The “Selection” Quotes of “Digital Master” Apr, 2020

A selection among multiple available choices is a decision. The knowledge constraint and perception bias are paramount issues during the decision process.

"Digital Master” is a series of guidebooks (28 + 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, provides advice 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 “Selection” quotes in “Digital Master.”

1 At the heart of innovation is a life cycle of idea generation, interaction, learning, and selection. It’s important to develop the best and next practices to fuel innovation and take a holistic approach to develop business-wide innovation capabilities.

2 A selection among multiple available choices is a decision. The knowledge constraint and perception bias are paramount issues during the decision process.

3 Whether, for selection, career development, promotion, or self-development, the assessments are really about ascertaining the individual's "current state," a snapshot of where they are at that moment of time; also predict his or her “to be” state, their potential to be who they want to become.

4 When a board does not have any context or the wrong context, then everything else including director selection, agenda focus, interaction with management, etc. will be sub-optimal or worse.

5 Selection of KPI is the tricky part & selection must be aligned with the objective, a business strategy is more dynamic than ever nowadays, therefore, there’s no one size fits all, you may have to adjust KPIs from time to time accordingly.

6 IT skills gap can be bridged through creative selection, as the saying goes -hire for character, and train for skills. Look for traits such as intelligence, motivation, problem-solving, self-learning and communications, etc, truly treat talent as the human asset and capital to invest in, not just human resources to plugin.

7 Thinking = coherent (logical and operational) construction of a selection of aspects, judged relevant by the thinking agent, with the purpose to predict with selected observable aspects of the system, and hopefully open enough to question the selection.

8 The peril of measurement management such as the wrong metrics selection or ineffective measurement practices perhaps causes management conflicts or resource misalignment.

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Orchestrate an Extensive and Real time Digital Organization

The very characteristics of digital organization are about openness, responsiveness, innovativeness, fluidity, hybridity, high quality, and great design, etc, with a broad vision of transforming to the real-time, extensible enterprise.

The digital organization is a dynamic system which needs to continue evolving and adapting, explicitly seeks to orchestrate a creative environment in which people can grow and innovate; businesses focus on long-term and holistic perspective, become highly conscious about what’s happening in their environment, enable dynamic resources allocation, adapt to change promptly, grasp opportunities timely, and prevent risks effectively. Here are five aspects to orchestrate an extensive and real-time digital organization.

Innovation-oriented: Business environment is constantly changing. If you do not innovate, your competitors will and make your current successful product/service/business model obsolete. Innovation management is not about generating innovation/ideas, but rather the processes to take ideas to value. It’s a managed process and 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. In the innovation management process, certain ideas or opportunities will have more business appeal than others and given that resources are limited. So the innovation management process should enable focus on most attractive opportunities and involve new ways of bringing together ideas and resources to create something novel.

Innovation, either as an individual process or a collective process, helps us adapt, improve, grow, and integrate, think transparently, interdisciplinarily, and collaboratively. Innovation Management can provide optimized structures and frameworks to streamline processes and enable ideas implementation. Identification of the novel is only the beginning, the heavy lifting starts as a firm aligns resources and executes seamlessly, and hopefully, the firm can manage innovation lifecycle and executes in a manner that provides sustained competitive advantage.

Modular design: Building an extensive and real-time digital organization is about developing the lego-like modular design architecture, craft scalable capabilities with quality and reusability, having internal processes being broken into modular service components that have a standard open interface, with the goal to achieve strategic flexibility. Loose coupling makes it possible to change the component without affecting the entire system, as long as the structure and interface are kept stable.

Building a real-time digital organization is all about mastering dynamic planning & competency building, leveraging updated information for reinventing business but not reinventing the wheel, shaping highly innovative talent and teams, and accelerating the speed of changes. Flatter structures help to speed up organizational response to changing markets by breaking down silos and enforcing cross-functional collaboration, driving scalable performance, and enabling potential maximization.

Customer-centric: The digital organization keeps evolving, it has to go deeper to integrate all key business ingredients in orchestrating a real-time high mature business which has key capabilities to delight customers. Customer Experience (CX) value creation means the company management knows enough about their customers, and takes action to fill that type of need, be transparent to an extent where you don't lose profits. It is the process of making a company's products and services extraordinarily relevant to the wants, needs, or desires of customers physically, spiritually, or emotionally.

Goes beyond the commitment to customer-centricity at the top of the organization, it requires expertise in leading a customer-centric organization. Having a clear understanding of how customer-centric approaches enhance the business model and extend profitability. It requires consistently digging deeper and having metrics in place that keep a pulse on the inner workings of the business. By understanding customer goals, an organization could develop better interaction capabilities to enhance the customer experience. Engaging customers directly on an ongoing basis to see how their goals are changing is a good way to architect customer-centric organizations.

On-demand IT services/solutions: At the dawn of the digital era with an abundance of information, lightweight technologies, and emergent IT consumerization trends, many organizations have already reaped the benefit from the Software As A Service (SAAS) model which provides flexibility to improve IT cash flow and allows IT to make a value-driven investment in order to catalyze business growth and change.

The trend to the on-demand model is shaping the new mindset to run IT and business in a continuous improvement and delivery mode. IT must bring to the table innovative and intuitive apps and solutions that meet customers’ needs with high adoption rates. has been proven to bring visible benefits such as faster delivery and business competency. Highly creative and extensive companies have set up processes for drawing ideas out of business units, often using cloud-based, online platforms to encourage corporate-wide, crowd-sourced idea generation, and inspire open innovation.

GRC enhanced: GRC is and remains the purview of top organization management. Corporate GRC disciplines have a direct link to business and its processes. Not only from the financial perspective, but also from the involvement and signs being displayed about what guidance, values, and principles governing the company's commercial activities. GRC can be used to raise visibility and awareness for many things that are captured at the different levels of the organization, and bring them in front of leadership without the audit or regulatory compliance stamp on them.

GRC can also be used to drive organizational change and business value the most, it should sustain the transformative change in business with the right order: People, Process, and Technology. If you're serious about a risk-driven implementation approach for the chosen enterprise-class GRC solution, then you'll need to deal with, first and foremost, the human element - harden the soft factors for enforcing GRC effectiveness.

The very characteristics of digital organization are about openness, responsiveness, innovativeness, fluidity, hybridity, high quality, and great design, etc, with a broad vision of transforming to the real-time, extensible enterprise. Digital transformation is not a stand-alone initiative, but a continuous meaningful journey for adapting to the digital new normal of the dynamic business world. The purpose is the salt you put on the teams for achieving common goals, self-renewing in thriving as high-performance businesses.

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The Monthly Communication Brief: Communication Competency Apr. 2020

Organizations see the value and need for effective and coordinated communication as the tool to solve problems and drive changes seamlessly. 

The great communicators are the high-quality leaders or professionals who can communicate objectively with strong logic, clarity, and understanding; the great communicators are the great artists who are fluent in creative expression or metaphorical description.

Communication is both art and science. How to set principles and develop practices to improve communication effectiveness and build communication competency?

                                 Communication Competency

Competence, Vision, Communication, and Enthusiasm in Shaping a Superior Digital Organization The unprecedented opportunities brought by digital information technologies and increasing speed of change can lift up a fast-growing business promptly, also reinvent a well-established organization to reach the next level of business growth or organizational maturity.

Running Digital Organizations with Differentiated Business Competency The characteristics of digital business are dynamic, volatile, uncertain, and hypercompetitive. Digitalization implies the full-scale changes in the way business is conducted so that simply adopting new digital technology isn’t insufficient. You have to continuously scale-up and dig underneath, optimize organizational processes and develop business capabilities, transform the underlying organizational structures and functions to ensure the business as a whole presenting the differentiated business competency and running with digital speed. Here is a set of differentiated business competencies.

Communication Competency of BoDs Communication is the key to improve leadership effectiveness and improve business fluidity. Either at the boardroom or the different layers of the business hierarchy, effective communication is like the thread to connect all-important business gems, for building a trustful relationship, enforcing collaboration, and improving digital readiness and manageability.

CIOs as “Chief Interpretation Officer”: How to Improve Communication Effectiveness? The magic “I” in the title of CIO has many indications, such as Chief Information Officer,” “Chief Innovation Officer,” “Chief Influence Officer,” etc. Communications sometimes seem like an oxymoron. As we move from applying technology as a vehicle to maximize efficiency and minimize costs to leveraging technology as an enabler and catalyzer of totally new business models, to maximize business potential, forward-thinking organizations empower their IT to lead the digital transformation proactively. Therefore, CIOs need to become “Chief Interpretation Officer,” to bridge the communication gap between business and IT and improve digital leadership maturity.

Making Continuous Dialogues to Drive Digital Transformation Digital transformation makes a profound impact from the specific function to the business as a whole. Organizations see the value and need for effective and coordinated communication as the tool to solve problems and drive changes seamlessly. Communication is the word that means many things to many people and initiates a broad set of activities. Forward-looking companies across the vertical sector are on the journey of digital transformation, how to open continuous dialogues for driving digital transformation, and leading business success for the long term?

“Digital Master” is a series of guidebooks (28+ 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, advice 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.

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The “Tolerance” Quotes of “Digital Master” Apr, 2020

Simply put, to be effective, global leaders need high levels of cultural flexibility, tolerance of ambiguity, and low levels of ethnocentrism required in jobs with complex international and multicultural responsibilities.

"Digital Master” is a series of guidebooks (28 + 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, provides advice 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 “Tolerance” quotes in “Digital Master.”

1 It’s business leaders’ responsibility to establish an environment with a high-risk tolerance, where people can grow and develop, be curious, and creative without fear.

2 Simply put, to be effective, global leaders need high levels of cultural flexibility, tolerance of ambiguity, and low levels of ethnocentrism required in jobs with complex international and multicultural responsibilities.

3 Intrapreneur leaders often have balanced viewpoints to perceive success and failure objectively, such mental toughness will help an organization become more resilient, and nurture the culture of risk tolerance.

4 Many organizations are still managed through overly restricted hierarchical management discipline which discourages “Thinking differently.” Lack of a culture of learning and risk tolerance should be blamed for stifling innovation.

5 Good intrapreneur-leaders with ownership mentality can strike the right balance between increasing productivity and encouraging innovation; between setting the rules and let “out-of-box” thinking flow; between risk management and risk tolerance; between the new way to do things and the best practice, between stability and change, creativity and process.

6 People become inspired when they have someone in authority in whom they have absolute trust. That means an individual who has a strong moral compass, exhibiting integrity, empathy, thoughtfulness, respect, tolerance, determination, enthusiasm, confidence, understanding, optimism, patience, and a sense of humor is a bonus.

7 The tolerance of ambiguity means that the business leaders today are comfortable with uncertainty, unpredictability, conflicting directions, and multiple demands.

8 The heart of digital is about changes and innovation, to run a change agent IT and an innovative IT organization, the more difficult challenge is not just launching successful teams, but maintaining their motivation and focus, cultivating a positive attitude and building a culture of risk tolerance.

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Applying Different Kind of Rationality to Manage Business Complexity

Companies that are skilled at managing complexity can gain advantages by rejuvenating a high-performance business culture, developing “digital fit” leaders and professionals with differentiated capabilities, and building a unique set of business competency.

One significant effect of today’s digital economy is increased velocity, complexity, unpredictability, and a need for a faster response to changes in businesses. Digital management is multidimensional. There are different kinds of rationality that apply to different dimensions of corporate management. There is physical or technical rationality. There is emotional or psychological rationality, and there is mental or spiritual rationality, just to name a few. Each arena has its own rules and norms. Organizational leaders today should take a holistic view and structural approach to manage business complexity and improve organizational maturity.

Multi-dimensional business values: Not all business value is directly related to ROI, at least not in the near term. Corporate value is a multi-dimensional concept, there’re utility value, efficiency value, financial value, customer value, employee value or social value, etc. For example, some products/services features may deliver little to no ROI directly but are wonderful marketing tools to increase customer value.

Business management should dentify stories on the basis of their "strategic" or "tactical" value. Organizational value has a broader concept such as seamless customer experience, an optimal business service, a commercial value proposition, a social value system that deals with and provides context for varying interest and need, etc. When evaluating strategic business value and success, the whole system needs to be considered in order to help the organization become sustainable and "future proof."

Decision process effectiveness and decision maker’s mindfulness: A selection among multiple available choices is a decision. The knowledge constraint and perception bias are paramount issues during the decision process. With the exponential growth of information and rapid changes, decision-making is often a difficult task because it is contextual and situational. Thus, it’s important to define a systematic process and access the updated information for capturing crucial insight, weighing multiple factors for getting the best outcome.

Decision-makers today need to be multi-dimensional thinkers, leverage both critical thinking and creative thinking to ask tough questions for framing the real issues behind tough decisions. It is also important to embrace the contrarian viewpoints and leverage collective insight that balances out the biases. Collective decision making helps to generate more of everything (viable alternatives, criteria, etc.) all of which are shown to improve the quality of decisions.

Senior management influences "invisible culture": Culture is a collective mindset, attitude, and behavior. Culture is an amalgamation of people, their core values, their socioeconomic realities, lifestyles, and education. Culture is not something that can be dictated and followed such as a new policy or rule from management. The spirit of the organization comes from the top. Senior leadership makes a high influence on corporate culture. When the business gets over-complicated or stagnated, trace down the poor behaviors or lower-than-expected performance, understand the causes behind it. Perhaps it is the management culture that is out of date and harming the organization's prospects.

Company strategy flowing from company culture is intentional leadership at its best. Senior Management starts the wave coming into the shore, but it then has to reach the beach (bottom) before it can go back out. Senior leaders should walk the talk; believing in the effects and high value of company culture, and follow their roadmap continuously to improve the success rate of business strategy.

The right people are in the right place: Putting the right people with the right capability to solve the right problem is simply one of the biggest challenges facing businesses and our society today. The point is how to make intelligent judgments to ensure the right people with the right mindsets and capabilities to solve the right problems and overcome complexity. And it’s much easier to say than doing because it involves multiple intelligence judgment and assessment processes to evaluate people and problems, especially at the cognitive level in an objective way.

Different organizations perhaps set varying criteria to evaluate people’s “digital fit.” Generally speaking, a “digital fit” person is self-motivated, self-directed, self-inspired, purposeful, learning agile, and creative, etc. Find the right people through what they think and how they act, digital professionals have to learn the new skills and develop unique competency for adapting to the digital new normal and exploring the new possibilities and discovering the better way to solve problems.

From risk management to risk intelligence: Risk management is very useful for handling complexity and achieving the business results. Organizations are not always the ones paying for the risk. Stakeholders ranging from investors to customers to ordinary citizens to business partners might all benefit or suffer from the risk attitude of a company. As long as risks have been identified and agreed with stakeholders as per business needs, then you develop risk models that can effectively predict, optimize, and consider a continual and sustainable approach and the specific threshold for justifying opportunities and business outcomes.

The value of high mature risk management could be in better management decisions, optimized operations, greater resilience, improved reputation, increased confidence in management, etc. Risk Management mechanism needs to be well embedded into both soft business factors such as corporate culture and hard organizational elements such as processes and technologies, and it is not only about risk mitigation or control, but also about high mature risk intelligence.

There is no magic formula to improve organizational maturity. Companies that are skilled at managing complexity can gain advantages by rejuvenating a high-performance business culture, developing “digital fit” leaders and professionals with differentiated capabilities, and building a unique set of business competency for pushing the boundaries of a more sophisticated business mix that provides opportunities to create inter-business multidimensional value.

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The Insight of the Week 4/18-4/23 “Future of CIO 2020

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

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with 6700+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The “Digital Master” book series includes 28 books to share insight from the multidimensional digital lens and perceive the multi-faceted impact the digital era upon us is making to businesses and society. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Here is the weekly insight of digital leadership, IT Management, and Talent Management.

Build a Vibrant Workplace to Catalyze Change As changes are expedited for both individuals and businesses, neither business nor life is linear these days, a digital workplace encompasses so much and has fewer boundaries and more dimensions to expand. The digital management has to break down silos and traditional “command and control” management style, design, enable and enforce an inspirational and inclusive working environment to catalyze changes and maximize the full business potential.

The Ultra-Modern Corporate Board with Three “Digital Powers” Due to the complexity, uncertainty, ambiguity, and volatility of the digital era, the directorship in any organization must envision the future boldly and influence changes proactively. There are quite clear processes for the interaction between management and the board; oversight, supervision, development, and mentoring of management, typically at the higher executive levels.

The Value of Business Architecture (Part II) There is known known, known unknown, and unknown unknown, running a digital organization is challenging due to the unprecedented level of uncertainty, velocity, and complexity. Business Architecture (BA) should play a critical role in designing and managing future businesses that become truly proactive and move up the organizational maturity level by turning multidimensional factors impacting business models, business operations, and business reputation.

The 21st Century Business Transformational Capabilities In today’s business dynamic, the enterprise consists of a set of capabilities that are fundamental building blocks in digital transformations with which companies can transform business models, operational processes, and customer experiences to reach high-level business maturity.

The Monthly GRC Summary: Innovation Governance Apr. 2020 The important characteristics of digitalization are over-complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity. Hence, GRC (governance, risk management, and compliance) becomes more critical than ever. Here's the context; how should GRC programs be approached? Should technology be a driver? Can you achieve any level of GRC without automation? Can you achieve any level of GRC without people? What is the real driver of GRC?

Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking about the new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation, and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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The “Reliability” Quotes of “Digital Master” Apr, 2020

To improve business reliability, there needs to be a better appreciation to examine a situation and understand the problem from different angles in order to fix real issues and improve overall business quality.

"Digital Master” is a series of guidebooks (28 + 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, provides advice 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 “Reliability” quotes in “Digital Master.”



1 Reliability is the ability of the business to consistently deliver high-quality products, services, and expected business results.

2 Reliability is not about being static or silo, as a matter of fact, it’s about connecting, communicating, and collaborating to enforce trust and transparency.

3 Running a reliable business with the steadfast speed takes planning, structure or process tuning, and measurement setting.

4 Digital leaders have to not only provide clear process guidelines but also see that the teams are engaged, collaborative, and accountable to continually deliver the higher than expected business results to ensure reliability and endurance.

5 To improve business reliability, there needs to be a better appreciation to examine a situation and understand the problem from different angles in order to fix real issues and improve overall business quality.

6 Reliability, flexibility, profits with ROIs, optimization for improving business efficiency should be the driving force behind IT management.

7 Technically, there is no single initiative that will suffice to raise the digital IQ, shape an intelligent digital workforce enabling intellectual stimulation, trust, and reliability.

8 The difference between Reliability and Validity also sum up the differences between traditional business thinking and design thinking quite nicely. Traditional business thinkers have a preference for reliability--getting the same result every time. Designers prefer validity; getting the right result this time.

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Develop Business Case for Strategic Problems-Solving

 Strategic problem-solving often has a very wide scope, intricate factors, and needs to take an interdisciplinary approach today.

Fundamentally running a business is an iterative problem-solving continuum. Problem-solving is about seeing a problem and actually delivering a real solution to that problem, not just the band-aid approach to fixing the symptom.

Business Case provides the description and reason for starting an initiative to solve business problems, particularly at the strategic level by articulating and aligning with VSSP (Vision-Strategy-Structure-People&Processes). Business cases should place enough focus on the "why" - understanding, qualifying, and quantifying the problem, also should focus on the "what" - the solution and outcome.

Context - problem definition: Due to the unprecedented level of business complexity, it is fundamental but critical to figure out what is exactly the problem. The assumption that there is a single cause to a "problem" in a complex adaptive business system is unhelpful. Assessing and defining problems is usually more important than solving them. Because it’s worthwhile considering why things are the way they are for, in doing so, you are challenging automatic assumptions that something needs fixing.

Often, events are observed on the surface, and then the action is taken, but that is too early. Until the underlying problem is addressed, the symptom or result will continue to return. Contextual problem framing helps to see a larger business system with interactive pieces and “conflict” goals. There are multiple, inter-related dynamics and you need to be looking for patterns rather than isolating causes. So problem framing is about addressing the correct need and perhaps the problem becomes how to identify the need at the right level, develop a good business case, and continue to ask 'Why is that a problem?' at each successive stage.

Solution options and which solution option is most aligned with the strategic goals of the business: A well-articulated business case helps the business management clarify: What solution options are available that will meet the business need and which option is the best option? Is it one solution or multiple solutions that will be required? Which solutions represent the best business value in terms of achievement of the business outcomes? The main emphasis is on doing "better pre-work" - defining alternative solutions and the "success criteria," enabling consideration of the range of options, rather than the more traditional "jump to solution" problem-solving methodology and practice.

It might be a good idea to first split problems into different categories and to assess the relative importance of the different categories and what could be done about it. You can simulate the problem-solving processes and identify the constraints, robustness, modularity, scalability, costs, requirements, stability, and everything else you would need for solution optimization. Knowing these before real problem-solving development will drastically increase the probability of success with a premium solution (as close as possible).

Viability projections of the solution over a period of time covering the ROI and NPV: It’s important to discover and design better solutions, to push the envelope, and to go beyond what is expected; and last but not least, you need to evaluate outcomes of problem-solving. A good business case will demonstrate some measure of ROI, ROA, or ROE, Net Present Value, Internal Rate of Return and time to pay back, etc. Having the appropriate performance indicators is very important. And taking a systematic approach to measurement can avoid blind-spots in problem-solving,

To project the solution over a period of time and evaluate the practicality and outcome of problem-solving, there are quite a lot of questions worth asking, such as: What if it takes six months longer than planned and anticipated? How is ROI affected if it costs you 50% more to do the project? What is the cost of not taking these business initiatives? How to accurately project the economic impact of the proposed solutions, etc, both in terms of future maintenance needs and the increased risk of disruption. Having answers to all those worse case scenarios or data-based analysis will demonstrate to finance sponsors that you’ve seriously thought through all possibilities and come up with an optimal solution.

Risks and issues associated with the solution: Business management should ponder what are the risks associated with the solution. Is the level of risk acceptable to the enterprise? Companies should put in place a risk appetite system that goes beyond high-level statements, a good business case helps to identify and prioritize risks, and then look to mitigate the most important risks to bring them within appetite and provide business solutions with risk intelligence.

In essence, the goal for risk management metrics and measures is to build an understanding of decision support for problem-solving. The pitfall is that the risk management system is detached from the real management of the business. Enterprise risk management has to be expanded into enterprise opportunity management and embed risk identification and assessment in operational processes and multiple management disciplines.

Problem-solving is about understanding a problem and actually discovering or designing a premium solution. Strategic problem-solving often has a very wide scope, intricate factors, and needs to take an interdisciplinary approach today. A good business case helps to articulate, define, and align strategic problem solving with VSSP (Vision-Strategy-Structure-People&Processes). A solution should match a problem and with that in mind, the one thing change would be to have a phrase at the heart of everything the organization does.

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The Ultra-Modern Corporate Board with Three “Digital Powers”

Power is a great thing if you can use it wisely to make a positive influence and empower others to do the same!

Due to the complexity, uncertainty, ambiguity, and volatility of the digital era, the directorship in any organization must envision the future boldly and influence changes proactively. There are quite clear processes for the interaction between management and the board; oversight, supervision, development, and mentoring of management, typically at the higher executive levels.

The corporate boards have a set of “digital powers” to inspire and build the right set of digital principles and policies to catalyze changes and enforce governance discipline.

Supervisory power: Governance is the structure and processes of authority, responsibility, and accountability in an organization. The "possible governance methods, techniques, structures, etc" are based on the design of a management system which generally has a strong process element and the manner in which those management systems mesh with the governance arrangements. In its supervisory role on behalf of the sovereign power, the Board of Directors delegates the operational management of the company to the executive power. This power safeguards the business evolution and sustainability preserves the company for possible deviation or risk and informs the shareholders on a regular basis on those subjects.

The board exercises the supervisory power in organizing the corporate assets toward the achievement of the corporate vision and mission. Keep in mind that the purpose of the Board of Directors is to review and recommend the company strategy, as well as protecting the value of the organization. The Board of Directors needs to define clear milestones or Performance Indicators to control the behavior of the progress and monitor business performance periodically, oversee the strategy and advise management so as to ensure the best fit between short term profitability (shareholders) and long-term sustainability (stakeholders: employees, government, society).

Expert power: Due to the exponential growth of information and the shortened knowledge cycle, expert power is perhaps more powerful than other types of powers in the digital era. Today’s top leaders need to deal with constant ambiguity, they naturally gravitate to a leadership role when things are unknown, things will change, technology is involved, or a tough problem has to be solved, etc. Top organizational leaders such as BoDs should practice knowledge power relevant for either solving tough business problems or coaching the next generation of business managers or professionals.

The highly influential leaders make the splash based on their knowledge and insight and continuous delivery, not just the follower to chase the waves blindly. Knowledge is the ‘power’; wisdom is the exceptionally effective use of power. The expert power has the foundation of in-depth knowledge, profound insight, and abstract wisdom, Wisdom can provide a moral and ethical framework or boundaries for the use of expert power effectively. The top board leaders with high brainpower and energy can clarify a clearer vision, shape advanced mindsets, balance hard and soft skills, and build a portfolio of leadership capabilities in lifting leadership effectiveness.

Influence power: Leadership is an influence, the leader’s influence is based on courage to inspire, confidence to assert, wisdom to negotiate, and uniqueness to bridge. The corporate board takes the praise or the blame depending largely on their ability to influence corporate governance which has a direct link to each business and their processes; not only from the financial results, but also from the involvement and signs being displayed inside the organization, about what guidance, values, and principles governing the company's commercial activities as well as the business outcomes.

Leadership influence is made via inspiring, to encourage others toward your vision by communicating in-depth and breadth; Influence is made via asserting, to present ideas via confidence, persuasion, and expertise; Influence is made via negotiating and exchanging, to get others’ see your point of view, make tradeoff or compromise. The degree of leadership influence is much more complex than the leader’s title or personality.

Power is a great thing if you can use it wisely to make a positive influence and empower others to do the same! In understanding power, you can see how it can be used and then how you can give it to others to achieve common goals. Digital leaders need to practice multifaceted power in today’s knowledge economy, to build trust and enforce leadership effectiveness and maturity.

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The “Optimization” Quotes of “Digital Master” Apr, 2020

Organizational design is an ultimate expression of the organization’s strategy and structural optimization is one of the important practices to bridge digital maturity chasm.

"Digital Master” is a series of guidebooks (28 + 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, provides advice 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 “Optimization” quotes in “Digital Master.”



1 Optimization is not just about fixing things, but leveraging trade-off to improve business efficiency, flexibility, dexterity, and risk intelligence.

2 The goal of optimization is to eliminate unnecessary complications, lower cost, and fine-tune processes.

3 A structural scenario for problem-solving is a healthy process to make continuous adjustment and optimization. It goes between flexibility and a hard process, to adopt a premium solution.

4 Achieving the visibility of strategy execution provides a pathway into process optimization and dynamic capability. It helps business leaders become more future-oriented and discover the path to where they need to go.

5 Building an ideal digital workplace won’t happen overnight, and organizational structure optimization takes planning, experimenting, and scaling up.

6 Organizational design is an ultimate expression of the organization’s strategy and structural optimization is one of the important practices to bridge digital maturity chasm.

7 Organizational design is the structure and sometimes the strategies themselves that facilitate the customer-centric priority. In fact, unless the appropriate organizational structure is continuously implemented and optimized, otherwise, customer-centricity is just a buzzword.

8 You cannot make a true digital paradigm shift without breaking some old rules, optimizing certain business processes, or updating outdated best practices. Digital encourages autonomy and innovation.

9 Complexity is that critical mass point of optimization for the system in question, such that it is an integral stage in a systematic life-cycle.

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The Factors of “ABCDEFGH” for IT Strategy Management Success

Because technology is complex and the information is overloading. IT is perhaps one of the most sophisticated puzzle pieces in a modern company and it touches both hard business processes and soft human behavior. 

With the fast pace of changes and exponential growth of information, there is a danger of not having a dynamic strategy management process to develop and nurture IT-enabled business potential. The best strategies are living and ever-evolving, and when deployed, it should provide the framework for the organization going forward.

Too often, business strategy and IT strategy are developed mutually exclusive to each other. In fact, the IT strategy should be the subcomponent of business strategy. A well-defined strategy will be successful when considering the multitude of “ABCDEFGH” factors.

AB = the Apparent Benefit (of the strategy): Information Technology strategy needs to be integrated into the organization's strategy that outlines how an enterprise can achieve important business goals such as innovation fluency, process efficiency, increased employee productivity, or customer delight. The apparent benefits of having a comprehensive enterprise-wide IT management strategy in place also include decision effectiveness, cost optimization, organizational fluidity, etc, by breaking down silos and enabling better information access and analysis.

To realize the benefits from strategy management, lubricate processes, and improve IT integration with the business by clarifying IT-enabled business competencies and operation layers as well as how they fit together. "Executive management buy-in,""executive management's unconditional collaboration" plus leadership and management discipline & practices, are all critical to improve strategic management success, as well as allow the organization to measure, serve, deliver, innovate, and ultimately excel in returns.

CD = the Current Discomfort (with the existing situation) Often IT failure is caused by the management of IT rather than just IT management. IT management needs to feel discomfort with the existing situation. In many companies with lower-level of maturity, the business is the sum of pieces, IT works only within the system, it often causes silo, stifles information flow, fails to translate the high-level language of strategy into the professional language of the various staff specialty and causes management pains.

In fact, the disconnect between the business and IT is still one of the biggest root causes to fail IT and business due to silo thinking, analysis paralysis, legacy technologies, lack of business/IT understanding, not leveraging the collective brainpower of strategic vendor partnerships, lack of in-depth understanding the business capabilities or resources, and lack of outside-in customer-centric approaches, etc. Effective strategy management can help to dig into the root causes and improve IT organizational maturity.

EF = the Effort Forecast (to realize the strategy) We live in an era full of uncertainty, velocity, complexity, and ambiguity. Predict and deal with threats or disruptions that IT faces, sometimes you need to be able to look for something “hidden,” which is not always so obvious, in order to make better assumptions or improve forecast precision. Have a very good grasp of the overall business, its strategy, the marketplace, business model, and competitive distinctiveness to ensure that the IT-enabled solutions supplied to the enterprise deliver maximum value at an acceptable cost. IT has to provide both business and technical insight into how they bring success to the company as a whole transparently, holistically, and continually.

Predict what will happen and step further, and what you should do upon it. Forecast the IT effort to realize the strategy, prediction can be an outcome of the controllable relationships within a system and skillfully apply risk-based thinking to almost every discipline of IT management, including people management, financial management, asset management, reputation management, customer relationship management, organizational structure design, product or service development and so on.

GH = General Hassle (going on at the time and interfering with priorities) The organization has a limited budget and finite resources to apply to get the best yield possible to meet stakeholders’ expectations. IT leaders need to gain a clear understanding of what the priorities need to be. The right answer about the highest strategic priority depends on which of the business areas are most in need of improvement in the organization. There are always some constraints for IT organizations to balance a healthy portfolio of “running, growing, and transforming.”

Often, lack of the strategic focus or a clear understanding of what the priority needs to be is a general hassle to effective IT strategy management. There is no way to create a definitive prioritized list without a business context. There're a lot of things CIOs may already be familiar with, such as enterprise architecture, the latest technology trend, etc, and CIOs need to set project priority, weave the clear picture of business by crafting IT capabilities and competitive differentiators to ensure business for long-term perspectives and seamless strategy management.

Because technology is complex and the information is overloading. IT is perhaps one of the most sophisticated puzzle pieces in a modern company and it touches both hard business processes and soft human behavior. IT management needs to understand the multitude of “ABCDEF” factors to improve IT strategy management effectiveness by expanding its impact in every dimension to improve the company’s operational excellence, business responsiveness, performance, flexibility, digital fluency, and maturity.

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The Monthly “100 Creativity Ingredients” Book Tuning: Creativity and Inclusiveness Apr. 2020

Many think there is no innovation without inclusiveness. The most advanced societies are diverse mixtures of peoples that can spark creativity and amplify innovation.

All humans are born with raw creativity ability. Creativity has many dimensions, with multi-faceted truth and myth, manifold knowledge, and multidimensional insight. Creativity is the wings of our mind and the tempo of our heartbeat. Creativity is a constructive disruption, not so bad addiction, and a sensational phenomenon.



The purpose of  “100 Creativity Ingredients - Everyone’s Playbook to Unlock Creativity“ is to classify, scrutinize, articulate, and share insight about one hundred special creativity ingredients, to paint the picture with them, to add colors on them, to embed the music into them, and to make the story via them, in order to unleash our collective creative potential.   

                           Creativity and Inclusiveness 

Creativity and Anthropology Anthropology provides a holistic perspective of digging into the dynamic human interrelationship. Anthropology helps people understand and enliven the varied social contexts and cultural scenarios in a better way. Anthropology presents every aspect of human life and elucidates the cultural traits, complexes, and motives of specific human behavioral aspects. Anthropology helps us connect the wider dots to spark creativity, and creativity will add enriched content and unconventional wisdom to anthropology as the knowledge domain, they mutually reinforce each other.

Innovation vs. Inclusiveness Creativity is innate with many special ingredients; creativity can be developed if the conditions are right and there is inspiration, inclusiveness, encouragement, and abundance of knowledge. Innovation is then the management discipline to transform those novel ideas and achieve their business value. Many think there is no innovation without inclusiveness. The most advanced societies are diverse mixtures of peoples that can spark creativity and amplify innovation. So, how to involve people with different talents in creative thinking and actions? And how can you help to improve the harvest of the creative seed and accelerate the advancement of the society?

Is Creativity only Achieved via Diversity The world is hyper-connected, there's nothing in the universe that exists in isolation from everything else, and certainly not a culture in particular? Cultures, as a collective mindset and habit, are mainly shaped by the “mainstream” mindset at the particular time and need to be reprogrammed when it lags the era we live in, only creative and transformative leadership can make such a shift. Culture is like the soil, the key factor to spur the seed of creativity. But what is the real engine of creativity? Is creativity only achieved via diversity? Should diversity mean more about the color of characters and the difference of cognition, than the physical identity?

The Collective Creativity Creativity is serendipitous; creativity is full of color; creativity has many faces. How many forms of creativity are there? How are they different? How are they similar? Isn't what makes them similar also what makes them creative? Besides individual creativity, can creativity be manifested in the collective environment?

Cultivate a Culture of Innovation Although everyone talks about innovation and many companies intellectually understand innovation, they don’t really know how to build innovation into their culture. In many cases, companies of all sizes, especially large corporations have become too dependent on satisfying corporate regulation or protocols, and get sucked in innovation management. In essence, innovation rejuvenation is truly about how to cultivate a culture of innovation and manage a balanced innovation portfolio.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with about #6700th blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The “Digital Master” book series includes 28 books to share insight from the multidimensional digital lens and perceive the multi-faceted impact the digital era upon us is making to businesses and society. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. 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 take 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 “Belonging” Quotes of “Digital Master” Apr, 2020

Silo often causes miscommunication and reduces a sense of belonging and connection to the organization's larger mission.

"Digital Master” is a series of guidebooks (28 + 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, provides advice 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 “Belonging” quotes in “Digital Master.”

1 Collaboration is a fundamental part of what ultimately fuels inspiration, imagination, and innovation, and creating a sense of belonging enjoys understanding the complexity and guides people through it.

2 Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a motivational theory in psychology comprising different tiers of human needs, at the bottom is the basic "surviving" needs to the middle tier for" belonging" to the top tier of "self-actualization."

3 Silo often causes miscommunication and reduces a sense of belonging and connection to the organization's larger mission.

4 Many IT leaders are natural systems thinkers who can ask big questions, recognize the interconnections of things belonging to the system, as well as take a systematic approach to solve problems step by step.

5 Digital professionals belonging to different generations should learn from each other to advocate the most advanced thinking, ideas, and viewpoints from different perspectives in order to lead their organizations, and fundamentally our society to the next level of progression.

6 Collaboration creates a sense of belonging and builds trust through listening, asking questions, giving and receiving feedback, as well as dealing with conflict or even constructively advocating a point of view.

7 If you are going to motivate people, besides compensation, fair and consistent talent management should be in place, acceptance, appreciation, and affiliation can attract talent to have a sense of belonging.

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The Value of Business Architecture (Part II)

BA brings together aesthetics, use, purpose, materials, and more to create a built environment that suits its purpose now and into the future.

There is known known, known unknown, and unknown unknown, running a digital organization is challenging due to the unprecedented level of uncertainty, velocity, and complexity. Business Architecture (BA) should play a critical role in designing and managing future businesses that become truly proactive and move up the organizational maturity level by turning multidimensional factors impacting business models, business operations, and business reputation.

BA is a useful tool to manage complexity: There is no surprise, once a while, the digital seems to be going wild, and chaos swallows the order in a moment. Business becomes overly complex and people get frustrated and annoyed by not being able to accomplish things easily. Complexity is diverse, ambiguous, and dynamic with unpredictable outcomes. In the corporate scope, there are hierarchical complexity, information complexity, collaboration complexity, governance complexity, environmental complexity, etc.

BA is a useful tool to help business leaders look at complexity in different lenses and untangle it systematically in search of simpler concepts and methods. Try to diagnose the root causes of complexity, analyze what the impact of complexity is on a system (a process, business, economy) as well as look for the impact of removing some of the unnecessary complexities and foster desired complexities, enforce multidimensional business values and ensure organizations becoming sustainable and "future proof."

BA is a facilitation tool to get timely & meaningful Business intelligence: All data, from wherever it comes, is legitimate and reflective of the systems that provide it. Business Architecture helps to balance the multi-facet of facts and data, as such, the data reveals deep and essential truths about not only the business domain it covers but also about the systems that capture it. An intelligent organization can leverage BI to figure out where you were before, where you are now and where you want to go, based on data, and weave the foresight to prepare for the future of business.

With BA as a facilitating tool, business leaders and professionals can understand how data reflects reality by doing data investigation or any attempt at understanding the business context and balancing multi-facet of facts and data such as Volume, Velocity, Variety, Veracity, and Value. Analyze, model, visualize and extract information value to formulate insight to solving complex business problems. Organizations can take advantage of information to gain knowledge and insight, drive culture evolution, and transform the organization towards a more intelligent enterprise.

BA is a useful tool to simulate change: Change is the new normal with increased paces. BA provides a basis for the simulation that can offer a means to see the cascading effect when the change is made in organizations. Business architecture seeks to represent the architecture of an organization in terms of information, process, capability, and performance, either as it exists or as it is intended to be, thereby facilitating the planning and communicating of business change initiatives, applying multifaceted perspectives unfolding into wider multi-dimensionally enhancing systemic continuum.

BA is a useful tool to help define strategic goals and measurements of change management, assess the maturity level of business change capabilities, consider service, process, information, asset, people, etc, dimensions of the adequacy of the capability to fulfill their goals to change, make regular reviews to chart progress and fine-tune change efforts. Continuously try to improve, develop, and change everything in a prioritized order as long as it creates a more long-term business advantage and solves critical business challenges.

BA helps to envision customers’ perspective, deliver customers’ outcomes efficiently and reliably: Being customer-centric is one of the most important business goals in any forward-thinking business today. BA can offer viewpoints or approaches for modeling total customer experience. Valid business architecture and strategy mapping allow you to understand customers further and what they value, identify gaps, diagnose existing problems, and come up with better solutions.

Engaging customers directly on an ongoing basis to see how their goals are changing is a good way to architect customer-centric organizations. BA is a useful tool to help the degree of customer centricity alignment – customer strategy, the process to the strategy, technology to process, and organizational design to all - tells the story. The larger challenge is how you create a common understanding of the business of what customer centricity is and more importantly how every individual can contribute.

BA is an effective tool to retain institutional memory and knowledge: The border of knowledge domains is blurred and the scope of knowledge is expanded in the continual base. The premium business solutions often require an integration of different sets of knowledge and digital fluency across multiple disciplines. Business Architecture should help to manage multi-disciplinary knowledge, look for leverage within the ecosystems, industries, and domain knowledge that defines the business interactions and interrelationships, reference and intelligence, etc.

BA provides a practical knowledge management framework. An essential role for Knowledge Management is the need to enable knowledge flow, connect ideas but also people, and crucially manage to generate business value. The goal of knowledge management is about optimizing processes to keep knowledge flow and update for creating business value and producing measurable progress in the business. A thoughtful and systematic knowledge management solution needs to explore the breadth and depth of knowledge, its prospects, and practice to improve the collective learning capability.

Consider the digital organization as the self-organized but interlaced and hyper-connected system. The value of Business Architecture is for designing and managing the digital organization that can respond to multidimensional factors impacting business model, operations, and reputation. BA brings together aesthetics, use, purpose, materials, and more to create a built environment that suits its purpose now and into the future.

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#6700 Blog Posting Celebration: Understand Human Capital and Unleash Human Potential Apr. 2020

Whatever you use to refer to the people in the organization, there is an investment that is needed in order to achieve the business goal and this investment has various perspectives.

Digitization and globalization have a huge impact on the business and world, and talent has become the defining theme of this new digital paradigm. People are always the most invaluable asset the business should invest in, tapping the unlimited human potential is both art and science, it takes out of box thinking and a trans-disciplinary approach. Here is a set of blogs to celebrate the #6700 blog posting.

Understand Human Capital and Unleash Human Potential 

Three Aspects of Human Capital People are the most invaluable asset, and Talent Management is always one of the most important disciplines to manage the business. There are quite a few terms that have been used. From personnel management to Human Resource Management to Human Capital Management of today. Whatever you use to refer to the people in the organization, there is an investment that is needed in order to achieve the business goal and this investment has various perspectives - one being the human perspective. So organizations need to see this as a critical aspect of growth and invest in their people, thereby taking the debate away from the term of reference to the reality of what it should be.

Human Capital vs. Human Resource Today's organizations have a big disconnect between talent management strategies and business strategies - when business parties involved in human capital and resources management understand the connection and are able to create those links concretely, not abstractly or theoretically - then they become successful and share that strategic value adds of transformation with the organizational leaders. But first things first, what’s the difference between Human Capital and Human Resource?

How to Digitalize Human Capital Management As always, talent is the most significant asset in any organization today. However, many businesses still treat their people as cost or resources only, lack of integrative approach to manage performance & potential; knowledge & culture in a holistic way. With the latest digital technologies and social platform, how to manage your human capital with effectiveness and agility?

The Breadth and Depth of Tapping the Human Potential Potential is about the ability to grow and develop into something in the future. There are physical potential, intellectual potential, and spiritual potential. How to unleash the abundance of human potential is perhaps one of the best rewarding areas for human society advancement. But it is the arena full of myths. Metaphorically, human potential is like Spring Water, the deeper you dig, the more it flows out. To tap human potential is also like drilling the oil, if exploring too narrowly, you might never detect the right spot; if deploying the shallow field only, you won't touch the right point either. Tapping the limitless human potential is both art and science. It takes the out-of-box thinking and trans-disciplinary approach.

Bridging the Potential Gap Organizations today need both performance and potential. Performance keeps your business running, churning numbers, etc, whereas potential looks at an employee that can bring your company to the next level, and the collective human potential in the organization is the greatest thing the organization should ever invest in because it is the driving force to catalyze the business growth and build the unique organizational advantage the competitors cannot beat. So, how to understand both potential and performance at the deeper level, bridge the gap to unleash the collective potential and accelerate business performance to the next level?

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with about #6700+ 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 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.

Read More