Innovation

It’s important to architect, reimagine, and co-develop an innovative society via an expanded lens and hold on to a strong belief that collective progress leads to leapfrogging societal advancement.

Innovation happens at the intersection point of people and technology, business and customers, transforming great ideas to generate value. There are many key factors that lead to the success of innovations; it is imperative to sharpen them and build innovation as the core business capability. 

With rapid change and continuous disruption, building an innovative organization or society is not an overnight phenomenon, but a long-term planning and dedicated effort to make differences

It is about creating an anticipatory design for improving innovation excellence: The construct of a design-driven innovation system allows open-minded brainstorming, creates space for open dialogues and design brainstorming, develops a common understanding of innovation effort, creates the necessity and motivation for it. One of the important steps in anticipatory design is to get the management buy in. The structural design innovations most often require design teams to attend to the total system of valued product interactions and related opportunities for creating new design features that enable unique value creation across the wide-ranges of current and new product interactions.

Organizations become more people-centric, and products or services turn to be more personalized. So, the purpose itself is a multidimensional system. It has emergent properties that help to deal with future possibilities for innovation. For innovative organizations, good design best meets the needs of many. However, it becomes the 'ideology du jour' to those that do not continue to inquire as to the 'fit' of the level of thinking with dynamic system context. Design work has different stages of maturity, from design-by-default, in which design just happens to design –by-practice in which design becomes a strategic business activity and management practice.

Business leaders as innovation integrators can practice “structural leadership”; unleash innovation potential of the organization: Innovation becomes more complex, requiring interdisciplinary expertise and cross functional collaboration. Integration is a critical step in optimizing business processes/capabilities/capacities for developing a set of differentiated and dynamic innovation competency. An effective innovation integration team composed of interdisciplinary experts as insightful “integrators” help their organization explore information-based innovation potential in a structural way.

Organizations have limited resources/talent; it’s critical to integrate their business innovation capacity in order to balance business stability and growth, build new capability, and achieve innovative forms of competitive advantage given path dependencies and market positions. The right leadership structure is the one that allows the right mentality and innovative culture to bloom. Innovative leaders play structural leadership via deepening understanding of interfaces and interactions associated with complex businesses, making effective decisions in developing innovation capability, and manifesting connection, caring, trust-building and influence to accomplish strategic business goals.

It’s important to begin thinking about ways for orchestrating innovation ecosystems: Business ecosystem orchestration is accelerated to the hyper-connected digital world. The real challenge is to understand where and how you can and should improve to get the biggest effect and scale-up across the digital ecosystem effortlessly. There are many factors impacting innovation effectiveness such as leadership, culture, capability, practices, tools, recognition system measurements, risk approach. Each component by itself may not cause a good environment, but collectively, they can weave a strong innovation ecosystem.

Digital world has become increasingly complex in nature; an innovation ecosystem should fully cover a wide enough direction, and organizations are combining all that is available to them in imaginative, adventurous ways. With ecosystem involvement, companies will become more open to diverse opinions and feedback, people become the center of innovation management and they are the major focus for innovation process and accomplishment; businesses become more resilient to failure forward.

Highly collaborative organizations are more productive, competitive, and innovative in solving difficult business problems effortlessly. Innovation needs to lay out different structures, thinking and solutions to allow this to develop in its potential. It’s important to architect, reimagine, and co-develop an innovative society via an expanded lens and hold on to a strong belief that collective progress leads to leapfrogging societal advancement.

Read More

Philosophical Problem-Solving

Leaders today are encouraged to leverage philosophical understanding to reimagine leadership and reinvent traditional management disciplines, in order to run purposeful, high mature organizations.

The digital ecosystem is complex, it becomes complex if things do interact, particularly in the case of nonlinear interactions, you can't separate things properly or you cannot predict the future accurately. Philosophy helps managers abstract their thoughts and management insight to understand the business dynamics, work toward some common purposes or goals of the business system, often including the continuing viability and renewal of the organization for the long term prosperity.

The underlying philosophy includes choices on business management themes, and governance flavors in relation to vision, mission, principles, standards etc: Because there are silos thinking and overly rigid processes to stifle changes. Often, the management has been made complicated if using the means of traditional approaches; the effectiveness of strategy management depends on how it draws upon all the various fields to come up with something integrated. The clarified management philosophy allows people to see the cause and effect thoroughly for improving organizational manageability.

From a people management perspective, it makes strategic sense for the organizations to integrate human capital management into performance management, knowledge management, and culture management in order to align organizational vision with employee engagement and talent development, setting establishment of the contribution of the roles; analysis and synthesis of a variety of the management disciplines with people-centricity themes.

Leaders leverage philosophical lens to ask insightful questions which are still current and meaningful to architect a purposeful organization and harness governance: To survive in a knowledge economy, people need to be learning agile, ask meaningful questions, and share fresh insight. A knowledgeable mind can become outdated much sooner than before if it stops filling in the new knowledge. Business leaders and professionals are faced with similar challenges. Philosophy is an ongoing inquiry into the nature of things based on abstract reasoning. By leveraging philosophical lenses, people are encouraged to look for an experience of truth, the unfolding of wisdom by those who have gone beyond traditional thinking and conventional understanding.

Management and governance are interdependent. Governance structure provides philosophy and principles to orchestrate digital transformation. Governance philosophy provides ongoing inquiries into various aspects of business management; governance principles offer a set of rules to develop empirical methods and next governance practices. By taking a philosophical lens, people can gain insight about themselves, their organizations, as well as the ecosystem they live in for architecting a purposeful organization.

As the compass of human civilization, philosophy allowing people to see the cause and effect of complex problems thoroughly, based on conceptual, futuristic, paradoxical, and “big picture” lenses: Philosophy is always important to better understand organizational evolution and harness its power to serve human purposes. Philosophical thinkers are great learners with endless curiosity to keep exploring the breadth of knowledge and depth of insight in shaping paradoxical understanding of business complexity. Philosophical thinking encourages us to ask big “WHY” questions, and helps us see the reasoning in decisions and actions for leading progressive changes, as well as clarify cause-effect of problem-solving.

From the business management perspective, simplicity and complexity are dual forces of running a high-performance digital business. Philosophical questions can help to discover the real cause and even dissolve the problem that is the discipline worth pursuing. To truly fix the problems and optimize organizational performance, you need to use philosophy compass, put additional effort to do extrapolation and find the purpose. Cause-Effect analysis anticipates purpose but not until the business system is actualized, can you really observe manifest purpose.

Organizations will reach the next level of business maturity when each part of the business can collaborate synchronously to achieve common goals timely. To make a progressive movement and advance humanity, leaders today are encouraged to leverage philosophical understanding to reimagine leadership and reinvent traditional management disciplines, in order to run purposeful, high mature organizations.

Read More

Initiativesofagilegovernance

The higher the complexity of the organization, the stronger GRC practices are needed to improve organizational maturity.

Contemporary organizations becoming complex is not for its own sake, but to adapt to the environmental changes, GRC can be used to raise visibility and awareness for many things that are captured at the different levels of the organizational hierarchy. 

Good corporate governance enhances business management disciplines for developing and sustaining the environment and culture. It enables an enterprise to prosper, meet its agreed goals with the available resources whilst making the most of its opportunities, to improve overall business agility and maturity. The corporate BoDs as one of the critical governance bodies need to ponder: What are the governance weaknesses or pitfalls and how to improve GRC practices and disciplines?

If it does not address strategically important emerging issues, there is a very real risk that governance as a discipline will begin to lose focus of its prime purpose: In face of “VUCA” reality, governance is steering, with direct links to each business and its processes. It isn’t just about putting restrictions on what you can do; it is also about monitoring and knowing when things are not going to plan, so that you can take care of emerging issues at the right time.

In today's business dynamic, governance controlling and enforcement takes a new meaning. It takes agile governance practices to address emerging issues, and prevent risks effectively, in order to respond to changing circumstances and fix real problems thoroughly. So the business leaders need to reflect the spirit of their governance discipline, not only from the financial results, but also from the involvement and signs being displayed about corporate guidance, values, and principles governing the company's commercial activities on a daily basis.

It's impossible to change rightly or have a good governance model without having a holistic view, or an outside-in perspective: Due to the rapid changing environment, businesses have to overcome unprecedented uncertainty and complexity. Organizations today are more like organic systems that must keep evolving to adapt to the changing environment. There are varying degrees of understanding of the scale and scope of corporate governance; the context for corporate governance includes a wide range of circumstances and capabilities which are subject to constant organizational variability. It’s important to shape a holistic governance prospect to enforce strong corporate culture and values. It’s important to break down the silo mentality and take an outside-in, people-centric perspective, keep optimizing business processes; harness holistic management disciplines structurally.

The holistic governance, or integral governance approaches all have a role to play in driving or scaling business initiatives efforts and building high performance organizations. Business leaders should listen to a wide range of feedback from business users, question the business’s requirements and justifications of business initiatives. The value proposition of holistic governance should be integrated within and across operations not siloed off in a box and improve the success rate of business strategy management.

Governance efforts usually devolve into time-consuming, overbearing bureaucratic constructs, if organizations don't view governance as "decision-making optimization": A strong governance model illustrates the governance processes that are used to govern specific activities and establish decision rights. Otherwise, corporate governance perhaps adds a heavy layer of control and enforcement which causes business ineffectiveness or even bureaucracy. Strong governance discipline improves decision intelligence and overall problem-solving competency at the organizational level via embedding governance mechanisms of escalation and resolution.

Governance as a decision optimizer is the act of guiding, influencing and regulating the decisions and behaviors of the entire workforce, management included, to improve decision maturity and drive sustainable value-creation to the shareholders. If effective governance with optimal decision-making mechanisms is put in place, they would be capable of setting the right dose of risk appetite, improve risk intelligence, and ensure decisions occur as fast as they possibly can, to improve decision coherence across the organizational hierarchy.

The higher the complexity of the organization, the stronger GRC practices are needed to improve organizational maturity. It takes a consideration of your current governance maturity - where you are today and how far and fast you might change things, coupled with a good definition of roles, responsibilities wrapped around governance processes to build a high performance, highly intelligent organization.

Read More

Initiativesofarchitecture

Business Architecture is an important tool that should support the requirements of the business and will need to be adjusted periodically. 

Business Architecture is like a compass tool for the organization to navigate through the right direction, implement a good strategy by enhancing the processes of problem diagnosis (current state), setting up policy/guideline, doing gap/impact analysis to define where and how, that bridges the gap between what is required and how it is implemented, and taking cohesive actions in change management. 

The information provided in the architecture provides guidance/direction on what steps need to be taken by the board and senior executives to reach their strategic goals for the company.

              Initiatives of Architecture 

Initiativesofarchitecture Business Architecture's role in designing and planning future enterprise is to gain the long term strategic-choreography perspectives, understand business complexity and its dynamic ecosystem. It’s an effective planning, facilitating, and optimizing tool for diagnosing and managing complexity, driving business value and cost-efficiency via consolidation, integration, optimization.

Initiatingarchitectureaspects Due to high velocity and continuous disruptions internally and externally, Cross boundaries, organizations face many dilemmas, meet a lot of paradoxes, get misunderstood and experience frustration when they don't get expected results from change or strategy management practices.

Initativesofarchitecture Organizations become overcomplex and hyperconnected, Business Architecture contains the organizational context and is strategic in that it gives direction to the business design and transformation. It is a management tool to identify gaps, assumptions, risks, keep the priorities in balance, shape the prioritization of the opportunities, make proactive movement by avoiding the kinds of problems that "order-taker" organizations run into all the time.

Initiativeofarchitecture We no longer live in the world that runs in years, but one that runs in minutes. Change is the new normal with increasing pace. Business Architecture is an important tool that should support the requirements of the business and will need to be adjusted periodically; enabling the management to think about the interrelation between stability and adaptation, standard and creativity, sequence and iteration, enhance business growth and balance cycles appropriately.

Illuminatesinnovationarchitecture Organizations become over-complex and informative, frameworks add value as they are implementations of the patterns to avoid having to reinvent the wheel for every business initiative. It is defined as a set of principles and describes best practices of how things should be done from the process and documentation side. It is a configurable, reusable semi built application with features designed for specific purposes technically.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 10 million page views with about #10100th blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The “Digital Master” book series includes 29 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.

Read More

Information & Innovation

Information is the most invaluable business asset and information savvy business has high potential to achieve innovation excellence.

Information is the most invaluable asset of the organization, and creativity is one of the most desired professional qualities. In fact, information is one of the most time intensive puzzle pieces of innovation. Information analysis is one of the significant processes in innovation management.

Regardless of how big or complex data is, it does not make sense if it is not converted into usable information for decision making to identify, analyze and solve issues for the better of the company and its stakeholders including customers. To produce value from information, users really need the ability to change enterprise-wide inputs to "what-if" future outcomes; organizations must turn information into knowledge, insight, and innovation.

Information-driven time-to-insight is increasingly becoming critical and often plays an instrumental role in innovation management: As things become more complex and thus, you need analytics tools to cope with complexity. Organizations need to get crucial information faster, and yet improve decision making effectiveness. It's vital to harness the data’s actionable power as it enters the pipeline for refining data into fresh insight to solve problems effectively.

With rising customer expectations, the need for speed is actually more important than ever before. Data driven real time "what-if" analysis immediately to determine future outcomes. Critical thinking is essential for making decisions based on comprehensive analysis while creative thinking "creates" new possibilities. Both analysis and creativity are critical to solve complex problems alternatively. In fact, creativity and logic are actually the “hybrid truth”; requiring logical analysis to understand multiple opinions and emotions which trigger creativity to improve innovation excellence.

information analysis and creativity are both crucial to refine quality knowledge: You will never be able to automate true knowledge discovery completely. Refining data and capturing fresh insight requires a lot of experimenting, creative analysis & synthesis. A growing number of tools attempt to provide increasingly indicators on quality results; help to explore the data as quickly as possible, and visualize tools to make better business insight and potentially reveal a way forward.

Automation is part of the solution in knowledge refinement, but not everything can be automated, there is lots of creativity needed to reimagine what is possible, capture new knowledge, and fresh insight. What you can automate is the input into such a creative discovery process that results from feature selection. The creative human interpretation process is needed to tell a most likely story about the data-based analysis results for either leading talent development or business growth structurally.

Organizations need to investigate areas where they can have "quick wins" or discover innovation hot spots with creative analysis: We will never have the universe of data to interpret. We are lucky to have much larger samples now. but we still have to understand how quantitative data is a subset of reality. Use data to understand past, present performance and unleash potential; make predictive analysis of past performance to predict the future; make prescriptive analysis – focusing primarily on optimization -identification of best alternatives to achieve high performance.

Keep in mind, what happened yesterday will not be a perfect image of today or tomorrow. The advanced analysis is not just about capturing hindsight of business, but focusing on improving accuracy of prediction and effectiveness of prescription. Information savvy organizations are designed to transform unevaluated information (raw data) into information whose accuracy and authenticity are verified, and then information is transformed to knowledge to debunk innovation puzzles. So advanced analysis enables the business to not only make profitability, but also discover hot spots of innovation to ensure long term prosperity.

Information is the most invaluable business asset and information savvy business has high potential to achieve innovation excellence. Now with analytical intelligence capabilities combined with social pulse, the organization has more visibility of people's sentiments and can work to build a motivating environment for increasing employee values; optimizing employee experiences, delighting customers and generating multifaceted business value.

Read More

Initiativestoupperlevel

 Continuous improvement goes hand-in-hand with one of the digital principles, "to learn constantly so we continually improve. 

The digital era upon us is about people-centricity. Self improvement is about inspiring authenticity; growth mind, engagement, and innovation. Improvement cannot happen without change, and change should not happen without improvement.

 “Continuous Improvement” is the digital principle to achieve high professional quality. There will always be some resistance existing psychologically and methodologically, so overcoming resistance is one of the most challenging tasks for making continuous improvement either individually or collectively.

Keep practicing and climb the pyramid of cognitive maturity for leading cognitive progress: We are what we constantly think and do. Each of us has a defined cognitive threshold - an upper limit to the level of complexity that we can handle at any one time or on any one topic. But we can keep improving cognitive abilities via continuous learning, sharpening multidimensional thought processes to deepen understanding.

Each cognitive mind has a perceptual difference, cognitive gap is one of the serious problems because it disconnects many things which are supposed to be interconnected and causes blind spots for decision-making. Brainstorming or improving communication skills also raises your total cognitive threshold to improve cognitive agility. It’s important to examine your thought processes and make sure they are open to true understanding, strengthen cognitive ability of acquiring knowledge through thoughts, senses, learning and experiences to make effective decisions or sound judgment for reaching a high level of cognitive maturity.

Keep climbing the information-knowledge-insight pyramid to gain wisdom: We live in the complex world with overwhelming growth of information, faster pace of changes, too often, assumptions and prejudices get in the way of in-depth understanding. True understanding requires a person's ability to grasp or comprehend information, refine data into knowledge, abstract knowledge into fresh insight and capture ultimate wisdom. How deep your understanding is based on the mindset, logic, knowledge, lenses, and the methodology you leverage to interpret things.

Knowledge by itself is nothing if you do not understand how to apply it and make it useful for problem-solving. In order to deepen the level of understanding, it’s important to analyze and synthesize information, dig deeper to gain contextual understanding by embracing holism. Effective information -knowledge-wisdom refinement cycle is crucial to broaden varying perspectives, spark innovation, and solve real-world problems seamlessly.

Keep self-developing and climbing a self-actualization pyramid: Either individually or professionally, self-development is the full cycle of self-reflection, self-motivation and self-actualization. People think, create, and self-actualize by architecting themselves, experimenting with new things and exploring the art of possibility. It’s important to build a creative working environment in which the talented employees can grow and innovate, unleash their full potential for achieving high performance in the long term.

Talented people have the fitting mentality, aptitude and attitude, concentrate their energy on developing their own strength and building their unique set of capabilities via self discovery and autonomy. The goal of building a people-centric organization is to create a workplace in the way people can relate to themselves and to their experience of the environment and others around them, inspire self-management, and unleash collective potential.

Continuous improvement goes hand-in-hand with one of the digital principles, "to learn constantly so we continually improve." When an organization cultivates a culture of learning and progress, people feel supported and confident, in taking ownership, responsibility, and keeps focused for reaching the next level of professional competency.

Read More

Insight

So hopefully, we are moving from a knowledge economy to the digital age with the abundance of wisdom.

It is the holiday season, it’s also the right moment to recharge energy, bring an optimistic view about the future, set the fresh tones in pursuit of true wisdom. In reality, it's so easy to see faults and mistakes; make negative thoughts & messages pervasive. 

But start from this holiday, encourage positive thinking, recognize benevolent intentions and actions; and bring authenticity, fresh insight, true wisdom to light; in order to rejuvenate fresh energy, refresh mindsets, and reinvent an advanced human society. All of us need to ponder: What wisdom does humanity need to develop in the present day situations? Take some time to reflect on the spirit of the holiday and take a progressive journey to pursue true wisdom.

It’s important to differentiate true wisdom from conventional wisdom: Wisdom includes whatever knowledge we've acquired and it incorporates experiences, reflections, and questioning to capture insight. It may seem intangible, but it is very real and invaluable, and there is personal learning in it. There is rational wisdom - accumulative wisdom based on past experience and gained knowledge. There is unconventional wisdom which implies “out-of-the-box” thinking creativity and fresh insight. Keep in mind though, conventional wisdom has a negative connotation about sticking to outdated concepts, old traditions, ineffective cultures, or simply the old ways to do things. If you keep holding conventional wisdom, you continue encouraging mediocrity. Thus, it’s truly a courageous journey to break down old thinking boxes and pursue true wisdom.

With rapid changes and frequent disruptions, it’s important to scrutinize those common beliefs or best practices, are they still fully functioning or already outdated? Insightful business leaders and professionals should share their fresh insight based on their subjective perceptions to explore themselves, surrounds and beyond, try to minimize the discrepancy between their personal understanding and objective truth. That means they are on the journey in pursuit of truth. True wisdom leads to putting more thoughts into things and searching for flaws in decisions and that widens the possibility of coming up with alternative solutions.

It’s crucial to strike the right balance between confidence and humility; long term & short-term perspective, local and global: Wisdom is the insightful quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgment; the inner quality of being wise. In reality, there are quite many silos in traditional industrial organizations. The impact of collaboration platforms and technological tools are right on. Insightful leaders and professionals are about to strike the right balance of the optimistic spirit and cautious attitude; confidence and humility; openness and standardization; discipline and flexibility; local common sense and global wisdom; and balance long term and short term goals & objectives.

The future of the organization is the right mix of ‘virtual’ and physical. While information technology provides new frontiers for work systems, there are also challenges with issues of human 'connectivity'. What's intended to bring us closer together may leave us feeling further apart. As deep human connection is still important, and the connection is not only just about physical interaction but more importantly as an emotional connection. Wise leaders and professionals encourage cross functional communication, collaboration, to build a culture of learning agility and innovation.

Imagine how different the world would be if true understanding, empathy and real wisdom become the theme of modern society: In the real world, humans aren't as good as we should be in our capacity to empathize with the feelings and thoughts of others. So misunderstanding, misinterpretation, miscommunication cause significant issues and divide human society. The most important capability of the cognitive mind is the willingness and ability to seek out fresh knowledge, gain an in-depth understanding of issues or people, address people’s ignorance and assumptions, articulate the real root cause of problems in order to solve them smoothly.

Someone in the throes of a strong emotion is simply unable to hear rational arguments or respond logically. Listen objectively with an open heart and mind, make cohesive understanding and logical reasoning; being non-judgmental, and balance between tolerance and respect to achieve harmony. Once a person understands that we all have different lenses, perceptions in the way we look at the world, it becomes easier to connect the mind and touch the heart, she/he becomes a wiser human being.

We are moving to the deep, deep digital dynamic; put aside all the trained thoughts, boxes, systems and let the open possibility come to connect naturally, Wisdom encourages us to keep on gathering facts; knowledge. Knowledge without wisdom perhaps creates more problems due to misunderstanding and misjudgment; when it creates wisdom which gains more knowledge that creates more wisdom. So hopefully, we are also moving from a knowledge economy to the digital age with the abundance of wisdom.

Read More

Initiativesoforganizationalsustainability

Sustainability are cross-disciplinary efforts; sustainability innovation is the scalable way that can be learned and practiced.

Today’s digital business environment is dynamic, complex, and uncertain; there are always different complexities at a different time or dimensions. A sustainable society will only come through common beliefs, the accumulated actions of billions of individuals. There are the trends with an interdisciplinary convergence of sciences and humanities essential toward a circular economy and our shared beautiful planet.

It’s the time to renew ourselves, renew our beautiful planet via a sustainability lens: Sustainability is not just the buzzword about corporate social responsibility, but an important capability to improve bottom line profitability in the lower carbon, sustainable economic era, and make an influence on the global ecosystem. It is the low hanging fruit when moving beyond compliance and obligation.

When we look at the hyper rising costs of energy in recent years, efficiency has been a key internal driver for sustainable practices. Thus, business units need to be engaged with implementing sustainability initiatives; sustainability needs to be integrated into existing key process & performance management systems. The organizations need to build the right capabilities to enhance sustainability and improve business maturity.

It’s critical to develop the best practice for catalyzing sustainability innovation: All too often many organizations perhaps manage a few sustainability initiatives successfully, but they lack the systematic approach to manage resources and talent, bridge gaps, to build sustainability as a business competency. Organizational sustainability management requires an effective business system that is capable of managing and sustaining energy efficiency. Sufficient data or information is crucial to dig through the new gold and implement sustainability initiatives. Whatever the activity to improve sustainability; the best way is to use the least resources and take the least time and still meet quality standards.

In management practice, the pressure of short-term earnings performance is at odds with the longer-term nature of sustainability. A fine-crafted sustainability strategy can be used to drive innovation efforts in the development of a holistic sustainability strategy; communicate what needs to be done down the line to the various functional domains responsible for unlocking sustainability potential of the business. Every organization should strive to explore the "best practices' ' throughout their organization to improve energy efficiency and scale up sustainability effects, orchestrate an energy-efficiency, sustainability-savvy, and resource-optimized modern organization.

Regular feedback is a must and incentives should be comparable to expectation set and engage more people as advocates in creating the sustainability momentum: Organizational leadership sets sustainability as a high priority, embed real, measurable, ongoing commitments to go beyond the immediate benefits of compliance, obligations, and efficiency, make incentives tied to performance on sustainability initiatives. It is a logical scenario of establishing a roadmap for sustainability management, using the data collected to motivate and impact sustainable change to reduce organizational energy footprint.

The incentives will increase the willingness of employees to give you those ideas upon improving business sustainability and supporting corporate goals, balance sustainability efforts with business demands to make an influence on the environment,improve business’s bottom line efficiency, orchestrate the energy-efficiency, sustainability-savvy, and resource-optimized modern organization.

Sustainability are cross-disciplinary efforts; sustainability innovation is the scalable way that can be learned and practiced. There is always an element of social benefits in any industry; it is for the organization and its promoters to draw the balance between social and commercial objectives. It’s also important to practice to orchestrate cross-disciplinary sustainability efforts, facilitate cross-functional communication, develop a comprehensive roadmap, optimize business processes, and take a structural effort to achieve measurable results.

Read More

Initiateleadershipvaluevirtue

Leadership now becomes more open and interdisciplinary, influential and innovative, with varying ingredients.

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 Here is the monthly tuning of digital leadership.

         Leadership Value & Virtue

Initiativesofleadership Leadership is about change and direction. Leadership is a principle, but often you have to break down the outdated rules in order to lead forward effectively. Far too often the term "leadership" is thrown around loosely and without any regard to true meaning.

Initiativeofleadership Contemporary leadership is about a clear vision, an advanced mindset, and a planned attitude of risk-taking for inspiring innovation, leading organizations and our societies forward with leapfrogging changes and unleashing collective potential courageously.

Initiateleadershipbenevolenceinfluence It’s time for holiday celebration, it’s also a time to ponder deeper about leadership in a hyper-connected environment with interdependent global dynamic, hybrid diversity.

IngredientsofleadershipThe world becomes more complex with information abundance and hyperdiversity; leadership is the foresight to see the future needs of an organization, and our society. Today’s organizational leaders should have the ability to perceive clearly and influence deeply; striving to be true to their intentions.

Initiatevalue Every organization has a purpose, as well as a set of values to reveal its purpose. The value of the firm goes beyond economic value or shareholder value, to include other forms of value such as societal value, employee/customer value, supplier/alliance partner value, managerial value, etc.

Leadership now becomes more open and interdisciplinary, influential and innovative, with varying ingredients. The leaders today need to become more benevolent to unify the difference; more experimental to spur innovation; more adventurous to explore the “art of possibility,” and more cautious of potential risks, for advancing human society.

The “Future of CIO” blog has reached 10 million page views with about 10100+ 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

Initiativesoflogicalreflection

For logical people, every meaningful thing has logic in it. 

It’s time for holiday celebration, it’s also the time to review what has happened, what we can learn from the past; boost creative energy for the upcoming journey; it’s the moment to clarify the logic of enforcing mutual understanding, to believe that people can change and start to think about the greater good. 

Think big and globally, if we look at the world through a lens of genuine positive intent, where we think through our intention, decisions and actions and the ripple effect being created, the world would change for better significantly.

Logic to do holiday self-reflection: Being human is to first find our true identity through self-reflection and self-realization. Awareness is at the level of the energetic connection between heart and mind. So the logic of self-reflection is about knowing who you are; providing clarity, discovering your strengths, uncovering weak points, giving you directional opportunities for personal growth. It enforces self-confidence- having the right dose of ego to overcome fears and be courageous enough to take risks; self-motivation -the right attitude to learn and grow, and make improvements to become better human beings.

Also, apply reflection logic to sense, better understand yourselves and how knowing who you are and your own style of influence affect how you interact and respond with your surroundings, let your thoughts and actions work to keep you motivated, only then can humanity stand. So the logical process of reflection is the foundation of learning, growth, improvement, refinement, evolution.

Logic to fix ignorance: We live in a dynamic environment with information exponentiality, over-complexity, and unprecedented uncertainty. There are competitions, conflicts, and controversies all over the place in today’s global environment. Humans have huge potential, but each one of us also has our limitations. Let’s acknowledge the fact that we are ignorant and let the other person complement our expertise, and show us a different way which could offer different viewpoints and solutions. Isn't the holiday season the good time to be open-minded for true human interactions?

In reality, people ignore the problems because they can't figure out the exact cause and effect so the solutions are vague, variable or unknown. People ignore the problems because they are so complex and there are more problems behind it, which are intimidating. We all have to walk in the shoes and see the problem or situation from the others’ point of view. Thus, it’s important to apply logic to fix ignorance, uncover patterns and understand the interconnectivity underneath the surface. An insightful outlook helps to gain an in-depth understanding of cause and effect

Logic of progression: The spirit of holiday is to reveal virtues of being peaceful, non-hatred, uprightness, gratitude, humility. tolerance, looking forward to making progression. It's almost the end of year, it’s also the time to assess people’s accomplishments and potentiality. Assessing a person’s motivational potential is how well they can focus on performing well in new and changing contexts. A progressive mind is all about the desire to learn, grow and make continuous improvement.

You sense yourself and that's all you need to let your thoughts and behavior work to keep you motivated. Different people, communities, groups are perhaps at the different stages of the progress journey. Individual progress enriches our professional or life experience and drives an upward life journey. Collective progress leads to societal advancement.

Are you on the journey of being self-aware, self-motivated, self-directed, self-disciplined, self-renew, self-sufficient, and self-reliant to make purposeful life and drive progressive changes? The advanced society is a dynamic continuum with collective human progress. Real societal progress is made through people with foreseeable and progressive mindset, to sustain a balance of diversified viewpoints, creativity, discipline for solving problems and driving progress collectively.

Holidays are the time to rejuvenate and recharge energy. Every person is unique and we all have our own strengths and weaknesses. For logical people, every meaningful thing has logic in it. Discover underneath the logic behind who you are, where you are going. Individualism and collectivism are not exclusive, but complimentary, An advanced society is the right balance of individualism and teamwork, democracy and unification; science and art to solve varying problems collaboratively.

Read More

Inquisitiveness

Real societal advancement is made through the work of forwarding-looking minds, updating knowledge, and progressive activities to lift humanity constantly.

We belong to modern societies with varying characteristics such as citizenship, freedom, liberty, a system of fairness. However, the real world is sometimes dysfunctional, causing pain for many of us in reality. Isn’t this holiday season to make a wish, fix the root causes of problems from mindset to behavior, make the modern world fully functioning, let benevolence, capabilities, great things shine through the darkness at the dawn time of leapfrogging progression. 

Can we make deep inquiries to scrutinize thoughts, words, human intentions, behaviors anthropologically? Are we ready and willing to eliminate what clearly isn't working, rejuvenate cultures and renew the fresh energy?

Are you able to identify cultural behavior -the beliefs and unspoken rules that everybody in the organization knows and shares? How does it drive culture- collective organizational mindset and behaviors? Culture can make or break an organization. Culture is soft, but it's one of the “toughest” ingredients in the “digital transformation formula.” Culture is invisible, but it's one of the most powerful factors for organizational or societal long-term prosperity. A good culture is a foundation for seamless changes and collective progression. Culture is not something that can be identified based on the slogans you posted on the wall; the smile you put on the face or the costume you wear to the work thoroughly; you need to see around the corner, observe what people say or do when the management is not around; culture is also not the thing that can be dictated and followed such as a new policy or rule from management.

It comes down to which perspective you wish to take - values, behaviors or underlying assumptions for understanding the culture deeply. Too many rigid procedures or hidden rules will stifle creativity and free thinking, thus, make culture outdated. Culture has to permeate into the fluid digital business environment and needs to be nurtured via communication, collaboration, and a culture of innovation is like a blender that well mixes important ingredients such as passion, focus, and teamwork. In fact, by learning to break down old rules and clarify cultural logic, we would see a fundamental and dramatic shift in reinventing the culture and making a paradigm shift.

Are you able to recognize culture patterns - does the company truly embrace openness, transparency, collaboration, empowerment, respect for the value of people and adding value to the enterprises, etc. Focus on the fact that the fundamental nature of organizations that consists of human social systems, which are partially designed, even architected, but are also grown, matured, and evolved. A culture of passionate people that embrace change and seek understanding will be paramount.

A culture of innovation isn't built in a day; you can’t impose the desired culture to the organization. When the organization only rewards the rule followers, not innovators, the old rule breakers, more often, they focus on encouraging mediocrity, short term results, not long term vision.Insightful leaders should inspire creative thinking, independent thinking, holistic thinking, encourage growth mindset and rejuvenate culture of changes. It’s important to recognize your innovators - lookout for curious people with a broad knowledge based, interdisciplinary understanding, bold vision and hands-on attitude and benevolent behaviors.

Are you able to quantify the culture in order to reinvent it -Does culture really need to be quantified, can you measure it effectively? The culture thing includes feelings and emotions that you will know by the level and transparency of organizational interactions across hierarchy. Culture is intangible, but can be assessed objectively. Understand both the internal and external aspects of the workplace. The first step is to get a baseline read of the culture. This can be done using any number of tools or asking a series of questions that get at the hard part of what is working and not working.

Technically, understand more about if/how to measure progress in the cultural aspects of an organization. It's about what matrix you use to measure and the ability to respond positively with transparency and stay with it for the long term.Some cultural instruments are in fact measuring climate If you can map the culture you have and the culture you want, you have effective and efficient processes to enable transformation with strong management support, then you can begin making culture change happening smoothly.

People suffer from distorted perceptions, outdated culture, dysfunctional societal systems, Culture and brand are the most important "soft" elements that a company will make since they will define how the company interacts with its various stakeholders. It’s important to understand societal culture phenomenon and contextualization via different lenses. Real societal advancement is made through the work of forwarding-looking minds, updating knowledge, and progressive activities to lift humanity constantly.

Read More

Illuminategoodness

It’s time to reflect on the spirit of the holiday, appreciate many things we do -read, think, understand, reflect, practice deliberately; appreciate all good, beauty, and harmonized things at an influential level.

It’s time to celebrate the holiday through “food for thoughts.” Be grateful for wisdom, which are invaluable treasures to warm the heart and touch the mind. Be grateful to understand others and be understood, make deep appreciation through fresh insight. Appreciation touches all things - it’s from our heart flow into our mind, we can come together in an effective way bringing about change we want to see.

Goodness to Reflect Holiday Spirit

Innateawareness 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.

Influenceviafairness Fairness means to be impartial, equitable, objective, dispassionately examining, and open-minded. Fairness is a concept with two characteristics to be judged by each individual for her/himself to be fair or unfair towards others.

Is Kindness a Mindset? Kindness often starts as a thoughtful mind and deliberate action, but enough of it, and it becomes a habit. The true value of kindness is its consistency, to convey a person’s high quality as a human, the high professionalism as an employee; and the true nature as a creature. You don’t need to be a religious person to show kindness, just like you don’t have to go to college to gain knowledge. Kindness is a state of mind. Kindness can have different styles, it could be as hot as flame, or as cool as ice water; It’s something that you commit to before it becomes second nature which overcomes the negative psychology and drives human world progress.

Future of Abundance Abundance is directly related to who we ARE: Behind the eyes, the smile, and the body. The "abundance" is about awareness, within you, is who you ARE. It cannot be rocked, directed, or manipulated by anything. Once recognized, there are no limits, and, this is abundance.

Initiative Collective Progress We are on the major shift from industrial silo to digital hyperconnectivity, informativeness and superconsciousness. Besides human consciousness, is the internet conscious? Is sensory technology conscious? Is the digital organization conscious? Is our hyper connected ecosystem conscious? True, is our universe conscious?

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 10 million page views with about #10100 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.

Read More

Illustrateregardless

Regardless who we  are, where we live; holidays awake -our consciousness to -pursue truth, despise false; ponder sequence-consequence in humanity…

It’s a peaceful, quiet holiday,

It’s another moment to-

hold on our beliefs,

refresh our thoughts;

ponder the spirit of Christmas:

benevolence, thoughtfulness, fairness;

discover the meaning for -

the journey of being called life-

purpose, potential,

adventure, accomplishment.


Regardless of our differences,

all human beings are -

more similar than different;

can we take a holistic viewpoint of -

people with -

growth perspectives,

set the common principles to-

encourage desired changes.

solve perplex problems facing -

humanity, smoothly.


Regardless of who we are,

where we live;

holidays awake -

our consciousness to -

pursue truth,

despise false;

can we listen to-

diverse viewpoints;

understand the other side of-

the coin;

broaden the perspective to -

fix misperceptions;

eliminate unconscious bias;

clarify sequence & consequence;

to convey the essence of Christmas?

Read More

Illustraterenewing

Modern life is-intense, fast-paced; isn’t holiday -the time to -genuinely look, gently feel, gradually permeate, keep our aura flowing, instill passion, recharge energy, reimagine the future, boldly?

It’s a quiet, soothing day,

don’t you believe-

another Christmas is coming,

with its typical holiday charming;

Isn’t the time to-

let it be;

relax, reflect, renew,

offer, receive gifts to-

show caring

touch hearts,

connect minds,

thoughtfully?

Aren’t we -

all individuals with -

different grades of -

humanness?


Holiday season is for -

recharging, recovering;

it is the time to -

neither over-thinking,

nor stop-pondering;

keep our mind free,

thoughts flow over,

naturally;

put our ego aside,

be a sensible being;

originally;

look, listen, feel,

taste, touch, ponder,

demonstrate kindness,

compassion,

friendliness,

universal love,

toward all beings,

comprehensively.


Modern life is-

intense, fast-paced;

isn’t holiday -

the time to -

genuinely look,

gently feel,

gradually permeate,

keep our aura flowing,

instill passion,

recharge energy,

reimagine the future,

boldly?

Read More

Initiativesofbods

Corporate boards as one of the high-level governance bodies play a crucial role in business advising & monitoring, to run fitting organizations.

The digital paradigm shift is inevitable. Keeping digital fit means the fitting mindset, fitting attitude, fitting structure, and fitting speed. The corporate board's main work is to oversee business strategy management and make an objective assessment of the organization's fit from different perspectives such as business information savvy, agility, innovation, resilience, etc.

 Fitting organizations are always on, volatile, fast, highly-connected and ultra-competitives, stretching out in every business dimension for driving the full-fledged digital transformation. The corporate board needs a well-rounded team of individuals who can complement each other’s mindset, expertise, and work collaboratively to shape a fitting organization.

The team or organizational fit manifested in accepted and expected behavior, has a way of neutralizing differences to create synergy: Organizational fit means more about value-adding or behavioral norm. There are many business factors that have an impact on digital fitness such as organizational structure, process, people, culture, technology, competition, market segmentation, rules, responsibility, etc. Sometimes, organizational fit from conventional lenses makes relationships easy and perpetuates the status quo, so if companies are satisfied with where they are and going then they should pay attention to fit. Thus, from GRC perspective, the fitting corporate board needs to have both ‘fresh eyes’ and ‘inquisitive mind' to scrutinize the fitness of the business.

The business fitting oversight from the corporate board provides the guidance for the business management to keep tuning organizational competencies. From a talent management perspective, fitting teams are heterogeneous and competitive to close blindspots, bringing holistic perspectives. Everyone feels committed to the goals of the team, and they are comfortable with the behavioral expectations associated with those goals for achieving high performance results.

Organizations collect feedback, analyze context and convert them into actionable business insight inferentially: With frequent disruptions and constant changes, the real-time feedback from boardroom to front desk can provide insights that can genuinely help management teams drive improvement over time. There is a mechanism to collect feedback and there is transparency in the follow-up. Social activities and participation help leaders sharpen strategic insight and extend strategic execution. It’s an expansive cycle of continuous feedback, exploration, experience and a more natural process of improvement.

Feedback does not focus on the past; it tells you what is happening so that you can adapt. The information gained from feedback can help business management develop the next digital practices. Feedback helps to not only act but aid to feedforward for either managing change or accelerating performance. It needs to be continuous, as close to real time as possible, the feedback from BoDs helps business management improve their daily practices and enhance GRC discipline of the organization.

It’s important to establish ground rules for communication and meeting progress checks: The digital rules are not some out-of-date cliche or rigid processes to stifle innovation. Instead, they are based on the set of digital principles and philosophy behind the methodologies. overly restrictive policies will lead to micromanagement or too much control which leads to business bureaucracy, inefficiency and stifling innovation. Corporate boards set principle guidelines, to shape the positive culture, encourage innovation, harness cross boundary communication and collaboration.

Most board directors are top seasoned business leaders with decades of experiences or deep functional expertise, independent board directors are also the “outliers” who can provide fresh perspectives and share the unique insight. By following the digital principles and rules, the business lifecycle could be viewed as resulting in emergent means of reorganizing, refocusing, rebalancing resources, and redirecting people to understand the whole,

The effects of an increasingly digitized world are now reaching into every corner of businesses and every aspect of organizations. Corporate boards as one of the high-level governance bodies play a crucial role in business advising & monitoring, to run fitting organizations which understand and lead with emergent digital trends, and commit to transforming themselves into high-performance digital business.

Read More