Running IT as Innovation Threshold

It’s a natural evolution as most innovation initiatives involve IT.

Digital is the age of innovation. Innovation management is about transforming new ideas to achieve their business value. Innovation is what leads to differentiation. When looking at businesses or organizations, any innovation practice today is always a combination of people, process, and technology. The most powerful innovation navigation system involves tapping the organization's ecosystem for collective perspectives and knitting all critical business elements such as people, process, and technology into differentiated innovation competency in which IT is the threshold.

Information could be one of the most time intensive pieces to innovation puzzles: Information brings about business ideas and insight; business ideas generate lots of information. It is so critical to streamlining information flow across functional boundaries to nurture ideas and keep them flowing. The creative idea is often, if not always arrived through the interaction of ideas from different domains of thoughts, knowledge, and experiences, cross-field without boundaries. IT plays a significant role in adding those critical pieces which are needed for the accelerating validation of facts about business ideas, definition, benefits and shortcomings, applications, and competing technologies. The abundance of information and the range of emerging technologies can help to foster a deeper sense of connection and purpose in employees, ignite latent worker passion and bring together disparate parts of the organization to build a highly innovative business. Digital IT leaders need to develop business insight, not just through IT lenses, but through the outside-in business lens. Then, they can practice that knowledge to start innovating at the organizational level and across the business ecosystem.

IT has a great opportunity to catalyze innovation and lead the business transformation: To transform IT from a controller to a catalyst, the digital mantra for running IT organizations is to "do more with innovation." Innovative IT can only happen if IT is regarded as a strategic business partner and given the role in catalyzing innovation and driving business changes. With unprecedented velocity and complexity, IT leaders have to be really creative on how they adapt to changes and be experimental to try new things and ensure that IT is strategically positioned to be ahead of where the business is moving next and drive innovations proactively. IT leaders need to share their vision of where a company should go and how it will get there, how it might be missing out opportunities without taking actions; they should be able to recognize the struggles of the company, identify the issues associated with innovation in an enterprise and across the business ecosystem. Talented IT professionals are business ‘gurus’ with technical proficiency, they can understand the real world business problems deeply and come up with innovative business solutions proactively.

IT has to take a holistic approach to handle the investigation of innovative business solutions and create business differentiation: Most companies fail at innovation execution because they have no clear processes, nor understand the linkage required to work horizontally across departments or take a holistic approach to manage innovation. IT-driven Innovation Management nowadays is more science than art. What defines science from chance is the ability to repeat a process with the same resultant solution every time. Every organization needs to develop tailored innovation principles, methodologies, or practices by leveraging effective technologies, tools or methodologies and apply them wisely with the expertise to drive innovation and develop the organizational level innovation competency. It takes a systematic and disciplined approach to manage a balanced innovation portfolio. By empowering IT and leveraging digital platforms and technologies, businesses can be more effective in executing innovative ideas, relying less on silo functions, and more on cross-functional collaboration and innovation. Innovation processes need to be rigorous, not too rigid; an organization that has a lightweight process which allows creativity and innovation to flow, get protected, channeled and nurtured will succeed more often than an organization that does not have such a process.

It’s a natural evolution as most innovation initiatives involve IT. Digital organizations must manage information effectively, and bring to the table innovative solutions that meet customers’ needs while reducing the cost to market. IT is as an innovation threshold for integrating key business elements into differentiated competency. IT leaders should look at innovation from the perspective of developing business-wide innovation competencies, scaling up innovation practices, amplifying innovation effect, and building up the innovation framework which enables the business to manage innovation in a structural way.

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Building a Conflict-Competent Boardroom

Senior leadership is neither equal to seniority nor the big title; at the board level, it implies the high level of intellectual and emotional maturity. 

The modern digital board has many responsibilities, also gets a lot of distractions and hits many pitfalls on the digital transformation. In order to lead today’s hyper-connected digital organizations with the hyper-diverse workforces, board directors should become the digital provocateur to drive changes and set the leadership tone for digital transformation. In practice, people vary in their ideology, cognizance, perceptions, and priorities; and they react to situations in different ways. Therefore, conflict is perhaps inevitable, even at the board room. How to build a conflict-competent boardroom to ensure effective communication and high mature governance? How do high performing Boards make great decisions and deal with not only emotions, legitimate, but also politics, power, or conflict?

Strive to be conflict competent: From the boardroom to the coffee room, many command-control working environments are static and tedious, there is no energy in the room because people are afraid of being themselves and saying anything which might cause conflicts. In an open and creative work environment, there is the energy between people, meaning they are not afraid to say things that will help the business improve. Forward-thinking boards are looking for people who have cognitive differences or unique strength as part of the mix of Board skills, for bridging gaps, improving governance effectiveness and embracing trends such as digital transformation. Diversity, mainly the diversity of thought and color of viewpoint helps to build a mindful digital board. Conflicts are perhaps inevitable due to different personalities or communication styles. The diverse viewpoints should always be welcomed, even they seem to conflict. But conflicts need to be handled wisely. If there is a trustful relationship in the board, conflicts within the group can stimulate deep discussions, spark collective creativity, improve decision maturity and the board productivity cycle. Criticism shouldn’t be taken too personally. It is important for leaders to accept some constructive criticism from time to time, and be fully aware of how they are performing. The wise leaders look at constructive criticism or well-wish feedback as a way to improve their leadership maturity.

The key is to find out the root cause of the conflict: When conflicts happen, it’s important to listen and understand before acting, and constantly learn, educate, and share. The challenge for leaders is to motivate others to be real problem solvers by first understanding what is the conflict, and then, deal with it smoothly. Are conflicts caused by cognitive difference, miscommunication or excessive emotional involvement? Could it be a cultural difference, emotional responses, or the growing pain of the board transformation? Etc. How aware are you of what triggers to the conflict, and what are the specific ways to better manage them before and after the buttons to trigger the conflict are pushed? Global boards will, for the most part, go through a learning process, relationship building and understanding of what it takes to get cross-cultural agreements. Maintaining the great board dynamic can help transform the emotional board to an effective board by dealing with conflicts smoothly. and improve communication continually.

The certain level of conflict perhaps generates creative tension or stimulates brainstorming: A conflict-competent, mindful Board exhibits a creative tension between collegiality and challenge. Highly quality digital board directors not only make constructive criticism to the management but also are the fiercest critic to themselves. They are hunting for constructive criticism and smart skepticism as the hidden gems. Being innovative is a state of mind; it is about thinking differently, acting differently, delivering differently, adding value differently from the status quo. Innovation requires thinking beyond, as opposed to outside the box, altering or changing the frame of reference to create previously unconsidered solutions. To achieve the creative tension balance, the behavior of the Chair is key, both for what they do in meetings and what they do behind the scenes. From a governance perspective, the complementary mindsets and expertise at the boardroom will help to identify management blind-spots and capture collective insight.

Senior leadership is neither equal to seniority nor the big title; at the board level, it implies the high level of intellectual and emotional maturity. The right way to deal with conflict is to identify them right at the start, find the root causes, and handle them wisely. There is still a long way to achieving corporate governance maturity. But it’s worth the effort. High-mature digital boards with conflict-competent and “cool-headed” directors are driving force for progress changes and exemplary of contemporary leadership.

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The Best “Holistic Thinking” Quotes of “Digital Master” Mar. 2019

In terms of a holistic 'viewpoint,’ one does often need to integrate different stereotyped ('mechanistic') viewpoints; it is the integration and searches for new viewpoints that are holistic.

“Digital Master” is the series of guidebooks (27+ books) to perceive the multi-faceted impact digital is making to the businesses and society, help forward-thinking organizations navigate through the journey in a systematic way, and avoid “rogue digital.” It perceives the emergent trends of digital leadership, advises on how to run a digital organization to unleash its full potential and improve agility, maturity, and provide insight about Change Management. It also instructs the digital workforce on how to shape a game-changing digital mindset and build the right set of digital capabilities to compete for the future. Here is a set of “Holistic Thinking” quotes in “Digital Master.’


1 Holistic thinking is more than a combination of those three ways of thinking: analytical, systems, and critical thinking.

2 Holistic thinking" refers to a big picture mentality, and understand that the whole is often greater than the sum of the parts.

3 Holistic thinking requires a very open mind and ability to transcend conventional wisdom.

4 Holistic thinking which requires interdisciplinary knowledge and systematic approach is on demand to deal with today’s over-complex business dynamic.

5 A holistic perspective is a zoom-out the view and works well when deploying/conceiving /rethinking a system.

6 Holistic thinking is the type of thinking practice that appreciates how underlying complexity generates the features and phenomena of interest to practitioners

7 A holistic digital management approach is about leveraging nonlinear processes and interconnectivity between problems in a managerial context, to ensure that the business as a whole is superior to the sum of pieces.

8 “Being holistic” suggests a genuine sense of exploration and innovation. The holistic management focuses on the long-term and transformative business management practices.

9 In terms of a holistic 'viewpoint,’ one does often need to integrate different stereotyped ('mechanistic') viewpoints; it is the integration and searches for new viewpoints that are holistic.

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Running IT as Information Synchronizer

Running IT as information synchronizer enables business management making effective decisions and improving the organizational fluidity and maturity.

With the exponential growth of information and continuous disruptions, Information Management becomes making and breaking point of digital transformation. Information is the lifeblood of the enterprise, the abundance of information brings both significant opportunities for business growth and unprecedented risks which could fail the business even overnight. Information and its life cycle is complex. IT organization has to shift from technology oriented to I-information driven, to become an information synchronizer for optimizing the value of information while minimizing risks.

Information Synchronization: Real-time information is important for responding to changes. Information synchronization is the process of establishing consistency among data from a source to the target data storage and vice versa, as well as the continuous harmonization of information over time. Often, inconsistent or broken business processes result in significant information inconsistencies. Therefore, streamlining and standardizing information management processes is an essential prerequisite to providing effective information integration solutions and achieving information synchronization. Ensuring data quality and establishing strong information governance are critical steps in information synchronization. Data Quality doesn't mean you pursue the perfect data, but the good enough data being transformed into useful information. At the strategic level, the goal of strong information governance is about how to strike the right balance of the long-term focus with some quick wins.

Real-time information delivery: IT is responsible to manage one of the invaluable business assets - information. Information is one of the most invaluable assets besides people in modern businesses. IT is like the digital brain of the organization, retrieving and processing information, analyzing, synthesizing, memorizing and most importantly, providing the business insight about the business opportunities and possibilities. The power of information is to empower the business with real-time insight across the organization in ways never possible before. Therefore, just-in-time information management is crucial for running a real-time digital organization. In the digital era with “VUCA” characteristics, timing is always important to leverage the right information for making effective decisions by the right people. An insightful IT can provide real-time information delivery and ensure information fluidity and business holism. The real-time information can bring business insight and foresight, enable organizations to see the future clearly; enhance businesses competency, re-imagine growth, delight customers, and keep doing things innovatively, to further elevate the digital business maturity.

Digital synchronization: The power of information is to empower the business with real-time insight across the organization in ways never possible before. With these business insights, organizations acquire the ability to reshape products, services, and customer engagement, with the help of digital technologies. The insight-driven digital transformation can create the business synchronization of all functions running at the multiple levels of the organization seamlessly. IT needs to really understand the strategic goals of the business and accelerate strategy management by synchronizing information and building the 'right' bridge between IT and business. That means IT strategy is an integral part of business strategy. The “I”-  digital IT can create the business synchronization of all functions running at the multiple levels of the organization seamlessly.

The power of information helps the business become highly innovative by connecting the wider dots and experimenting with a new way to do things. Running IT as information synchronizer enables business management making effective decisions and improving the organizational fluidity and maturity. Digital synchronization occurs on multiple levels of the organization, it presupposes the ability of each 'link' to articulate their 'strategic intent,’ and presents the recognizable digital rhythm to keep the business not only spinning around but also moving forward with the right pace and drive digital transformation steadfastly.

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The Monthly Organizational Structure Tuning: Designing Digital Organization with Changeability Mar. 2019

Digital makes a significant impact on every aspect of the business from people, process to technology, both horizontally and vertically. Digital becomes the very fabric of high performing business, being outside-in and customer-centric is the new mantra for forward-looking and high mature digital organizations today. From an organizational structure perspective, how can you fine-tune the digital dimensions of your organizational development to harness innovation?

Designing Digital Organization with Changeability

Digital Organizational Design vs. Business Changeability The very characteristics of digital are the increasing speed of change and hyper-connectivity. Digital makes a significant impact on every aspect of the business both horizontally and vertically. Forward-looking organizations leverage the latest technologies to fine tune the organizational structure and improve the business changeability. Organization design is the vehicle through which the business strategy is executed and defines the business environment in which the digital organization can reduce the organizational culture friction, improve the business changeability, maturity, and unleash its full potential.

Heralding an Ecological Digital Organization Digitalization makes a profound impact from a specific function to the business as a whole, building an organization of the future is not too far away. Digital organizations are hyperconnected and interdependent. They need to have an in-depth understanding of gains and pains of organizational design and development. They should also renew themselves periodically to cope with the change effectively to the best of their ability. Heralding an ecological digital organization need to emphasize participation, relationships, communication, and collaboration and unlock business performance and potential continually.

Tuning Organizational Structure to Improve Digital Ready-ness? Organizations across the vertical sectors and geographical boundaries are on the journey of digital transformation. New generations of digital technologies such as digital collaboration platforms and tools are enabling not only the structured processes of the past but also the unstructured processes of the digital enterprise. The future of digital organizations would be complex enough to act intelligently and nimble enough to adapt to the change promptly.

Tuning Organizational Structure from Hierarchy to Circular for Achieving Fluidity, Flexibility, and Fit With the increasing pace of changes, hyper-connectivity, and interdependence, organizations across vertical sectors are at the turning point, take the multidimensional approach to make the digital paradigm shift. From the organizational structure perspective, the overly rigid pyramidical organizational structure forms communication gaps, encourages silo mentality, creates the performance bottleneck, also decelerate business speed. Therefore, fine-tuning underlying business structure and processes is a critical step for improving digital business fluidity, flexibility, and overall digital fit.

Fine-Tune Organization Structure to Get Digital Ready Due to the “VUCA” nature of digitalization, the business complexity is unavoidable. Organizations that are skilled at managing complexity can gain advantages by pushing the boundaries of a more complicated business mix that provides opportunities to create inter-business value. From an organizational structure perspective, how to fine tune the digital dimensions of your organizational structure development to get digital ready?

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2.8 million page views with about #5500+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. blog posting. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom, to inspire critical thinking and spur healthy debates. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating the new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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The Best “Divergent Thinking” Quotes of “Digital Master” Mar. 2019

Creativity needs a balance of divergent and convergent thinking, the latter isn't valued enough.

“Digital Master” is the series of guidebooks (27+ books) to perceive the multi-faceted impact digital is making to the businesses and society, help forward-thinking organizations navigate through the journey in a systematic way, and avoid “rogue digital.” It perceives the emergent trends of digital leadership, advises on how to run a digital IT organization to unleash its full potential and improve agility, maturity, and provide insight about Change Management. It also instructs the digital workforce on how to shape a game-changing digital mindset and build the right set of digital capabilities to compete for the future. Here is a set of “Divergent Thinking” quotes in “Digital Master.’

1 Divergent thinkers develop mental techniques to come up with great ideas and explore different solutions to the problem.

2 The divergent thinking is sort of free thinking to keep your mind free, to explore and question.

3 Developing creativity requires both self-awareness and internal motivation, divergent and convergent thought processes.

4 Innovation is like a breathing cycle: inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, diverge, converge, diverge, converge.

5 One of the biggest challenges in this complex digital world with high velocity and uncertainty is the fact that we need different perspectives, different knowledge and different ways to solve many existing and emerging business problems.

6 Divergent thinking typically occurs in a spontaneous, free-flowing manner, such that many ideas are generated in an emergent cognitive fashion.

7 It’s best to bring a group of people together with the cognitive difference such as different backgrounds, capabilities, strengths etc., together in order to encourage divergent thinking because the team needs to go divergent to explore the space.

8 Creativity needs a balance of divergent and convergent thinking, the latter isn't valued enough.

9 Innovation, to a certain degree, the process to transform a novel idea to the business value, is a combination of divergent and convergent thinking, the systematic and synthetic processes.

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Deal with the “Pale, Stale, and Failing” Patterns Properly and Lead Digital Transformation Smoothly

The journey of going digital will not be so smooth, there are many curves and bumps on the road. 

Digital transformation isn’t just an extension of continuous improvement of the current business, but a quantum leap with radical change. The journey of going digital will not be flat. It represents a break from the past, with a high level of complexity and uncertainty. The path for digital transformation can be iterative, evolutionary, revolutionary, or disruptive. Ad hoc digital transformation is doomed to fail. How to deal with “pale, stale, and failing” patterns properly and lead digital transformation smoothly?

Pale vision: The true business vision is a reflective process of an organization really understanding itself and its strategic goals, to perceive the future of business. Anybody with a dream can draw up a vision, but it needs top leadership with the strategic insight into the problem to carve up the vision in actionable steps. Due to the “VUCA” characteristics of the business dynamic, rapid changes and overwhelming growth of information, business vision could be cloudy pale and make the organization “lost in the dark” if management is not well preparing the upcoming disruptions. Pale vision also happens that every side of the fence, commercial and technical, under the silo walls, misbelieves the relevance and difficulties of each other’s works. Vision is the ability to see beyond what is to what could be. It is the synthetic view of ‘looking forward,” and “looking behind,” “looking beyond,” and “looking around.” However, in many organizations, there is a tendency for business managers to focus on short-term goals or quarterly results due to pressures from shareholders and unprecedented uncertainty facing businesses today. Pale vision with “near-sighted” view distracts the team and discourages transformative changes. Good leaders don't lose the sight of long-term perspective or 'big picture' vision even though they spend certain time, efforts, and resources on achieving the short-term quick wins. The great leaders stand up as high as they can and look in every direction they could to shape a clear and colorful vision to inspire changes and tell compelling stories to steer digital transformation holistically.

Stale knowledge: Knowledge is power, but it is without a doubt one of the most invaluable and most poorly managed asset in business today, and it’s worthy of massive amounts of attention and resources. Siloed or outdated knowledge is what leads to a decrease in imagination or decelerates the speed of changes. With the exponential growth of information and shortened knowledge management cycle, There is false information, and knowledge is outdated sooner than you think. Stale knowledge is also like perished food, easy to get expired. Thus, knowledge cannot be managed like those other hard assets. More attention needs to be placed on the conditions that allow knowledge to flow and generate value rather than try to manage or control knowledge like it is a thing that can benefit from that type of intervention. Knowledge management is actually not an isolated discipline, it needs to be embedded in the key business processes to shape a learning organization. An essential role for Knowledge Management is the need to connect ideas but also people, and crucially management. Because at the end of the day, what you expect is companies that are capable of mobilizing collective knowledge, ideas, experiences, capacities to business competency and learning plasticity for adapting to the ever-changing environment and anticipating in business transformation proactively.

Failing signals of strategy implementation: Strategy management is challenging. There are about two-thirds to three-quarters of large organizations struggle to implement their strategies. Why does strategy execution unravel? Lack of accountabilities, decision ineffectiveness, or inter & intra-divisional tensions. It seems logical the more ambitious strategy the businesses undertake, they should expect higher levels of friction; disconnect between strategic goals and tactical tasks; culture inertia or inefficient processes. People is often one of the weakest links in strategy management. To dig deeper, the execution gaps exist at the people’s mindsets or the organizational culture. Sometimes strategy makers spend much more time designing the content of strategies than thinking about how to implement them successfully. The matter of fact is they have to drive implementation, otherwise, the emergent strategies will continue to be ignored. More specifically, the common failure signals of strategy implementation also include such as, value proposition failed to be translated into meaningful operational deliverables; management and planning deficiencies, too much staring at spreadsheets and reports, but too little focusing on concrete deliverables, risk management, and real progress tracking; the weak value proposition in terms of business or customer impact, etc.

The journey of going digital will not be so smooth, there are many curves and bumps on the road. To deal with “pale, stale, and failing” pattern properly, it’s important to take an overarching approach that has to dig underneath the surface of businesses and take holistic management to integrate both hard and soft business elements to organizational competency, improve organizational adaptability and lead digital transformation smoothly.

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The Monthly “Performance Master’ Book Tuning: The Multi-Layer Performance Measurement Mar 2019

Mindsets, behavior, and outcome are all important elements of performance evaluation.

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

 

    

The Multi-Layer Performance Measurement

The Two Sides of Performance Measurement There’s no doubt that the well-defined measures and KPIs are important factors to manage performance and keep track of strategy execution effectively. However, everything has two sides: Do some performance measurement initiatives encourage quantity over quality? It also raises the question as to whether you are doing/measuring something simply because you can, you want to, or because you always have done even though the operating environment may have changed. Indeed, it is thought-provoking. Having KPIs that are both measurable and truly meaningful is always a challenge.

Running High-Performance IT with Multi-layer ROIs The commercial goal of all businesses is to generate revenue, expand the net-new business, enlarge their business footprint, and monetize their core competencies. The business paradigm is shifting from the industrial era with the scarcity of knowledge to an information-abundant digital era, technology plays a pivotal role in the digital transformation. And therefore, the role of IT in the current business environment should reflect such a significant shift, transform from the cost center to the revenue generator, and be able to enable business outcomes. Here are three aspects to run high-performance IT with multi-layer ROIs.

Three Dimensional Performance Measurement Hyper-connectivity and interdependence are the digital characteristics, it is important to understand that digital business development and transformation is the paradigm shift which takes multi-viewpoints, multi-discipline, and multi-stage approach. Strategy management, Change Management. and performance management need to walk hand-in-hand. Most organizations fail to manage performance effectively because they often only focus on single dimensional behavior performance. In practice, performance assessment is a combination of many factors and shouldn't be quantified so easily. Performance Management is a multidimensional management discipline. Mindsets, behavior, and outcome are all important elements of performance evaluation. Here is the three-dimensional performance measurement.

The CIO's Four Views of IT KPIs IT is pervasive in any contemporary enterprise today, however, most of IT organizations still get stuck into lower level maturity, with the reputation as a cost center, IT should work with stakeholders to develop KPIs that show how IT is improving business and enforcing business capabilities. Here are four views of KPIs, from IT cost breakdown to IT Performance quadrant; from PMO measure to business capability metrics.

Three Aspects to Measure Organizational Maturity? Organizations today are over-complex and hyper-competitive, management continues to keep the business running, but the lack of insight on how well their organization is doing for the long term. Is it functioning well or dysfunctional? Which management metrics shall you apply to measure organizational overall health and maturity? Who and what tools are being applied to measure if an organization is healthy or sick? Proactive or reactive? Intelligent or dumb? Customer-centric or operational driven?

The blog is a dynamic book flowing with your thought; 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 2.8 million page views with about #5500 blog posting. Among 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. 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.

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The "Performance Master" Quote Collection I

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The Best “PositiveThinking” Quotes of “Digital Master” Mar. 2019

Positive thinking is an idealistic realism, also the cautious optimism.

“Digital Master” is the series of guidebooks (27+ books) to perceive the multi-faceted impact digital is making to the businesses and society, help forward-thinking organizations navigate through the journey in a systematic way, and avoid “rogue digital.” It perceives the emergent trends of digital leadership, advises on how to run a digital IT organization to unleash its full potential and improve agility, maturity, and provide insight about Change Management. It also instructs the digital workforce on how to shape a game-changing digital mindset and build the right set of digital capabilities to compete for the future. Here is a set of “Postive Thinking” quotes in “Digital Master.’

1 Positive thinking is an idealistic realism, also the cautious optimism.

2 The positive people see the bright side, they have a special mindset that rain or shine, leading them to take risks and develop creativity.

3 A positive mental attitude can catalyze creativity because the mind is focused on strength, opportunities, and inspire creative thinking.

4 Positive thinking is the high thinking capability with capacity - the inward strength and ability- the outward actions, to reframe the experience of adversity.

5 Positivity enforces resilience; resilience strengthens creativity. Positive Thinking evokes betterment and leads to a brighter future.

6 A good positive chain of thoughts followed by positive actions brought good results.

7 Creative people always see possibility in the world, when most people only see the way that they have been told. Positivity plus adaptation catalyze creativity.

8 A positive mind can encompass a positive mental attitude. It is much broader than trust, empowerment, competitiveness and personal responsibility.

9 The difference between positive and negative is perception and choice. Learn to abide by nature and let the positive dominate the negative.

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Follow “LESS is More” Principle to Drive Digital Transformation

Digital transformation efforts need to be undertaken as the means of getting to a designated business competency to accomplish defined goals and manage a seamless digital continuum.

The digital transformation is now spreading rapidly to enable organizations of all shapes and sizes to reinvent themselves. It represents a break from the past, with a high level of impact and complexity. It needs to take an overarching approach that has to dig underneath the surface of businesses for integrating both hard and soft critical business elements into differentiated organizational competency and follow the “Less is more” principle to improve, innovate, and harmonize for reaching the next level of the organizational maturity.

SeamLESS communication: The goal for making seamless communication is to ensure hierarchical systems adaptive so that they can respond to the challenges of a more complex, interconnected, and interdependent digital dynamic. However, in many organizations, miscommunication or misunderstanding is prevailing and leads to conflict and malfunction. Communication gaps are often caused by cognitive difference, internal politics, ambiguous process, mistrust culture or other management bottlenecks, etc. To close the gap and improve business effectiveness, the strategic communication initiated by top business leaders are not the top-down one-way street, but the multichannel means integrated with the feedback mechanism to enforce trust and improve accountability. Trust is built based on the evidence that varying business functions can communicate seamlessly and work closely to deliver optimal business solutions with optimal speed. Great leaders are great communicators who will pay attention to communication content, context, and style, tailor diverse audiences for delivering clear messages to harnessing trustful relationship and achieving common goals.

FlawLESS execution: With fast-paced changes, the exponential growth of information, and technology-led disruptions, many of today’s organizations are running in between - the mix of old and new; the different departments or divisions within an organization which operates at different speeds. Thus, managing the flawless execution is challenging due to a lack of synergy and synchronization. Statistically, strategy management in organizations has a very low success rate. Strategy execution fails not because of the bad strategy, but more often because of the flawed management disciplines such as misalignment or miscommunication and poor management disciplines of an otherwise a sound strategy. Business transformation often means you need to fine-tune the underlying organizational structures, optimize organizational processes to streamline business flow, break through the industrial constraints and limitations, to achieve operational excellence and managing flawless execution.

FrictionLESS collaboration: Digital breaks down functional borders, geographical borders, and even industrial borders. Organizations, like individuals, need to be in flow to operate smoothly and adapt to changes with less friction. In a high mature digital organization, every function in the company needs to work together cross-functional borders when necessary, to ensure that the business as a whole is superior to the sum of pieces. The very obstacles to run a frictionless digital organization include thinking silo, functional silo, or management silo, etc. In fact, any kind of business frictions would decrease productivity, diminish innovation, or decelerate business speed. Digital platforms enabled by emerging technologies, efficient apps, and tools, help to lubricate processes, break down silos, flatter business hierarchies, allow people across the business ecosystem to share knowledge for co-solving problems and overcoming common challenges. In a frictionless digital workplace, dynamic business leaders, teams, and employees have a clarified vision to think with the long-term perspective, have a passion for catalyzing changes, and have unique competencies to drive a smooth digital transformation.

RelentLESS change: Digital transformation is more as a journey, not a destination, it could never end. Pushed by the waves of changes and continuous disruptions, organizations have to keep evolving, adapting, and innovating. They have to relentlessly improve their key business elements, emphasize participation, relationships, communication, and realize that they will need to renew themselves periodically to cope with fast-paced changes effectively. Keep focus, and keep innovating. There should always, at every turn, be a taste of better days, of continual improvement of retrospective action planning, incremental goal achieving, and creative idea brainstorming. Going digital is a relentless journey with strong leadership, clear vision, implementable good strategy, diligent people, optimized processes, efficient technology, and differentiated business competencies.

EffortLESS state: Business transformation usually involves internalization of the internalized value or conceptual model, so that the newly required behaviors don't require the same kind of effort and vigilance for change. Ideally, digital transformation is a natural process and rather, effortless to maintain. Instead, the newly established behaviors will be in harmony with the internalized values and models. Being effortless doesn't mean just sitting back and merely responding passively. More accurately, it’s about how to strike the right balance to achieve such a state of effortless digital flow and dynamic balance. Business management should understand how to pull both hard and soft business elements together to build the differentiated business competency, and push for multiple solutions; take the time to look at every situation from multiple points, as well as pull all necessary business resources to develop innovative business resolutions.

Digital is the new age paradigm associated with deep ecology - the digital organization is more like the living things with self-adaptable and self-renewal capabilities. Going digital could be a beautiful journey by following the “Less is More” principle. You are motivated to move away from something because it is painful or outdated; also move towards something which is inspiring, advancing, and delightful. Digital transformation efforts need to be undertaken as the means of getting to a designated business competency to accomplish a defined goal and manage a seamless digital continuum.

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The Monthly “Problem-Solving Master” Book Tuning: Systematic Problem-Solving Mar. 2019

Systems Thinking helps to create common rationale ground between different perspectives, understand interconnectivity between parts and the whole.

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

                Systematic Problem-Solving

Systematic Problem-Solving: Looking out of Problems before Looking into the Problem Problem-solving is about seeing a problem and actually finding a solution to that problem, not just the band-aid approach to fixing the symptom. How you find a solution to any problem depends on your perspective to that problem, but every problem has numerous angles to take into consideration. To deal with many of today’s complex problems, perhaps you need to conduct a systematic problem-solving approach - what Russ Ackoff, an American organizational theorist, used to call "looking out of the problem" as opposed to "looking into the problem," in order to solve problems thoroughly.

Shaping a Holistic View -Seeing both Forest and Trees? Holistic thinking involves understanding a system by sensing its large-scale patterns and addressing the big picture. In terms of a holistic'viewpoint,' one does often need to integrate different stereotyped or mechanistic viewpoints; it is the integration and searches for new viewpoints that are holistic. At times, when you only want to see things from your own point of view, see what you want to see, or, hear what you want to hear, often you miss the point to understand the real problem holistically as well as how to solve it creatively or systematically. Here are three aspects of shaping a holistic view of digital transformation.

Critical Thinking as the Cure of Three Symptoms of the “VUCA” Digital Normality Change is the new normal. In the digital era, any business can be at risk for survival at any minute due to continuous fast-paced changes and continuous digital disruptions. Digital leaders and professionals must leverage critical thinking as an effective tool to deal with “VUCA” digital new normal. Critical thinking can combine different thinking processes, to gather a mass of information, break it apart and reconstructed with a level of accuracy for projecting futuristic events, or numbers, etc. In reality, there is only a very small fraction of true critical thinkers. How to spot and cultivate more critical thinkers who can cure the following three symptoms of digital normality.

Systems Thinking and Digital Management Systems Thinking is a representation of how we see patterns in life, it is also an emergent property of the basic aspects of nature, layer on layer of systems, each with their own emergent behavior, coming together to create super systems we interact with daily. Systems thinking can help today’s top business leaders and management develop systems approaches to either make effective decisions or solve complex business problems in a structural way. Because Systems Thinking helps to create common rationale ground between different perspectives, understand interconnectivity between parts and the whole. Thus, systematic problem-solving has a better chance to solve the real problem with less side effect. Here are the multiple perspectives on how to leverage systems thinking in digital management.

The New Book “Problem-Solving Master” Chapter IV: Leverage Systems Thinking in Problem-Solving The world has become so dynamic with the exponential growth of information, it is full of opportunities and problems. Many problems do exist because they are either ill-defined or the concept cannot be adequately captured contextually. Further, there’s the problem that the same word means different things to different people because they carry different emotional baggage or have a cognitive difference. So, what’re the logical scenarios for problems diagnosing and solving? And how to leverage Systems Thinking in problem-solving?

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2.8 million page views with about 5500+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify your voice, deepen your digital footprints, and match your way for human progression.

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The Best “Critical Thinking” Quotes of “Digital Master” Mar. 2019

“Digital Master” is the series of guidebooks (27+ books) to perceive the multi-faceted impact digital is making to the businesses and society, help forward-thinking organizations navigate through the journey in a systematic way, and avoid “rogue digital.” It perceives the emergent trends of digital leadership, advises on how to run a digital IT organization to unleash its full potential and improve agility, maturity, and provide insight about Change Management. It also instructs the digital workforce on how to shape a game-changing digital mindset and build the right set of digital capabilities to compete for the future. Here is a set of “Critical Thinking” quotes in “Digital Master.’

1 Critical Thinking is the mental process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating information to reach an answer or conclusion.

2 Critical thinking has been described as “thinking about thinking.”

3 Critical thinking is to apply the objective analysis for either making judgments or decisions.

4 Critical thinking has been described as the process of purposeful, self-regulatory judgment, which uses reasoned consideration to evidence, context, conceptualizations, methods, and criteria.

5 Critical thinking has been described as “reasonable reflective thinking focused on deciding what to believe or do.”

6 The essence of critical thinking is careful deliberation, examination, and testing of assumptions, and consideration of opposing views.

7 The real critical thinking has creativity embedded deeply in the thought processes, and it has to ability to catch the trends and discovery of hidden connections.

8 Critical thinking is more critical than ever because the business and the world become over-complex, uncertain and ambiguous.

9 Critical Thinking is the rational analysis and evaluation of the issues in order to make a fair judgment.

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Five Characteristics of IT Maturity

Digital maturity is the state of ripeness, quality, fluency, delight, zest, balance, and resilience.

Compared to the considerably static industrial age, the digital environment is complex, uncertain, unpredictable and unrepetitive. Organizations rely more and more on technology, and IT needs will only expand. Thus, the CIO’s ability to build fundamental business competency is now greater than ever. How well an IT organization can adapt to the dynamic environment directly affects the future of the business. IT maturity is proportional to overall business maturity. IT touches both hard business processes and soft human behavior. Here are five characteristics of IT maturity.

Robustness: IT is perhaps one of the most sophisticated puzzle pieces in a modern company. Because technology is complex and the information is overloading. Digital organizations are the robust and adaptive living system which are comprised, in part, of people, processes, and technologies. The dynamic digital organizations need to get away from letting things fall through and start creating an “integrated wholes” by utilizing correct processes and running IT as the linchpin. All such systems function, grow and prosper by continually adapting, evolving, and improving flexibility, versatility, and resilience of the company. You cannot run a digital-driven and nimble business without "de-complexitizing," or "de-bureaucracy," and make transparent on what is being delivered and how or what is being delivered. IT is not just the business of the IT department, it must break down the functional silos, and take a structural approach to consolidate, modernize, integrate, automate, and optimize for improving its functional performance, robustness, competencies, and maturity. 

Comprehensiveness: Information is the most invaluable commodity individuals and organizations produce in the digital environment in which they currently function. It’s also one of the most invaluable business assets need to be managed successfully! However, many organizations feel overwhelming by the exponential growth of information. IT should help the organization harness and understand the information to capture the real-time business insight, provide ways to better recognize and act on the comprehensive information for gaining competitive advantage. Information does not live alone but permeates into everywhere in the businesses. In many legacy organizations, their methods, and procedures to process information are siloed and outdated, stifle information flow, and thus, business flow. To achieve information comprehensiveness and knowledge abundance, IT plays a significant role in refining information to gain broad business insight and hande execution intensity in a structural way.

Responsiveness: Digital means rapid changes and continuous disruptions. How successful organizations can handle digital disruptions depends on how fast and capable they can adapt to the ever-changing environment. The degree of business responsiveness depends on how those systems and subsystems interact with each other, and those interactions can be structural, technical, informational, or human. Digital organizations must have strategic responsiveness to process business information almost real-time, communicate and collaborate with business counterparts timely. Running a real-time digital organization means high-responsiveness and high speed. Breaking down silo thinking and digitizing the management disciplines and practices are the first step for running a high-responsive digital organization. Business management also needs to have flexibility for taking the different approach to meet the business’s expectation, leveraging tailored methods to fit specific circumstances, and ultimately respond to the external environment promptly.

Fitness: The term 'fit' in the dynamic digital environment can be interpreted with a degree of variability. Different organizations perhaps set varying criteria to evaluate “digital fit.” Organizational fit, manifested in accepted and expected behavior, has a way of neutralizing differences. Where you want to look for 'fit' is in relation to the values you want to build or maintain within your team, and the kinds of behaviors that you would expect to see as a result of, or in alignment with, those values. From the business management perspective, digital fit means putting the right people with the fitting mindset and capabilities in the right position to solve the right problems. More specifically, how do you define the right problem, the complexity level of problems, and how can you solve them in better ways? It’s important to identify the skill gaps and define the technical or functional competencies required, integrate talent management, culture management, change management, and performance management into a holistic people management approach to fit the purpose and achieve strategic business goals.

Innovativeness: Digital is the age of innovation. To deal with change and fierce competitions and to move forward from information robustness to innovation excellence, do not focus on hierarchies but on ideas, innovation, openness, and problem-solving. Due to the fact that innovating in today’s digital world has become increasingly complex in nature, while the individual contributions provide the 'building block" of innovativeness, it is the collective consensus on what to do with them that is appealing. At the organizational level, innovation leaders need to define a clear vision, discover the blind spots, identify unknowns, bridge gaps, and ensure the organization will stay focusing on building their innovation competency. Cross-pollinating ideas, collaborating and sharing knowledge are what spurs innovation. Communication, collaboration, and coordination are necessities for keeping ideas flow and practicing good idea management. The dynamic digital ecosystem outlook helps the business connect the wider dots to innovate, also encourage the broader base collaboration to build differentiated business competencies.

IT is moving up its maturity from functioning to firm to delight. Digital maturity is the state of ripeness, quality, fluency, delight, zest, balance, and resilience. IT management must get a feeler of the business view, help in trying new technologies as a business enabler for developing differentiated business competency, expanding digital effects systematically and chartering the digital paradigm shift seamlessly.

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The Monthly Foresight: Shape the Future-Ready Digital Workforce Mar. 2019

Shaping digital workplaces is about building an environment with the abundance of information and the culture of innovation, to put people at the center of business.

The effects of an increasingly digitalized 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 wanted 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 to the digital future effortlessly?

Shape the Future-Ready Digital Workforce

Running a Future-Driven Digital Organization Digital organizations are the living systems which keep growing and maturing. Organization of the future is an organization designed openly for anyone with ideas on how human organizations ought to be contrived in the face of the “VUCA” digital new normal, hyperconnectivity and fierce competition. Reimaging the future of business is exciting, but investigating the different path for unlocking business performance and potential needs to take a systematic approach and develop it into a more solid form. Digital leaders must realize that you cannot wait until there is an immediate pressing task, continuous adaptability is necessary in an ever-changing world, in order to run a future-driven digital organization.

Revitalize Digital Workforce to be Future-Ready: With the faster pace of changes and continuous disruptions, companies across vertical sectors have huge pressures to survive and thrive in today’s hypercompetitive economic dynamic. They are at the transition stage from operating a mechanical organization to running a dynamic digital living business. Digital organizations are the mixed bag of something old and new; physical building and virtual platform, with diverse workforce working in different functions running varying speed. A digital workplace encompasses so much that it's hard to isolate it from other dimensions of the enterprise. What is the logical scenario to overcome challenges and revitalize digital workforce to be future-ready?

Five Building Blocks to Shape a Learning Organization? With the exponential growth of data and the mixed bag of new information and outdated knowledge, digital organizations and their people must learn through their interactions with the business environment continually, infuse digital into every aspect of the business, and keep information and knowledge flow frictionlessly. High organizational learning relates to high response in recognizing and addressing system constraints, unleashing business potential, improving organizational changeability and innovation capacity. Here are five building blocks to shape a learning organization.

Three Aspects in Building a Digital Workplace Digital workplaces are about building an environment with the abundance of information and the culture of innovation, to put people at the center of business, and to both engage employees and delight customers. After clarifying the Big Why, there are still many questions haunting around about the Knowing -HOW, though: Is it possible to have an effective digital workplace where the culture is more command and control, where the chosen solutions simply mirror or reinforce the way of working within that hierarchy, but do so very well? Or is it a prerequisite of an effective Digital Workforce to have that more open culture and "traditional" organizations are facing a culture change task alongside the development of a more effective Digital Workforce? Could you be imposing the current values of collaboration and openness on an effective Digital Workforce, and discounting organizations who aren't making progress in developing their own Digital Workforce? When setting the workplace policy to enforce digital management, are you thinking of guidelines for people? Do you have a basic business conduct policy that people sign when they join?

Three Characteristics of Digital Organization Digital organizations are like the living systems that can self-renew in thriving as high-performance businesses. Digitalization means that companies need to infuse digital into every aspect of the business, expand to every dimension of the organization. It is the movement from static to flow, silo to holistic, mechanical to organic, and command & control to self-management for shaping the digital-empowered workforce with the following characteristics.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2.8 million page views with about #5500th blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The “Digital Master” book series includes 25 books to share insight from the multidimensional digital lens and perceive the multi-faceted impact the digital era upon us is making to the 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 the new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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The Best “Design Thinking” Quotes of “Digital Master” Mar. 2019

Design thinking is to pursue the “art of possible.”

“Digital Master” is the series of guidebooks (27+ books) to perceive the multi-faceted impact digital is making to the businesses and society, help forward-thinking organizations navigate through the journey in a systematic way, and avoid “rogue digital.” It perceives the emergent trends of digital leadership, advises on how to run a digital organization to unleash its full potential and improve agility, maturity, and provide insight about Change Management. It also instructs the digital workforce on how to shape a game-changing digital mindset and build the right set of digital capabilities to compete for the future. Here is a set of “design thinking” quotes in “Digital Master.’


1 The design does need more recognition as thinking and problem-solving process.

2 Design Thinking is a human-centered, iterative process for setting goals and putting strategies into place to achieve genuine innovation.

3 Design thinking utilizes elements from the designer's methodology and practices to arrive at an innovative solution.

4 Creating an innovative product that is profitable to your business while being exciting to the users

5 Design thinking is to pursue the “art of possible.”

6 The purpose of design thinking is common sense thinking involving real people in the solution; finding the simplest and best value solution that fits for the purpose.

7 More and more of work is less about design in its purity and more focused on holistic and strategic design-led business initiatives.

8 The big advantage of being design centered is that you prioritize in making things likable vs. just making them functioning.

9 Organizational design is the ultimate expression of the organization’s strategy - because it reflects the resource allocation and configuration of the value-creating processes.

10 High mature digital organizations integrate organizational design (OD) into the process design and organizational re-engineering.

11 Aesthetics is an important principle for either product design or business innovation

12 Empathy is a fundamental component and a path of design.

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