Information-Insight

The digital era upon us is about information exponentiality and knowledge abundance. Information is the most invaluable asset of the company besides people. Technically information is nothing until it helps to make more effective decisions or create multifaceted business value. Refining business insight from abundant information is a critical step to close understanding gaps, improve information alignment with the business, and unpuzzle business innovation.

Classify information and capture insight: Data is raw, information needs to be collected, stored, processed, classified, refined, and distributed to the right people to make right decisions timely. When information flows frictionlessly and has been used to make informed management decisions to develop new products/services, enter new markets, explore new channels or having information to be able to conduct day to day operations which have an output value, etc, it becomes one of the most invaluable commodities of the business and the lifeblood of the digital organization.

Either for solving problems or running businesses, information is no doubt important but more than that is complete awareness of what is happening in the context and gain contextual understanding of the business. Once you do that, you use your ability to classify information and knowledge and know their linkage to capture the insight for understanding things thoroughly. The goal is to capture business foresight and refine customer insight by enforcing a healthy information life cycle to ensure the right people get the right information timely, diagnose and solve right problems scientifically.

Information can be misleading, but the insight of the situation requires in-depth understanding: In today’s digital new normal with the characteristics of velocity, complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity, information is invaluable but not perfect, there is misinformation or outdated knowledge which further causes misunderstandings and creates various human problems. Thus, digital leaders and professionals need to gain deep understanding as the challenge about insight is that information can be absorbed, knowledge can be taught, but insight cannot be told completely because it comes from each individual’s understanding, connection, discernment, personal experience, penetration, and perception.

Knowledge is gained via learning processes, but insight is the integration of learning and thinking scenarios and it is a unique perception which needs to be gained by each individual. It is about penetrating and often sudden understanding of a complex situation or problem. An insightful thought can go beyond a moment, even take certain systematic planning. Insight is an understanding of the cause and effect based on the identification of intriguing relationships and behaviors within a model, context, or scenario. By having an active learning and thinking cycle, over time, you develop an effective set of filters that help you find new information interests you and refine them into valuable insight.

It is critical to managing information - the soft business asset holistically to capture business insight and foresight: All forward-looking organizations across vertical sectors declare they are in the information management business. Because companies across sectors around the globe transform themselves into digital powerhouse that is based on information, and the business’s ability to explore soft information assets has become far more decisive than their ability to invest in and manage physical assets. The challenge is that information/ knowledge are fluid, they cannot be managed like those other hard assets. The focus needs to be on the conditions that allow information and knowledge to flow and generate value rather than try to control it.

Organizations have both tangible or physical assets and intangible or soft assets which enable businesses to operate smoothly and build competitive business advantage. There's a difference between the potential value of an information asset, its realized value - when consumed, and its probable value - accounting value. Understanding and measuring these differences is a critical step to close gaps via managing Information/Knowledge holistically.

Digital flow can be streamlined by enforcing cross-functional communication, using common business language for harnessing understanding, and taking incentives to encourage idea sharing. In fact, information management competency, especially the ability to capture business insight and make continuous improvement with consistency, is the soft asset by which organizations can differentiate themselves from competitors, in order to reach the next cycle of the business growth and organizational maturity.

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Insight of “100 Digital Pitfalls: How to Overcome Pitfalls on the Path of Going Digital”: Inflexibility - Illogic

Digital makes a significant impact on how we think, live, and work. There is a mix of old and new, physical and virtual, order and chaos. We are in a time of tremendous change, the dawn of the digital age, the path to the next level of digital maturity, also in the era of confusion and information overload. Therefore, it’s critical to identify, understand, and avoid pitfalls, discover strategic and predictive pathways to change, increase confidence, position a brand and leverage resources to make the digital paradigm shift effortlessly.


The purpose of “100 Digital Pitfalls: How to Overcome Pitfalls on the Path of Going Digital” is to throw some light on how to identify, understand, and overcome common pitfalls on the digital journey, dig underneath the surface, and take a holistic approach to integrate both hard and soft elements for improving the long-term organizational competency and reaching the high-level of business maturity.

     Inflexibility - Illogic

Inflexibility In contemporary society, the policies get updated to reflect the new age, adapt to the new speed, and fit for the new perspectives to shape an progressive ultramodern world.Digital era is volatile, complex, uncertain and ambiguous, with increasing rate of changes and fast growing information, organizations across the vertical sectors need to be informative enough to make effective decisions and resilient enough to overcome continuous disruptions....

Inflexibility II Good ideas nearly never emerge spontaneously but from interactions, not single individuals. Silos, rigidity, inflexibility, static mindset, or bureaucracy, etc., create gaps and slow down idea flow and stifle innovation. "Digital Master” is a series of guidebooks (28 + books) to perceive the multi-faceted impact digital is making to businesses and society, and help forward-thinking organizations navigate through the journey in a systematic…

Unproductive Everything has two sides: Do some performance measurement initiatives encourage quantity over quality or distract people and cause unproductivity."Digital Master” is a series of guidebooks (28 + books) to perceive the multi-faceted impact digital is making to the businesses and society, help forward-thinking organizations navigate through the journey in a systematic way, and avoid “rogue digital.” It perceives the emergent trends...

“Irrational & Illogical” There are often multiple and inter-related dynamics behind complex problems, you need to look for patterns rather than isolating causes and integrating different pieces of the puzzle to come up with a holistic solution.Due to fast-paced change, the exponential growth of information, hyper-connectivity, and continuous digital disruptions, the problems facing businesses today turn to be over-complex, have a very wide scope, and are difficult...

Incoherence The digital organization’s long-term advantage is based on its unique strength which can be built and stretched through the combination of talent, resources, processes, and technologies to perform a set of business activities and achieve high-performance business results. The digital organization blurs the geographical, functional, organizational, and even industrial borders nowadays. The enterprise is nothing more than a “switch” in the network...

The blog is a dynamic book flowing with your thought; growing through your dedication; sharing your knowledge; conveying your wisdom, and making influence through touching the hearts and connecting minds across the globe. The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with about #7600 blog postings. Among 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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Interdisciplinarian - Generalists with a Specialism!

  The digital talent should all be generalists with a specialism!

At the Industrial Age with silo and considerably static knowledge, businesses value specialization so much that they don't set up systems to consistently facilitate specialists meeting cross-discipline with other specialists to gain multidisciplinary understanding. However, the digital era is hyper connected and interdependent, continuously expanding the knowledge horizon becomes more strategic and tactical for mastering professional skills and building transferable capabilities. It comes to the brainstorming of the industrial vs. digital era and specialists versus generalists debates, and gains the new perspective upon developing high professionals to get digital ready.

Functional oriented “silo” encourages specialists: Traditional organizations are often inside out, operation driven. For quite some time, due to the process driven, functional oriented “silo” nature of industrial organization, businesses have been fostering a belief that 'people should become a specialist on one thing to a level in which they can be the 'best of the best.' Because the world is increasingly complex and fast-changing the need for specialization is likely to increase. Society encourages such thinking at the young age, it’s also been encouraged in businesses for quite a while. However, when many specialists work on their own without empathetic understanding and communication, silos are created, functional gaps enlarge and they end up cobbling together a business organization of disparate, but hopefully aligned toward some common business vision and objectives.

Specialists have a tendency to think that the business as a whole is a sum of pieces so it might cause gaps or disconnections. With hyper connected and interdependent digital new normal, greater specialization does not need to lead to silo working, there are other organizational options such as cross-functional collaboration because today’s business is always on and digital technology empowered, the Subject Matter Experts and the technique professionals aspire to excel in their respective roles and grow in professional stature, specialists can collaborate with cross functional managers and communicate with other specialists to co solve ever complex business problems effectively.

Holistic management needs generalists: Holistic management implies that the business as a whole is superior to the sum of pieces. A functional silo is supposed to have a specific strategic goal, and that is actually okay to improve business productivity. Actually most organizations elevate a specialist, and that is what they feel most comfortable with. However, to bridge the gaps, someone above the silo is supposed to glue all the individual puzzle pieces together so business generalists are in demand to have a big picture in mind so the business can focus on strategic goals rather than just functional objectives.

In reality, silos self-perpetuate because that is the business culture we consciously encourage individuals to pursue. So organizations hope they actually have generalists who rise up and can interface effectively with all the specialists. They have a clear vision, update rules, a set of strategic goals, prioritization and facilitation skills to enforce cross functional conversations and cross functional collaboration. They develop the best and next practices to advocate holistic management.

Specialized generalists: The problem is that, to be a good generalist, you need quite some knowledge of quite some fields. A generalist still has a specialism. You may be knowledgeable about a lot of subjects, but there will always be something you're really good at. Specialized generalists are in demand to broaden viewpoints and deepen the domain knowledge for insightful problem solving. They usually have unique strengths and create specialism that others don't have. They will be asked to give advice as soon as the "specialists" have come up with something which looks good from a very close distance but misses the general problem because he/she is just a specialist.

In today's business dynamic, a forethought leader who wants to have their ideas and that technical expertise shared and implemented into projects needs to be a specialized generalist who has “T-shaped” skills, business acumen, and the ability to motivate and communicate effectively. They are the people that stand outside the political hierarchy of the changing area, understanding the mechanisms of change and human behavior as well as providing appropriate measures for facilitating change.

The digital talent should all be generalists with a specialism! Either generalist or specialist, interdisciplinary skills are crucial and expert power has the foundation of in-depth knowledge, profound insight, and abstract wisdom, to connect the minds and win the hearts, to drive transformative changes.

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Book "Digital Hybridity" Insight: Inner-Balance

The emotion behind the change is the catalyst - to make our “visions” reality.

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

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

Inner-Balance

InnerBalance It is imperative that we are willing to seek out help, break down silos. companies have to keep searching for new opportunities to disrupt, rather than being disrupted, but keep an inner balance to co solve problems collaboratively and move the business forward solidly. Organizations of the future are increasingly exhibiting digital characteristics in various shades, dimensions, extensiveness, and intensity. It takes inner-balance, greater transparency,...

Intrapreneurship Leadership & Balance Intrapreneur leaders can add a new dimension of vision in making the right choice for balancing the business’s short-term gain and long-term win. With increasing pace of changes and fierce disruptions, modern businesses have to make many tough choices in its growth-maturity business journey. For many companies across the vertical sectors, especially those large traditional corporations, entrepreneurialism becomes a new fixture for management..

ImprovingEmotionCycle “The emotion behind the change is the catalyst - to make our “visions” reality. Human history is an evolutionary journey to keep advancing economically, technologically, and sociologically. Digitalization implies the full-scale changes in the way business is conducted so that simply adopting the new digital technology may be insufficient. The multidimensional digital effects provide impressive advantages in terms of the business speed, the abundance...

ImprovingMultitudeofDigitalBalances The digital organizations need to get away from letting things fall through and start creating “integrated wholes to achieve the dynamic equilibrium. Digital makes a significant impact on every aspect of the business both horizontally and vertically. Due to the “VUCA” nature of digitalization, change is unavoidable, firms that are skilled at managing digital dynamics can gain advantages in profitability, speed, business growth, and innovation...

InitiatingDigital Balance Cycles Digital businesses and their people learn through their interactions with the environment, to keep knowledge flow as well as business flow, and strike a delicate digital balance. Digital transformation is inevitable, it means the increasing pace of change and fierce competition. Organizations must keep the lights on and also make strategic movements all the time. Like running up to the string, keeping digital balance is critical in reaching digital...

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with about #7600+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. blog posting. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom, to inspire critical thinking and spur healthy debates. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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Rejuvenate Culture Change

The management should advocate clarity and transparency, apply design thinking to re-imagine the better way to do things.

With “VUCA” new normal, the business lifecycle could be viewed as resulting in emergent means of refocusing strategic goals, reinforcing digital principles and rules, reorganizing business structures, rebalancing resources, rejuvenating business culture, and redirecting people to understand the whole, in terms of its inner processes, its interactions with external systems, its components, the specific interaction among them, etc, for improving business performance and organizational maturity.

Clear the view of the organizational capability maturity: Organizations across vertical sectors are on the journey to make digital transformation. Top executives need to take a strategic perspective, translate the company vision into broadly defined strategic goals and objectives which are achievable components to focus on achieving the future state of the business. They should identify the capability patterns of the company, make the risk profile of the enterprise performance deficiencies, and assess the management view of the capability to support the intended future operating model and implement a well-defined business strategy.

Capability underpins the strategy. To fill the capability gap, determine what the future needs to look like, and what the transformation must look like. Transformational capability creates something new out of something old, reaching the new horizon out of an existing vision. Vision and strategic goals need to be clarified and have to be accessible, understandable, and made relevant to all levels of the organization. Well define a set of strategic goals first: from them, determine certain "action items." These action items become goals for business units; and then, each individual manager or supervisor has a goal, with action items and opposing metrics, and so on. Strategy can be implemented in a step wise manner.

Loose overly restricted organizational hierarchy: With unprecedented uncertainty and interdependence, businesses are inherently and intensely complex and unpredictable systems. Overly restricted organizational hierarchies are silo-based encourage “command & control” management style, decelerate business speed. The future of organizational design should flatten hierarchy, streamline flow and achieve autonomy. It’s important to break down silos, keep information and ideas flow frictionlessly. Forward-looking organizations experiment with different types of organizational structures so the multi-disciplinary and cross-functional teams are able to streamline information and workflow, and build a unique set of business capabilities. 

An organization can make a smooth alignment and approach a flow zone when people are ready for moving to a fluid structure, and digital leaders are eager to set stages and drive a frictionless, immersive, and relentless digital transformation. New generations of digital technologies are enabling unstructured processes to build dynamic business capability and foster collaboration, so the large group of people can interact, form, and amplify collective capabilities to achieve common goals.

Rejuvenating business culture: The right culture is the invisible but critical success factor and the very fabric to keep the business system running smoothly. Building a culture-savvy organization is important for the long term success of the business, what are the ideas within the walls that derive profitable actions, positive influence, and collective confidence. Culture is reflected and influenced by policies, practices, rewards and incentives. Culture is a collective mindset, attitude, behaviors; it is the leadership mindset that shapes the culture and employee behavior that expresses "culture."

As the saying goes, culture eats strategy for dinner. The degree to which culture supports strategy depends upon the degree to which culture unifies its efforts to realize critical business success factors, and thus, implement successful strategies. The good culture is positive and harmonized. The key is about striking the right balance between opposing forces, each with its own set of pros and cons , with the goal to achieve the strategy and build a digital-savvy organization. 

 Cultural change in an organization begins with the involvement of the top management and their commitment to change. These are particularly required during changing times to keep the workforce open to innovation including a compelling future vision and the presence of transformational leadership. The management should advocate clarity and transparency, apply design thinking to re-imagine the better way to do things. It’s also critical to make continuous improvement without losing the big picture, to ensure that the business as a whole is superior to the sum of pieces for improving organizational maturity

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Innovative-Insight

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

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with 7600+ blog postings in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The “Digital Master” book series includes 28 books to share insight from the multidimensional digital lens and perceive the multi-faceted impact the digital era upon us is making to businesses and society. 

The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Here is the weekly insight of digital leadership, IT Management, and Talent Management.

InnerBalance It is imperative that we are willing to seek out help, break down silos. companies have to keep searching for new opportunities to disrupt, rather than being disrupted, but keep an inner balance to co solve problems collaboratively and move the business forward solidly.Organizations of the future are increasingly exhibiting digital characteristics in various shades, dimensions, extensiveness, and intensity. It takes inner-balance, greater transparency,...

Unconventional-board Given rapid, continual change in the business environment and increased governance demands, corporate boards have to reinvent themselves to continue to be relevant and valuable to their companies. The corporate board monitors strategy implementation and results, amend wherever necessary to match changing marketplace conditions, and by doing so to ensure the long-term prosperity of the business.

Inner-talent-training Leadership growth comes from identifying opportunities, tailoring development and putting the appropriate level of effort into a continuous process. A leadership development program implies 'doing things differently' as well as 'doing different things' at all leadership levels. To renew organizational energy and rejuvenate business culture, developing leaders is a crucial investment, requiring time and energy, best practices and next practices.

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

Innovation & Intrapreneurship 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 in the digital age is to deliver the value of information in helping businesses grow, delight customers and do more with innovation.

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

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Informative-criticism

 It’s important to apply critical thinking, step out of what you are trying to understand, remove the “old box” shaped via conventional wisdom or group thinking, learn to be impartial, open-minded, unbiased, and take a multidisciplinary approach to solve problems effectively.

The effects of an increasingly digitized world are now reaching into every corner of the business and every aspect of the business ecosystem. Critical thinking is looking beyond the surface, not just accepting things at face value but asking questions and being active in multifaceted thought processes to make logical reasoning. 

Here are a few ingredients in critical thinking and informative criticism.




Constructiveness: Methodologically, critical thinking has been described as the process of purposeful, self-regulatory judgment, which uses reasoned consideration to evidence, context, conceptualizations, methods, and criteria. It is commonly understood to involve the commitment to the social and political practices of participatory democracy, willingness to imagine or remain open to considering alternative perspectives, willingness to integrate new or revised perspectives into the ways of thinking and acting, and willingness to foster criticality in others by providing or receiving constructive feedback.

Constructive critics are like a mirror as it gives an alert of forthcoming challenges we are facing, makes sound judgment of people and things, actively looks for constructive critics from internal users or business partners for improving performance and customer satisfaction. Constructive criticisms such as good advice or timely feedback is crucial to our professional advancement. The best thing about constructive criticism is that it calls to make a person or an organization much more self-aware and can fuel professional progress or business growth.

Humility: Criticism with positive intention is that it calls to make a person much more self-aware and can fuel professional progress and personal growth. In fact, with unprecedented uncertainty and frequent disruptions, digital professionals today should be skeptical about the conventional understanding of issues so that they examine everything before accepting it for the real truth. They show humility to admit something they don’t know so they need to keep learning, seek multidisciplinary knowledge, and have courage to challenge conventional wisdom.

Digital leaders and professionals need to practice critical thinking continually, provide or accept feedback proactively. Treat feedback as information and perception, but you have the choice what story you put into it and what actions you will take for change. Not to have critics might make your path easy, but you might not be able to make improvements and explore your true potential. Feedback needs to be relevant, continuous, as close to real time as possible so it is oriented towards expected behavior and makes continuous and measurable improvement.

Integration: Critical Thinking is commonly understood to involve the willingness to integrate new or revised perspectives into better ways of thinking and acting. Being in a "state of information overload" should be a clue that you are probably reacting from a stress state and not thinking in a self-reflective manner in which Critical Thinking can be accessed successfully. To deal with the nonlinear, multi-logical situation in today's digital dynamic, critical thinking as the core skill is concerned ultimately with the status of claims such as evidence, predictions, analysis, integration, especially when inferences are drawn from them.

Leveraging a wider thinking box including critical thinking enables digital leaders and professionals today to look at the wider aspects around problem space and then, understands the effect of imposing boundaries within that space, in order to frame the right problem and solve it in a structural way. From a problem solving perspective, you think critically when you begin to focus and delineate the factors associated with the problem, apply critical thinking to gain a contextual understanding of the scope and context of the problem, see a larger system with interactive pieces and “conflict” goals, practice integration, open up cross-disciplined dialogs and optimize the whole process in ways that perhaps were not possible before, to make an everlasting solution. Either thought processes or system integration, the successful integration will depend on the underlying relationships between all of the crucial points and how they influence each other in building solid and differentiated competency.

Contextualization: Due to the scarcity of information and static setting in the industrial age, many people are used to living in silos, operate with an incomplete and relatively small view of the world without contextual understanding and apply conventional wisdom based on a very limited thinking box they shaped quite a long time ago. Nowadays we are in the age of exponential growth of information and business complexity, Critical Thinkers live out of the box, ask open questions to collect relevant information and share fresh insight in enforcing understanding and creating the relevant context to make everlasting solutions.

The value of information is not isolated, it's contextual. Understanding context is often the first and the critical step in complex problem solving - without it, you are working without any boundaries or causing more side effects later on. Digital leaders and professionals must be comfortable with “VUCA” reality and become digital-fluent in contextual intelligence that aids you in understanding what’s relevant and what’s not. “Seeing” the context you are “part” of, allows you to identify the leverage points of the system and then “choose” the “decisive” factors, gain the contextual understanding of a specific cause and effect in a specific context or the core issues of a situation based on the identification of relationships and behaviors within a model, context, or scenario.

The digital landscape has many dimensions technically, philosophically, psychologically, and sociologically. It’s important to apply critical thinking, step out of what you are trying to understand, remove the “old box” shaped via conventional wisdom or group thinking, learn to be impartial, open-minded, unbiased, and take a multidisciplinary approach to solve problems effectively.

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The digital organizations are not the "closed system" but the dynamic digital ecosystem which is complex, interrelated, and interconnected, full of opportunities and risks. 

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, although it is not all linear steps, but an iterative, ongoing and upgoing change continuum. 

The purpose of the book “Change Insight” is to dig deeper to analyze the psychology behind changes and handle problems and changes at the level of the mindset, and explore people-centric change management philosophy and practices.

 

             Innovative-Intensive-Cohesive-Effective 

Innovative-Intensive-Effective-Cohesive Going digital and running an intensive, effective, and cohesive digital organization takes dynamic planning and dedicated execution. Digital organizations are all about information savvy, responsiveness, adaptation, high-performance, and speed. The effects of an increasingly digitized world are now reaching into every corner of businesses and every aspect of organizations. The digital organization is a living thing with the ability to continually...

Uncover Logic and Consequence of Change Management Organizational change management today is not just about a few spontaneous businesses initiatives for reacting to business dynamics, but structured and well-planned efforts to make continuous improvement. Digital means hyper-connectivity, uncertainty, and ambiguity. Change is inevitable, closer to reality is that change is continuously happening in such a dynamic environment of a company.

Improve Organizational Manageability The digital organizations are not the "closed system" but the dynamic digital ecosystem which is complex, interrelated, and interconnected, full of opportunities and risks. Digital organizations are the hyper-connected and interdependent complex dynamics of the ecosystem within which the business is competing and with which the business is unavoidably entangled. They could be disrupted by emerging trends or disturbed by nonlinear events.

Innovate-Improve-Change-Capacity The digital world is information-intensive and technology-driven, the digital transformation is multidimensional and evolutionary. Digital transformation represents the next stage of organizational maturity which will improve how the enterprise works and interacts with its ecosystem and deals with the challenge of “VUCA” digital new normal. It requires accelerated digital mindsets and takes a multidisciplinary management approach to improve the...

Initiative & Involvement Business initiatives require the highest risk-taking at a strategic value chain; including organization, investments, and assets. Change is inevitable. Running a business today is an iterative planning-action continuum. High performance organizations take business initiatives proactively and drive continuous progress steadfastly. Change is never for its own sake, any business initiative, especially change, should be viewed as an "opportunity"...

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.

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Unconventional-board

The best boards see themselves as a unified team rather than a disparate set of individual voices. An unconventional board can think differently and decide wisely.

Given rapid, continual change in the business environment and increased governance demands, corporate boards have to reinvent themselves to continue to be relevant and valuable to their companies. 

The corporate board monitors strategy implementation and results, amend wherever necessary to match changing marketplace conditions, and by doing so to ensure the long-term prosperity of the business.

 

Unconventional understanding: All real economic growth or societal progress is driven by some sorts of unconventional understanding of things and the world. Unconventional understanding and true wisdom lead to putting more thoughts into things in a logical way and searching for flaws in decisions and that widens the possibility of coming up with alternative solutions. Knowledge is power, but be aware when some of the long-acquired knowledge is no longer applicable in certain situations. People with “unconventional mindset” and learning agility have the willingness and ability to seek out updated knowledge, gain an in-depth understanding, and address their ignorance and the assumptions they make to minimize it.

Unconventional boards think differently and lead innovatively. The important issue is how the corporate board accommodates diverse opinions and how they assess them and converge the diverse thoughts into wise decisions. Some rational or accumulative wisdom that grows with age, or “learning from past experience” are already lagging behind the digital era with blurred geographical, functional, organizational or industrial borders. All of the different approaches are out there to suit different minds to learn. The transformative change needs to deprogram the old mindset, update new knowledge; let go of the “voice from the past,” connect the hearts and minds of people; collectively, transite to the state of “superconsciousness” for making a seamless digital paradigm shift.

The unconventional wisdom in the boardroom comes from the balance of analytics and intuition, thinking fast and slow in making effective decisions: Making decisions at the strategic level is one of the most critical activities of corporate boards. They need to make conscious choices based on their intelligence, past experiences, and taking "tough decisions keeping their sensitivity intact." Analysis just leads to a balancing “act,” which is like a “see-saw.” But, the real balance achieved is an outcome of inner awareness. Both the art of intuition and the science of analytics has the role to play in making wise decisions. The decision-making scenario includes: Identification of tasks, understanding the tasks and how they should be sequenced, and how to leverage information associated with tasks optimally to make effective decisions.

New and different skills and perspectives are needed to effectively address challenges at the board level. The true wisdom leads to putting more thought into things and searching for flaws in decisions and that widens the possibility of coming up with alternative decisions. An insightful outlook of BoDs helps to gain an in-depth understanding of cause and effect based on the identification of relationships and behaviors within a model, context, or scenario of digital transformation, with the goal to improve the corporate board decision effectiveness and leadership maturity.

Character based leadership at the board level presents strong digital leadership traits such as critical/independent thinking, influence, ethics, global perspective, and cultural cognition: Leadership is forward-looking, to make progress. Character sustains leaders about who they really are, and strategy pushes business to concern where they want to go. It starts with having a vision, then developing a plan to achieve it. Authenticity, courage, consistency, etc, are all crucial elements of character. Corporate boards oversee strategies. Character is a great beginning when the strategy is lacking. Without character, the strategy is in dark; without strategy, the business is aimless. Strategies can be changed, altered, modified and pivoted. A leader of character at the board level has to have the courage to make tough decisions that are right versus the one that is popular for either making good policies or co-developing strategies. Understanding character is very relevant and timely for those leaders who are seeking new ways to maximize themselves and human capital initiatives in their organizations, measures, to individual and collective attitudes, beliefs and commitment principles.

There are many important ingredients in effective leadership, such as trust, empathy, influence, humility, etc. In reality, the world is still full of stereotypical leaders, look the same, think the same, and act the same, what is missing? The diversity of thoughts and unconventional understanding; the diamond in a rough and fresh eyes, etc. The best strategy is to engage, yield, redirect, and embrace the interaction of two complementary and opposing forces – Yin and Yang, as the world -both natural world and human world are so dynamic with a balance of energy. Corporate board leaders can see the two sides of the same coin yin and yang, accept and appreciate both to witness the perfect balance of the universe.

Strong team, strong board, strong organization. While their remit is to bring their (ideally) diverse experiences and opinions to bear on the organization’s future, the best boards see themselves as a unified team rather than a disparate set of individual voices. An unconventional board can think differently and decide wisely. When evaluating how well they perform as a collective, forward-thinking boards determine how well everyone works together as a team, and again, whether collectively, they have the right experiences to navigate the changing business environment and still deliver against the organization’s strategy.

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Variety of Hierarchy

 It’s important to enforce desired hierarchy, create business synergy, maintain viability, and make strategic effects. 

The digital transformation is now spreading rapidly to enable organizations of all shapes and sizes in varying sectors to reinvent themselves to get digital ready. In fact, the digital organization is a living thing with the ability to continually change as the world changes. Thus, the overly rigid organizational structural pyramid becomes the very obstacle that stops the digital flow and stifles innovation. 

In the emerging digital age with the nature of hyperconnectivity, nonlinearity, and interdependence, it’s important to break down the outdated hierarchy, enable innovative types of digital hierarchies, build a creative working environment and develop high intelligent, high mature workforce step-wisely.

“Learning Hierarchy” (Learn-Share-Relearn-Create) smoothly: With the mixed bag of new information and outdated knowledge, digital organizations and their people must learn through their interactions with the business environment continually. The pervasive digitization requires the balance of “old experience” and “new ways to do things.” Top seasoned leaders or high professionals become aware when some of the long-acquired knowledge are no longer applicable in certain situations. You have learned to no longer apply that knowledge in those specific cases, and then, relearn the updated knowledge for gaining unique insight on the changing circumstance accordingly. In fact, the digital workforce today has to learn and relearn all the time and then apply those lessons to succeed in new situations, climb the “learn, share, relearn, and create” hierarchy step by step.

Practically, a learning organization is the one in which leaders encourage learning-acting-improving as an iterative business continuum. The problem is that knowledge doesn’t always inform you of true understanding and it must keep flowing and refreshed to generate the value. You have to keep updating knowledge, create new knowledge and become the knowledge value creator. You need to apply  learning, act, observe the consequences of their actions, make inferences about those consequences, and draw implications for future actions.

Intelligence hierarchy: The intention of Eco-Information Management Life Cycle is to build a high-intelligent organization by processing and refining insight for making the right business decisions timely and bringing profits to the organization for the long term. The synchronicity of the information management cycle enables the organization to improve business speed, generate ideas, make decisions, catalyze innovations and improve organizational maturity. Business professionals need to climb the Data-Information-Knowledge-Intelligence-Insight-Wisdom pyramid continually.

In present days, we cannot separate knowledge and creativity if we want to stay competitive on the market. Knowledge can be taught, but insight is a unique perception which needs to be gained by each individual. By having an active learning and thinking cycle, over time, you develop an effective set of filters that help you find new information interests you and refine them into valuable insight. Knowledge is gained via the learning process, but insight is the integration of learning and thinking scenarios. Hence, knowledge can be taught, but insight is a unique perception which needs to be gained by each individual.

System hierarchy: Due to the “VUCA” digital new normal, today’s business is often operational in crisis and conflict environments. Digital organizations are dynamic systems. System hierarchy provides the system stability and resilience. Organizations leverage systems principles to introduce different concepts of hierarchy, in which systems evolve and interlink to create larger systems, within even larger systems, and so on, and these systems of systems can forge or alter a myriad of relationships/alliances. To improve the organizational maturity, what can be unifying is looking at each function in the enterprise as a subsystem and then finding a unified means of looking at the essence.

System hierarchy is different from the command and control hierarchy. In system scenario, the hierarchy can be viewed as onion-like layers rather than the command and control hierarchy, though this is not to say they must be mutually exclusive. An organization with system intelligence can approach the flow zone when the positions in its hierarchy have clear and accountable tasks. Balance is key. There must be enough central control to achieve coordination toward the large-system goals, and enough autonomy to keep all subsystems flourishing, and functioning for achieving high-performance results. The healthy planning-adjusting-evolving digital refinement cycle creates the business synergy to strive vigorously in leading digital transformation.

Modern digital organizations are not just the sum of functional pieces, but an integral whole. To run a highly functional digital business, the business hierarchy must balance fluidity, freedom, and responsibilities of the substems (functions) and the total system, to enable information fluidity, workforce creativity and management holism. It’s important to enforce desired hierarchy, create business synergy, maintain viability, and make strategic effects. The desired outcome is to assess the employee's contribution and ability at the different levels of the organizational hierarchy to fulfill tasks and objectives in line with the organizational goals and unlock collective potential.

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Book "Digital Master" Insight: Interdependence

The challenge for digital organizations is to manage its portfolio of relevant cross-border strategic synergies and organizational interdependence, to achieve the digital equilibrium via delicate balance.

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 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. 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 high mature digital organization.

Interdependence

Inner-interdependence Either digital organizations or modern societies are loosely defined as dynamic entities and the hub of cultures within a geographical location. The digital business today is not just working within the industry, but permeating a cross-ecosystem which is dynamic, continuous, interdependent and interactive. Imagine the organizational complexity that comes in due to very characteristics such as less structure, rules and regulations, diversity, volatility,...

“Interdependence” Characteristic of Digital Organizations The challenge for digital organizations is to manage its portfolio of relevant cross-border strategic synergies and organizational interdependence, to achieve the digital equilibrium via delicate balance. Digital makes a significant impact on almost every aspect of the business from people, process, to technology, both horizontally and vertically. It does make a smaller world, but also makes businesses and the world super complex and full of uncertainty..

Interdependent Thinking: What’s your System Thinking of the World Interdependent Thinking is a true system view of the world. One of the significant characteristics of emerging digital era is interdependence, due to the latest digital technologies such as social and mobile, the business and world have become hyper-connected and interdependent, it does make a smaller world, but also makes businesses and the world super complex and full of uncertainty and ambiguity.

Impartial, Independent Hybrids It is important to understand that dynamic business development is multifaceted, gain the necessary knowledge to run a digital organization with impartial, independent hybrids and orchestrate a holistic digital ecosystem. With rapid change and exponential growth of information, businesses today need nothing less than a paradigm shift in their thinking about the fundamentals of how organizations work. There are so many seemingly paradoxical,...

Interconnectivity Digital transformation is not a stand-alone initiative, but a continuous journey of adapting to the digital new normal in the dynamic and hyperconnected business world. With rapid change, continuous disruptions, hyperconnected and always on business new normal, the emergence of potential opportunities for exploring digital transformation is likely to follow a nonlinear pattern as the pervasiveness of an organization's digital journey increases....

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with about 7600+ 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 for human progression.

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Organizational Coherence

High performers seek to make multidimensional business value they create visible to their internal and external stakeholders and deliver premium products/services/ solutions consistently.

Consider digital organizations as the coherent, self-organized but interlaced and hyper-connected ecosystem, coherence is about logic and consistency. “Business logic" comprises business rules that express business policy, workflow or information flow from one person to another. 

If the logic is clear enough, the business is operated frictionlessly and change can be implemented seamlessly. Here are a few perspectives on digital innate-coherence.

Operational coherence: The business is a dynamic system with this side, that side, and the interaction of both sides. Information exponentiality, increasing pace of changes, fierce business competitions, and frequent disruptions create characteristics such as uncertainty, volatility, complexity, unpredictability, and ambiguity. Operational consistency remains a favorite mantra for management and it is essential in earning and holding the trust of one's team. Therefore, consistency remains a favorite mantra for management and facilitates efficiencies in operations and the ability to deliver a shared brand promise across services, sectors, and business boundaries.

From mindset to attitude to behavior, consistency is a critical element for delivering quality business products or services and driving cohesive changes. Consistency enforces effectiveness, fosters customer satisfaction, improves quality, and unlocks performance. The organizational maturity is not based on how many years organizations have been around to support the business, but about how proactively the organizations can respond to the business requests and how effectively it can provide high quality and tailored solutions to meet customers’ needs in a consistent way.

Process coherence: Processes underpin business capabilities. Process coherence fosters “cosilience” (coherence + resilience” of the organizational capabilities. Process design is logical-how it is or will be done - describes a solution. Design is usually only done on "to be" future processes because the existing "as-is" processes are already designed. If a process exists, process designers create a model of it and measure the outputs; if it produces the desired results, wonderful, if not, then use the model to identify the process components most likely to be responsible and re-design them to ensure coherence.

To optimize a process, analysis is conceptual - what is done, what is needed, describe the problem, and what can be done for existing "as-is" processes - what is done; or for future "to-be" processes - what is needed. Designing and modeling are the two sides that make a bit of metal a coin. In a nutshell, Process Design is described as the larger activity of creating new processes or improving on existing ones, while process modeling may be described as a part of the overall design phase which aids in process analysis. If no process exists, or, if it is incapable of delivering measurable results, then process designers start with a design, model it, measure it, and seek improvements to achieve process coherence.

Logic plus consistency lead to coherence: The degree of business coherence decides how flexibly the organization can adapt to business dynamics and how innovatively it can drive progressive changes. Business managers have to come from clarity about internal and external environments and the dynamics that affect them. As a matter of fact, the digital coherence is the decisive factor for the success of business strategy implementation and how well organizations can take the step-wise approach to make the cohesive change in a logical way, continual renewal, and build a long-term winning position of the business.

The differentiated business competency is based on having a deeper understanding of the drivers of value in their specific markets, having imagination to think differently and demonstrating courage to translate those thoughts into actions. From an organizational structure perspective, a company can approach the flow zone when communication is clarified, the positions in its hierarchy have clear and accountable tasks, the business system is running coherently, and processes are streamlined to improve the organizational performance seamlessly.

High performers seek to make multidimensional business value they create visible to their internal and external stakeholders and deliver premium products/services/ solutions consistently. The challenge for organizations is to manage its portfolio of relevant cross-border strategic synergies and organizational interdependence, fine-tune the structure to achieve business coherence, and manage risks to improve organizational resilience.

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“Problem-Solving Master - Frame Problems Systematically and Solve Problems Creatively" Book Insight: Inferential-solution

In most cases, you don't understand your business environment because you have never looked outside the boundary of the problem.

The purpose of “Problem-Solving Master - Frame Problems Systematically and Solve Problems Creatively“ is to throw some light on how to understand, frame, and solve today’s multilayer, interdependent, and over-complex business problems effortlessly. 

Digital leaders and professionals should self-aware of their role in problems, show professional maturity, and develop a good reputation as the problem-solver.

     Inferential Solution

Inferential-Solution Digital leaders and professionals today need to be in a continuous learning mode with inferential logic, interdisciplinary knowledge, strategic reasoning skills, challenge existing thoughts, standards, rules, seeking additional knowledge and experience, handle “complex problems or rewrite the rules of the competitive game" to overcome the challenge. Problem-solving is about seeing a problem and actually finding a solution to that problem, not just...

Invisible The art of management will take a more crucial role in exemplified leadership, discovering hidden patterns, understanding invisible, gaining interdisciplinary knowledge, applying efficient technological tools, and mastering intangible for achieving the next level of business maturity. Contemporary business is complex, there are both visible and invisible success factors for solving critical problems and improving business maturity.

Innovative & Integral Take a multidimensional and integral view to understand the problem. In most cases, you don't understand your business environment because you have never looked outside the boundary of the problem. Problem-solving is about seeing a problem and actually discovering a real solution to that problem. Many of today’s problems are complex, it’s critical to look at problems scientifically, artistically, philosophically, psychologically, and sociologically...

Inter- Logical Problem-solving It is important to get out of the "fear" that blocks creative genius inside us, learn how to liberate imagination and come up with a new approach to problem-solving. Creative problem-solving is about how to think unconventionally or from a new perspective for either defining or solving old or emergent problems. There is always a well-known solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong. Problem-solving is both art and science....

InterThoughtinProblemSolvingScenario Multidimensional thinking is important to understand, frame, and solve today’s multilayer, interdependent, and over-complex business problem and directly impacts the intellectual sophistication of problem-solving capability. With the overwhelming growth of information and an unprecedented level of uncertainty, there is known unknown and unknown unknown. Many problems become so complex, fact-finding and prototyping are crucial steps in discovering...

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with about 7600+ blogs 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 for human progression.

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Unless (II)

 Unless the basic components are in place, then there is the risk of a serious mismatch in expectation between the provider and receiver of innovation.

"Digital Master” is a series of guidebooks (28 + books) to perceive the multi-faceted impact digital is making to the businesses and society, help forward-thinking organizations navigate through the journey in a systematic way, and avoid “rogue digital.”

It perceives the emergent trends of digital leadership, provides advice on how to run a digital organization to unleash its full potential and improve agility, maturity, and provide insight about Change Management. It also instructs the digital workforce on how to shape a game-changing digital mindset and build the right set of digital capabilities to compete for the future. Here is a set of “Unless” (II) quotes in “Digital Master.”

Innovation is a buzzword that can easily be misused unless you have a clear goal on what you want to get out of it. Is it cost savings, efficiency, better go to market strategy, improved IT agility in supporting new business, etc.

Innovation is useless unless there are real, measurable benefits in the quantitative or qualitative way: Faster time to market, productivity gains, higher efficiency.

Unless the basic components are in place, then there is the risk of a serious mismatch in expectation between the provider and receiver of innovation.

Unless the persons whom you wish to change see the benefits of the change, no change is possible. So you have to demonstrate the intended change with results!

Until and unless there is a mutual agreement between both management and staff as to a vested and balanced approach to the goals and vision of the organization, the performance management process will most likely remain an adversarial relationship.

Any strategy and model have limited utility unless each individual decides to change, owns the process of change, and takes the adventure into inner landscapes.

You cannot consider culture as one element of the strategy execution unless you can identify the dominant cultures, subcultures, and the layers of those cultures.

Unless there is naïve behavior, the impact of an overspending is rarely significant to most organizations. The last area where you could identify failure is that the business outcomes have not been achieved.

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Innate-integral-capability

To keep the business unique, competitive and innovative, the objective assessment of business capability is important to design, build, and preserve core competency even as management expands and redefines the business.

The digital era upon us is about exponential growth of information, increasing speed of change and continuous disruptions. How successfully the organization can handle digital disruption depends on how fast and capable they can adapt to the ever-changing environment. A business capability is the firm’s ability to design, build, integrate, and reconfigure internal and external competences to enable business strategy. It’s important to clarify the organizational condition/suitability/adequacy/ viability of capability, and improve the overall success rate of business strategy.

Suitability: Capabilities underpin business strategy. Technically, capability represents the “what” whereas the process and people represent the how. Organizational capabilities continue being considered the market-relevant bundles of assets and resources with the potential to drive business competitiveness. To evaluate suitability of the capability, organizations can look at both process and capability maps and decide that capabilities are fit and accessible and thus aid the conversations between stakeholders. There are both capability necessities and capability differentiators. Competitive necessities focus on meeting the customer expectation and delivering what the business asks for; competitive differentiators allow the business to “dream bigger,” and achieve “the art of possible.” It’s important to identify your business core capabilities which are harmonization of multiple capabilities such that it permeates the entire organization with a focus, and hone them into organization-wide competency.

A core competency is valuable, rare, and difficult to imitate. To improve the suitability of the organization, having a clearly developed enterprise capability mapping helps to design, build, scale, and optimize a set of business capabilities. To shorten the time cycle and save the cost for building business capabilities, integrate existing building blocks or recombine existing capabilities into the more sophisticated capabilities for enabling an iterative strategy execution continuum.

Adequacy: Organizational maturity is proportional to the maturity of business capability. Thus, assessing adequacy and weighing on the importance of business capability is critical to improve business competency. Methodologically, the management readily considers multiple dimensions (service, process, information, asset, people, etc.) of the adequacy of the business capability to fulfill their business strategy. The maturity of a business capability would be based on the ability for the capability to deliver on customer needs or to achieve the desired capability outcome.

Capability development evolves and moves from the fundamental level to differentiated level between categories based on the technology evolution, business driver, or business model evolution etc. Different weighting may be applied to the capabilities. A capability's maturity should be measured by how well it adds value to the customer. But adding value won't be the same for every company. To keep capability relevant and adequate, it’s important to set up priorities, divest non-core capabilities, and free up resources that can be used to deepen core capabilities in order to build sustainable business competency for the long run.

Viability: Digital organizations are dynamic and informative, business capabilities also need to be dynamic. A viable digital organization can deliver impressive business outcomes and improve its performance by taking continuous digital practices to improve manageability. How viable the business is depends on the business's ability to integrate, build, and reconfigure internal and external competences on the fly to address rapidly changing environments, build new capability, and achieve innovative forms of competitive advantage given path dependencies and market positions.

Ideally, the viable digital businesses are solid enough to give some sort of forms and meaning and open enough to its environment allowing the movement of information, ideas, and people in and out. Loose coupling makes it possible to change the components of a capability without affecting the system. If you need to modify one of those capabilities to execute a dynamic strategy or develop new products/services/ solutions to delight customers, then model/mapping assists with a high level impact assessment and delivery approach. Capability views are more open to considering both internal or external sourcing and provide a level of abstraction that allows more open considerations of the business ecosystem from the multidimensional lens. 

To keep the business unique, competitive and innovative, the objective assessment of business capability is important to design, build, and preserve core competency even as management expands and redefines the business. The highly complex and dynamic organizational system needs to be elaborated in a well-organized effort for adapting to emergent business changes in its own structures, functions, and behaviors, to improve business competency and maturity significantly.

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