy Thanksgiving with “MINDFULNESS” It’s another Thanksgiving Day approaching, it’s not just the time for shopping or relaxing, but also the time to recharging and doing some introspection. It is not just the time to gain a few pounds but also doing more PONDERING. In the other word, happy Thanksgiving with mindfulness. Although you can’t control every event of your life journey, but via the power of digital mind-crafting, you can adapt to the change and cultivate the new sets of mind. Indeed, the mindset is far more important than talent. Talent can always be developed by those with an open and right mindset. In chapter II of Digital Master, we introduce the 15 decoded ultramodern digital mindsets, here we sum up a set of mind with holiday themes.

CIO’s Digital Agenda V: How to Manage Innovation in a Systematic Way: Generally speaking, innovation is how to transform the novel ideas into products and services to achieve its business value. Innovation has more enriched context than ever, and there are many forms of innovation - technology, application, product, design, process, business model, communication, management, culture and customer experience - just to name a few. Each has its own unique pathways. CIOs as business leaders: How can you manage Innovations in a systematic way?

CIO’s Digital Agenda IV: Managing Change Life Cycle Effectively : Change is inevitable, and organizational change becomes a common practice within an organization, but more than two-thirds of change effort fail to achieve the expected results. What’re the barriers to cause the change failures, and how to make Change Management tangible rather than fluffy, and manage change lifecycle effectively?

Tuning a “Digital Master” in this Holiday Season: Digital Master is only a click away now, it is not a holiday entertaining book, but if you would like to do some holiday mind crafting, strengthen strategic muscles to keep digital fit; go beyond the surface to capture multi-dimensional insight and digital foresight, then, you shall get this book, for holiday brainstorming.

Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating 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.

The First Step in Agile Transformation

11:11 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

Agile is more a "direction," than an "end." Transforming to Agile means the business knows the direction they want to go on.

Lots have been said about transition and transformation to agile. Most organizations are already using agile of some form or shape. However, the business level agile transformation is a continuous journey. Like chicken and egg story. Do you first start with cultural transformation or start with agile adoption? Agile transformation is an important step in digital transformation, from doing Agile to being agile, how to manage it in a more effective way?

Agile adoption should start by cultural transformation as the first step. Because as we know the organization is nothing but people. So if the people’s mindset doesn't change we can’t transform an organization into agile. A shift from Waterfall to a more Agile approach impacts on every aspect of the cultural web - power structures, organizational structures, and control systems are all changed. The "old' stories no longer apply, and there are new symbols, rituals, and routines. It's not surprising that people find the shift of their entire culture disturbing. If you want to bring about change, then considering the key elements of the "cultural web" as they currently stand, where you want them to get to, and what the challenges will be can help with this. So, first all employees should be given a proper team culture training sessions and in parallel, you need to train them in leadership qualities and in agile so that the employees will be fully aware of what is transformation and also they show enthusiasm and finally contribute in this transformation process.

It depends on how and by whom agile is introduced. If Agile has got an executive mandate, it is comparatively easy to convince from bottom to top. Agile implementers also have the bulldozer in the executive chain. But even in this case, agilest need to take care that bulldozer does not corrupt agile. If agile is getting started from the bottom without any executive support, you would expect resistance at every level. it would be important to answer to the people at any level of the organization on why are you transforming from Waterfall to Agile. This is a fundamental question and everyone has a right to know the answer. As an agile proponent, you need to show that everyone gets benefited from agile adoption at the individual level in addition to corporate/divisional benefits.

People are best motivated by how a change will affect & benefit them. Identifying what these will mean for each individual may help to identify and resolve points of resistance. If creating an environment for Agile to flourish, there's increased control given to those doing the work, more autonomy. It's the team's decision on many things, not just the manager's responsibility. Increased sense of purpose of what they are working on, due to the closer involvement with the business, often via the involvement of the product owner. Install the new methods from the ground up. In that way, people will be motivated because they will have control over their own work. You can't create self-organizing teams by "implementing agile" as a management program. Any change initiative faces difficulties. One way to get people on board is to probe into what they really believe in and what their assumptions are. Challenging these assumptions and beliefs and making them aware, would be an important step towards onboarding them.

Agile is about rapid feedback and focus on business value work. To business people, better ROI, and more sustainable business model. To developers and other doors, higher efficiency/ productivity with less stress. Rapid feedback to validate if we are going on the right way and will reach our goal. Focus on business value work is about doing nothing that does not aggregate value direct to the business. In this context, you could motivate people to adopt an agile approach via persuading:
-Clients will receive a piece of the functional product earlier and their business will begin to benefit soon.
-Bugs and requirements gaps are discovered earlier. So we can adapt project plan and scope to increase project's success probability.
-As clients begin to use the product, requirements and their priority may change. So we can adapt project plan and scope to increase project's success probability.
-Agile states that we should reduce useless documentation, so we can focus on what is really important for business.

Agile is more a "direction," than an "end." Transforming to Agile means the business knows the direction they want to go on, and as the people start “putting on” the agile mindset, discover new ways of working, collaborating, delivering value, they inspect and adapt in that journey by overcoming the frictions and challenges. You have to keep things rolling, to make agile not just a methodology to manage projects, but a principle instilled into a healthy culture to run the business more effectively.

A Cohesive Culture

10:30 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

A cohesive culture becomes the way we discover ourselves, do business to delight customers. It is our brand promise.

Culture is the collective mindset, attitude, and behavior. Culture is part passion, part commitment, and part faith. It's the passion and excitement about what we're doing and how we're doing it. It's the synergy of the team, the managers and business leaders. Therefore, a cohesive culture creates team synergy, catalyzes digital transformation and improves overall organizational maturity.

Leadership cohesiveness: True transformational leadership goes beyond the skills of individual leaders or managers to become an institutional capability exhibited in how the senior team demonstrates its commitment to transformation and embeds the transformation capability throughout the organization. Culture is 'established' by those at the top. It is either cultivated by the rest of the company or senior management is at odds with the rest of the company. If the senior managers are actually senior leaders, they are accountable for ensuring that all of the company cultivates a positive and growing culture. It is all about the direction the senior management is looking for and who they feel accountable to. Be humble. Celebrate with the team in their successes, don't take ownership of the success. Be there. Listen and engage employees on both a personal and professional level.

Employee Discovery: A cohesive culture helps people discover who they are, and inspires people to become who they would like to be. Genuinely care about their well-being and their future. The definition of culture is 'The Mindsets, Attitudes, Feelings, Values, and Behaviors that characterize and inform a group and its members' - but ultimately it is WHO you are and not What you do or HOW you do it. By encouraging people to focus on who they are, and pursue the purpose， discovery, autonomy, and mastery, the great culture catalyzes positive mind, attitude, and behaviors; but discourage the negativity and unprofessionalism. At the conversations about culture, we need to remember that it is the policies, procedures, rewards, and retributions that drive and groom advanced minds and good behavior and it is the employee behavior that expresses "culture." Successful culture change helps people become who they are. Culture is the way how we think and do things around here: but HOW you do what you do is a result of your culture - WHO you are. Employees’ discovery and mastery are a journey to developing others at all levels to become leaders and teach them to develop others.

Customer Delight: Digital is the age of customers. Hence, you have to put the customer at the heart of everything that you do as a business - great customer experience management is a differentiator for companies. It also has to be driven by a culture within the company starting at the Board level. You need to believe that, the customer is the lifeline of the business. The good customer experience management is the norm, but exceptional customer service and experience offer the 'WOW' concept as the necessary success factor to ensure you stay ahead of the game, particularly with your peers in the business. Once you have this basic premise right, everything flows naturally and exceptional customer service and WOW moments will be the automatic result. If we promise our customers we will listen and take action, then internally we must act this way as well, and so on. It means doing innovation with the business flexibility to continually exceed customer expectations; bearing in mind that the cycle of exceeded exceptions and feeling of it has shortened. It is now mandatory to do innovation with speed. Not only when they walk into your store, interact with your product and speak to your staff, but also when they get in contact via multiple sales channels. The entire customer journey and experience they have of your brand at each stage needs to be mapped out clearly to be sure that your customer is getting the best service, and that their experience is consistent, on-brand, relevant and refreshing.

A cohesive culture is a foundation to implement strategy effectively. The commitment is that we are all in this together and have our passions focused on a goal with a cohesive leadership to build a cohesive culture. We all succeed together or fail together. It's committing to each other to help, teach and share. Culture becomes the way we discover ourselves, do business to delight customers. It is our brand promise.

Happy Thanksgiving with “MINDFULNESS”

11:35 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

Be grateful to understand others and be understood.

It’s another Thanksgiving Day approaching, it’s not just the time for shopping or relaxing, but also the time to recharging and doing some introspection. It is not just the time to gain a few pounds but also doing more PONDERING. In the other word, happy Thanksgiving with mindfulness. Although you can’t control every event of your life journey, but via the power of digital mind-crafting, you can adapt to the change and cultivate the new sets of mind. Indeed, the mindset is far more important than talent. Talent can always be developed by those with an open and right mindset. In chapter II of Digital Master, we introduce the 15 decoded ultramodern digital mindsets, here we sum up a set of mind with holiday themes:

A Gratitude Mind -Be grateful to understand others and be understood. It is another Thanksgiving day approaching, regardless of which situation you are in, there’re still plenty of things to thank for, the sunshine, the moonlight, the season of changes and the abundance of information, etc. From a leadership perspective, what’s the breadth and depth of a gratitude mind? And how does it make the positive influence upon your surroundings?

Kindness is a Mindset: Kindness often starts as a thoughtful mind and deliberate action, but enough of it, and it becomes a habit. The true value of kindness is its consistency, to convey a person’s high quality as a human, the high professionalism as an employee; and the true nature as a creature. You don’t need to be a religious person to show kindness, just like you don’t have to go to college to gain knowledge. Kindness is a state of mind. Kindness can have different styles, it could be as hot as flame, or as cool as ice water; It’s something that you commit to before it becomes second nature which overcomes the negative psychology and drive human world progress.

Happiness is a state of mind where one hunts for pastures even in a desert. Many perhaps think happiness comes from the heart: the joyful moment to cheer you up or the enchanting time to touch your soul. Happiness, according to psychologists, is a state of one's mind. You would make the time worth if you were to ask an intelligent question why feel happy at certain instances or moments and why not at other times? It is a necessity to know about oneself, about one's own individual personality, so as to think with clarity in life. It’s the moment when one looks at the flowers of roses with ignoring the thorns underneath it. And it's the journey to pursue happiness, not just a destination.

A Balanced Mind: We have come on this lovely beautiful planet, Being a human being is great. We can imagine, we can create and we can appreciate many things. We have so many faculties. It is a rainbow, full of colors and fragrances. However, the world is far away from perfect, and most of the problems are caused by miscommunication, poor decision making, or dig deeper, the unbalanced mindsets lack of Emotional Intelligence. So what’s Emotional Intelligence, and how to cultivate a balanced mind with emotional brilliance?

A Changeable Mind: We live in the era, more often the "mainstream" mind is far lagging behind the internet speed. It must be acknowledged that changing mindset can be a very long process, it takes both vision and strategy. It occurs only through a dialogical process. It requires a devotion to fairness, correctness, truth, progress and solid respect for fundamental rights. Change happens when mindset turns into mind flow.

Thanksgiving is a symbol of harvest, the spirit of giving, the celebration of hard work and the abundance of life. - so happy Thanksgiving with mindfulness.

Best of all it is to preserve everything in a pure, still heart, and let there be for every pulse a thanksgiving and for every breath a song. –Konrad von Gesner

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Three “W”s in Running a Digital IT

11:33 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

IT Value is based on transforming data into intelligence and brings insight and wisdom into the workplace.

IT plays a pivotal role in digital transformation of the organization, because IT is the only entity in the organization supposed to understand business entirely and oversight organizational processes horizontally, IT needs to be able to provide innovative solutions or supply differentiated services that contribute to both top line growth and the bottom line success of the organization. IT needs to become business’s innovation engine, rather than just tools. IT is the “whole brain” of an organization to bring wisdom into the workplace. Besides triple “I”s - Information, Innovation, and Integration, triple “A”s - Automation, Analysis, and Agility, triple “C”s - Change, Collaboration, and Cloudification, triple “P”s - Principle, Process, and Performance, triple “E”s Enablement, Exploration, and Effectiveness & Efficiency, triple “V”s - Vision, Value, and Variety, triple “F”s - Fast, Flow, and Flexibility; triple "T" factors - Transformation, Transparency, and Talent Management; triple “S” factors: Strategy, Speed, and Simplicity; triple “D” factors - Data, DevOp, and Design; triple “Q”s - Quality, Quantity, and Questioning; triple “G”s - Gap minding, Governance, and Gauging Performance, here we introduce three “W” factors in running a high-intelligent digital IT.

Workforce Analytics: IT management is about having the right people to get the right information at the right time to make the right decision, and creating a work environment that helps your company meet its business goals. If people are a company’s most invaluable asset, companies cannot afford to ignore the analytics of their current or future workforce. Workforce analytics are finally starting to get some attention and should be a huge growth field in the coming years. Established workforce analytics takes time and patience while getting the collection of correct data, cleaning the data, and setting up automated feeds from the data source systems. However, the time and energy are worth the effort if it can achieve the expected result. Workforce information can be used to determine talent movements, benefits preferences, reward program acceptance, and cost - just to name a few of the benefits.There isn't any general rule on how to drive workforce performance, a process could be put in place to understand what flaws are in place, impeding a good performance and its improvement. IT needs to work closely with HR to manage people in more intellectual ways.

Water-scrum-fall Hybrid Methodology: Agile emerges as a major methodology with a set of principles to run IT projects in many IT organizations, but often, especially for large projects, the hybrid model to mix Waterfall’s structure and Agile’s iteration is practical and flexible. And“Water-Scrum-fall is a hybrid approach to application lifecycle management that combines Waterfall and Scrum development methodologies.A flexible approach that embraces both traditional and Agile development principles allows development teams to use whatever practices and techniques best meet the needs of the problem being solved. Many organizations use Agile principles and Scrum communication techniques in their day-to-day product development but employ traditional Waterfall methodologies for planning, budgeting or documenting the project’s progress. “ -whatis.com

Wisdom Management: Wisdom in workplace means to empower people with the right tools and information at the right time, in dealing with the varying situations wisely. Modern Information Management not only manage data and information but also abstract insight and wisdom via advanced analytics, it’s the full life cycle of data-information-insight-wisdom management. Wisdom in the workplace is possessing the knowledge of your workplace inside out and having the ability to pass on that knowledge to others. Knowledge life cycle is managed very effectively in such workplace; it means that raw data has been transformed into information smoothly; information has meaningful connections as facts or ideas to provide business insight, information is further refined into knowledge; knowledge is information having value in a context which flow freely in a highly intellectual organization. Employees will grow and advance in such organizations also having the patience to observe, knowing how to allow your wisdom and experience to lead your words and actions. Wisdom in the workplace is about cultivating intelligent and empathic leadership and management team, driving fully engaging employees and building a high-performing team.

Business paradigm is shifting from industrial era to information/digital era, IT value needs to reflect such shift. IT Value is based on transforming data into intelligence and brings insight and wisdom into the workplace. The solutions IT delivers to the enterprise is transforming data and information into knowledge and intelligence. The ability to incubate, grow, protect and leverage intellectual capital is the greatest value that any IT organization can provide its enterprise.

Tuning a “Digital Master” in this Holiday Season

11:26 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

Go Digital, like a Pro!

Digital Master is only a click away now, it is not a holiday entertaining book, but if you would like to do some holiday mind crafting, strengthen strategic muscles to keep digital fit; go beyond the surface to capture multi-dimensional insight and digital foresight, then, you shall get this book, for holiday brainstorming. It is:

A Guide Book to Debunk Enterprise Digital Maturity;
A Bridge Book to Mind Industrial era and Digital Era;
A Playbook to Shape Game-changing Digital Mindsets
A Framework to Orchestrate Dynamic Digital Capabilities.
An Ongoing Book to write the new chapter of Digital Innovation.

The “Digital Master” Navigation

Digital Master Introduction - Digital Master refers to those high-performing, high innovative and high-mature (less than 15%) digital organizations; they have both clear digital vision and well-crafted digital strategy; they are courageous to be in the vanguard of digital transformation with a quantum lead. But they also proactively develop more advanced and unique digital capabilities step-by-step and build a digital premium into their very foundation of business, such as digital thinking, culture, agility, intelligence, and structure, and they achieve high performing results through strong digital governance discipline and reach its zenith as the digital world continues to expand and diversify. At the individual level, Digital Masters are those cross-generational digital professionals who are equipped with the advanced digital minds and build a unique set of digital capabilities, climb to the top of Maslow’s Pyramid 2.0.

Digital Master Chapter I: The Future of Digital Organization: Digital transformation is a journey, from digital strategy crafting to organizational structure tuning, it has to permeate into business strategy and vision, mindset, and action, culture and communication, process and capability, etc. As we addressed in Digital Master, only less than 5% of organizations reach the highest level of digital maturity. From Organization Design (OD) perspective, what’re the characteristics of a digital organization, and how to improve its digital agility and overall maturity?

Digital Master Chapter II Introduction: Decode 15 Digital Mindsets: We have moved into the new digital age when information is abundant and where creativity becomes a baseline competence. The race of human against the machine is ongoing; the knowledge life cycle is significantly shortened, just as the “agricultural mind” lagged behind the industrial age earlier last century; and now, the industrial mind can also drag down the digital speed. The pace of information technology is so rapid that no one can rest on a static mind-set, past accomplishments, or the wishful thought that everything is perfect the way it is. Indeed, mind-set is far more important than talent. Talent can always be developed by those with an open and right mind-set.

Digital Master Chapter III Introduction: Digital Strategy A digital strategy is cross-functional effort and multidisciplinary, multidimensional planning; it brings up new functions, roles, and responsibilities, collaboration, demand for intuition and emergence, complementarities, philosophy, neutron sciences, and trans-disciplinary businesses. But these are not new per se. The frameworks of thoughts, consciousness and maturity assessments apply to strategy, then, now and in the future.

Digital Master Chapter IV Introduction: Digital Culture -Culture is the collective mind-set: attitude, behavior or approach to work adopted by or embedded among a group of people in the conduct of business. Every organization has a culture, whether defined or not. Actual culture is a function of leadership, starting at the top. Culture is like the “glue” that holds and binds an organization together. It is the most invisible, but powerful, fabric weaved in the organizations and surrounding the society as well.

Digital Master Chapter V Introduction: Digital Capability-A business capability is the set of abilities needed by an organization in order to deliver value. It’s the ability of an organization to do things effectively to achieve desired outcomes and measurable benefits and fulfill business demand. In today’s business dynamic, digital capabilities are a fundamental building block in digital transformations with which companies can transform customer experiences, operational processes, and business models, to reach high-level business agility and maturity. The often described business capabilities include such as robustness, speed, comprehensiveness, responsiveness, agility, improvement, sensitivity, optimization, resilience, etc. Read this chapter to figure out the characteristics of digital capabilities

Digital Master Chapter VI Introduction: Digital Innovation. Generally speaking, innovation is how to transform the novel ideas into products and services to achieve its business value. Innovation has more enriched context than ever, and there are many forms of innovation - technology, application, product, design, process, business model, communication, management, culture and customer experience - just to name a few. Each has its own unique pathways.

Digital Master Chapter VII Introduction: Digital Intelligence: A digital shift is a mind-set shift, which also comes with information shift, a shift that organizations will take advantage of information to gain knowledge and insight, a shift to drive culture and transformation toward a more intelligent enterprise, a shift from playing smart tools to being an intelligent business, it’s about building such cohesive, agile and intellectual capabilities to adapt to the continuous change and unpredictable disruptions.

Digital Master Chapter VIII Introduction: Digital Workforce: The future of work will remain “imperfect”; more stress, faster deadlines, reduced budget, etc. However, digital workplace is more flexible and productive, propelled by technology to affect where we work, how we work and at what time we choose to work. Our reach becomes global, distance disappears and connectivity increases, the future of work is indeed more fun, purposeful and intelligent.

Digital Master Chapter IX: Digital Maturity: Digital makes a profound impact from specific function to business as a whole, the purpose of such radical digitalization is to make a significant difference in the overall levels of customer delight and achieve high performing business result. High mature digital organizations have the high level digital capability not only to build digital innovations but also to drive enterprise-wide transformation. They have to stretch out in every business dimension for driving the full-fledged digital transformation, and they benefit from their actions. These high performing digital masters achieve significantly higher financial performance than their less digitally mature competitors and read this chapter to discover their key success factors.