Wednesday, June 6, 2018

Tuning Organizational Structure from Hierarchy to Circular for Achieving Fluidity, Flexibility, and Fit

11:29 PM Pearl Zhu 1 comment

There is more than one road to lead the digital way of achieving fluidity, flexibility, and fit, enjoy the journey and make a seamless digital paradigm shift.

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

Fluidity: Most organizations need to have a certain level of the hierarchy to improve business efficiency. However, to be a highly functional system, the hierarchy must balance the freedoms, welfare, and responsibilities of the subsystems and total system. This is particularly important for running today’s digital business with high velocity and unprecedented complexity and uncertainty. The reality is that organizations that do not respond to external environmental changes will quickly outcompete as more nimble and adaptable companies catch up and take their customers. The bottom line is how well the organizational structure is being influenced by varying business factors. The management needs to check up: Does the chain of communication flow easily or does it stop at one level? Digital means flow, mind flow, idea flow, and information flow. Organizations, like individuals, need to be in flow to communicate fluently and operate smoothly. Thus, to break down silos or overly rigid hierarchy, organizations need to be in flow to keep up with the speed. Forward-looking organizations experiment with different types of organizational structures to enforce business alignment, enablement, communication, collaboration, and harmony. For example, the circular or onion-like organizational layer is different from the command-control type of hierarchy: Every system is a subsystem of a larger system and simultaneously it is always build up by subsystems. these systems of systems can forge or alter a myriad of relationships/alliances for further enforcing communication and accountability. Ideally, the digital organizational structure needs to be solid enough to “keep things in order,” but also fluid enough to interact with the expanded digital ecosystem seamlessly. The ultimate business goal is to unlock latent expertise, scale innovation, amplify digital impact, and streamline business flow across the business ecosystem.

Flexibility: Digital is the age of option. Flexibility is about figuring out alternative ways to do things. Today’s organization is the mixed bag of old and new, order and chaos. The flexible organizational structure is implemented through the virtual team setting well mixing with the physical structure. Digital favors hybrid solutions. Ideally, the physical organizational structure, relationships, virtual platforms, and social connections wrap around each other to ensure responsibility, smoothly information flow and employee empowerment. Limited hierarchy works best in a creative environment where the free flow of ideas and their prompt implementation is a key element of success to improve business responsiveness and changeability. Logically, breaking down silos and being intentional about developing processes that encourage cross-functional collaboration and enforcing business flexibility. From the management perspective, flexible organizations tend to have managers with the right mix of personal attributes, that is, people who demonstrate a variety of skills, be comfortable with ambiguity, and respectful of the process. They practice leadership discipline via influence, not via command-control. The centralized, decentralized, and hybrid models can all work given the proper planning and management focus to keep them fine-tuned for improving business effectiveness and flexibility.

Fit: There are both hard fit and soft fit. There are many business factors that influence and have an impact on digital fitness such as organizational structure, process, people, culture, technology, competition, market segmentation, rules, responsibility, performance measurement, etc, and these elements are interrelated. The right mixed structure allows the right mentality and innovative culture to bloom. Dedicate to do more with innovation rather than logistic management. Organizational behavior is the example of the shift in thinking about talent management to adapt as well. An increasing focus is on soft skills, intangible capital, knowledge management, leadership rather than management. Organizational behaviors are examples of the shift in thinking about talent management to adapt. Flattening a corporate hierarchy serves no purpose if at the same time you flatten the tenacity of people who are willing to lead and take chances. With the fitting structure and people, information exchanged are free flow, accessible to all group members and you are able to appreciate each other’s thoughts, that is the difference between flat structure and silo-based structure. Here you want to look for fit is in relation to the collective capability you want to build or maintain, the flatter the organization the better for information flow, engagement, accountability, and the freedom to act, and ultimately organizations reach the healthy business cycle with the right balance of growth and stability, innovation and standardization, inside-out and outside-in.

Compared to the mechanical nature of the industrial organization, digital organizations are like the living systems that can self-adapt and self-renew in thriving as high-performance businesses. There is more than one road to lead the digital way of achieving fluidity, flexibility, and fit. The goal is to enjoy the journey and make a seamless digital paradigm shift.

The Monthly “Change Insight” Book Tuning: The Digital Change Pendulum June 2018

11:03 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

Change is inevitable, organizational change has become a common practice within an organization, but too often changes are made as a reaction to outer impulses, crisis, and demands. This is the bureaucracy’s way of meeting the challenges. A digital transformation is achieved via dynamic Strategy-Execution-Change lifecycle management, though it is not all linear steps, but an iterative, ongoing and upgoing change continuum. How to spot your change champions and cultivate the culture of learning and innovating?

The Digital Change Pendulum

Digital Change Pendulum, How Fast can it Swing? Digital means the increasing pace of changes. A changeable organization is to creating organizations where change is the norm and happens the whole time thereby delivering faster and increasing market share. There is the distinction between different types of organizational change - incremental or transformative; the scope, scale, and impact of the changes. In order to build a high-responsive and high-informative organization, digital leaders need to make an objective assessment via asking: Digital change pendulum, how fast can it swing? And how to take a proactive approach to manage the journey of digitalization?

Mastering Changes from Multiple Dimensions? The very characteristics of digital transformation are the increasing speed of change and hyperconnectivity. But change is difficult and has a very high failure rate. So, how to capture the signals of change readiness, how to improve change effectiveness, and how to manage and sustain change efforts multidimensionally?

Riding Learning Curves to Accelerate Changes Change becomes the new normal, and even the speed of change is accelerating. Too often changes are made as a reaction to outer impulses, crisis. How do you make changes to anything without knowing all the parts and how they are related? The goal of Change Management is to manage changes in a systematic way, either for making continuous improvement or innovation. Most of the changes are complex processes, how to ride learning curves to accelerate changes?

How to Lead Through Constant Change ? Change becomes new normal because of the "VUCA" characteristics of digital dynamic. Traditional step-by-step Change Management as one-time initiative or isolated approach might not work any longer for constant and multitude of change. Companies need to embed a changeable mindset in their culture and build change capabilities among all staff, not only managers in a continuous way. From a management perspective, what are the roadblocks to change, and how to lead through constant change more effectively?

How to Get Ahead of the Change Curve The change curve is a model of the states that people who are to change will go through because going through the downs of the change curve has a negative impact on productivity, leadership is required to guide people through the different phases in order to flatten the curve and to minimize the impact on productivity.

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 the 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.

Three Aspects of Clarifying Digital Business Model

10:50 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

Going digital is the journey to continue exploring the new business model for lifting the company to the next level of the growth cycle.

The emerging digital trends bring significant opportunities for organizations to pursue business growth through methodical examinations of alternative business models. With emerging digital technology trend and abundant information, the new digital business model can be discovered if organizations ride learning curve rapidly and explore the art of possibility courageously. Here are three aspects of how to explore the alternative business model and unlock organizational performance and potential?

Just following trends in your own sector is a sure way to lose: Business model is neither equal to strategy nor technology only. It is a description of the way in which an enterprise intends to leverage the emerging technologies or uprising trends to make money. In essence, it means to explore the alternative way to grow the business. Trends are just a means to an end for successfully innovating business model and making the profit. The starting point for a business model differs based on the objectives and nature of an organization. Business management must clarify many fundamental questions such as: What are your vision and mission? What is your strategic advantage? Who are the potential customers? What need is met for the customer? How well can you leverage the emerging technology trends? Why would someone prefer to buy from you? Which role will your business play in providing the offering? What percentage of that market do you expect to capture over what period of time? Etc. It is about how fast organizations can ride learning curve, foresee and apply emerging trends, that’s where you win the competitive advantage. There is the tension between old and new business model. To avoid obsolescence, the business model needs to allow space for innovation and explore the varying possibilities.

A business model's strength as a planning tool is that it focuses attention on how all the elements of the system fit into a working whole: The essence of a business model is some source of value that represents a competitive advantage. A well-defined business model is an analytical model that lists all of the sources of value, cost, risk, and contains the formulas to interconnect them. It builds an entire frame of elements that describe the intents and constraints of a business or organization. There is the mapping relationship between the business model (value model) and capability model, between capability model and process model. The quality capability model allows business leaders to establish important business goals relevant to the capability and identify goal dependencies to establish a high mature enterprise. Business model reinvention needs to be based on the core business competency either through providing value-added products/services/solutions to current customers or exploring the new customer need. In today’s digital dynamic and technical environments where Information and Technology are being used more and more around the globe for revenue-generating initiatives, the business model generates predictions for how to make the profit and improve customer satisfaction.

A business model must be testable both from a standpoint of the "story" (the value scenario) and the numbers: A well-defined business model shouldn’t be too abstract, it needs to contain everything having to do with how the business generates money, and there are both the story perspective and measurement number perspective. Because the challenging part of the business model is that you must be careful of what cost optimization/restructuring/performance measures need to be considered while trying to model a particular scenario. When the organization experiments the new business model or develop the new business entity that creates the revenue stream, it usually presents three challenges: First, emerging businesses usually lack hard data. This is particularly true when their latest technologies or cutting-edge products are widely diffused in the marketplace. Second: Innovative leaders are in demand to lead an emerging business because often, many leaders are trapped by conventional thinking, but the new business requires innovation and innovation requires fresh ideas. Third: There is the tension between old and new systems, keeping optimizing the existing systems and processes is always important to improve the business responsiveness and performance.

Digital disruptions are inevitable, and digital transformation is unstoppable. Organizations shouldn’t just respond to them in a reactive way. Digitalization is the journey to continue exploring the new business model for lifting the company to the next level of the growth cycle. To effectively respond to the digital dynamics, companies must begin thinking about ways with strategic planning to broaden their ecosystems and revenue streams while becoming more responsive, innovative and scalable.

The Monthly “Digitizing Boardroom” Book Tuning: The Boardroom Refreshment June 2018

10:59 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

Modern corporate boards play significant roles in guiding businesses in the right direction and achieve expected business results. Due to the “VUCA” characteristics -Complexity, Uncertainty, Ambiguity, and Velocity of the Digital Era, the directorship in any organization must have the agility to adapt to changes and build abilities to advise, inspire and motivate a group of people toward accomplishing shared visions and goals.

The Boardroom Refreshment

Three Aspects of the Board Refreshment The digital paradigm is an emerging ecosystem of principles, policies, and practices that set limits or boundaries, also provide the guidance for problem-solving or creating something new under the digital rules. The high-performance board makes the disproportional impact on running a high-performance business through their invaluable oversight of the strategy and relentlessly inspiring changes and innovation. To improve directorship effectiveness, there are quite a lot of things digital boards need to shape up, and there are so many issues the boards have to deal with. Here are three aspects of the board refreshment.

The Digital Board Composition/Refreshment Inquiries ? Contemporary boards play the crucial directorial role in business strategy oversight, performance monitoring, business advising and policy setting. They are also the mastermind behind the digital transformation. Not only do today’s BoDs need to have sufficient knowledge to understand the digital business ecosystem, but also they need to have the collective insight to present today and foresee the future. The matter of fact is that the changes sweeping the business are hugely disruptive and there is nowhere to hide. Leadership is all about change and directorship is about steering the business toward the right direction. From board composition and refreshment perspective, which challenges do you face, when and how do you tackle the issue of change in the boardroom? And how to build high-performance boards for today and the future?

A Scrutinizing Board: How to Inspect Digital Quality of the Business The primary role of the Director is to provide strategic oversight, setting governance principles, and making the judgment on an assurance of corporate action within a framework of practical knowledge. If they do their jobs right, the executives and management team can do their jobs in a well-orchestrated fashion as well. Innovation is one of the crucial components of the corporate strategy, which role the BoD should play in both management innovation and innovation management? Or the first step first, how to innovate Boardroom?

Digital Tuning: How to Innovate Boardroom The primary role of the Director is to provide strategic oversight, setting governance principles, and making the judgment on an assurance of corporate action within a framework of practical knowledge. If they do their jobs right, the executives and management team can do their jobs in a well-orchestrated fashion as well. Innovation is one of the crucial components of the corporate strategy, which role the BoD should play in both management innovation and innovation management? Or the first step first, how to innovate Boardroom?

Three Traits of Contemporary Digital Board Directors The corporate board today is the mastermind behind the digital transformation. Due to the complexity, uncertainty, ambiguity, and volatility of the digital era, the directorship in any forward-thinking organization must have the ability to guide, inspire and motivate people top-down and bottom-up toward accomplishing shared visions and goal. But more specifically, what are common leadership traits and characteristics of digital board directors? And what are complementary mindsets, skills, and experiences needed to build a contemporary digital board?

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2 million page views with 4700+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify your voice, deepen your digital footprints, and match your way to human progression.

"Digitizing Boardroom" Book Quote Collection 3

"Digitizing Boardroom" Book Quote Collection 2

"Digitizing Boardroom" Book Quote Collection 1

"Digitizing Boardroom" Book Chapter 8 A Culture Savvy Board Introduction

"Digitizing Boardroom" Book Chapter 7 A "Talent Master" Board Introduction

"Digitizing Boardroom" Book Chapter 6 A "Governance Champion" Board Introduction

"Digitizing Boardroom" Book Chapter 5 An IT-Friendly Board Introduction

"Digitizing Boardroom" Book Chapter 4 An Innovative Board Introduction

"Digitizing Boardroom" Book Chapter 3 A Performance-driven Board Introduction

"Digitizing Boardroom" Book Chapter 2 A Strategic Board Introduction

"Digitizing Boardroom" Book Chapter 1 23 Themes of Digital Boardrooms Introduction

"Digitizing Boardroom" Book Preview

"Digitizing Boardroom" Book Introduction, Slideshare Presentation

Three “Break Down” to Reinvent Digital IT Organization

10:53 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

Running IT as the software startup is simply about taking bold initiatives to reinvent IT by cultivating the new attitude and fusing the fresh energy.

Forward-thinking organizations declare they are in the information management business to improve organizational competency and long-term business growth. IT organization is at the crossroad, either move up the maturity level to make things happen or get stuck as a cost center and gradually become irrelevant. Today’s CIOs as digital leaders must deal with rapid changes, constant ambiguity, increasing complexity and unprecedented uncertainty. To reinvent IT for getting digital ready, CIOs perhaps need to take some courage for breaking something first - break down the old IT thinking box, break down the status quo, and break down “we always do things like that” mentality. IT leaders need to unfold their leadership on the daily basis, to think strategically and implement strategy steadfastly.

Break down old school silos of thought: Old school IT organizations were operated with silo setting as an isolated support function. Silo creates the gap between IT and business that drags down the business speed and causes the majority of IT organizations getting stuck at the lower level of business maturity. Silos are a product of organizational insecurity and internal competition for resources. Silo is also a cultural problem resulting from poor leadership. To break down old school silos of thoughts, cross-functional communication, collaboration, transparency, respect and clear leadership are the keys to breaking down the perceptions and realities of the issues. To reinvent IT as the strategic partner of the business, CIOs need to work closely with other executive peers and IT teams with feedback mechanisms and willingness to find solutions that can support both the business need and build any ROI required to justify the business case. To keep evolved and invested in the greater purpose or vision, every department in the company needs to work together to be successful, business does not own the goals and own the solution; and IT should not hold up the business or even decelerate business speed. Good digital leaders today can both focus on what they do and keep their eye on the bigger picture as well.

Break down the old school of reductionistic management discipline: Traditional CIOs often live in the box, leverage linear logic and take the reductionistic approach (business is the sum of parts) to manage IT. In the evolutionary human society, Newtonian mechanics have fueled industrialization. However, now we are moving in the hyperconnected digital economy, digital businesses today are more like the organic living thing rather than the mechanical system keeps spinning. Therefore, to break down the old reductionistic management discipline, IT leaders should practice Systems Thinking to ensure that IT is the integral component of the company and linchpin of the digitalization. IT can refine the invaluable business information and bring opportunities to the business, helps the top management team understand the possibilities of how new technologies can enhance creation or improvement of product/services/solutions. In the traditional management setting, IT is often the background music, but in the digital era, IT has its own music sheet to play for leading change proactively.

Break down IT system, process, and capability bottleneck: Different companies are at the different stage of the business life cycle; different IT organizations are also at the different level of management maturity. In many traditional IT organizations, legacy IT systems or outdated processes cause the bottleneck for IT responding to changes timely. Startup companies have few technical burdens, but often lack resources or standard to achieve high efficiency. IT needs to build both necessary competency and differentiated competency. To break through IT system bottleneck, IT needs to integrate varying applications and enable workflows between them. The ultimate goal is to maximize the value from existing IT systems and the need for better business performance and responsiveness, prioritize IT workload, and manage the full application life cycle in a continuous mode. A digital IT is a thresholding competency of the business,

We are in the digital paradigm shift, with the mixed bag of old and new. Running IT as the software startup is simply about taking bold initiatives to reinvent IT by cultivating the new attitude and fusing the fresh energy. It takes the collaborative effort across the entire business scope to streamline processes and keep information flow seamlessly and run a fluid digital business seamlessly.

The Monthly “IT Innovation” Book Tuning: The Insight, Innovation, and Improvement of IT June 2018

11:22 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

IT leaders need to think strategically and creatively about alternative solutions and ask themselves tough questions about how to personalize IT to gain differentiated business competency.

Within abundant information and emergent digital technologies, IT is a key component of holistic business mindset to re-imagine “what is possible” - unleashing business potentials and improving business efficiency, effectiveness, agility, and maturity. The art of possible to reinvent IT for the digital age is to deliver the value of information in helping businesses grow, delight customers and doing more with innovation.

The Insight, Innovation, and Improvement of IT

IT Innovation and Intrapreneurship ? The digital organization is technology driven and information intensive, IT needs to become the linchpin to integrate people, process, and technology into differentiated business competency such as innovation. The art of innovation is to connect wider dots for creating new ideas; the science of innovation is to take a structural approach to innovation management. Thus, IT is the hub to bridge the art and science of innovation. Nowadays, IT is the business in the business and the digital engine of the entire organization. The role of CIO continues to evolve rapidly in the midst of the information in digital transformation. Forward-looking IT organizations should practice intrapreneurship for running IT as a software startup, promoting and sustaining organizational performance, renewal and corporate competitiveness.

Running IT as Innovation Glue: Nowadays, information is the lifeblood of the business and technologies are the disruptive forces behind digital innovation. The highly innovative organizations depend more heavily on its technological knowledge and IT-enabled capabilities to develop and commercialize innovation. IT is the super glue to weave all important business elements seamlessly for building the unique business competency, manage a balanced innovation portfolio and improve innovation success rate.

How to Develop a Comprehensive Innovation Framework ? Innovation is not serendipity. Working in an innovation garden not only takes passion but also needs the process and hard work. A systematic innovation approach is to depict innovation as a system, rather than a traditional process. Innovation performance depends on the alignment of its various components (people, process, resources, actions, controls, measurement, etc.). Though there's no single structure that will work in every organization, the comprehensive innovation framework with all important enterprise components is the great tool to intensify innovation with focus and manage innovation in a structural way.

IT Personalization: How to Run Digital IT with Differentiated Advantage? IT is always at the center of change. The emergence of potential opportunities for exploiting digitization is likely to follow a nonlinear pattern at exponential speed, as the pervasiveness of an organization’s digitization journey increases. IT can no longer just “keep the lights on,” IT leaders need to think strategically and creatively about alternative solutions and ask themselves tough questions about how to personalize IT to gain differentiated business competency.

The “Digital Master” Book Series- Innovation Core “Digital Master” is the series of guidebooks (23+ books) to perceive the multi-faceted impact digital is making to the businesses and society, help forward-thinking organizations navigate through the journey in a systematic way. Digital Master refers to those high-performing, highly innovative and high-mature (less than 15%) digital organizations; they have both clear digital vision and well-crafted digital strategy; they are courageous to be in the vanguard of digital transformation with a quantum lead. At the individual level, Digital Masters are those cross-generational digital professionals who are equipped with the advanced digital minds and build a unique set of digital capabilities.

The blog is a dynamic book flowing with your thought; growing through your dedication; sharing your knowledge; conveying your wisdom, and making influence through touching the hearts and connecting the minds across the globe. The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2.5 million page views with about #4600 blog posting. Among 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating the new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes the time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

Digital Fusion: How to Unleash the Full Business Potential

11:18 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

Consider the digital organization as the self-organized but interlaced environments, and humans are vehicles of natural and cultural solutions.

Uncertainty, ambiguity, unpredictability, velocity, etc., are the digital new normal. With the increasing pace of changes, the emergence of potential opportunities for exploiting digitization is likely to follow a nonlinear pattern as the pervasiveness of an organization's digitization journey increases. Business leaders need to be both bold and cautious, apply multidimensional thinking and take multifaceted management disciplines to drill down the critical success factors that underpin each of the higher level performance dimensions to accelerate business performance and unleash the full business potential.

Discover what is possible - to unleash digital potential: Modern digital organizations explore the new possibility and build the capabilities to perform in the future so that the organization does not only 'earn enough from today,' but 'thrive in the future.’' However, the level of “silo” in many organizations remained far too high before. Nowadays, the emerging digital technologies are lightweight and more powerful to enable the business fostering relationship-building and cross-functional collaboration, emphasize participation and engagement, improving business efficiency and productivity, harnessing innovation and change. Unleashing digital potential is the strategic effort either at the individual or the business level because that’s what really matters from the long-term perspective. Those digital leaders with the ability to break down organizational silos bring real added value to the enterprise. More and more organizations realize that they have to renew themselves periodically to cope with change effectively, take adaptive management discipline and adjust the fluid structure that responds effectively to their function at the moment.

Create business synergy - harmonize to achieve what is possible: Organizations have limited resources, many businesses took a big bite of resource to keep the lights on, only left very little for doing innovation or digitalization. To create synergy, unlock performance and unleash digital potential, businesses need to fine-tune their organizational structure and business system. Cost efficiency only is not equal to gaining business synergy. Synergy creation requires organizational structure tuning, as well as identifying and developing core competency to get future ready. The key is to harmonize business relationship through less hierarchy, cross-functional insight and adopt a highly integrated process and engage the whole organization in knowing and understanding the direction and planning of the business, handling concurrency and simultaneity, create synergy through cross-functional communication and collaboration.

Ride the up cycle of digital delight - build a people-centric digital organization: Happy employees and delightful customers are the symbols of high-level digital maturity. Delight is the emotional imprint left on a customer who attributes the right, positive, and memorable feelings produced by a purchasing experience. Delight is also a positive mentality of employees who can focus on problem-solving, autonomy, self-discovery, and creativity. To put another way, working in a delightful environment means less silo, less internal politics, or unnecessary pain, people have better opportunities to be who they are, and who they want to be. Build an open environment to encourage inquisitiveness and inspire innovation with the risk-tolerant culture. It needs to involve the entire team at all levels, exhibit positive thinking and proper behaviors at all times.

Consider the digital organization as the self-organized but interlaced environments, and humans are vehicles of natural and cultural solutions. A digital organization can bring greater awareness of intricacies and the systemic value of organizational systems, business process, people dynamics, resource alignment, or technological touches, with the ultimate goals to accelerate business performance and unleash digital potential.

The Monthly “Unpuzzling Innovation” Book Tuning: The Multifaceted Digital Innovation June 2018

11:27 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

The good innovation can leap the business to the next level of prosperity, and the bad innovation can fail the business in a fatal way.

Digital is the age of innovation. And innovation is what leads to differentiation. There are many ways to differentiate and, therefore, there are many ways to pursue innovation. Digital Master refers to those high-performing, highly innovative and high-mature (less than 15%) digital organizations; at the individual level, Digital Masters are those cross-generational digital professionals who are equipped with the advanced digital minds and build a unique set of digital capabilities. Talking about innovation is not new nowadays, everybody, every organization now is talking about innovation. It's been at or near the top of the business or economics agenda for a long time. However, there are a lot of confusions about innovation and there is no magic sauce to guarantee its success. Innovation is not serendipity, but a discipline

The Multifaceted Digital Innovation

The Multidimensional Digital Innovation ? There is no doubt innovation is becoming more important whereas technology becomes more advanced. Innovation is an exploration, production, adoption, assimilation, and exploitation of value-added novelty in business, economic and social spheres. Innovation is the core activity of human evolution of changing the environment to reach performance for profit, for saving of resources, for the satisfaction of customers, for expediting collective human progress. Here are the multidimensional aspects of digital innovation.

Take an Evolutionary Approach to Manage Innovation At the static industrial age, most organizations are focusing on improving margins by reducing the bottom-line cost rather than the top-line growth. For those organizations, innovations are still serendipitous. However, with increasing speed of changes and continuous digital disruptions, businesses today face fiery competitions and rapid digital shift either technologically or economically, innovation is no longer “nice to have,” but must have differentiated business capability. So, serendipity can be planned into innovation management. Forward-looking organizations take an evolutionary approach to manage innovation in a structural way.

Three Innovation Management Approaches ? Digital era opens the new chapter of innovation. Today, at the hyper-connected digital ecosystem, innovation can happen anywhere, anytime, it expands both horizontally and vertically. Innovation comes in many flavors and there are many opportunities in an enterprise to do so, such as breakthrough innovation, evolutionary innovation, incremental innovation, systematic innovation, customer-centric innovation, open innovation, design-driven innovation, or management (leadership, culture, communication) innovation, etc. There is no one-size fits all formula to manage all sorts of innovations well. But innovation shouldn’t be just serendipitous as well. Here are three management approaches to improve the innovation management success rate in the digital era.

Good Innovation, Bad Innovation: How to Discern It Innovation is the light every business is pursuing, and there is no surprise that the average success rate of Innovation Management is very low. The good innovation can leap the business to the next level of prosperity, and the bad innovation can fail the business in a fatal way. So how to set the criteria, make a clear discernment, and manage innovation more effectively?

The Multifaceted Creativity Creativity is the most needed skill in the 21st century because digital is the era of innovation. Creativity is both innate and a skill. Developing creativity requires both internal motivation and self-awareness. Being original and being yourself is the first step, breaking down the convention thinking box, and practicing out-of-the-box thinking is one of the mental activities to stimulate creativity as well. Here is the further understanding of the multifaceted creativity.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2 million page views with about 4600+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify your voice, deepen your digital footprints, and match your way to human progression.

Tipping to Scale Digital Systematically

11:19 PM Pearl Zhu 1 comment

The digital organization is a system that is not scalable so easily, but it’s the worthy effort to amplify business capabilities, accelerate and sustain changes.

Digitalization implies the full-scale changes in the way businesses are conducted. It is important to understand that digital transformation is multifaceted. Digital management is responsible for designing, enabling, and enforcing a collaborative, innovative, intelligent, inspiring and inclusive working environment for engaging employees, delighting customers, and unlocking business performance. Leading organizations are able to identify the critical spot to scale up, and leverage the framework approach for reaching the next level of business growth and organizational maturity systematically.

Looking uphill can help to identify the real problems that matter, and on a scale that can make a difference: 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. Digital means the increasing speed of changes, customer-centricity, hyperconnectivity, and always-on business dynamic. Look for providing business solutions which will directly benefit the external end customers and improve business competency. For that, companies need to have a very clear vision and understanding of why they exist and the value they bring to customers and the very reason for digital transformation. To build differentiated business competency, you have to transform the company’s underlying functions and integrate all important business elements such as people, process, technology, and culture into cohesive business competency. To scale up, organizations must begin thinking about ways with strategic planning to broaden their ecosystems and revenue streams which becoming more responsive and flexible. When businesses can identify problems really matter, dig into the root cause, and fix them radically, they reach the moment to accelerate changes and amplify digital impact, explore new opportunities aggressively and expedite for rising to the new height effortlessly.

Looking at innovation management from the perspective of developing business-wide innovation capability: Digital is the age of innovation. One of the most important aspects of scaling up digital means that the organization is debunking the innovation puzzle and able to manage innovation with a systematic approach. This requires an effective 'innovation ecosystem' that is capable of supporting both widespread incremental innovation in products/services and the rarer breakthrough innovation, working methodology, business model, and market positioning. The highly innovative companies can connect wider dots - the key resources/assets in their vicinity and context to the information and resource-rich hub or clusters across the business ecosystem for sowing innovation seeds, growing into fruitful plants and reaping the business benefit. They can also expand the ability to scale up innovation practices across the digital ecosystem. When innovating to create new value, position a brand, align people inside an organization or differentiate and position products or services in diverse markets, organizations are on the right track to developing innovation as the management process and the business-wide unique competency.

Developing a set of next practices to scale up digital steadfastly: More and more firms are learning and implementing best practices for scaling up change efforts, unlocking digital performance and improving the success rate of innovation. For example, every organization needs to develop the tailored innovation practices by leveraging effective tools or methodologies and use them wisely with the expertise to really add value or drive innovation. However, the practice that is “best” today is almost always not "best" in the future due to change circumstances. Therefore, businesses must match the vision and tailor their own need to develop a set of next practices to scale up by adding the right ingredients and going digital internally and culturally. It’s about how to keep tuning a structure that makes the business more responsive, scalable, highly connected, and continually deliver what the business needs and maximize the digital potential of the company. Digital organizations arise when the scale of the interrelations, interactions, and collaboration amplifies the collective capability to achieve more values for the organization.

The digital organization is faster, always “on,” high connected and super competitive. It is a system that is not scalable so easily, but it’s the worthy effort to amplify business capabilities, accelerate and sustain changes. Digital transformation efforts need to be undertaken as the means of getting to a designated business competency to accomplish a defined goal and manage a seamless digital continuum.

The Monthly “Digital Master” Book Tuning: Building Digital Competency for Adapting to Changes June 2018

11:05 PM Pearl Zhu 1 comment

Digital makes a significant impact on every aspect of the business from people, process to technology, both horizontally and vertically. Digital becomes the very fabric of high performing business, being outside-in and customer-centric is the new mantra for forward-looking and high mature digital organizations today. Digital leaders must realize that you cannot wait until there is an immediate pressing task, continuous adaptability is necessary in an ever-changing world, in order to run a future-driven digital organization.

Building Digital Competency for Adapting to Changes

How to Achieve Digital Coherence ? Coherence is simply about logic and consistency. The digital coherence is the decisive factor for the success of strategy implementation and how well organizations can take the step-wise approach to make the digital transformation, continual renewal, deliver the value to the customers consistently and build a long-term winning position of the business.

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

Digital is the Era of ...: We are at the dawn of the digital era. The effects of an increasingly digitalized world are now reaching into every corner of businesses. A digital paradigm is an emerging ecosystem of principles, policies, and practices that set limits or boundaries; but also offer the guidance for problem-solving or creating something new from old. The emerging digital era has many dimensions, how can you gain the deep understanding and embark a meaningful digital journey?

Three Refinement to Shape High-Mature Digital Organization ? Change is multifaceted with increasing speed and velocity. Digitalization is the radical change, Change Management is all about balancing the main elements impacting change such as people, strategies, processes/procedures and IT, refining business success factors to practice digital management disciplines relentlessly.

The Synthesizing Competency of Digital Organizations In general, analysis is understanding the thing by examining it as parts; synthesis is understanding a thing by examining it as a whole. Synthesizing business competency is developed, combined, integrated or reconfigured by a set of cohesive business capabilities dynamically to address rapidly changing in the business environment. Here are three synthesizing business competencies for running digital organizations.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2+million page views with about #4600+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. blog posting. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom, to inspire critical thinking and spur healthy debates. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating the new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

Digital Master Featured URLs:

Digital Master Online Order Links:

The Digital Portrait of Modern CIOs

10:55 PM Pearl Zhu 1 comment

As businesses change shape, size, expansion, and transformations, CIOs too need conditioning and improvement.

In the world moves too fast, with the exponential growth of information, leadership, marketing, finance, technology, etc, are all intertwined. IT leadership is strategically important. What C-level executives really want is a partner that works both "on the business" and "in the business," not just "for the business"; someone who knows what they want before they know themselves; someone who can contribute to the top line business growth and long-term business strategy. Thus, the digital portrait of modern CIO is different from the traditional CIOs who often think and act as the tactical IT manager. The important thing is that digital CIOs as the top leadership role, must have the strategic mindset, interdisciplinary knowledge, unique personality, and a clear idea of what needs to be done, yet creative enough to not hold the company back from growth.

An Innovative Outlier: Traditional CIOs often live in the box, take the reductionistic approach (business is the sum of parts) to manage IT. Outlier CIOs are the one who can step out of a conventional thinking box, connect nonlinear dots interdisciplinarily, and leverage Systems Thinking to ensure IT as an integral component of the company. Nowadays, technology becomes the game changer and innovation driver for businesses. Digital CIOs are often innovative outliers because they have technological vision and awareness, eager to share their fresh perspective on how IT can bring opportunities for the business, help C-Level leaders understand the possibilities of how new technologies can enhance creation or improvement of products/services/solutions. Further, CIOs have to provide "innovation execution" services to fellow business peers. The focal point is business, not on the technology itself, to become customer-centric and risk-intelligent. IT is the business.

A Change Agent: CIOs are accountable for the critical part of the business that is constantly changing and evolving, with increasing pace. To reinvent IT from a change laggard to the change organization of the company, CIOs shouldn’t get pushed for the changes, they are in a better position to play a role as a change agent. The more complex the change, the more complex the solution. It takes a multi-stepped process to get ahead of change curves. The change should be viewed as an “opportunity,” and deep engagement usually accelerates changes. Change Management needs to craft and most importantly deliver clear and cohesive messages at both the individual and group level, and more critically reinforce these statements through consistent actions. IT should ensure its strategy implementation allowing for digital speed, and responsiveness to be seen by the business as an enabler and even an accelerator. The business-engaged CIO is the right type of digital leader to run a proactive IT and keep navigating during rough sea journey of large or small changes.

An Insightful Polyglot: IT historically has had poor communication accountability within IT or between business and IT. As we move from using technology as a vehicle to maximize efficiency and minimize costs to using technology as an enabler and catalyzer of totally new business models, IT role becomes much more focused on the marketing of technology. The IT leaders usually play the role of a translator between the business and IT; they must straddle concepts and translate language between the business and technical staff. Bridging IT- business gap and eliminating “lost in translation” syndrome becomes the strategic imperative for improving business responsiveness and performance. Beside communication content and context, it’s also important to adopt a new leadership mindset to envision and take more open, interactive and persuasive communication styles to get buy-in.

As businesses change shape, size, expansion, and transformations, CIOs too need conditioning and improvement. The digital CIOs’ portrait is multidimensional, they have to wear different personas and master multiple leadership and management roles effortlessly.