Initiation & Integration

To speed up change and spark creativity, the digital business life cycle could be viewed as resulting in emergent means of shaping a vision reflecting the objectives and soul of the company, participation, adaptability, innovation, and people-centricity.

Change is inevitable, organizational change has become a practice within an organization, but too often changes are made as a reaction to outer impulses, crisis, and demands. This is the bureaucracy’s way of meeting the challenges. 

A digital transformation is achieved via dynamic Strategy-Execution-Change lifecycle management, though it is not all linear steps, but an iterative, ongoing and upgoing change continuum. What are digital CIO’s profiles and how to reboot IT to get digital ready and cultivate the culture of learning and innovating?

      

  Initiation & Integration 

Information & Integration Modern organization has its own sophistication- silo functions, the sea of data, and the pool of talents, etc. To run business as a holistic living thing rather than “the sum of pieces,” it’s important to “put things together, and optimize,” “process, integrate, and refine information” to gain business insight. There are different complexities at a different time or dimension and there are multilateral integration to achieve business coherence.

Initiative & Involvement Change is inevitable. Running a business today is an iterative planning-action continuum. High performance organizations take business initiatives proactively and drive continuous progress steadfastly. Change is never for its own sake, any business initiative, especially change, should be viewed as an "opportunity" for solving business problems, improving employee productivity, delighting customers, optimizing costs or improving business products/services/processes.

Innovation & Integration Nowadays enterprises are inherently and intensely complex, diverse, and ambiguous with unpredictable outcomes. There are unknown interactions and very high inner dynamics in business complexity. To become nimbler, people-centric, and more intelligent and resilient, organizations today cannot be organized using the outdated or mechanistic paradigm that resulted in silos or bureaucracies. It’s important and more challenging to design a socio-technical system, rather than form a "data-driven mechanistic system."

Idealization-Integration Compared to the other executive positions, the CIO role continues to be shaken up, refined, reinvented and reenergized. The magic “I” of the CIO title sparks many imaginations and modern CIOs need to wear different hats and play multiple roles. The purpose of "CIO Master - Unleash the Digital Potential of IT " is to provide guidelines for building a framework to run a highly effective, highly innovative and highly mature digital IT organization. Also, it provides the principles to reinvent CIO leadership via practicing multitudes of digital influence. Here are a set of blogs for brainstorming the role of CIOs and reinvent IT to get digital ready.

Innovation Integration & Implementation The characteristics of digital transformation are high velocity, hyper-connectivity, hyper-complexity, and interdependence. The organizations are like the switch connected to the dynamic ecosystem which is controlled by both internal and external factors. To speed up change and spark creativity, the digital business life cycle could be viewed as resulting in emergent means of shaping a vision reflecting the objectives and soul of the company, participation, adaptability, innovation, and people-centricity.

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 minds across the globe. The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with about #7500 blog postings. Among 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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Unimaginable

Influence is thought-provoking, insightful, and unimaginable. Defining your true purpose is a helpful instrument to guide yourself, your team, your business, and your relations along the other dimensions.

"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 “Unimaginable” quotes in “Digital Master.”


Life is like a seed, inside each seed, there is an unseen potential, unleashed energy; unimaginable colors and uncompromised substances; a big strong tree is metaphorically inside this tiny seed, but it will never grow unless planted and nourished.

It’s important to create or nurture an inclusive environment in which people will genuinely feel good, willingly get involved with commitment, and will demonstrate unimaginable contribution, and the working environment becomes healthier, happier, and creative.

To discover unimaginable uniqueness of people, you need to look at all aspects of their individual traits, work ethic, influence, creativity, experience, capability, achievements and performance, as well as the hidden potential.

To uncover unimaginable uniqueness of employees, the management needs to pay more attention to those shining spots: Who can bring unique insight, who can find better ways to solve problems or delight customers; who has the courage to debate with good intention, who is just unconventionally different, who is a positive influencer for business culture? Etc.

Influence is thought-provoking, insightful, and unimaginable. Defining your true purpose is a helpful instrument to guide yourself, your team, your business, and your relations along the other dimensions.

To discover unimaginable uniqueness of people, you need to look at all aspects of their individual traits, work ethic, influence, creativity, experience, capability, achievements and performance, as well as the hidden potential each employee has if given the opportunity to excel within the work environment.

Once the leadership starts to understand this basic fact, its mindset changes from that of the limitation to the possibility, and it becomes ready to create or nurture an inclusive environment in which people will genuinely feel good, willingly get involved with commitment, and will demonstrate unimaginable contribution, and the working environment becomes more healthier and creative.

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Inference & Intervention

Organizations today cannot be organized using the outdated or mechanistic paradigm that resulted in bureaucracies. Digital leaders and professionals today need to be in a continuous learning mode with interdisciplinary knowledge, strategic reasoning skills..

Modern organizations are complex systems. Complexity is diverse, ambiguous, and dynamic with unpredictable outcomes. It is often erroneously confused with the term complication. Nevertheless, complexity and complication do not mean the same thing. Something that is complex is not necessarily difficult, but something that is complicated does have a high degree of difficulty. 

Leadership is complex as there are so many traits and characteristics that are considered when evaluating leadership maturity

What is the gap between the complexity of leaders' roles and leaders' minds? Organizations today are hyper connected, hyper diverse and hyper-complex, there are thinking gaps, knowledge gaps, capability gaps, etc, you simply can't resolve the 21st-century problems with the mindsets shaped half-century ago. The individual mindset or "personal paradigm" is much deeper. It is related to your functioning as a person - how you think about yourself and the world. It takes a substantial intervention on an individual level, working to expose and unravel the existing personal paradigm and then introduce a new paradigm. Knowledge workforce, especially business leaders today need to be deep thinkers and effective self-learners, continuous learning is a great habit to keep their minds fresh and knowledge updated. Then, they apply their learning, act, observe the consequences of their actions, make inferences about those consequences, perform better, and make continuous improvement.

To bridge the gap between the complexity of leaders' roles and leaders' minds, it’s important to gain an in-depth understanding of the “VUCA” business new normal, the multitude of business relationships, the multidimensional shareholders’ value, and visible & invisible successful business factors well. To mind the gaps, those who are leading the change must first examine their own mindset -how easily or difficult the change will be to complete, their perceptions of change agents who take change initiatives, their decision making about the direction of the change, their methodology about how change is done; The degree, scope, and nature of the change required. Besides soft leadership, communication skills, it’s also important to develop business domain knowledge, multiple management experiences, and organizational restructuring skills, etc, to drive transformative changes.

What developmental interventions are most effective at fostering mental growth in leaders so that they thrive in complexity? Organizations not only need good managers to take care of today’s business but also have to grow the future leaders with sophistication to deal with the complex and volatile digital ecosystem. In order to determine the correct training intervention, organizations need to have a good grasp of the need for the soft skills training prior to any course determination and development, proactively evolve cognitive diversity, creative diversity, cultural diversity, knowledge/skill/background/education diversity, and personality diversity, etc, and improve leadership maturity.

Digital leaders need to always look at the capabilities and skills that they don't have so that they can build a winning team and complement each other. Foster mental growth in leaders and build differentiated competency so that they thrive in complexity. There are a variety of development & training needed such as conflict management, emotional intelligence, confidence, coaching (Mentoring), positive mindset (thinking/attitude),  influencing, cross-cultural sensitivity, etc. Business leaders can lead with the right mindset to develop a modern digital organization with every dip in the business lifecycle.

How effective are leaders in tackling complex organizational/social/global issues once they have experienced advanced mental growth? Organizations are indeed becoming more complex and need to become more flexible and re-organized in a simple way using a clear measure of complexity. Business leaders today need to have mental toughness with tolerance of ambiguity, be comfortable with uncertainty, unpredictability, conflicting directions, and multiple demands. They can comprehend dynamic, deal with the mountain of information, master induction or deduction; understand variables, interfaces, interactions, intervention, weigh in varying decision factors, convert the information into valuable knowledge and precious insight in handling business problems effectively.

To deal with fast-paced changes and continuous disruptions, growth mindset and cognitive intelligence are in strong demand to ride learning curves and make the progressive movement. Once they have experienced advanced mental growth and emotional excellence, they can walk through the cycle of communicating, influencing, listening, understanding your audience, knowing the purpose of your communication efforts, choosing the right morality, giving and receiving feedback, negotiation, in order to manage the complex system and the people of the complex system effortlessly.

What is the "complexity" between the levels of hierarchical complexity at which a leader can currently operate given the decision she/he needs to make in her role? Hierarchies bring certain levels of system inventions in the industrial era as they provide system stability, efficiency and resilience in the considerably static industrial era. However, within traditional hierarchical structures, mechanical 'command/control' mindsets appear to be the norm, and compliance focused performance management stifles innovation. In the emerging digital age with information exponentiality, high velocity, nonlinearity, and interdependence, the overly rigid hierarchy stops the digital flow and stifles change.

Hierarchical complexity, as opposed to other forms of complexity, applied to leaders' minds, their roles, their organizational cultures. You can have a flat formal structure in which people actually operate from a hierarchical mindset, as well as a hierarchical formal structure in which people actually operate from a flat mindset. To optimize business hierarchy and drive successful changes, business leaders need to dig through complexity by asking: Are we increasing in hierarchical complexity because we need to coordinate more things? are we increasing in network complexity because of the number of nodes and connections in the organizational environment? Are we increasing in governance complexity because the management discipline and GRC practices are interdependent than ever?

Organizations today cannot be organized using the outdated or mechanistic paradigm that resulted in bureaucracies. Digital leaders and professionals today need to be in a continuous learning mode with interdisciplinary knowledge, strategic reasoning skills. Stimulate creative conflicts, make necessary intervention, challenge existing thoughts, knowledge, or standards, seek additional knowledge and experience, co-create knowledge, of something new leading innovation and growth and drive transformative changes.

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Performance Management Brief: Innovative Scoreboard

Innovation score means an attempt to measure innovation; so the factors included in any scoring system will depend on what you are looking to evaluate.

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.

  

    Innovative-scoreboard  

Innovationscoreboard The innovation indicators vary depending on who is doing the measuring, and how they are measuring. It’s contextual. Innovation is about transforming novel ideas into business values. Innovation score of the organization means an attempt to measure innovation management effectiveness for improving the return on investment. The factors included in any scoring system will depend on what you are looking to evaluate (individual vs. team vs. organization;...

Informative-scoreboard The key variable in actively using a Balanced Scorecard is always the attitude and culture of the organizations, the leadership traits of executives and decision makers.Effective scorecards are by nature, consciously and purposefully constructed to help business leaders make better decisions based on data, not just gut feelings, and improve organizational manageability. It provides the business management a holistic view about the progress of...

InnovatorScoreboard See-through Innovators from the heart and mind. Innovation is about transforming novel ideas into business values. Innovation score means an attempt to measure innovation; so the factors included in any scoring system will depend on what you are looking to evaluate (individual vs. organization? potential vs. past performance?), this is usually done through innovation indicators. What’re the pros and cons of measuring innovation and score...

IT-transformationscoreboard The digital transformation scorecard allows you to focus on the most important things. Without scorecards, it will become like searching for a needle in the haystack. Forward-looking organizations are on the journey of digital transformation. How would you calculate the digital maturity score of your organization? Which management metrics should you apply to measure the progress of changes? Proactive or reactive? On the track or too slow?

IT-Scoreboard  IT performance needs to well reflect the business value in which IT can contribute both strategically and operationally. Traditional IT is still being labeled as a cost center, as value hasn’t been conveyed in a structured or quantified way, or it only focuses on measuring internal value (cost efficiency, internal customer satisfaction), but it may not reflect the full set of value IT can bring to accelerate business growth or delight end customers....

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 minds across the globe. The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with about #7500 blog posting. Among 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.



The "Performance Master" Book Amazon Order Link

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The "Performance Master" Book Introduction Slideshare

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The "Performance Master" Book Introduction

The "Performance Master" Book Chapter 1 Introduction

The "Performance Master" Book Chapter 2 Introduction

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The "Performance Master" Book Chapter 4 Introduction

The "Performance Master" Book Chapter 5 Introduction

The "Performance Master" Book Conclusion

The "Performance Master" Quote Collection I

The "Performance Master" Quote Collection II

The "Performance Master" Quote Collection III

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Problem-Solving via Different lenses

Take a multidimensional and integral view to understand the problem. In most cases, you don't understand your business environment because you have never looked outside the boundary of the problem. 

Problem-solving is about seeing a problem and actually discovering a real solution to that problem. Many of today’s problems are complex, it’s critical to look at problems scientifically, artistically, philosophically, psychologically, and sociologically via cross disciplinary dimensions. These dimensions interact and mutually influence each other.

 Problem-solving masters today not just reactively look at problems via different lenses, they actually proactively reframe problems, dissolve problems, or prevent problems accordingly.

Understand and solve problems scientifically: Science is an objective matter and it claims to be based on both inductive and deductive reasoning. Technically, Science = "At" & "How." What defines science from chance is the ability to apply known facts, repeat a process with the same resultant solution every time. Follow scientific principles to identify the problem-what is exactly wrong-the exact description of the problem, leverage five “WHYs” and scientific analytics techniques to discover the real cause of the problem and address it logically.

Mathematics is the science, and it is the design, construction, and operation of deductive systems, based on the principles of logic and the patterns of nature, helps us understand our perceptions of reality to articulate the problem scientifically. It also helps to figure out solutions by integrating knowledge-based data into analytic models simulation testing implemented for problem-solving or design nonlinear models for “predictive" cause and effect in system dynamics. Methodologically, find the factors involved in the "incorrect" outcome. See if you can measure or weigh each factor's contribution to the result, or the description of the unit of measure. Build a hypothetical equation that describes an "incorrect" outcome. See how changing any of it gets better or worsens that outcome.

Reason cause-effect and dissolve problems philosophically: Philosophy is a subjective matter and it’s the history of ideas and an ongoing inquiry into the nature of things based on abstract reasoning rather than empirical methods. It’s important to apply philosophy to ask questions that other sciences cannot even think about. Philosophy can allow you to see the cause and effect thoroughly and help you see reasoning in action. It not only allows you to reason the visible, but also perceives the invisible elements of the problem.

Philosophical thinking encourages you to ask big “WHY” questions. Philosophical problem-solvers abstract the quintessential from complexity, discover the root cause of problems, not only to solve the problems, but to dissolve them. To put another way, philosophy takes on problems of knowledge, but perhaps its greatest strength is in its ability to "solve" problems elsewhere. Philosophically, there isn't always a right or wrong choice in any situation and there are a lot of grays. Observations and conclusions in the field of philosophy may be acceptable or unacceptable to different people of different social and ethnic backgrounds.

Generate ideas and practice creative problem solving artistically: Creative problem solvers are in demand because they tend to be non-conformists, they are skeptical of, but open with outside opinions, and connect the dots to spark creativity. There is more flow of creative ideas, the more patterns you discover, the more alternative solutions could emerge. Sometimes breakthrough ideas or creative solutions are rarely or never logical in foresight, but they will look logical in hindsight.

A problem often leads to opportunities because they challenge us to address something that is not working before. Creative people judge the world for themselves and discover possibilities and create multiple pathways via interactions, associations, and expansions, etc. They are flexible to share the “right” things with others, also be open to “wrongs,” not necessarily real wrong, perhaps the complementary viewpoint for enforcing creative problem-solving. They continue to brainstorm potential "grade" or "range" solutions by reinforcing coherence, consolidating and integrating ideas to come up with an innovative solution.

Identify problems sociologically: Sociology is the study of human interaction, usually within the context of organized groups, communities, or societies. Thinking sociologically requires imagination and insight, to identify and explain the interconnectivity of different problems. Always remember that problems exist not in isolation, but as an interacting system of problems or an undesirable social phenomenon. Sociology brings much more depth to our knowledge with an interdisciplinary understanding of interdependence of problems in order to come up with holistic solutions. But if you spot the wrong problem, it perhaps means more damage than what you think of.

In today’s hyper connected and interdependent business world, solving problems really matter could mean that there is the opportunity you can take care of a chain of problems, not just an individual problem. Collective creativity derives from sociology, you will get different types of ideas internally and externally and if you want to profit from both of them. It’s important to apply sociological discipline to stimulating and measuring the originality and creativity in problem-solving. The goal is to maximize the invaluable inputs to find the best ideas and its market impact and profit.

Addressing and solving problems psychologically: One of the most influential aspects of people's psychology is how they perceive the problem and how they relate to it. There is no one size fits all approach to addressing the different psychological responses and thereby reducing anxiety because there are different psychological perspectives. We know that anger and fear are counterproductive to learning or building trust, for collaborative problem-solving. There are optimistic vs. pessimistic perspectives of problems, the challenge with problem-solving is to create emotional states and psychological perspectives for people to reduce anxiety, and become more positive and open to new perspectives and get more evolved.

Opportunities arise from the problems that people face. All problems are opportunities, but not all opportunities are problems. To discover the heart of issues and solve them effectively, digital leaders and professionals should change “we always do things like that” mentality by exploring different ways of understanding and alternative ways to solve problems. Think both in macro and micro ways,think positively, assume that every problem has multiple solutions, always explore different choices, ask open questions to themselves and others to explore new possibilities and come up with premium solutions.

Take a multidimensional and integral view to understand the problem. In most cases, you don't understand your business environment because you have never looked outside the boundary of the problem. It is important to discover the containing system has social, ecological, economic and political elements and you must advance the development of all of these factors in order to solve problems creatively and holistically.

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Keywords Summary: Invaluable

Businesses value view is multi-faceted and it’s interesting to see how business value is in the eye of the beholder.

From one generation to the next, the substance of leadership does not change, it’s about the future, change, and influence. However, digital leadership trends will continue to emerge. 

Here is a set of featured blogs to dig into the “keywords” of the 21st century to brainstorm the future of digital leadership and business transformation.

    Invaluable

Invaluable Today we are inextricably linked in real time and in ways far more imminent than most realize. Running a modern business is not just about crunching numbers, but also needs to connect the dots and paint colors. Organizations today need nothing less than a paradigm shift in their thinking about the fundamentals of how organizations work, as well as how to leverage information, evolve rapid changes and catalyze innovation.

Invaluable II Organizations across industrial sectors face hyper-competition and continuous disruptions. Running a successful business is about creating value to stakeholders. Business value is multi-faceted, not all business value is directly related to ROI. So it’s interesting to see how business value is in the eye of the beholder. To avoid fast obsolescence and gain long term advantage, business management needs to explore different paths for designing new business models, understand business value chain/stream, and take the alternative value creation approach to accelerate performance and unleash business potential.

Value Chain & Stream Management Businesses value view is multi-faceted and it’s interesting to see how business value is in the eye of the beholder. The business value stream/ modeling/mapping, once built, is a good tool to visualize the end-to-end enterprise. In fact, enterprise has many value streams, from ‘opportunity to vision’; from ‘vision to blueprint’; from ‘blueprint to roadmap’; from ‘roadmap to plan, ’and from ‘plan to solution,’ etc.

Information Technology as a Systematic Business Value Generator There are far larger, business-oriented responsibilities on the horizon IT should take, and there is also vertical permeation IT needs to make for accelerating business performance. In today’s digital business ecosystem with the exponential growth of information and ever-evolving digital technologies, Information Management is a key differentiator between high-performing organizations and mediocre companies.

Knowledge Management Structure and Value Create a structure for knowledge management that allows the business to measure it qualitatively as well as quantitatively for shaping a knowledge-savvy organization. Knowledge is information that has the potential to generate value. Knowledge is power. Compared to the physical asset, knowledge is more intangible, complex and dynamic. Some companies have managed it, but very few companies are doing what they should do to design a knowledge management structure....

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 minds across the globe. The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with about #7500 blog postings. Among 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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Unique

Competitive uniqueness makes you shine even on a raining day. It provides the opportunity to think of new ways to do things; it helps the business to differentiate itself from competitors.

"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 “Unique” (iii) quotes in “Digital Master.”

To discover unimaginable uniqueness of people, you need to look at all aspects of their individual traits, work ethic, influence, creativity, experience, capability, achievements and performance, as well as the hidden potential.

To identify potential and create an authentic organizational culture to encourage employees’ growth, business leaders and talent managers need to pay more attention to those shining spots: Who can bring unique POVs, etc.

Competitive uniqueness allows the business to “dream bigger,” and achieve the art of possible - it involves new ways of bringing together ideas and resources to create something novel, figure out “the best or most innovative solution" for the business' requirement, offering added value and feature insights based on system understanding.

Competitive uniqueness makes you shine even on a raining day. It provides the opportunity to think of new ways to do things; it helps the business to differentiate itself from competitors.

The differentiation provided by unique capabilities usually is more long-lived than differentiation provided by marketing actions that can be copied easier. Hence, a clear understanding of what capabilities, services or solutions are supporting your competitive advantage is needed in order to build unique competency.

The competitive necessity and competitive uniqueness are both important, the maturity of a business capability would be based on its ability to deliver on either customer needs or to achieve the desired capability outcome, but also importantly, to build the differentiated brand and the long-term business competency.

IT staff’s collective competitive necessity will keep the business light on, while their collective uniqueness can help grow and even transform the organization. Thus, advocate the culture for talent to compete for uniqueness.

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Impact & Interrelationship

The role of Business Architecture in designing and planning future enterprise is both interesting and challenging for helping the organization make transition. 

Business disruptions are inevitable, and digital transformation is unstoppable. Business Architecture contains the organizational context and is strategic in that it gives direction to the business design and transformation which is worth its weight because of its high impact on the organization’s long-term prosperity. 

It helps to architect business in the transition to the strategic state, calculate the organization’s performance score, keep change on track and make continuous improvements.

Navigability: Business Architecture is a great tool for business leaders to navigate the business through the “VUCA” new normal, clarify the direction of the company, bring up a long-term standpoint, orchestrate the organizational interrelationship between people and process. It creates a high level of consensus which implies that an acceptable, transparent, and credible basis for evaluating, selecting, and resourcing projects exists or can be constructed.

The future of the organization is fluid, flexible, informative, and autonomous, very few organizations understand all the gains they could enjoy from organizational structure or process tuning. How easy is it to find your way and jump from place to place in the architecture repository based on various types of associations/relationships between elements. Business Architecture brings the systems understanding of how relationships, ecosystems, market dynamics, and the connections between related business functions work. It helps to navigate change, especially the large scale of business transformation smoothly.

Organizational Changeability: Change is inevitable, organizations shouldn’t just respond to them in a reactive way. You have to transform the company's underlying functions, processes, cultures, or structure to get digital ready. Thus, Business Architecture is a highlight which changes to focus on, which one can be ignored; and it is a steering instrument to provide a holistic view so that the business problem can be seen from every relevant perspective and every perspective has a whole world behind itself, in order to facilitate change or movement in a company.

Change cannot be just another thing that needs to be accomplished, it has to be woven into the organizational culture, process, and action of the organization. Quality should in particular focus on the result of the change. An enterprise has an architecture, you need to make trade-off decisions in interventions and these have outcomes and impacts. Business Architecture is an important tool that helps to look at the transition and state transformation of the enterprise, facilitate communication, navigate through Change Management, and bring up business value continuously.

Business Agility: “Agile discipline” is about embracing “agile” principles and values, setting guidelines and policies, and developing the best and next practices to enforce business manageability. In many traditional organizations, there are many roadblocks such as silo mindset, mediocre culture, or lack of prioritization, etc, to take an agile way. Agile Business Architecture emerges over time, incrementally thinking about the future, but doesn’t overbuild the architecture. It is about impactful choices upfront that will make later choices easy.

Agile needs to be the philosophy to perceive multidimensional business values. Agility has the very characteristics such as Readability - Clarity, Understandability, Comprehensibility Usability, Simplicity, etc. Business Architecture is to be open about your architecture, encourage criticism, allow requirements to drive your architecture updates.

Scalability: To scale up either best practices or innovation effect, organizations must begin thinking about ways with strategic planning to broaden their ecosystem perspective. It enables the organization to become more responsive and flexible. A good architecture should be able to respond to the times and that can mean a growing or shrinking company and orchestrate strategic planning. It needs to do the things it knows quickly and efficiently. With effective tools, leading organizations are able to identify the critical spot to scale up, and leverage the framework approach such as BA for reaching the next level of organizational maturity systematically.

To effectively respond to the digital dynamics, companies must begin thinking about ways with strategic planning perspective via business architecture lens to broaden their ecosystems and revenue streams while becoming more responsive. It’s important to scale up and speed up by adding the right ingredients and going digital internally and ecologically. From the organizational design and structure tuning perspectives, align the different parts of the digital ecosystem to adopt more points of integration with the digital loosely coupled modular capabilities and processes, to build up dynamic business competency.

Digital Transformation can give businesses the ability to apply real-time insights across the organization in ways never possible before. The role of Business Architecture in designing and planning future enterprise is both interesting and challenging for helping the organization make transition. The broader you can oversee and the deeper you can perceive the holistic digital impact, the further you can reach business vision and the pinnacle of digital transformation.

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Innovation-Insight 2/19/21

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

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with 7500+ blog postings 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.

Influential-professionalism Digital workforce is multi-generational, multicultural, and multi-devicing and the digital workplace is diverse and dynamic today. Business professionalism is critical for today’s digital workforce based on simple logic: Unprofessionalism leads to poor judgment and then drives ineffective decisions which will cause the business fragile and stagnate.

Innovative-culturist Culture is defined as "the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another." Culture is collective mindset, attitude, and behavior. Culture of an organization or our society remains a fingerprint and an identity of the entity. It’s a crucial element for lifting the organization and our society to the next level of advancement and prosperity.

Innovation & Intrapreneurship Leadership is complex yet simple: Complex in that there are so many traits and characteristics that are considered when evaluating a leader. Simplicity in that the substance of leadership never changes, it’s all about the future and change; direction and dedication; influence and innovation. The purpose of the book: “Leadership Master - Five Digital Trends to Leap Leadership Maturity” is to convey the vision of digital leadership, share the insight about leadership maturity, and summarize five emergent digital leadership trends

Informative-scoreboard The key variable in actively using a Balanced Scorecard is always the attitude and culture of the organizations, the leadership traits of executives and decision makers. Effective scorecards are by nature, consciously and purposefully constructed to help business leaders make better decisions based on data, not just gut feelings, and improve organizational manageability. It provides the business management a holistic view about the progress of...

Inferential-comprehension "Decision Masters” refer to the digital leaders or professionals who can leverage multidimensional thought processes, information and intuition, and take a step-wise scenario for making effective decisions consistently. “Decision Masters” also refer to the businesses or organizations that follow a set of well-defined principles, leverage fine-tuned decision processes, efficient information management system, decision frameworks, tools, and metrics to enable people across the organization making effective decisions collaboratively.

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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InstrumentalBoDs

Forethoughtful BoDs need to gain a deeper understanding of the enterprise in order to be an insightful culture navigator, a credible actor in the strategic dialogue and steer the organization in the right direction.

The corporate boards are the guiding roles, like the steering wheel of their company. In the globalized business environment, very often, people of various nations or cultures are in various facets/functions. Senior leadership teams such as BoDs need to lift from reactive to active and proactive mode for adapting to the dynamic business environment with continuous disruptions, make an objective assessment of their organizational culture maturity, and become culture navigator of their company.

 

BoDs enthusiastically design, navigate and advocate a set of cohesive digital culture as a pathway to change: Culture is about how people think and do things in the organization. Every organization exhibits a culture. The departments within the organization have a culture. Anytime people work together for an extended period of time, a culture is formed. The corporate board’s role, in large part, is to make good decisions that enhance the value creation for the organization. Organizational culture needs to be first shaped at the boards, C-suite, and executives need to become culture masters first. “Culture” is invisible but a Big Talk. Accountability and oversight are all part of the game changes that boards must address.

Leadership should be thought of in terms of empowering others. The Corporate Board sets the tone for making good policies to navigate culture in the right direction. Organizations need to do what their policies say or have the policies say what they do. In practice, aligning a workforce toward intentional cultural shifts can be quite complex, understand the culture and its essential first. Building a performance culture starts with leadership advocate and management of organizational change, something that is rarely successful when driven from the bottom up. It’s important to cultivate culture change champions who can instill drive, passion, and enthusiasm, expand knowledge, harness skills, build capabilities, for the whole organization and direct that to a unifying and shared goal and sustain changes consistently.

BoD leaders can influence/enhance the culture via empowerment and delegation: Envision and advocate the new culture and understand the inertia of old one. The digital corporate board is diversified, cognitive, proactive, and instrumental. Their leadership effectiveness is based on the leadership substances such as vision and purpose with digital leadership styles such as participation, coaching or delegation to influence corporate cultures. They need to evaluate the degree of empowerment by asking: How much delegation is permitted. What is the decision-making freedom at various levels of hierarchy? They can give full empowerment to a matured management team, but not to a team that is not mature enough. To give empowerment blindly is dangerous. Unclear or ambiguous delegation inevitably leads to unsatisfactory results.

Nowadays, innovation is the most critical business competency. Boards should understand that innovation is not one individual's or even a department's responsibility, it is a cultural issue. It could be a challenge to change the culture without top board leadership guidance and empowerment. It falls into the hands of leadership to enable, manage and lead with guidelines, systems and processes to achieve desired results. Great boards are heterogeneous, inquisitive, intelligent, effective, innovative and influential. Navigate and make cultural influence based on open leadership, creativity, sound judgment and inclusiveness.

Deal with cultural conflict and overcome negativity wisely: A company may have its own unique set of cultures. There can be diverse and sometimes conflicting cultures that coexist due to sub divisional culture and different characteristics of the management team. The negative culture has many causes such as uninspiring homogeneous leadership, destructive office politics, bureaucracy, or myopic goal setting, etc. The right way to deal with conflict is to identify them right at the start, find the root causes, and handle them wisely.

As experience between positive performing cultures and mediocre or negative cultures is that they evolve from the platform of trust and respect that cascades from the top. Effective boards will, for the most part, go through a learning process, relationship building and understanding of what it takes to get cross-cultural agreements. They should avoid the pitfalls such as misleading simplistic views of corporate culture or the misinformation that the problems of the organization are. They are responsible for setting principle guidelines, grounding rules and policies to shape the positive culture. But in mind, the overly restrictive policies will lead to micromanagement or too much controlling which leads to business bureaucracy,

Digital workforce in organizations today are multi-generational, multicultural and multi-tasking. Those that have the most effective organizational culture are where the senior team really lives the vision, values, and ethos of the organization - and don't just pay lip-service to it. Thus, forethoughtful BoDs need to gain a deeper understanding of the enterprise in order to be an insightful culture navigator, a credible actor in the strategic dialogue to steer the organization in the right direction.

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Inferential Problem-Solving

Digital leaders and professionals today need to be in a continuous learning mode with inferential logic, interdisciplinary knowledge, strategic reasoning skills, challenge existing thoughts, standards, rules, seeking additional knowledge and experience, handle “complex problems or rewrite the rules of the competitive game" to overcome the challenge.

Problem-solving is about seeing a problem and actually finding a solution to that problem, not just the band-aid approach to fix the symptom. With “VUCA” reality, the problem-solving thought processes and practices will not be simple for many of today’s complex issues or vexing problems. Therefore, it’s important to figure out the logic behind the problem solving. 

Because trying to fix the wrong cause of a problem or fix it in the wrong way will waste time and resources, decrease productivity, and even worse, cause more problems later on. Until the underlying problem is addressed, the symptom or result will continue to return.

Logic is the ability for examining inference via analyzing, evaluating, and producing coherent argumentation: Many of today’s problems are complex, it might be a good idea to first split problems into different categories and to assess the relative importance of the different categories for them and what could be done about it. To frame the right problems, it’s important to listen to a wide range of opinions and multidimensional viewpoints in order to make sound judgments based on unbiased fact. An argument opens a new perspective, evokes paradoxical thinking, you don’t need to agree completely with the other side of viewpoint, but you can always gain empathy, insight, and new perspective to see things from the other angle.

In many cases, there are more than one way to solve problems. Make a deep analysis, take the identification of the facts and root cause and mold into a solution based on the objectives and other extenuating circumstances. Take a structural way to identify and prioritize alternative solutions, and test every assumption if possible. Evaluate which alternatives might work better than others based on reasoning, logic, calculation, and conscious weighing of expected outcomes, etc. Fact-finding and prototyping that cycling back through the process might be necessary so the best solution is found in overcoming the challenges. That is the realm of logical analysis within systems understanding in problem-solving.

Logic is perhaps the very clue hidden in varying circumstances and the abstract across disciplinary domains horizontally for systematic problem-solving: Many problems do exist because they are either ill-defined or the concept cannot be adequately captured contextually. Problems often do not exist in isolation, but as an interacting and interdependent system. Nonlinearity is an important ingredient in the systematic problem-solving formula because problem-solving based on linear logic or analytics only can sometimes cause more problems later on. The more complex the situation is, the more important it is to apply logic via multidimensional thought processes and cross disciplinary boundaries to see underneath the symptoms and dig into root causes of the problem.

The nonlinear problem solving logic comes through different characteristics such as hyper-diversity, volatility, ambiguity, unpredictability, and increased flux. Often, some critical bits and bytes of information are the missing pieces in innovative problem-solving. What exactly the problem is depends on perspectives of varying shareholders. Thus, ask for their feedback on what they believe the problem to be but also be prepared to hear something you might not like or agree with. In this way, you have better chances to see around corners without ignoring some pieces of important information, understand the problem with context, connect dots horizontally, identify the leverage points of the systems and then choose the decisive factors for effective problem-solving.

Logic enables us to dig underneath the surface or look uphill, and unpuzzle the myth of problem-solving vertically: The most important capability of the cognitive mind with strong logic is the willingness and ability to question the unknowns, identify problem areas, seek out knowledge, gain an in-depth understanding to get the heart of the matter, and dig into root causes. Besides macro and large-scale problems, there are also the intermediate and micro levels of problems. Either from top down or bottom up, lubricate the organizational hierarchy to streamline information flow and feedback-feed forward cycle for clarifying problem-solving logic and expediting problem-solving processes.

The assumption that there is a single cause to a "problem" in a complex adaptive system is unhelpful. You need to be looking for patterns rather than isolating causes. There are multiple, inter-related dynamics, you have to really dig beneath the superficial layer, see around the corner and transcend the interdisciplinary knowledge, to get to the real problem. The well-defined “CAUSE & EFFECT” relationships allow you to uncover the deeper causes, in order to make sound decisions and choose solutions and move forward.

With hyper connected and over-complex digital new normal, balance is a leverage for the problem-solving and gaining an in-depth understanding of economic and social systems, to overcome the common challenges and advance the human race. Digital leaders and professionals today need to be in a continuous learning mode with inferential logic, interdisciplinary knowledge, strategic reasoning skills, challenge existing thoughts, standards, rules, seeking additional knowledge and experience, handle “complex problems or rewrite the rules of the competitive game" to overcome the challenge.

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Information Dot Connection Sumup

Information dot connection is the foundation of innovation.

A digital workplace is all about people-centricity, empathy, innovation, agility and high-level business maturity. Digital organizations are always on, inter-dependent and hyper connected, people are always the most important asset in any organization before, today, and future.

  In an ideal digital workplace, the organizational structure is solid enough to keep people or things in order; but fluid enough to keep information and ideas flow.

              Information Dot Connection

 

Information vs. Decision Making Information and decision-making are intimately connected and interdependent. In today's digital dynamic, information is abundant and even explosive, the business has become over-complex and hyper-connected. What's the correlation between information and decision making? If a data-decision pair works fine to advocate analytics based culture; as information is the processed data; and knowledge is processed information, how about the information-decision…

Information vs. Knowledge High-performance companies are capable of mobilizing collective information, knowledge, ideas, experiences, capacities to develop business competency and learning plasticity for adapting to the ever-changing environment. The digital era upon us is about the exponential growth of information, abundant knowledge, and the rapid pace of changes. While information is an ingredient of knowledge; in order to interpret information.

Information & Innovation Information dot connection is the foundation of innovation. An information system is an abstract view of an activity system focusing on the gathering, processing, distribution, and use of information. It provides the information needed for the decisions that are part of the activity system. The Information Technology system supports the information system. It encapsulates hardware, software, data and communication technologies.

Information vs. Process Information Management cannot become mature, without decent attention to process management and vice versa. All forward-looking organizations claim they are in the information management business. Information is the lifeblood of the business, process management is to manage known from flows. Besides people, information and process are key success factors of the company. In fact, they are two sides of the same coin - it is unwise to consider one...

Information System vs. Digital Ecosystem Information systems incorporate both ends and means, continuously open to new information from the dynamic business environment, and are able to circulate information within the ecosystem seamlessly. Information is permeating into every corner of the business and becomes the lifeblood of the digital organization. Digital technology is lightweight but more powerful. Information Technology System is the "nerve system "of the digital business which...

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with about #7500th 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 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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Understand Intensity of Digital Transformation

With high velocity and frequent disruptions, the varying stakeholders need to adjust "every day" of the digital transformation journey as the current situation and its net value changes.

Digital transformation is inevitable. The purpose of going digital is to achieve high performing business results and unlocking the full business potential. There are intensity of change and there are numerous points-of-view and reference points of varying stakeholders, and they all have a different view on "change." They must raise their vision, define the “why and what” the change outputs will look like, and how to strengthen the strength and improve the weaknesses.

Higher high: The height of change management needs to be compatible with the height of strategy, and the height of Change Management is related to how ambitious the change objectives are. The higher the horizon of change is, the higher level of impact and complexity perhaps get involved. In fact, to explore the emerging digital horizon, you have to understand what it means to the business and get to know the external changing connected environment, see interrelationships rather than isolated things, and understand patterns of changes rather than static “snapshots.” Inspirational change leaders can higher the high - clarify vision, provide clear directions, bring cohesive processes, and stand by their words and motivate people to change.

In the rapidly evolving businesses and complex digital economic systems, to stay competitive, companies must explore the emerging digital horizon and ride steep change curves confidently. Change isn't always in our control, but it is amazing how much control we have in adapting to it. Digital transformation is the large-scale change effort to reach the higher horizon of business growth cycle. It is important that businesses get the best out of the people, the company with higher changeability can push people out of their comfort zone, and get the maximum motivation to maximize the performance and unleash their potential.

Deeper deep: With the overwhelming growth of information, knowledge is outdated soon. It is crucial to transform information into business insight and intelligence which can instruct organizations to adapt to changes systematically. Ideally, digital transformation can give your business the ability to apply real-time insights across the organization in ways never possible before. Information allows you to build an actionable insight as to how to move from one level to the other for deepening understanding. Without deep insight, organizations perhaps only fix symptoms, not the root causes. Deeper deep involves a step-wise scenario of information –insight – decision making.

The abundance of information flow makes it possible to gain real-time insight and business foresight if organizations are truly being digitized underneath. For decision-making to be effective, the decision-maker should deeper deep, making their decisions rich in information and significantly different from the available data. In the business setting, delivering a high level of digital impact to your organization is not about finding a way to replace the old information management system. It is about getting insight to the right user in a way that supports a better decision life cycle.

Sofer soft: The management is more art than science, the communication and management style is a “soft discipline” to achieve high business performance. Traditional command & control management is ineffective if relying on “exclusiveness” (excluding things like listening, accepting feedback, ensuring that expectations are reasonable). The problem of it is that you can control people’s behavior, but not their mind, and it leads to authoritarian behaviour and bureaucratic decision-making.

“Softer soft” management style can truly touch the mind and heart, and make change sustainable. Create a harmonized working environment by communicating smoothly to make collective decisions and taking a collaboration road to achieve strategic goals. The soft communication skills such as influence and persuasion which begin with trust, but influence does not necessarily come as a giving to a person with a high trust index, but via bridging and having conversations. It’s a skill to be learned, a persuasive communication, exemplary leadership, personal sacrifice, all held together by a collection of confidence to improve leadership effectiveness and management maturity.

Harder hard: Processes underpin digital capabilities, capability will decide business’s strategy and affect business execution. Process s hard, so is business capability. The higher the strategy is, the “harder” the business capabilities need to be built - there is intricate complexity in it, and capability will decide business’s strategy and affect business execution. “Harder hard” capability development evolves and moves from the fundamental level to differentiated level between categories based on the technology evolution, business driver, or business model evolution etc. Often capabilities include dependencies, one is part of another or depends on another. So capability mapping includes capability dependency identification, visualizing the end to end enterprise and bridging the “gap of opportunity” between where you are and want to become, to ensure capability portfolio coherence.

In practice, capability designers create a model of it and measure the outputs “Harder hard” capability design and modeling involves capability analysis - documenting how an existing capability works/ flows to capability re-engineering - making improvements to an existing capability to design - creating and/or documenting a new capability, linking the sequence of activities, events from end to end, and taking the theoretical design to implementation, measure it, and seeking improvements. Moreover, these activities are cyclic.

With high velocity and frequent disruptions, the varying stakeholders need to adjust "every day" of the digital transformation journey as the current situation and its net value changes. The well-educated digital leaders and professionals must be comfortable with “VUCA” reality, broaden their outlook, envision the bigger picture, discover and develop their organizational strength, be conscious of the learning curves, keep the end in mind in order to drive digital transformation in a structural way.

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We are all on the journey to self-awareness; some simply have a greater recognition of being on that road.

The purpose of the book “Digital Maturity: Take a Journey of a Thousand Miles from Functioning to Delight” is to envision the future of the business, articulate the very characteristics of digital organizations; reimagine the interdisciplinary and hyperconnected digital ecosystem; fine-tune processes and structures of the digital business; develop the best and next practices to charter the digital paradigm shift seamlessly; leverage information & technology as the linchpin of the digitalization; take a holistic approach to measure digitization effort; avoid pitfalls and barriers on the way; and make a leap from doing digital to being digital effortlessly.

Digital makes a significant impact on every aspect of the business from people, process to technology, both horizontally and vertically. It is like a gigantic puzzle with many misplaced pieces, you have to put them all in the right places to discover the real meaning and unleash its full potential. You cannot make a true digital paradigm shift without an in-depth understanding of the digital interconnectivity and embracing the multitude of digital maturity.

Inner-awareness 

Inner-awareness The enterprise consists of an amalgam of socio-systems, techno-systems, bio-systems, and econo-systems. The organizational leaders and professionals today need to gain the multitude of “digital awareness,” be aware of their own strength and weakness, understand that real-world development is multifaceted, be able to look ahead, identify the certain trends in their industry and potential risks. As lack of awareness will cause egotism, ignore knowledge limitation, too much gut feeling, which further leads to misjudgment and ineffective problem-solving.

Insightful CIO with “Digital Awareness” With digital awareness, the CIO can transform from a technology manager into a business-savvy leader, from a hands-on technical manager to a strategic adviser, and from a support-center supervisor to a proactive change agent. Leading organizations embark on the “Digital Era” of computing and managing, to reach the next level of operational excellence and business maturity. Digital transformation is a journey, the increasing pace of technological.evolution..

Unaware As long as you are aware of your weakness. it’s not so much of a weakness in practice, in a team context. The most 'dangerous' weaknesses are those you're completely unaware of."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.”

Inner-Self-Awareness A self-awareness mind continues to practice reflective thinking. We are all on the journey to self-awareness; some simply have a greater recognition of being on that road. There are different kinds of leaders and thus different forms of leadership. The one constant is the need to begin by leading oneself. A self-awareness mind continues to practice reflective thinking: Better understand yourselves and how knowing who you are and your own style...

Improving Awareness The big WHY and WHAT sort of questions should help people get curious about the wholeness of an organization - the concept of System Thinking. Systems Thinking helps people to see the interconnected relationship between the parts and the whole, or simply “to see the forest for the tree.” What kind of questions could you ask people in order to raise their awareness about the practicality of Systems Thinking, or to clarify what people understand..

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with about #7500th 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 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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Up

You need to keep a growth mindset, updating knowledge, enforcing cognitive understanding, and move up to the next level of decision maturity.

"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 “Up” quotes in “Digital Master.”

An entrepreneur’s mind is like spring, bending in order to straight up; retreating in order to move up; recharging in order to accelerate up, driven, but not extreme, dynamic and elastic.

Digitalization is inspirational, iterative, and progressive, is the shape of digital like the upward spiral to reach the high level of organizational maturity.

You need to keep a growth mindset, updating knowledge, enforcing cognitive understanding, and move up to the next level of decision maturity.

Openness, transparency, collaboration, empowerment, respect, are all important perspectives for enforcing bottom-up innovation.

What does the open mind mean anyway: Is it like to open the window of mind, let the instinct wind blow up or brainstorm pour through? Is it like to turn on the conscious or subconscious light to brighten up the darkness of thought or shadow pondering? Is it like a magnet to attract wise, seems opposite, but complementary viewpoints? Or Is it like pulling up the analytics string or plugin imagination switch? Is it about mind crafting, digging through, stretching out or strengthening up?

From the business management perspective, innovation opens up new possibilities of combining existing business competencies in new ways which can form distinctive competencies as a stepping stone for doing more creative things.

When CIOs climb the upward leadership maturity path, and then their IT organizations will also move up to unleash the full digital potential and achieve a high-performance result.

The digital ecosystem provides unprecedented opportunities to strike a dynamic balance between the inner and outer elements, and leapfrog the business world up to the next level of advancement. Change is the new normal.

Everybody involved with the process thinks they know how it works and where the issues are, but putting independent eyes upon it almost always ends up painting a somewhat different picture. You need to set up a framework that allows for differing opinions about what process stands for, what it means, or what’s important about it, etc. It's about overall business benefit from process management when integrating all related parties’ viewpoints.

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