Future of CIO

Tuesday, March 28, 2017

The Monthly Digital Principles, Practices, and Performance Tuning Mar. 2017

11:29 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

Digital principles define why one make a decision one way or another.

Principles are statements of values. Things that define why one make a decision one way or another. These core decision values guide the attitude and behavior of individuals within an organization. Digital does flatten the organizational hierarchy and blur the functional, organizational, and geographical borders in the business ecosystem, it could mean less restrict rules or bureaucracy, but it also means the guiding principles become more crucial to be defined as core decision values and behavior guidelines. The business principle is less about controls, but more about the clarity of "why we make decisions the way we do,” and what’re the expectations of employees' work performance?

Three Core Principles in Accelerating Digital Innovation? Innovation is the specific phenomenon of the knowledge-based economy. It is about having new knowledge and new processes. It is also about too much knowledge in terms of too many good creative ideas and too little available resources. Innovation is about prioritization as well - via a systematic discipline that can "smell" the right idea at the right time and place, make it tangible, and achieve its business values.

Setting the Right Principles for Change Management: 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 the change life cycle effectively?

Five Principles to Run a Digital IT ? Digital does flatten the organizational hierarchy and blur the functional, organizational, and geographical borders in the business ecosystem. It could mean less restrict rules or bureaucracy, but it also means the guiding principles become more crucial to be defined as core decision values and behavior guidelines. From IT management perspectives, guiding principles let the organization know what to expect when dealing with IT, and serve as a yardstick by which to measure IT internally and externally, and it can spur some great discussions with fellow C-suite members and business unit management.

Three Principles to Encourage Professional Digital Competition ? Competition is part of nature and human society. In nature, competition is for evolution, in business, competition is for surviving and thriving. Competition is part of the natural dynamics of life. It is part of the genetic bias of every living thing in nature as a survival-seeking mindset. There are ample examples of competitive behaviors in the animal world. In the primitive tropical forest, the competition is bloody and cruel for surviving only. In the silo industrial age, the competition is about commanding & controlling to get the certain order from chaos and keep the status quo; and now we are stepping into a far more advanced digital era steadily, the goal of the healthy competition in the human society is to encourage innovation and accelerate the speed of progression. How to set principles to encourage professional competitions and inspire innovation??

Three Principles for Communication Effectiveness Communication is always important, although it is the means to the end, not the end itself. The end is for problem solving and idea brainstorming. A great communicator doesn’t need to be “the everyone’s cup of tea,” but in order to communicate effectively and avoid the miscommunication symptoms such as “lost in translation,” you have to follow the right set of principles and deliver the messages persuasively and creatively.?

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.8 million page views with about #3600th blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking 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 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.

The New Book “Digital Gaps” Chapter 5 Introduction: Digital Professional Gaps

11:23 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

Being a digital professional inherently and inextricably links with high levels of professionalism.

Generally speaking, a professional is an individual with the expertise of some specific area, who earns his/her livings from that expertise. Being professional also means that the individual not only has the skill but also presents the high-quality professionalism such as positive mentality, fair judgment, and good behaviors. So, how to identify digital professional gaps, and improve the workforce quality, creativity, collaboration, productivity, and engagement?

Communication gaps: Communication is the key to improving business effectiveness, modern management efficiency, and workforce harmonization. Communication gaps are often caused by cognitive difference, ambiguous process, or management bottleneck. Miscommunication is also caused by perception gaps because people have the different knowledge base and cognitive understanding to articulate things. Even two people observe the exactly same thing or participate the same conversation, they could perceive the situation and convey the message differently. Communication gaps decrease productivity, stifle innovation, cause mistrust, and decelerate the business speed. “The lost in translation” could happen at any level of the organization; for example, if people at the bottom and middle level don’t get the opportunity to understand the business's strategic goals via effective communication, they would be easy to get lost and inundated with daily tasks which perhaps do not add enough value to benefit both the business and the employees’ well-beings, they feel exhausted, bored, and lack of achievement. It perhaps needs to first categorize what kind of communication bottlenecks existing and which communication gaps should be closed. There are hard communication barriers such as, out of date processes, procedures, practices, or soft ones such as culture, politics, or leadership style, etc. Communication effectiveness can be improved when the hard barriers are broken down and soft obstacles are overcome.

Accountability gaps: Digital organizations advocate autonomy, mastering, and innovation. Lack of accountability is often one of the biggest obstacles to getting things done, or cause change inertia in the organization. Because people don’t feel “safe,” or run away from accountability because they had a personal experience or they have observed others being treated poorly or unfairly when being held accountable for results. It is not uncommon to confuse accountability with blame. They are actually opposites. Shared accountability or collective accountability involves shared ownership, empathetic communication, the true measure of accountability is determined not by whether someone or a team makes a mistake or not, but on how quickly they can recover so that customers, teammates, and others aren’t negatively affected by the breakdown. Accountability can be harnessed via motivating your employees to achieve higher than expected result and build the culture of learning, trust, and professionalism. It is also important to design a high-effective performance management system that enforces accountability. If you ensure the individuals have the autonomy within their tasks or projects, you will be able to address performance on an equal partnership basis.

Professional maturity gap: Maturity is about being fully developed and fully grown, it is just the opposite of being immature. Professional maturity means that you are fully developed in some way to fulfilling a role or function. Often, people are the weakest link in running high-performance businesses. Maturity is the combination of capability and potentiality. It is the ability of an individual to gauge or measure the capability or potentiality of a candidate for responding to a particular query-action-behavior-delivery of any thought processes, based on the level of response received at to the receiver’s end. Maturity is also a phrase we are using today to describe a decent level of emotional intelligence at work, lack of emotional intelligence will make a person look immature. Maturity refers to having a sound understanding of basics and making a fair judgment. Maturity is the balance between courage and consideration. Lack of understanding and adaptation can enlarge maturity gap. Maturity is simply having the ability to live comfortably with contradictory thoughts, and expressing things sometimes courageously by taking care of the feelings of the other people as well. It is related to handling a situation wisely, taking responsibility, being accountable for both what you say and what do. So, professional maturity is about ripeness, thoughtfulness, quality, balance, and wisdom.

A professional is an individual who strives to represent skills and delivers quality. A digital professional presents high mature professionalism which means - the mastery of digital capabilities, the sound judgment via independent thinking and multidimensional thought processes, the positive attitude, the humility to the things they don’t know, and the good behaviors to act cohesively.

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"Digital Gaps" Introduction

"Digital Gaps" Chapter 1 Cognitive Gaps

"Digital Gaps" Chapter 2 Leadership Gaps

"Digital Gaps" Chapter 3 Management Gaps

"Digital Gaps" Chapter 4 Capability Gaps

"Digital Gaps" Chapter 5 Professional Gaps

Digital Transformation: From Deficiency & Inefficiency to Proficiency and profundity

11:18 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

Business will be more successful when they realize that one of their greatest strengths will be their multifaceted digital proficiency to scale up and shift from “doing digital” to “being digital."

We are at the dawn of digital age with the exponential growth of information, continuous disruptions, tremendous changes, hyperconnectivity, and interdependence. When led effectively, organizations can take the path to the next level of business effectiveness, innovation, and maturity; when led without a clear vision or thoughtful planning, it means information overloading, further confusion, and business ineffectiveness. It does raise the bar for digital leadership as well. As transformative digital leaders, can you participate proactively, look optimistically and engage constructively toward needs to be able to recognize areas of deficiencies and inefficiencies, then ask the open questions such as “What if?” and 'How about...?' And lead your organization to reach the level of proficiency and profundity?

Knowledge proficiency: It is the paradigm shift from information scarcity in the industrial age to knowledge abundance in the digital era. At today’s digital dynamic, information is abundant and even explosive. To quote Peter Drucker, knowledge is the most valuable commodity. It couldn’t be truer in the digital era. On one hand, the fresh knowledge can be captured from the abundance of information; on the other hand, it doesn’t take long for that knowledge to become a commodity once the market is exposed to it. Besides people, information is one of the most valuable assets in the organization today. Thus, the idea of applying the asset management principles to arrange your own corporate knowledge strategy is worth exploring. Although knowledge is more intangible, complex and dynamic compare to the physical asset, the organizations should be able to put some measurable value on the information and knowledge assets because it is "vital" to the business. Hence, information management and knowledge management should be managed holistically as the corporate asset; if done properly; it can turn the most valuable personally-owned information and knowledge assets into corporately owned assets. To reach the state of knowledge proficiency, it is also important to identify and close the gap between knowledge and insight, and help digital leaders and professionals to be not overwhelmed by the exponential growth of information and abundant knowledge, and capture the valuable business insight to make sound judgments and effective decisions. Organizations are complex adaptive living systems, which are comprised, in part, of people (subsystems) who are also complex adaptive living systems, all such systems function, grow and prosper by continually, via learning, innovating, adapting, and evolving.

Capability proficiency: If traditional organizations are often operated inside-out based on inefficient processes or deficient resources, and then digital businesses should focus on building capability and proficiency via outside-in customer lens, in order to make a digital leap effortlessly. An organization needs to ask whether they need the capability at the base level to keep the lights on, or at the competitive level to stay competitive in the business and at a differentiating level to be the key differentiator for its business. Because the digital business environment is nonlinear, dynamic, and volatile, some leading organizations have multiple core competencies defined as those that provide a real competitive advantage and are not easy to replicate. A core business competency is a seamless integration of multiple capabilities with a focus, in order to implement strategic goals smoothly. A cohesive set of business capabilities can further build into the business competency. And a core business competency is a deep organizational proficiency that enables a company to deliver unique value to customers, engage employees, out beat competitors, and achieve high-performance business results with speed.

Leadership proficiency: To lead organizations towards the uncharted water and blurred territories, today’s digital leaders must develop a broad set of skills, capabilities, and build a comprehensive leadership portfolio with differentiated leadership competency and hardcore leadership proficiency. Generally speaking, due to the speed of changes, especially at technology arena, a digital leader today needs to be a dynamic person with open, growth and complexity mindset, the high capability to handle personal attributes, manage impressions, have profound understanding of the digital ecosystem, communications to suit situations so as to make things happen. And they should also be good at motivating, engaging and building trust and the culture of learning and innovation in the entire organization. The top digital leaders should have the proficient understanding of their particular organization's current and potential corporate structure, senior management style, strategic plan, to practice the expert power, with the ability to master the variety of business dialects, move from one conversation to the other seamlessly, without “getting lost in translation.” The digital leaders need to understand their environment profoundly and playing field to develop a plan to harness the opportunities identified. To put simply, the digital leadership proficiency is based on their leadership authenticity (nature) and qualification (nurture).

Digital transformation is a leapfrogging business change. Business will be more successful when they realize that one of their greatest strengths will be their multifaceted digital proficiency to scale up and shift from “doing digital” to “being digital.” In fact, it is the time to better understand digital evolution and harness its power to serve human purposes and design the institutions and societies to be a well-balanced digital ecosystem with the abundance of energy and sustainable advantages via proficient skills and profound insight.

The New Book “Digital Gaps” Chapter IV Introduction: Digital Capability Gaps

11:23 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

It is crucial to identify and close enterprise capability gaps for achieving the business coherence and improving organizational maturity.

The capability is the ability to do something and achieve certain outcomes in a consistent way. The corporate capability is the collective ability to implement strategy, innovation and make changes. The organization’s capabilities can be categorized into both competitive necessity and competitive uniqueness. Statistically, the capability-based strategy has much higher success rate than the other style of strategy crafting. Capability gap is the lack of a capability to build business competency or managing changes. Hence, it is critical to identify and close business capability gaps and build organizational competencies for achieving strategic business goals.

Bridging effectiveness gaps: Doing the wrong things differently isn’t transformation. There are a number of challenges common in transformation programs, such as getting the right strategies, execution, great leadership to drive changes, and a broader view of consumer demand, etc. Either change or more radical business transformation are to solve the problem small or large. Effectiveness is about doing the right things. Doing the wrong things differently isn’t transformation. That is the importance of good transformation practice within a motivated change culture oriented to the right work for the right reasons. A solution is nothing if the problem is not perceived accurately. Therefore, creating the awareness of the problem is the first step to making a solution being understood and accepted. Digital transformation starts with the realization of the gaps where you currently no longer can deliver the business objective and vision of success for your company and shareholders. Determining what the future needs to look like, and what the transformation must look like is the next step. There are many pitfalls on the way for digital transformation, hence, it’s important to bridge the effectiveness gap. First things first, frame the right questions before answering them, ensure doing the right things before doing things right.

Bridging the gaps between capability and process: view Capability and process are two viewpoints of an organization. An organization has the capability to deliver outcomes, an organization executes processes to deliver an output of the organization, leverage people, process, and technology to achieve business goals. Capability view is for the strategic re-think of “What,” and the process view is about the executable know “How.” A process view will cause stakeholders to limit their thinking to process deficiencies, and not consider the other resources inherent in exercising the process; by leveraging capability view, they readily consider service, people, process, information, asset, etc, dimensions of the adequacy of the capability to fulfill their business strategy. Capability provides a level of abstraction that allows more open consideration. Capabilities are WHAT abilities/competencies an organization has/needs. Process are HOW an organization does something. Both capability and process view are useful in managing business transformation, which to use depends on the purpose you have in mind. A process view gets into technical details, and capability view of the enterprise helps businesses identify “actuality, capability, and potentiality,” build competency and improve the overall business maturity.

Closing the learning capability gap: Learning becomes the knowledge builder and we can define learning through the information it absorbs and the capability it builds. Learning is a process and everyone has an enormous capacity to learn. Limitations on learning are barriers invented by humans to create gaps which stifle changes and innovation. In the digital era, the knowledge life cycle is significantly shortened, digital workforce today has to learn and relearn all the time, and then apply those lessons to succeed in new situations, and a collective learning capability is a strategic imperative the company’s long-term success. Learning becomes knowledge builder and we can define learning through the information it absorbs and capability it builds. It is important to cultivate the learning culture that has awareness and understanding the importance of learning in order to bridge the learning capability gaps and build a high-innovative and high-mature digital organization. From a management perspective, to bridge the learning capability gap, it is also imperative to improve knowledge management which involves the use of technologies and processes with the aim of optimizing the value that is generated and with the goal to improve the organization’s collective learning capabilities and ultimate business competency.

It is crucial to identify and close enterprise capability gap for achieving the business coherence and improving organizational maturity. A cohesive set of business capabilities builds into the business competency. And a core business competency is a deep proficiency that enables a company to deliver unique value to customers, engage employees, out beat competitors, and achieve high-performance business results.

CIOs as “Chief Innovation Officer”: Setting Principles to Manage an Innovation Capability Portfolio

11:20 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

Innovation should start from a deep research of people’s concerns, needs, and frustrations.

Generally speaking, innovation is to transform novel ideas and achieve their business values. It is not a serendipity, but a discipline and a systematic approach with a set of practices to achieve business goals. Innovation helps to tackle the complexities of business dynamic in the digital ecosystem. Nowadays, innovation is no longer “nice to have,” but “must have” differentiated capability to stand out from the competitions. Capabilities are typically expressed in general and high-level terms and typically require a combination of people, processes, and technology to achieve. So how to set well-defined digital PRINCIPLE to manage a healthy innovation capability portfolio and drive a successful digital transformation.

Do not ignore any specific types of innovation: Without innovation, organizations cannot thrive for the long term. Managing a healthy innovation portfolio should be integrated with the annual strategic planning process and financial investment model. The size and mix of the innovation project portfolio depend on the business circumstances, strategic objectives and severity of external challenges or changes. Generally speaking, all businesses should have a handful of "bets" in the breakthrough category. What's important when developing the mix is to strike the right balance of quick wins and long-term winning proposition; the radical breakthrough and the evolutionary changes. There are “hard” innovations such as product/service/business model innovations, as well as “soft” innovations such as management/culture/communication innovations. A high mature digital organization can handle innovation streams for different purposes and with different time frames. Due to the increasing pace of changes, innovation can happen anywhere across the organization and its ecosystem. If you do not innovate, your competitors will and make your current successful products obsolete. Innovation is the mechanism through which you grow and evolve something to something better (higher value-add) or something new, mostly based on a combination or modification of previous attributes/approaches. The evolution of innovation only exists in the more open environments that create insights, take advantage of all sources of creativity in a more open way and leap innovation management to the next level.

Accept risks for potential reward: The risk is part of innovation, but you can manage parts of these risks. Innovation by its inherent nature comes with a risk. The failure is of crucial importance in the process of achieving innovation. People learn far deeper and more enduring lessons from significant failures than from anything else. These lessons will increase the effectiveness of your next innovation practices and therefore probably increase your chances of meeting your objectives on your next attempt. Accept risk for potential reward for innovation management. However, from finance management perspective, set the discipline, consider what capital you are prepared to risk in making the innovation, do not let this be so much that losing it will cripple your business. Hence, the best judgment, a qualitative approach is given for managing innovation risks and improving innovation success rate.

Make innovation benefit the widest possible audience within your organization: Innovation is the means to the end, it should either benefit your customers or your employees. Innovation, as an individual process or collective process, helps us adapt, improve, grow and integrate. Lots of tools are available to help us think differently, assess problems and come to solutions in novel ways. When looking at business/organizations, the most powerful of these processes involves tapping the organization's ecosystem (people-centricity) for the collective perspectives/insights of those who make up and know intimately their parts of the system. Being innovative is our gift as humans, with a great deal of what defines us as humans actually, whether new products, services, solutions, new sounds and music, new way of reading and publishing, new ways of educating future of generation, etc It is about incorporating entrepreneurial and startup principles, with a focus on reducing risk adversity to add value to the quality of people’s lives.

Don’t sacrifice the long-term viability of the portfolio for short-term rewards: Innovation can happen everywhere -disruptive innovation, evolutionary innovation, and incremental innovation because technology is changing constantly. In dynamic environments, there must be a capacity to respond to new and emerging opportunities and to create new opportunities. Though both quick win and long-term return on investment for innovation are crucial, do not sacrifice the long-term viability of the portfolio for only short-term rewards, maintains a balance between exploration and exploitation. It is important to manage the innovation life cycle with speed. It’s about how to get all the way around the world, to capture all relevant information, to see from different angles. Disruptive innovations may be considered as drivers for emerging digital strategies with the goal to build the long-term competency of the organization.

Last but not least: being innovative is a state of mind, which is more important than doing any type of innovation: Just as we find energy is released from one steady state to another, we find innovation from our outer realities attempts to change to the steady state of our inner self. This energy is called being innovative - as a state of mind. There is an emotion life cycle in an innovation! The kind of emotions within a person that triggers an improvement/creativity process can be numerous and most likely will be a combination of emotions. Real change and creativity are deprogramming old mindsets, letting go of outdated traditions or the voices from the past, reprogramming collective minds with new values, norms, and attitudes. Innovators need to rise above the status quo and take on a new set of activities that have them involved in the strategy development process from the get-go. Being able to engage in the successful creation of innovations is a very hard work and does include a lot of thinking, observation, inquiries, unusual connections, experimenting, skills, and abilities as well as practices and theories. Innovation should start from a deep research of people’s concerns, needs, and frustrations. Innovation requires thinking beyond, as opposed to outside the box, altering or changing the frame of reference to create previously unconsidered solutions. Innovation is about thinking differently, acting differently, delivering differently, adding value differently from the status quo.

Digitalization stipulates companies work together in a hyper-connected and continuously converging environment that provides structural analysis and a certain extent of serendipity. This is about understanding the wholeness. Digital means flow, there is more flow of creative ideas, the better opportunities to reap the benefit from innovation management. Set principles, and take a holistic approach to manage a healthy innovation capability portfolio.

The New Book “DIgital Gap” Chapter 3 Introduction: Digital Management Gaps

11:10 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

The very characteristics of digitalization are hyper-connectivity, hyper-complexity, and interdependence; with the exponential growth of information and fast-paced of changes.

Most organizations at the industrial age have been operated with classic management discipline, which is based on a tacit assumption that organizations can be compared to machines as a mechanical system. They are based on silo functions and divide-and-conquer methodologies which are promoted both in organizational design as well as task responsibility or accountability distribution. Nowadays, businesses are steadily moving into the digital era with characteristics of hyper-connectivity and interdependence, how to close the gap between classic management and digital management in order to improve business effectiveness and maturity?

Bridging strategy-operation management gap: Strategic management as long-term planning requires a vision. In other words, a company needs to define which it wants to be with a clear vision and how they want to get there, and then operational management will translate the long-term plans into smaller scale plans to operationalize the move toward the vision. Generally speaking, strategy management takes a holistic view, and operational management takes an interval view. Operational management could be viewing things from a single side internally while strategic management is a holistic view of things both internally and externally as the way of coming up with actions that will improve organizational performance and conformance in order to achieve the set goals. Strategic management is concerned with establishing “where” the organization competes and “how” it chooses to compete and capture the market share; Operation Management, on the other hand, is concerned with a specific aspect of how such as the roles, process & procedure used to make decisions, and measurement, etc. They are complementary management approach to achieve digital management continuum.

Bridging IT-business gap: There are nature frictions between different functions of the organization, especially between business and IT. IT doesn’t exist to do everything it is asked, nor does it exist to implement without business justification. It is there to manage a scarce and expensive resource for the business, doing its best to see that the application of IT brings the best business results possible. However, often there is typically a significant gap between what the business wants and needs vs what IT is providing. The result is usually a lot of churns until they get it right. The bottom line is, for any company to succeed, it is essential for the entire company to be pulling in the right direction. IT is integral to the business. IT and the business need to develop a true partnership and work to pursue the desired outcome via bridging the multitude of gaps such as communication gaps, collaboration gaps, skill gaps, and performance measurement gaps, etc.

Bridging innovation management gaps: Although innovation is listed at the top of every forward-looking organization’s agenda, there are both idea gap and execution gap existing in innovation management. Innovation is not serendipity, but a systematic process to transform novel ideas and achieve their business values. It requires a much deeper whole system with emergent, generative, iterative, and integrative approach. It requires much more time, energy, passion, courage, experimentation, retreat, and reflection to get clear and focused on the innovative idea, business model, process or solution. It is also critical to pulling the resources to build an innovation nurturing a working environment which can encourage talented people to develop their creativity, with the freedom to try and even to fail. Innovation management takes cohesive steps of minding the gaps, accelerating strategy execution and make a leap of the digital organization.

The very characteristics of digitalization are hyper-connectivity, hyper-complexity, and interdependence; with the exponential growth of information and fast-paced of changes. The traditional management practices are often just not fit enough for speeding up and toning the business capability to respond to the opportunities and risks, due to the multiple gaps existing between functions and underlying processes; the management styles and the outdated “best practices,” they apply. It is imperative to close the modern management gaps, harness communication, and collaboration, and improve organizational agility, effectiveness, and maturity.

The Interdisciplinary Approach to Digital Transformation

11:03 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

The organizational digitalization is surely a transformation journey, as it has to permeate into business vision, strategy, culture, and communication, processes. etc.

Compared to changes, the transformation is more radical, digital transformation is not just about experimenting with the latest digital technologies or playing the fancy digital gadgets. You have to optimize the underlying functions, processes as well as fine-tune soft business elements and expand changes to all directions; you have to take an interdisciplinary approach and collective leadership to manage a digital transformation successfully. 

Managing digital transformation takes a multidisciplinary approach: The digital transformation is now spreading rapidly to enable organizations of all shapes and sizes to reinvent themselves. But dealing with the significant challenge of digital transformation requires accelerated digital mindsets, leveraging multidisciplinary knowledge and insight, taking an end-to-end response and a structural approach. It involves applied Science (Engineering), Art (Design), principle (Philosophy), Cognition (Psychology), Social norms (Culture) and group behavior (Sociology). Overall speaking, trans or interdisciplinary science can be applied to digital management with integrating multidisciplinary methodology, it enables digital leaders and professional to frame bigger thinking boxes, to work not just within the box, but across the multiple boxes, and approach problems via multifaceted way, technically, scientifically, philosophically, psychologically, and sociologically. The solutions will most probably cover standard aspects such as culture/behavior change, support resources for the design/build/ implementation of the change (what mix of internal/external resources /capabilities), planning and control etc. but also very specific technical/functional/system aspects.

Applying the digital ecosystem viewpoint: Digital ecosystem is just like the natural ecosystem, with the full spectrum of lights, and keep the dynamic balance of order and chaos. Classical science defined an ecosystem in terms of the multiple parts of a system while systems science defines it based on multiple interactions with the environment and the interactions among parts within the viewed system. All artistic, scientific, philosophical knowledge of mankind is inspired by nature. Just like the natural ecosystem has provided the impetus to her evolutionary agenda of human mind and consciousness. Digital businesses and their people learn through their interactions with the environment, they act, observe the consequences of their action, make inferences about those consequences, and draw implications for future action. The process is adaptively rational, it has to strike the balance of ‘keeping the order,’ and sparking the innovation. The dynamic digital ecosystem can be perceived through the lenses of sociology, psychology, the economics of education, the anthropology of cultures, economics, organizational and communication sciences, poetical science, STEAM, and so on. In similar processes, poets, artists, scientists, philosophers also tread on their path of the quest to understand the symbolic language of nature contributing to the evolutionary processes. The interdisciplinary business insight should lead us not only understanding, but also predicting; not just managing problems, but also pursuing solutions and purpose seeking, as a mode of thinking and action.

Digital transformation reflects the holism theme: Digital transformation is like to paint the picture which needs many colors; it is also like to orchestrate a symphony which takes many instruments, and it surely takes multidisciplinary knowledge and understanding for leapfrogging. Because for every need, provisions are there, for every problem, solutions are there, for every scientific development, resources are there, but to be discovered, applying human intelligence and through the process of discovering, human mind and consciousness will expand and evolve. Digital organizations and systems have the characteristics of nonlinearity, adaptability, unrepeatability, unpredictability, and denial of control. So, with such digital paradigm shift, knowledge is not less important, but more important, though knowledge alone is not sufficient, the insight is the most wanted vision to see the world in the holistic and intimate way, with artistic touches and scientific disciplines. To engage and function in such dynamic environments, it requires fundamentally different mindsets and paradigms such as accepting that influence is attainable, but control is not. It is important to understand the philosophy, psychology, and technology behind the digital transformation. The challenge is to move from the individual level to the system level. In other words, in order to enable systematic macro change, you need to apply methods and techniques deriving from social sciences, political sciences, statistics, economics, and so on, according to the principles of scientific and empiric inquiry. The need of the time is to design the institutions and societies to be a well-balanced digital ecosystem with the abundance of energy and sustainable advantages.

Organizations’ digitalization is surely a transformation journey, as it has to permeate into business vision, strategy, culture, and communication, processes. etc. Understanding that digital business development is multifaceted. You can't expect an individual to fully develop such broad-based concepts, it takes the team effort, and more importantly, team coordination. It is the transformation that is reshaping our thinking and recasting the way we view ourselves, the systems of which we are the part of the environments in which we live, and the way we think and solve problems. It is the paradigm shift which takes a multidisciplinary approach.

The New Book “Digital Gaps” Chapter 2 Introduction: Digital Leadership Gaps

11:23 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

The key to the organizational success is to integrate next generation of leaders, tap into their way of looking at the world, solving problems in a very creative and collaborative style.

Digital means hyperconnectivity, fierce competition, and “VUCA” digital normality. Successful companies need to keep growing and innovating, and developing the next generation of leadership is one of the best ways to do that. The variety of management studies shows that there are significant leadership gaps for both innovation management and management innovation, as well as the radical digital transformation. The traditional cookie-cutting matching leadership development approach more possibly lands a homogeneous follower, cannot discover an authentic leader. And traditional talent pool is too static, limited and not dynamic enough to select authentic, creative, and energetic digital leaders who can lead more effectively in today’s complex global business environment. The change needs to come from the top to amplify its influence. If you are not taking steps now to shrink that leadership gaps, you will not be prepared to lead the digital business in the future. But more specifically, how to identify and close digital leadership gaps in order to improve leadership effectiveness and maturity?

The gaps between leadership and management: A fundamental purpose of leadership is to provide vision and empower change while a fundamental goal of a manager is to oversee the tasks and execution. Great leaders inspire people to think broader for catching the holistic picture and to think deeper to understand things underneath the surface. They invite debates and challenges from employees for innovative ideas. Whereas, the managers merely administer and execute the assigned functions with an aim to achieve targeted results. Great leaders not only have great vision, but are realistic towards making it happen, and have a great manager to complement the execution process. The primary role of leadership is about creating change while the primary objective of management is creating order. Challenging beliefs, ideas, and strategies along with accepted ways of doing things are all hallmarks of leadership. Being a leader can on occasion feel isolating, however, by following your instinct, you will more often than not turn the situation around and produce a positive outcome. A great manager does need to lead “at times,” and a great leader does need to manage “at times,” however, at the very core, great managers, and great leaders are both critical to every organization and we should respect both of the roles which are often interdependent, with complementary mindsets and skill sets.

The trust gaps: The progressive business relationship and society are built on mutual trust and respect, not power and status quo. This is particularly important at the dawn of the digital age because the business and the entire world become so hyperconnected and interdependent. However, many organizations are still running in a command and control mode and live in the silo working environment lack of trust. One thing that is true, fear and anger operate on the lowest level and can do little more than creating orders in the short term but often make damages for the long-run. Trust is not straightforward, but multifaceted. When leaders realize that if you want to achieve greatness in your realm, you will have to touch the upper levels -the mind and the heart, thus eliminating fear, anger, or other negative emotions. In order to close the trust gap, continue to see the importance of dealing with blind spots by learning how to be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to anger. Leadership mindset and behavior have been found to be the most influential elements in building trust. Trust starts with oneself, the mind, and grows outward to the people and the environment, just like changes. Mutual trust is that linchpin without which leadership is hollow and ineffective.

The vision gaps: Top leadership roles are supposed to be the guiding force in the enterprise, envisioning and leading the business towards its future. Closing the vision gap is in fact to close the leadership authenticity gap. Leadership is about the future and change, innovation and progress which are all based on the clear vision and profound insight. The best vision is insight, and the most wanted vision is foresight. The vision thing is, in fact, the precious leadership trait to bridge the industrial age and the digital era, the local and global understanding. A visionary leader changes the course of the business by seeing beyond what all others see or by charting new revenue or growth through the creation of new products, services, business models or market share, etc. And C-level executives need to be the visionary, because vision is an integral part of the leadership or directorial role. The essence of leadership is to guide directions via removing the obstacles or breaking down the outdated things either hard or soft, visible or invisible, in order to lead forward. Vision doesn’t have to be exclusive or externally focused. In most cases, it must be a shared and collaborative vision.

There is no one generic set of leadership skills. Effective leadership differs by level, the type of organization, the stage of organizational evolution, the mindset of stakeholders, the complexity of the business, the national and political culture, and many other dynamics. In order to mind the gaps, the leadership principles should be abstracted and highlighted, the criteria need to be refined and clarified, and the leadership development has to be re-tuned and integrated with all other policies and procedures. The key to the organizational success is to integrate next generation of leaders, tap into their way of looking at the world, solving problems in a very creative and collaborative working style, to drive the successful digital transformation effortlessly.