Initiateboardleadership

 BoD leadership needs to be future oriented, steer the organization towards the digital journey with a clear vision, a solid strategic roadmap and effective feedback system.

The very characteristics of digital era are complexity, ambiguity, uncertainty and ambiguity, the inevitable range, breadth, depth, and pace of uncontrollable factors acting on any organizations across vertical sectors mean identifying business vulnerability, handling the management fuzziness and constant fine-tuning are essential to improve the organizational maturity. 

Hence, corporate governance rules and principles need to be followed to improve effectiveness and transparency of the company. The corporate board as one of the critical governance bodies requires multidimensional thinking, dots connection, asking insightful questions to complement each other’s strength, and balance of multiple perceptions in guiding businesses in the right direction.

Leaders depend on perception to rule and to set vision and goals; provoke thoughts and actions to unify the varying perspectives of stakeholders: Uncertainty and risk are inherent in every venture, leadership is about vision and change; it’s about creating a powerful future that is compelling in the present, that utilizes the best talents, capabilities, cultures, and resources of their people and organization to produce meaningful and invaluable results. The senior business leaders such as corporate boards today need to see further than what all others see; understand issues from new angles, broaden perspectives, deepen perception; predict what will happen and take steps further - what organizations should do upon it.

Corporate boards oversee business strategies. As part of the strategy development effort, top business leaders need to know their company inside-out, discover the “innate strength” of their business, make an objective assessment of their business capability maturity, provide invaluable feedback to either strategy development or execution. Not only does the development of a good strategy depend upon identifying the core problem, but also how to leverage the limited business resource or capacity to solve them effectively. The intention is not about finding the perfect solution but making progressive problem resolution. It's critical for senior business leaders to clarify long-term business priorities and short-term concerns, identify and clear business barriers or obstacles, optimize business structures, and systems, which may impede the vision or stifle changes. A strategy is long enough to plan a company's future with confidence and short enough to sense the urgency to execute it.

Monitoring of business performance and conformance in respect of the strategic goals and objectives, strategy, and policies: Both performance and conformance are important at the board level, to run a high performance business. Corporate boards need to make a laser-focused performance-driven agenda to ensure the business achieves the higher than expected business results. They also need to enhance compliance discipline to ensure that the company actually complies with the regulations relating to its operations for keeping the lights on proactively.

The corporate board’s role, in large part, is to make good decisions that enhance the value creation for the organization. Performance without conformance is not genuine and sustainable; conformance without performance adds very little to the firm value. Business performance should be judged at the enterprise level considering the overall satisfaction over each combination of cost, schedule, and stakeholders’ satisfaction. Thus, BoDs have to spread their time on varying important issues scientifically. Conformance is critical, but there’s no doubt that the board only fulfills its role to shareholders and the management team when it is focused on performance.

Governing risks, setting the risk appetite and risk framework for an enterprise: Generally, there are two types of risks: downward risks (loss of value) or upward risks (opportunity to make profit, expand the business to create value). Some risks can be quantifiable; some can only be approximated. Often a big risk is that the risk management system is detached from the management of the business. Corporate boards need to work closely with the senior management for mastering risk intelligence, identify both business risks and opportunities and keep focusing on doing fundamental things right.

Corporate boards need to ask the management tough questions such as: What are the history risks lessons being learned? What are the predictable facts based on history, current status quo and risk clues? Why do you think that most risk management has not been done effectively? What are the risk management blind spots? Is it because the risk management program is immature and shortsighted? What to do with this risk even when the risk management program is immature? Etc.The BoDs and the management work closely to define organizational risk appetite and risk attitude so they know the business tolerance of their enterprise for the resulting downsides risks. So the business can manage risks, enable continuous improvement with the power of leadership support, and integrated data-based insight.

BoD leadership needs to be future oriented, steer the organization towards the digital journey with a clear vision, a solid strategic roadmap and effective feedback system. They keep enhancing corporate governance discipline such as setting principle guidelines, grounding rules and policies, preventing problems, managing risks, reviewing the organizational objectives holistically with the correct strategy lenses/focus, and monitoring performance results continually.

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Innatearchitecturalapproach

Architecture is an investment; it is an interdisciplinary approach to identify appropriate problems, as well as choose the appropriate problem to solve.

Organizational architecture's role in designing and planning future enterprise is to gain the long term perspective of the business and become a platform or tool to solve problems effectively. There are many architectural models, all claiming to be the solution to the problem, but none of them are able to truly address the complex issues involved in every space. 

Prevention is superior to problem-solving. Preventing problems requires architectural perspective, information technologies, people, processes, and systems to analyze and predict the possibility of a problem.

Preventing issues, not just fixing issues: Information exponentiality, unpredictability, interconnectivity, nonlinearity, interdependence, hyper-diversity, rules, regulations, etc, are digital new normal today. There are unknown interactions and very high inner dynamics in business complexity, uncertainty, and emerging events. Business architecture as an enterprise knowledge container could be an important tool to improve strategic planning accuracy, predict or prevent risks from happening.

However, many organizations seem to lack appreciation of cost savings in a problem that never happens; they also lack principles or methodologies to prevent problems from happening. Setting digital principles is not to manipulate “how,” but to develop the digital philosophy, build the quality standard, and help to shape the mindsets to improve problem management effectiveness. The architecture is an important tool to set guidelines, helps management untangle the complex situation or the business relationships in the eyes of beholder, integrate functional parts into enterprise solutions, embedding analytics mechanisms into processes for problem prediction and prevention.

Simplifying complicated things is an optimal choice for preventing problems or errors: There are a variety of complexities existing in well-established organizations today such as: hierarchical complexity, information complexity, collaboration complexity, governance complexity, or environmental complexity, etc. Business Architecture is a useful tool to help organizational leaders look at complexity via business impact, risk management, people-centric perspectives. Undesired complication creates hassles for different people across the organizational hierarchy to gain common understanding of problems, create “integration hairballs” distract people from innovation; cause long term business pains.

Simplifying complicated things is an optimal choice for preventing problems or errors. Thus, business architecture is considered a useful tool if it can reduce complexity, enable maximum reuse of assets, untangle complexity systematically in search of simpler concepts and methods, eliminate the costly re-inventing of the wheel, prevent problems or errors. Simplexity is the very characteristics of a high performance business. There is nothing absolutely good or bad, you just have to have discerning eyes to understand complexity thoroughly, handle them in a structural way to improve business agility, effectiveness, resilience and maturity.

Leverage the architectural perspective to experiment, explore, and encourage a new way to solve problems, or in better case, prevent problems: Business architectural structure tends to evolve through various stages of abstraction: Contextual; Conceptual; Logical; and Physical. Architecture is a blueprint of the business and it’s logical to see architecture being understood as a philosophy to discover the “truth and myth” of enterprise context, enable business management to see the cause and effect of problems thoroughly, in order to solve them without causing further issues.

Business architecture is both a planning and communication tool that helps the management ask insightful questions, facilitates knowledge based conversations; allows you to reason the visible, perceives the invisible elements of the problem, and helps you see reasoning in action. So ultimately, you can dissolve some critical issues via business architecture as a philosophical lens. Philosophy is the foundation of science. It’s important to apply philosophy to ask questions that other sciences cannot even think about. Because when you abstract, deepen and unify understanding, set common principles to follow through, different parties can work more collaboratively, it's probably that there would not be a problem to be solved at all.

Architecture is an investment; it is an interdisciplinary approach to identify appropriate problems, as well as choose the appropriate problem to solve. Enterprise architecture and enterprise architects have a central role in defining the enterprise of the future, setting the right priority to solve problems that really matter and solve them effortlessly.

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Innatecreativity

One of the important characteristics of the digital age is hyper-connectivity.

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 flowing.

             

Creativity Connectivity

 

Creativity and Sociology Sociology is the study of human interaction, usually within the context of organized groups, communities, or societies. Sociology brings much more depth to our knowledge with an interdisciplinary understanding of creativity, business, and even an entire human society. Because the key elements in creative activity are often socially based and developed, hence, sociology can contribute significantly to understanding and explaining human creativity often as the collective activity. Thinking sociologically requires imagination and insight, to identify and explain social mechanisms of creativity and innovativeness.

Creativity vs. System Thinking Creativity is about connecting dots to generate novel ideas; to dig into mindset level, it’s a system thinking process. Systems Thinking is about seeing interrelationships rather than isolated things, understanding patterns, focusing on the nature of relationships rather than just on separate entities. What’s the further understanding of creativity and Systems Thinking?

Creativity and Humility All humans have a creative/artistic side while also have a curious/scientific side, bestowed with three basic instincts which are humility (egoless awareness and acceptance), curiosity (restlessness with the status quo), and creativity (urge to change or improve the status quo). Amazingly, these three basic instincts are intertwined. Humility energizes curiosity and curiosity ignites creativity.

Creativity & Education Creativity has emerged as one of the most wanted professional capabilities. But there is still serendipity about creativity. Creativity is fresh and new every time. Is creativity natural or nurtured? Can creativity be taught, how can today’s education system produce more creative leaders and professionals? Are modern educators both the artist and engineer for crafting talent?

Creativity and Authenticity Being authentic is the state of self-consciousness, self-discovery, and self-improvement. It seems everyone who considers authenticity has his or her own view of it. It is a construct formed in the mind and we know that the mind of every individual is different, the actual mental understanding and subsequent manifestations in action will be different for each individual. Does being authentic give you the courage to be creative? Or actually, creativity seems to make your life more authentic, in pursuit of “Who you are.” What are the intricate links between creativity and authenticity?

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 7 million page views with about #8700th 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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Innovation

Innovation is a state of mind that focuses on crafting creative ideas and spurring innovation.

Innovation is the light every organization is pursuing; the good or bad innovation would depend on the business’s attitude to drive innovation and its aptitude to manage innovation. 

 It takes a creative mindset to connect wider dots, open leadership to build innovative culture, and interdisciplinary methodologies to manage innovation effectively.

Innovation and assimilation: Information is permeating into every corner of the organization and knowledge is only clicks away. Innovation is a managed process of idea exploration, production, adoption, knowledge assimilation, and exploitation of value-added novelty in business, economic and social spheres. To become an expert in your domain, you need to not only assimilate the existing knowledge, but also have to create the new knowledge and spur creativity; you need to unlearn and relearn, update knowledge, and advocate either hard or soft innovation; identify innovators and unlock organizational creative potential.

Every organization has a culture or a set of subcultures, separation of cultures is a fleeting norm for the world. Diversity is the innovation catalyst. When you cannot assimilate diversity between two or more cultures for that matter, you lose the hope of what diversity brings to the party. Organizations are at the different vertical sectors and stages of business maturity, they should tailor their business needs and take a logical approach to build their organizational innovation strength. systematically to achieve the long-term business results in a consistent way.

Innovation and viability: Viability is one of the very characteristics of the digital organization for accelerating business growth. How viable the business is depends on their ability to integrate, build, and reconfigure internal and external competences dynamically to address rapidly changing environments and achieve innovative forms of competitive advantage given path dependencies and market positions. Ideally, the viable digital businesses are solid enough to give some sort of forms and meaning and open enough to its environment allowing the movement of information, ideas, and people in and out, enhance cross-functional communication & collaboration, synchronize change and create business synergy.

Innovation happens at the intersection of people & process, process & technology. It’s important to balance process and flexibility; standardization and personalization. There is a pendulum swinging between people and process, engagement and hierarchy; organizational process, technology, structure, individual behavior, and collective team activities - all these factors interact in a dynamic. Forethoughtful organizations leverage design thinking to reinvent an organization that can enforce collaboration and harness innovation by maintaining viability, and making strategic effects for enjoying a powerful tailwind to improve innovation performance.

Innovation & concentration: Information is a critical piece in the innovation puzzle. With exponential growth of data, there is no way, also not necessary to absorb every bit & byte of information flowing to you, you need to be selective in order to be more informative and creative to bring up fresh perspectives. You have to stay focused, learn how to swim in the sea of information, set the right priority, and concentrate on innovative problem-solving with continuous deliveries. You need to spend time and energy on innovation and focus on creative activities.

Change is inevitable; innovation is the most wanted change, to achieve the concept of “the sum is larger than its parts.” The focus of innovation should include the actions designed to optimize business performance, drive business growth and sustain performance results. Companies have to be prepared to lose some to gain more. They have to make the strategic choices of where and when and how they innovate. Innovation is not for its own sake, focusing on meeting important customer needs, instead of just doing simply interesting research topics, helps to assure that the results of innovative approaches will have a positive impact for the clients, partners, end users, and the marketplace.

 Innovation is a state of mind that focuses on crafting creative ideas and spurring innovation. Every organization has the capacity to innovate both as one of the initiatives or in a sustained way; both at the individual level and organizational level. Innovation is about moving forward. In any business, if you are not moving forward, you are moving backward. It is a strategic imperative to develop the organizational level innovation competency by cultivating innovators and tapping organizational potential to innovate,

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Innerpurpose

The purpose itself is a multidimensional system, to keep the business firm, think of the quality of people as systems, organizations as systems.

Running a digital organization is to connect the old and new, mix solid and fluid to enforce digital confluence and accelerate performance. A digital organization starts with a transcendent purpose that leads to a unique natural design, a design most fits to reach the state of business flow, zest, and achieve the business goals. 

High-effective business management should gain the super consciousness of business purpose from diverse perspectives, be able to let themselves think not only of what exists, how they exist in the business world, being in the business, to reach the high level of organizational maturity.

A good strategy is aligned with the business purpose to create customers and achieve business values: Every business is a system that has a purpose and that purpose is not inherent in the objects and processes you build and create. An organization comprises people, people have purposes that arise from their interactions with others and environment. They too are influenced by the surrounding environment. It’s important to integrate both visible and invisible business success factors such as leadership, people, process, culture, technology to build capability to enable strategy management. That strategy is aligned with the business purpose to achieve multifaceted business value.

A business is only a system in relation to a purpose. In practice, we need to shape highly valuable viewpoints about business change and innovation, enforce business alignment, enablement, integration, collaboration, and harmony, to gain the super consciousness of business purpose. Businesses interact with customers, employees, partners, and a variety of stakeholders. These interactions manifested with social, political, technical values, etc., tend to be dynamic, so the organizations can continue evolving and adapting, bringing greater awareness of intricacies and generating systemic value to accelerate business performance and unlock its full potential.

The organizational purpose and employee purpose ties in with the leadership development and who we are as people and as leaders: The purpose is the source of all power. The purpose of running a business is to create customers; forward-thinking companies are inspired to become people centric, aligning their employees’ purpose, career goals with organizational purpose and strategic goal of business. The purposes of running a people-centric system are to provide people opportunities to grow & innovate, design business processes that enable specific outputs and that will meet specific needs with the goals to either engage employees or delight customers.

It is amazing what people can do when they see they have a source of all power within themselves, discover their authenticity and worthwhile purpose to drive progressive changes. It’s important to cultivate open-minded leadership, and collaborative & professional working relationships to both unleash employees’ potential and drive organizational maturity seamlessly. It’s also critical to deepen the strategic planning conversations with the leadership team and highlight the value by people-centric purpose alignment, and improve overall business maturity.

Change is never for its own sake, the very purpose of introducing any change in an organization is to improve: Improvement comes only when people embrace the change and are actively engaged in whatever they are doing. The business management needs to clarify why to change, what to change, and how to change. As often, many organizations focus so heavily on the "doing," suffer from their daily busyness, even experience change fatigue, without making any progress. Increased engagement is a direct indicator of the effectiveness of any change, leading to higher profitability, morale, mutual trust, and high-performance.

Business change is hyper accelerating, especially as it relates to the people and value creation dimensions. It is more important than ever to engage profound business leaders to reimagine, architect, design, and help the enterprise chart the course and set a better sail. There is a saying that there are leadership opportunities at any given point in time where one or more people congregate to achieve a goal. Change agents are in demand to shape advanced mindset, rejuvenate culture of innovation and drive change, especially the transformative ones. This would support the “circumstantiality” between leadership and achievement.

The purpose itself is a multidimensional system, to keep the business firm, think of the quality of people as systems, organizations as systems. Business leaders should bring greater awareness of intricacies and generate systemic value to accelerate business performance and unlock its full potential.

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Innovativebalance

Due to “VUCA” reality, instead of out-of-date disjointed top-down management paradigms, what is needed today is out of box thinking, strong front-end decision making and a large dash of 'freedom to manage, and innovative problem-solving.

Drganizations large or small are on the journey of digital transformation. Business leaders couldn’t predict the future with a certain degree of accuracy, but the rate of change has accelerated. It is important to observe the problem-solving scenarios, develop problem-solving competency, and truly make change happen and sustain its impact. 

The progress is made by indicating that business leaders must learn how to strike a balance between managing complex issues today and predicting the uncertain issues of tomorrow, to improve overall business agility and maturity.

“Disruption” and “stimulation”: Abundance of information, fierce competition, and frequent disruptions, over-complexity are the new normal, it’s critical for organizations to break down silo, dare to voyage into the deep, deep digital new normal by building a cognitively open, hyper-connected, and intra-active ecological system in which there is a set of interrelated and interdependent things that collaborate with each other for achieving common purpose. In order to keep information flowing cross the boundaries and generate create energy, “disruption” and “stimulation” makes sense, taking into consideration that many businesses do not seem to be satisfied with the current circumstances because there are not enough innovations happening in the businesses to disrupt outdated mindsets, management systems, processes, cultures, business models, or practices.

Leadership is about direction and change. Dare to make creative disruption for awakening digital consciousness of business purpose, innovation, autonomy, make a seamless transformation from a traditional company with overly restricted hierarchy to an innovative organization in which people are encouraged to learn, grow, and share all the times, rejuvenate business model in a structural way and develop people empathetically. Don’t over-categorize, more often than not, you need to re-categorize or reclassify knowledge, talent, capabilities, to bring a more insightful perspective on how to run a high performance organization. Business management needs to break down silos, update their “divide and conquer” methodologies that cause silo mentality or unhealthy competitions, and take a holistic, integral, and iterative approach to go digital effortlessly.

Listening & telling: Traditional organizational management practices “command & control” discipline that make the organization disconnect from the changing environment, less agile to the dynamic business ecosystem. It’s important to listen to both the “Naysayers” and “Yaysayers” when it comes to deep and far-reaching change and encourage innovation. Naysayers or skeptics have an invaluable point of view about the change that needs to be listened to and considered. Gaining a deep understanding of people means listening to their stories with empathy, truly knowing who they are, how they think, what's strength, not based on their physical identity, but seeing through their character, strength, thought process, learning habit, personality. Encourage naysayers to think constructively and become change agents to inspire and share their success stories.

Communication is probably the world’s biggest problem as many listen to respond and not to think profoundly beforehand. Effective communication is two-way street, from top-down and bottom-up. Listening to the priorities of senior executives of the company. The biggest communication mistake is to assume it has occurred. The best way to improve communications is to stop talking and listen. The communication has occurred when the message is received and understood. In many traditional organizations, people feel unsafe to express themselves or try to imitate others but lose their own identity. Organizations should cultivate the culture of authenticity. It is important to try to find ways to make people feel involved in open-ended communication, ask insightful questions and embrace fresh perspectives in shaping the change effort to increase business success.

Compete and compliment: High-performance organizations encourage healthy competition, cross-functional collaboration, build competent teams with complimentary mindset, talent and skills. However, unprofessional competition causes serious problems and negative societal impact. It is the energy behind the competition that matters. When the team laser focuses on problem-solving and solving strategic goals of the company, they compete professionally and complement seamlessly, towards the attainment of the shared goals and that creates a conducive environment for unleashing collective potential and allowing collective capability to flourish.

Healthy competition is innovation-intensive and progress-driven. If we have two or more ideas, we have competition because of those ideas. Without competition, there would be no premium choices and intellectual stimulation. Collaboration is another pillar for innovation management and a prerequisite to implement a corporate strategy. It is about aligning people, process and technology and managing them holistically to achieve certain values. The management needs to compete and compliment accordingly, brainstorm ideas, turn around the tough situations skillfully, assign their talent, resources and time carefully to solve problems that really matter radically.

Due to “VUCA” reality, instead of out-of-date disjointed top-down management paradigms, what is needed today is out of box thinking, strong front-end decision making and a large dash of 'freedom to manage, and innovative problem-solving. The achievement's probability can be increased if the strategic management system is built and used according to the correct and complete framework, people are inspired to discover who they are, processes get optimized structurally and business competency are built or integrated dynamically.

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Inquisitiveness

The digital CIOs have to wear different colors of hats and master multiple leadership personas and management roles effortlessly.

This book “12 CIO Personas: The Digital CIO’s Situational Leadership Practices” is the extensive brainstorming and logical content expansion of my book “CIO Master: Unleash the Digital Potential of IT,” to reimagine and reinvent CIO leadership via practicing multitudes of digital influence. 

The important thing is that CIOs as the top leadership role must have a strong mindset, a unique personality, and a clear idea of what needs to be done, yet creative enough to not hold the company back from growth. Regardless of which personality they have, digital CIOs need to be both transformational and situational, innovative and tactical, business savvy and technology insightful, communication-effective and operation-efficient.

The CIO as “Chief Inquisitiveness Officer”

 

Inquisitiveness Curiosity is a human nature, inquisitiveness stimulates imagination; amplifies influence and accelerates improvement. Asking the right questions helps to validate how thorough and deep your thinking is on a particular issue: it can also assess whether they consider various different perspectives.

Innovateviacollaborator Being innovative is about thinking differently, acting differently, and adding value differently for solving problems creatively. Innovativeness is a state of mind. From an evolutionary perspective, this is what we humans have always done and will continue doing – exploring our minds and bodies for the latent powers inherent in our genes to generate creative energy, and unleash unlimited potential to drive progression.

Innovativecharacteristics Being innovative is about thinking differently, acting differently, and adding value differently for solving problems creatively. Innovativeness is a state of mind. From an evolutionary perspective, this is what we humans have always done and will continue doing – exploring our minds and bodies for the latent powers inherent in our genes to generate creative energy, and unleash unlimited potential to drive progression.

CIOs as “Chief Inquisitiveness Officer”: Three Big “WHYs” to Reimagine IT for Getting Digital Ready Different IT organizations and enterprises are at different stages of the business maturity, IT can be used as a tool, enabler, integrator, catalyst, or a digital game changer to meet the ultimate goal of an organization's short/medium/long-term strategic plans. Many IT organizations are at the crossroads, should they continue to be run as the cost center to keep the lights on only, and gradually become irrelevant? Or should they take the bold steps, move up the maturity level to get digital ready? The answer seems to be no brainer, but CIOs today, in fact, face numerous management dilemmas. They have to reimagine the new possibilities, convey a clear technological vision to both convince and deliver the alternative view of IT being a profit enabler and innovation engine. Digital CIOs are “Chief Inquisitiveness Officers,” they have to keep asking thought-provoking questions to brainstorm the better way to run IT. Here are three big “WHYs” questions to diagnose the possible causes of IT effectiveness, and improve IT maturity for getting digital ready.

CIO as Chief Inquisitiveness Officer: Can, Shall or How CIOs Say “I Don’t Know” At the industrial age, managers or leaders seem to be expected to have all answers, now businesses are moving to digital era with "VUCA" characteristics (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity), although there’s mountain of data, and information is only a few clicks away, indeed, in many circumstances, finding an answer to a complex problem takes collective insight and collaborative effort. So, as a senior level business executive, can, shall or how CIOs say “I don’t know”? How does someone in a highly visible position such as CIOs say "I don’t know" about the key business issue or technology problems without compromising his/her authority, career and influence?

Modern organizations have their own sophistication with silo functions, the sea of information, and the pool of talent. The CIO is an inherently cross-functional role, to bridge the business and IT; the data and insight, the business’s today and tomorrow. The digital CIOs have to wear different personas and master multiple leadership and management roles effortlessly. They need to lead at the strategic level for conducting a complex digital orchestra; they should be handy managers to plumbing information and keep it flow smoothly; they also have to be like the diligent gardeners, to build a unique IT landscape via tuning technology, removing waste, nurturing culture, and empowering people.

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Innovativeness

Innovation progress can be made if organizations can fine tune the processes to make idea flows, build the business capacity, create the “atmosphere” with innovation as a new normal and improve the overall success rate of idea implementation.

Due to the fact that innovating in today’s digital world with more changes and more potential disruptions, has become increasingly complex in nature, at a seemingly much faster pace. Innovation management also becomes more complex and volatile. Organizations can no longer rely on a single individual or team to drive innovation. It is usually a collaborative effort and a multi-disciplinary effort.

 The evolution of innovation only exists in a more open environment or ecosystem in which people can connect unusual dots, create unique insight, take advantage of all sources of creativity in an open way and manage a balanced innovation portfolio systematically.

Innovation and nimbleness: Nimbleness is about adaptability, flexibility, and resilience. Organization needs to be nimble for change or innovation, flexible to figure out alternative ways to problem-solving, resilient to fail forward. To adapt to the increasing speed of changes and fierce competitions, innovation is the only path to build differentiated business competency. Information is the most intensive puzzle piece in innovation and technology is usually the disruptive force. Thus, organizations have to become nimbler about updating technology and managing information effectively, in order to respond to change promptly, catalyze innovation, and meet the customers’ needs timely.

The digital dynamic is where the digital disruption threatens to tear down legacy systems. In the organizational setting, overly rigid processes, outdated technologies, or inflexible management, etc, stifle innovation. More and more businesses expect the consumerization style of information technology responsiveness. Customers become more selective for having personalized solutions. The nimble individuals or organizations are complex enough to act intelligently; adaptable in the midst of adversity, threat and stress; open-minded to embrace fresh perspectives, dynamic enough to encourage knowledge transfer innovation, and flexible enough to solve problems alternatively.

Innovation & contextualization: The business world becomes informative, interdependent, and over-complex, there is a paradigm shift that is taking place in accelerating innovation and building a scalable innovation ecosystem contextualization broadens perspectives, deepens understanding, stimulates creativity as an innate process to generate novel ideas and solve problems innovatively. Contextual intelligence is a higher-level of digital fluency. It helps business leaders or professionals read hyper-connected digital sentiment, see further than what all others, understand issues from new angles to connect wider dots for spurring creativity.

From problem-solving perspective, contextualization is a great way to overcome bias by appreciating different viewpoints and enhancing interdisciplinary understanding of issues, enabling the people to see interconnectivity between parts and the whole; gain a contextual understanding of where all the boundaries are, the scope and context of the problem, understand a larger system with interactive pieces and “conflict” goals, explore cause-effect relationships of varying issues, create the relevant context or capture fresh insight to make innovative solutions.

Innovation & sensation: The sensation is a physical feeling or perception resulting from something that happens around; sensation is the perception of outside images. As intelligent beings, it is important to manage emotions in a progressive way. Sensation can evoke vision, feeling, thinking, and emotions. Sensation makes us feel alive; helps us evolve to generate creative energy, and inspires us to come up with fresh ideas.

There is a full emotion cycle behind innovation; sensation is more active, focal, serial. You do have to feel the emotions and live with them through, manage them well, as being innovative is a state of mind, curiosity, passion, anger, conflict, calm, etc, all have a role to play in the innovation cycle. When you become self-aware, when you know the triggers to the emotions, it is very important to experience sensation, but not be overwhelmed; learn how to feel and engage life in a mindful way, think optimistically to spur creativity all the time.

We live in the “VUCA” new normal with varying characteristics such as diversification, ambiguity, unpredictability, nonlinearity and increased flux. It’s important to connect wider dots for spurring fresh ideas and catalyzing innovation. Innovation progress can be made if organizations can fine tune the processes to make idea flows, build the business capacity, create the “atmosphere” with innovation as a new normal and improve the overall success rate of idea implementation.

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Innovativeagilist

Agility is the ability of a business to adapt rapidly and cost efficiently in response to changes in the business environment.

The world is moving into the deep, deep digital new normal with wide, wide digital connectivity and tall, tall digital pillars. Agility is one of such powerful pillars to leap digital transformation and enable the business to unleash its full potential.

 Organizational agility is about to create and react to changes. It is about to take into account any change in the environment and transform the organization to survive, grow, and transform. It is about to respond to emergent events proactively.

Innovative Agilist

Innovativeagilists Agility is the ability to create changes or adapt to a changing environment. The progress to make agile transformation requires more cooperation around the organization, giving cross-functional people a good argument for why you are doing agile and what the benefits will be. The variety of agilest personas are in demand to accelerate flow-mind flow, information flow, knowledge flow and idea flow; and enhance iterative improvement or innovation

Innovative BoDs as “Digital Agilist” The business world has shifted from the industrial age to the digital era with “VUCA” reality, business agility is both philosophy and methodology, mindset, and framework. The role of BoD must always focus on the strategic initiatives of the organization amidst the mounting pressure of GRC responsibilities, and become the “Digital Agilists” who are able to phenomenally disciplined in focusing on creating value, developing the “digital-ready agenda,” overseeing the business strategy, setting “continuous improvement” culture tones, and steering their organization forward in the uncharted water smoothly.

Inneragility vs. Flexibility Agility is the ability of a business to adapt rapidly and cost efficiently in response to changes in the business environment. Agile provides greater flexibility and it requires great discipline especially at team member level. Great power comes with great reasonability.

Innovation Agility Innovation is neither a serendipity nor a rigid process or discipline, there is no such universal way to do innovation as well. It’s always about connecting, questioning and collaborating. It’s the certain mix of something old and new, being prepared to change what you are doing. So what’re further aspects of innovation agility?

innateagility vs. Accountability Agile has emerged as a major methodology and a set of practices for many IT organizations for software development, it is the time that Agile also needs a serious readjustment to scale it up to a new level. Agile has to be readjusted at different organization levels. Today it is not only about doing Agile, but it is also required outside the software development where accountability really matters and being Agile - to shape an agile mindset. Agility vs. accountability - what’s the correlation between them?

The blog is a dynamic book flowing with your thoughts; growing through your dedication; sharing your knowledge; conveying your wisdom, and making influence through touching the hearts and connecting the minds across the globe. The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 7 million page views with about #8700 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 the time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.


Decision Master Book Summary

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Decision Master Introduction

Decision Master Chapter 1 Decision Intelligence

Decision Master Chapter 2 Decision Principles

Decision Master Chapter 3 Digital Decision Styles

Decision Master Chapter 4 Decision Pitfalls

Decision Master Chapter 5 Decision Maturity

Decision Master Conclusion Five Pillars in Achieving Decision Excellence

Decision Master Quotes Collection 1

Decision Master Quotes Collection 2

Decision Master Quotes Collection 3

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Innateawareness

The organizational leaders and professionals today need to gain the multitude of “digital awareness,” be aware of their own strength and weakness, explore their own way to bridge the gap of opportunity between where you are and want to become.

Either individually or collectively, awareness has generally been viewed as an ability to understand yourself at the deep level -mindset, attitude, or behavior. Whatever the state of awareness you arrive at, there is always a deeper state, a profound degree of intrapersonal independence and cognitive intelligence. 

Collectively, the organizational consciousness can be gained through information-refined insight to improve organizational consciousness, responsiveness and maturity.

Self/universal awareness: Individually, self-awareness is the ability to tap into the consciousness with multidimensional thought processes that can refine information, do reasoning and understanding. As consciousness is basically a state of the ego, the worldly self, to sense or respond to the external environment. Self-awareness helps you build on your strengths and improve on your weaknesses. Collectively, the organizational consciousness can be gained through information management lifecycle as the massive volumes of information need to be refined into insight which drives business decisions and actions, discover and develop organizational strength for achieving strategic business goals and objectively.

Humans are urged by their inner, rational compulsion to seek higher truth about the being, they attempt to relate him/her with the timeless/spaceless essence of being. People can reach a state of pure awareness where our mind is completely open to receive new ideas from the collective pool or of being aware of an external object within oneself; self-awareness is the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the control system of the mind. It also allows you to leverage that knowledge to increase the influential outreach for the betterment of others. At the organizational level, the information-based analytical capabilities enables a collective all-permeating consciousness, which has made every object of the digital system responsive, communicative, to improve decision cohesiveness across the organizational hierarchy and overall business maturity.

Acute awareness of contextual variables, seeking fresh knowledge and unique insight: Organizations with strong “digital awareness,” can sense emergent opportunities, predict potential risks, and always have a strong understanding of what the business does, how it does it, and how it could be better. After gaining the full digital awareness, top management in an organization defines a clear business vision and strategy, and builds a set of core capabilities to meet and implement the strategy. The information based digital awareness also helps them understand how change capabilities are underpinned by change processes, people, and technology, as well as how much change capacity is really required for the change effort you are kicking off.

Acute awareness of business context indicates that business leaders can gain full awareness of both potentials and perils; know how to strike a balance between managing complex issues today and forecasting the uncertain issues of tomorrow; keep the lights on as well as grow and transform business for building long-term competency. Insightful leaders and professionals with strong “digital awareness” can make continuous improvement that has to link back to the organizational values and culture, and more importantly, it has to be regularly reinforced to improve business agility.

Resource-awareness: There are different types of resources such as funds, physical assets, people, information, reputation; there are resources of the talented people who comprise the firm, such as knowledge, training, insights, or experience, etc. Resource limitations are significant, thus, resource awareness is critical to make wise investment, improve business efficiency and competency. Without effective resource management, talented people simply cannot unlock their full potential, businesses cannot reach the high level of business maturity.

Successful resource management is critical to ensure that resources are available before they are needed, set the right priority to solve the most critical problems, mind resource and investment gap to enforce successful capacity planning, improve productivity, boosts creativity, and take holistic resource management discipline to improve the overall problem-solving effectiveness, and the success rate of potentiality development.

Consciousness is the quality or state of awareness; the organizational leaders and professionals today need to gain the multitude of “digital awareness,” be aware of their own strength and weakness, explore their own way to bridge the gap of opportunity between where you are and want to become. It takes an interconnected approach, building the digital workforce and workplace where change is encouraged, creativity is inspired, and the soft forces to changes are fine-tuned to make a seamless paradigm shift.

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Innercomplexity

To debunk the myth of complexity, we need to be looking for patterns rather than isolating causes; clarify cause-effect, rather than pinpoint symptoms.

Businesses today are over-complex and interdependent, multi-dimension and complexity are two key factors in the intrigues of large problems. There are no unsolvable problems, but there are complex problems that are those you cannot solve with given resources, knowledge and capabilities. And there is frustration if there is a lack of a solution that helps to enforce logic and validate methodology to smooth problem-solving. What’s the in-depth understanding of such complexity?

Complex systems require systemic and holistic analysis techniques based on synthesis: Change is overwhelming, complexity is inevitable, but they are both facts that are happening all the time and at a faster pace than never before. The people with what being referred to as highly intelligent have a strong aptitude to understand the "complexity" of the given problem. As it takes systemic analysis or nonlinear logic to dig into complex issues and interdisciplinary knowledge to understand interdependence between related issues. Only by exploring complexity across different vantage points, can we truly understand both the problem and the landscape within which it sits. It's like a rating scale of complexity. Some people get the whole picture as opposed to others that can't seem to get a grasp on the problem.

Complexity management is about simplifying, modernizing, integrating, optimizing, etc: Over-complexity in a business may be hiding simple ways to achieve things because the people involved just don't get the time to step back from the complexity and hence, they continue to follow the old routine to do the things. Companies that are skilled at managing complexity can gain advantages by pushing the boundaries of a more sophisticated business mix and providing opportunities to create inter-business value and differentiated business competency. Complexity management is about simplifying, modernizing, integrating, optimizing, usually involving early in the life-cycle and careful examination of numbers and types of stakeholders across the organization, to deal with common concerns and improve problem-solving effectiveness.

Managing a variety of complexity is both art and science: Simplicity and complexity are dual forces of running a high-performance digital business. It’s important for digital leaders and managers today to learn to think about systemic wholeness, leverage the hybrid digital management disciplines to balance centralized and distributed business management practices for renewing knowledge and rejuvenating something new into the classic business management. The essence of digital management discipline is to eliminate complications or unnecessary complexity which is hindering innovation, but enforce greater desired complexity such as highly-productive complexity, design complexity, or value/cost/risk ratio complexity that competitors cannot imitate easily.

To debunk the myth of complexity, we need to be looking for patterns rather than isolating causes; clarify cause-effect, rather than pinpoint symptoms. Strategically, look at complexity from a business impact perspective as well as from a solution perspective. A healthy complexity management cycle is to simplify unnecessary complexity, look for what is common for maximum reuse, analyze what the impact of complexity is and manage it structurally and effectively.

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Innovation

Innovation is not just a restless adventure, but a cautionary tale and step-wise journey.

Innovation is a managed process to implement novel ideas; different types of innovation (incremental or radical) should be managed via tailored management processes.it can range from small to game changers. 

Environment either encourages or discourages innovation, the ease or difficulties inherent in surviving. You have to overcome different barriers carefully and manage innovation in the right way with the right elements, both visible and invisible strategically and systematically to achieve consistent business results.

Innovation & process: Innovation is not serendipity, it is a management process and business competency. Innovation has a very low success rate, the main process barriers to innovation are silos, rigidity, inflexibility, stagnation, or bureaucracy, etc. The innovation managers need to scrutinize processes via system lens: Is there transparency in follow-up of a system of the innovation process from the idea up to the implementation? Are processes too rigid to adapt; too fragile to handle disruptions? Is the innovation process event driven or goal driven? Are there too many disconnects that occur between the birth of a concept and the process of turning it into a reality? Is the process overly standard, lack of flexibility? Does the process management have the very characteristics of responsiveness, sensitivity, or flexibility, people-centricity?

Innovation processes are varying: go nuts in your ideation process, but stay grounded by including reality checks in the broader processes. Innovation processes should demonstrate the business logic and a certain level of flexibility to take activities for getting the work done in a new way. From a macro perspective, a considerably loose and circular process is essential to manage the organizational level innovation effectively and develop a balanced innovation portfolio. With continuous process improvements, you can develop a powerful idea pipeline, reduce costs and increase the innovation success rate.

Innovation and Implementation: In high mature organizations, innovation strategy is an integral component of business strategy. Innovation execution is an integral part of strategy execution. Compared to other business initiatives, some innovation efforts take time to nurture and mature, as innovation implies high risks and high return. Even if you have many innovative ideas, it doesn’t guarantee innovation success due to the possible execution gaps. It’s critical to de-risk the introduction of innovations into the market, protect existing operations and brands, and establish clear proof-of-concept before making investments to launch and scale.

If generating ideas is more art than science; then implementing ideas is more science than art. High performance organizations create a disciplined, managed space for developing and testing new models, products/services, shielding innovation teams from the organization’s dominant logic and established standardized operating models, strike the right balance of flexibility and processes. A logical innovation implementation scenario has clear stages, well-selected decision-making parameters, performance thresholds, and combined with an iterative, experiential learning process that supports wide-ranging exploration at each stage to achieve business goals. Bridging innovation execution gap to achieving the business objectives requires a contracted execution scenario with clear stages

Innovation & intrapreneurship: Intrapreneurship is about discovering the new path for business growth by taking entrepreneurship activities. Practicing intrapreneurship in large enterprises needs to strike the right balance between stability and change, creativity and processes. Because if an established firm identifies a new value proposition that requires a change in the business model or the creation of a new one, then it's strategically safer to develop an independent venture, inspire entrepreneur spirit, break down “we always do something like that” maturity, and accelerate change or innovation.

Practicing intrapreneurship means enterprises should cultivate a startup culture, improves company performance by increasing the firm’s pro-activeness and willingness to take risks, and by pioneering the development of new products, process and services through enriching its culture, get smarter and flexible in building unique business competencies and pursuing the next cycle of business growth. Regardless of which vertical sectors you are in, the orchestrated corporate entrepreneurship activities can improve organizational growth and profitability and, depending on the company’s competitive environment, their impact may increase over time.

Due to the hyper-complexity of modern businesses, innovation has become more intense with information exponentiality and broader knowledge transfer. Innovation is not just a restless adventure, but a cautionary tale and step-wise journey. Innovation leaders need to clarify the goals and scenarios of innovation and take initiatives to drive innovation efforts systematically.

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 Either from management, technology or talent perspective, Is HYBRIDITY the right way to move forward with the right speed?

The purpose of the book “Digital Hybridity: How to Strike the Right Balance for Digital Paradigm Shift” is to shed some light on how to strike the right balance of stability and changes; being transactional to keep spinning and being transformational to leap forward for making a seamless digital paradigm shift.

 Digital organizations should apply the hybrid management approach, focus on building a diverse, networked, and extended modern working environment in which the powerful digital platforms and computing technologies enable seamless conversations, delayer overly rigid organizational hierarchy, inspire idea sharing and brainstorming, and engage employees and partners to achieve the high-performance result.

Inner Hybridity

Improve Digital Maturity by Pursuing “Hybrid Truth” Digital organizations are all about information savvy, adaptation, innovation, people-centricity, high-performance, and speed. They are expanding both horizontally and vertically. The high mature digital organizations are highly conscious about what’s happening in their environment, take a holistic understanding of relationships between parts and the whole, strike the right balance and leverage the pairs of business factors for pursuing the “hybrid truth,” to improve the overall organizational digital maturity.

Innovative Hybrid Digital Boardroom With the increasing pace of changes, overwhelming growth of information, and continuous digital disruptions, businesses today need to ride the change waves and catch the rising digital tide timely. Digital organizations today have the hybrid reality with both physical structures and virtual presence, the old way and the new way of doing things. They need to figure out all sorts of hybrid solutions as well. From a management perspective, digital hybridity means how to strike the right balance of change and stability; innovation and standardization; transaction and transformation. From the governance perspective, the digital board needs to adopt a hybrid model and take the holistic discipline with mixed leadership styles for steering the business in the right direction.

Innateworkforcehybridity As our digitized world becomes hyper-connected, over-complex and interdependent, digital system themes with all the aggregates-spanning business challenges, paradoxes and opportunities bring organizations further towards the challenges of constructing and enacting "hybrid realities" across individuals, teams, looser groups, organizations, network-enterprises, and holistic digital ecosystems. The digital paradigm that is emerging is the sociological organization which is alive, holistic, vibrant, energetic, responsive, fluid, innovative and resilient with hybridity of knowledge, processes, workforce, and competencies.

Themultitude ofhybrid digitalmanagementdisciplines We are experiencing a major shift from the industrial machine age with information scarcity to the digital era with knowledge abundance. Traditional top-down linear management style is frequently criticized for its silo, inflexibility, bureaucracy, unresponsiveness, or lack of innovation.

InneraspectsofrunninghybridITanddigital organizationWe live in the world with both “old” and “new,” embracing digital is inevitable as that is now part of the reality. In order to lead change and drive digital transformation, IT should combine the old way to do things, and the new way to explore, the next practices and the best practices, take the balance of traditional hierarchy and flatter structure; keep the lights on,” and “doing more with innovation.” Either from management, technology or talent perspective, Is HYBRIDITY the right way to move forward with the right speed?

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 7 million page views with about #8700+ 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.

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Innerlogicofstrategicproblemsolving

The strategy-execution scenario should embrace the agile philosophy, take an iterative problem-solving competency, keep the speed at sync.

It is a continuously changing world with “VUCA” a new normal, unprecedented emergence is inherent in every venture of the business. No organization can afford to stick to its old ways of thinking and problem-solving. And effective strategy management is an iterative strategic problem solving continuum to bring up higher than expected business results.

Logical step-wise problem-solving scenario: There are both old problems and emergent issues; short-term pressures and long-term concerns. Many of today’s business problems are complex, and the future is the most difficult problem of our era. To deal with complex problems at the strategic level, it’s critical to take time and planning, doing better pre-work, frame the real problems, define alternative solutions, set the "success criteria," and enable consideration of the range of options. Thus, business leaders need to check around: Which solutions represent the best multifaceted value in terms of achievement of the business strategy to bring up the great outcomes? What solution options are available that will meet the customers’ needs and which option is the best from a strategic perspective to solve a multi-set of problems? Etc.

In essence, strategy development is about diagnosing the critical business problems, setting principles, making choices, and taking step-wise actions. There is no way to create a definitive prioritized list without more business context. Science, art, design, and humanity are interconnected to understand the “scope” of problems. It's important to look at the problem domain systematically and apply the “simplicity and flexibility” principles to solve problems innovatively. For some tame problems, it takes a logical step-wise scenario, identify the problem, find the factors involved in the final "incorrect" outcomes, do root cause analysis, try to find a systemic solution to deal with human and social concerns radically.

A concerted solution to a multi-faceted strategic set of problems: Many organizational problems today are complex and interdependent with interactive pieces and “conflict” goals. Strategic planning is an iterative problem-solving process. A strategy sets the right priority, diagnoses the root causes of problems, understands interconnectivity between varying issues, and intends to come up with a concerted solution to a multi-faceted strategic set of problems. From a problem-solving perspective, a good strategy is a premium solution that results in formulated planning and approach for the long-term action plan, boost positive morality and spur innovation to deal with the chain of relevant problems effortlessly.

Due to the ever changing environment, problems continue emerging, solutions should only be complete enough to define and plan the solution strategies. Nowadays, no organization can afford to stick to its old ways of problem-solving or get stuck at the state of “problem-solving impasse.” For every existing or emerging problem, we need to contemplate the varying causes behind it; for each problem that is worth the effort, we should ponder multiple solutions to solve it without too many side effects. A healthy process for problem-solving goes between flexibility and hard process; creativity and logic, the best practice and the next practice.

A fine-tuned solution strategy: Discussions of strategic plan issues must be ongoing and not merely a once-a-year exercise, Strategic problem-solving often has a very wide scope, intricate factors, dynamic characteristics, and needs to take an interdisciplinary approach today. There are a variety of gaps that need to be bridged for improving problem solving effectiveness. High mature organizations craft the tailored solution strategy that helps to classify and prioritize problems or concerns, address the pros and cons of each solution, make a distinction between obvious solutions and out-of-the-box solutions; and apply nonlinear logic to clarify cause-effect seamlessly.

Ultimately addressing the correct need is what determines the right problem and solves them effectively. In practice, to come up with a logical solution strategy: First, identify the critical business problem and eliminate all non-relevant perspectives. Next, identify or establish all relevant guided principles with regard to the business problem at hand. The combination of all guided principles defines a solution space for the business problem you are trying to tackle, and keeps updating a solution strategy to improve the overall problem-solving maturity. When circumstances change, you are devising the strategy, it needs to be relevant but also general to deal with the changes the organization will naturally experience and keep optimizing business solutions.

A good strategy supports the proven and interdependent business growth model, provides visibility, capability, and agility of business development. The strategy-execution scenario should embrace the agile philosophy, take an iterative problem-solving competency, keep the speed at sync. Strategic problem-solving should keep the long-term view within the short-term attention, take a holistic look at the variety of business relationships and interconnectivity, connect the wide dots to both frame the right problems in order to solve them effectively.

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People with learning agility, demonstrate the following traits, to adapt to the twenty-first-century business realities.

High organizational learning relates to high response in recognizing and addressing system constraints, and adapting to the ever-changing environment. With the increasing pace of changes and the cutting-throat competitions, to effectively respond to the digital dynamics, either individually or collectively, continuous learning becomes an important skill for capability building and prerequisite of developing changeability.

         Innovative Learning

Innovativelearning We live in the information and knowledge economy, continuous learning is not only a requirement but also a great habit to keep the business professionals mind fresh, knowledge updated, skills relevant, etc. An organization's philosophies, core values, and organizational objectives drive learning and development. Due to exponential growth of information, the knowledge life cycle is significantly shortened in the digital era. The digital workforce today has to learn and relearn all the time, learning and development occur when it is encouraged and supported by Senior Management. Talent management is an integral component of people management to improve business competency and unlock business performance.

Innovating via Learning Learning is a continuous process and everyone has an enormous capacity to learn and we need to learn continuously in order to adapt to constant change. Today, there are continuous technology led disruptions and convenient, overloaded information, and commodity knowledge only a click away. The division between 'working' and 'learning' is replaced by combining and integrating 'working, thinking and learning.’

Innerlearningagility We live in a knowledge economy, today’s digital professionals are knowledge workers who are open to learning and sharing insight and creating new knowledge all the time. You simply can't resolve the 21st-century problems with the mindsets shaped half-century ago. Continuous learning is not only a job requirement but also a great habit to keep our minds fresh and knowledge updated. Learning agility is a person's ability to learn quickly, and adapt prior knowledge to new experiences, build professional competency, and solve complex problems smoothly. Here are three aspects to develop learning agility.

Innatelearningcycle Change is the new normal and knowledge could be outdated sooner than what we thought. Learning becomes a knowledge builder and we can define learning through the information it absorbs and the capability it builds. Learning competency differentiates high potential from mediocre, and it’s the great indicator of people's proficiency and long term professional competency. Learning cycles assume that learning is a process, it’s important to rationalize a healthy learning-unlearning-relearning cycle to keep knowledge fresh and enhance learning agility.

Innovativelevelsofadvancement Nowadays, organizations and human societies are inextricably connected with information technology. The geographical territories, knowledge boundaries, industry borders, or functional barriers are starting to weaken, allowing business leaders and professionals to pursue their aspirations, develop a fitting mindset, build their unique competency, as well as apply their expertise to the greatest effect.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 7 million page views with about 8700+ blog postings in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify your voice, deepen your digital footprints, and match your way for human progression.

Read More